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Pirates of the Midland Sea
One of the odd elements missing from 13th Age is that there are no pirates. Rob has said that this is the result of the Emperor's navy and the Archmage's wards. This strikes me as both a missed opportunity and an overstatement of the extent of the Empire's control. After all, one of the dominant themes of the game is that the Emperor has a ( Read more... ) -
Open All Night
Terrible Minds Challenge 8-17-2012
The snow was really coming down. Big wet flakes covered the windshield almost as soon as the wipers cleared it. Jim slowed the truck down to a crawl, following the ruts in the snow along the dark highway through the tall pines. In the pass, he saw an exit sign. He had no idea where it went but it was time to ( Read more... ) -
Ch-ch-changes
I've discovered that in this brave new world of social media that changing your job status requires further explanation. Yesterday I left my job at the Texas Attorney General's office. The job was okay and stable, but I was increasingly frustrated and it was becoming apparent that the future offered little more than a decayed version of the ( Read more... ) -
Recent Readings
This time, two collections of adventure fiction and a book on writing.
- The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour: Vol. 4, the Adventure Stories. An interesting and more than comprehensive collection of contemporary stories from the 30s and 40s. The collection is divided into three general sections: adventure tales, literary tales, and ( Read more... ) -
Owlcon
Jason and I went down to Owlcon a few weeks ago. Once again, it was a great weekend of gaming, and they set a new attendance record. They have a generous setup where in exchange for running two games you get to play in three. I ran Trail of Cthulhu and Day After Ragnarok (Savage Worlds), and I played in Atomic Highway, 4e, and Dr. Who. Jason ( Read more... ) -
A Month Without Gaming
Due to a confluence of holidays, sick days, and general craziness, neither of my roleplaying groups managed to meet in December. Some of this was just bad timing, with just enough people having conflicts for the groups to lose their quorums. Partly, though, it reflects the difficulty of getting groups of busy adults together ( Read more... ) -
WoW Now More Like 4e
One of the earliest and surprisingly lasting critiques against 4e has been that it was trying too hard to be like World of Warcraft and other electronic games. Well, the irony now is that fourth edition WoW with its changes to classes for Cataclysm is now more like 4e. Up until now, characters in WoW have had 80 levels and at every even numbered ( Read more... ) -
Recent Readings
It’s been awhile since I posted about my reading. Here is a summary of some of what I’ve been reading recently:
- Fans, Friends, & Followers, Scott Kirsner. An overview of success stories of the creative in our digital world. Kirsner opens with a chapter on the new rules for building and audience and creative career that leads into a collection ( Read more... ) -
Elitist Meme
Kuff reports that The Washington Post's Charles Murray has published a column on the Tea Party's rhetoric on elitism in America. This is nothing new, and merely the latest chapter in the long history of anti-intellectualism in America. The right has long implied that if you drink green tea or eat sushi and drive a Volvo that you aren't a "real ( Read more... ) -
Armadillocon
I managed to catch the last day of Armadillocon today, sitting in on three great panels. Joe Lansdale anchored a knowledgeable panel on whether Lovecraft was hurting horror (Conclusion: No, it's his lazy imitators). Steven Brust mixed it up with Joe McKinney, Nancy Holzner, and others in a discussion of world-building. And, I finished the day ( Read more... )