| Not the game you were looking for |
[15 Nov 2009|10:41pm] |
Things that didn't make the edit, contd. In reference to the Navigators' Guild's web of influence.
"Characters may find its hand in surprising places..."
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| Roaring, cautiously |
[14 Nov 2009|05:29pm] |
I got myself the DVD set of the TV series Roar, starring a particularly young-looking Heath Ledger. As it's a celtic-y thing I'm counting it as research. :P Quite enjoying it, actually. It's fairly light Saturday teatime type fare, of course, but there are some sophisticated touches in the stories. Been interested in watching this for a while - it was on here, but on a weekend afternoon and I never really caught it - but it's hard to find. I eventually went for a Dutch version, would you believe, at a non-discounted price. The audio's English, so you just have to wrestle the subtitles off and not be bothered about the episode summaries on the cases. This is one of the many series with a short life - just 13 episodes.
Have had some low-level bug/congestion thing for a while, with heavy sinuses and the impaired sense of balance that seems to follow for me. Last weekend was a bit foggy and unproductive. Still a bit cloggy but feeling much better, so hopefully this weekend will be more useful. Have Monday as leave, with the aim of making more progress on the Albion book and ordering another Lulu print in time to take to Dragonmeet in London on 28th. Though I'm being tentative about plans for that, as details of the event haven't emerged yet. It should be OK, but I've a principle of wanting to see events are worthwhile before committing, and I'm aware that the price of the train fare equates to four character illustrations for Albion...
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| Albion art - long leggety beasties |
[09 Nov 2009|01:10pm] |
I asked Scott Purdy to draw me some things for the otherworlds section of the Albion corebook. So he did. :)
(Hover for captions.)
 
The nuckelavee in particular was a difficult brief because the description is so flat-out weird. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. And I'll tell you a secret: this one I got full rights for because I didn't want anyone else to have a nice picture of him!
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| Albion art - more characters |
[05 Nov 2009|09:10pm] |
Courtesy of Mark Huffman, a warrior and a roguish type who's actually the example of character creation. More pics shortly.
 
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| Fake ketchup |
[01 Nov 2009|09:06am] |
Happy Samhain, I guess, and it appears to be a dark day of rainy rain. Should have done the laundry yesterday after all! May be glad of daylight bulb in study later.
Work was going through a slow and boring patch the last few days. Caught up on some data entry that needed doing. Thoughts straying to Albion editing and art acquisition. When I got to Saturday there was a bit of pent-up creative thingy so I actually got a bit done, whereas usually I find I just need to noodle about that day.
Today a bit of editing, plus cleaning and tidying I've been putting off. Got a work meeting in Leeds on Monday, and I'm going over to Mum's afterwards and spending Tuesday up there. Haven't seen her in a couple of months so it's past time for a visit.
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| Albion format etc update |
[25 Oct 2009|12:18pm] |
 With the help of folks at Furnace and the Tavern forums, I've arrived at a working model for the corebook. I'm going to aim for around 256 pages, which is substantial without being too daunting. It's fairly common in the industry - I'm looking at WFRP2 and Dragon Warriors, which are serving as helpful examples of how things can be done - and for me personally is about the cut-off point before books start to look too daunting to pick up. Making something one would read oneself seems like a good principle!
Into that book goes some of the material that was in the earlier draft of the GM's Book. Not all of it will fit anyway, and I still think there's some that should be kept away from players' eyes. The principle is to show all of the important bits of the game (which the original Player's Book didn't do) so that people have the big picture and are able to get close to the vision of what it's supposed to be like, but without getting too involved in detail. The WFRP2 corebook does this - short entries for Skaven, Chaos cults, etc and then move on.
So the otherworld and the spirit world get about 10 pages each in the corebook, with an intro and a few beasties. Some of the expansion stuff for Albion itself - e.g. Woses and Wastelanders and stats for animals - goes in, along with notes on planning and running a game.
Other bits of the GM's Book are getting pulled aside into the basis of a supplement that delves further in: more beasties, stuff about what different factions are really up to, etc. Not sure whether that'll be just otherworld/spirit world stuff, or whether it'll be slanted more generally toward GM-usefulness. Depends on what the material ends up looking like. For instance I've got a whole chunk on properties of herbs (published as the PDF product A Whistlestop Guide to Herbs) that should go in something somewhere, and it doesn't make sense to use corebook pagespace on it.
So that's the plan anyway. It means sets of content will be split between books, and there might be a little bit of repetition, but I think it's workable. Perhaps most important, it lets me stop getting my knickers in a twist about it and get on with the content.
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| Customer feedback |
[25 Oct 2009|11:14am] |
Easily.co.uk (paraphrasing):
We noticed we haven't received a renewal for your hosting. If you don't renew, it will be deleted on [the day before the email, go figure]. Please take a moment to complete our feedback survey.
Me:
Aha! *ticks boxes for crapitude* And they include a box for "what might have convinced you to stay".
"When I told you that malicious javascript was being inserted in my web pages, you might have considered taking it seriously, engaging with me and trying to do something about it. Just a thought."
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| Pre post |
[17 Oct 2009|02:36pm] |
Had a 5-min play on a Palm Pre in a shop. Dinky package overall. But the physical keyboard is far too small for me to use (could just about press the keys carefully with my nails); the interface wasn't immediately intuitive; and it seemed to take a long time to do anything.
At £35/month I wasn't even considering getting one; just curious.
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| Cute baby moment |
[13 Oct 2009|11:43am] |
My sister was telling me that she was crashed out on the sofa the other night and baby Caira stuck a dummy in her mouth and patted her like they do when they put her to bed.
So cute! Though apparently a bit slimy.
She also stands on her chair and then tells herself to get down.
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| Furnace 2009 |
[12 Oct 2009|05:47pm] |
I posted this on the Tavern forum as con feedback, and it'll do just as well here. Short version: this is the weekend RPG convention in Sheffield (so quite close for me), at the Garrison Hotel which is actualy part of the former garrison complex. It's a small, friendly affair focused on playing rather than shopping. Fun as usual, over too soon.
This featured me running a game of Jaws - notable because as far as I can remember I've never run a con game before, having a bit of a block about such things. There's no better con for addressing that, and I had a good group and was able to pretty much get on with it with very little in the way of nerves: it didn't feel like a big deal once I got in there, though it kind of was.
( Read more... )
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| Off to Furnace |
[09 Oct 2009|02:22pm] |
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Final preparations now (aargh!) and then off to sunny Sheffield at teatime. Back Sunday night.
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[07 Oct 2009|09:33pm] |
Have had a cold this week. Started in throat and got venture capital to open a snot factory. Pretty much everyone in our bit of the office is at some stage of it. Not helping.
Running a Jaws game on Saturday night at Furnace. Decision much helped by discovery of a Gar Hanrahan con(an) scenario, which I take as a badge of quality. Have to go through and convert - hardest bit will be deciding most important Qualities of d20 characters. Not exactly long on time - got Fri pm off but was aiming to use it more for packing etc. Found a sort of proto-con scenario I wrote for Albion (previosu version of), not sure how viable that is.
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[03 Oct 2009|09:32pm] |
-: I am only now eating dinner.
+: It is a tempeh stir-fry (lazy version involving little actual stirring and more leaving the lid on).
I am seriously thinking about running something for Furnace. Needs to be sorted fairly quickly. Contenders are Jaws, Questers, T&J and Albion. The sensible place to look would be the new stuff I want to promote, but it feels like the fun stuff would be the other ones. What to do, what to do. Am consulting my downloads in search of scenarios.
Otherwise Saturday's gone by in a bit of a haze. I know there was shopping and Merlin. He wouldn't carry any now he's famous. And I ordered a new wifi dongle cos this one keeps dropping the connecti
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| Do you smell burning? |
[01 Oct 2009|11:15pm] |
Fronk! October already.
Am thinking about whether to run something for Furnace. The most obvious thing to plug, Jaws, also feels like the hardest to come up with an adventure for. Any Furnaceers want to express a preference?
Did a little piece on PDQ for the programme book. Jaws copies have arrived. Albion was dispatched today, so should get it at work tomorrow or Monday - excited to see how it's worked out.
EDIT: Albion book is here! And looking pretty good. The clipart-based cover has worked really well - I'll keep it if I go the lower-profile sales route. A few tweaks to make on inside layout, of course, but will be interested to hear what other folks say. Anyway, the main thing is that it makes the update process feel real.
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| Phew! Albion draft away. |
[28 Sep 2009|01:04am] |
Plans to get Albion to Lulu by mid-week didn't entirely work out. In fact I've just put it up there and placed an order now.
Not ideal timewise with work tomorrow! Lulu interface running slow didn't help. But at least it let me sneak in on the coat-tails of a discount offer - and the order confirmation is offering me another one on an order in the next couple of days. Might apply it to a mini refresh of out of stock stuff at IPR.
Anyway, I didn't manage to revise all of the Albion text - most notably the spell descriptions and setting detail - but I have knocked all of it into reasonable shape within the new layout (with a lot of white gaps to look at later). It'll be really helpful for checking that I'm barking up the right tree presentation-wise. And that's a hell of a lot further than I've got in a long while. So yay me under pain of etc.
Planning to do some relaxing stuff the next few evenings instead of this!
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| In Albion did Kublai Khan... |
[21 Sep 2009|10:40pm] |
Gone funny? Moi?
Well, that's the end of my days off to work on the thing. Have made good progress that I hadn't made before, though not as far along as I'd hoped. Will aim to finish work early tomorrow to knock some more off, but I think that'll have to be it as far as the Furnace draft goes. So some sections will just have to be layout-revised but not text-revised. As it's a sample rather than ashcan copies that's OK.
It's heading for roughly the same pagecount as the previous version. I've taken a chunk of rules detail out, but opened the layout up a bit. Going from A4 to Letter probably shaved a smidgin of space off too.
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| Day 4 in the Big Albion house |
[20 Sep 2009|11:19am] |
Damn, I'm slow. Currently trudging through character creation chapter, which does have quite a lot of rules-related stuff that's important to get right. But having worked on it like a hundred times before doesn't help... Can't say I love it much right now, but I will again. That's how it goes.
Main bits still to go are the setting and magic chapters. For magic I've done the how it works bit, so that's going to be mainly working through the spells to make sure they fit with the slightly altered system stuff. Setting is pretty much just layout at this stage, though later I want to look at recent climate predictions and see if there's anything new to reflect.
We'll have to see where I'm at by the end of tomorrow.
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| A US healthcare stupid thing |
[20 Sep 2009|10:29am] |
Not a debate I'm getting much involved in, as obviously I know nothing about the US system, mired as I am in the publically-run free-to-use set-up here.
But occasionally I come across stuff about how things work over there that raise an eyebrow or six. Like this entry on AppleInsider. When people have lost their speech to illness their insurers force them to have expensive technology that's not very good and won't pay out for cheaper, better stuff (in the context of the source the iPhone is the example). They talk about someone who was given an $8000 Windows PC running speech synthesis software, with everything else disabled in case she should benefit from features not related to her illness. The piece really does make it sound like a vast web of companies scratching each others' backs at the expense of the people.
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