Recent Viewing
Recent Viewing
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G.I.T.S. S.A.C 2nd Gig
I watched the first episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, 2nd Gig last night and enjoyed it.
Lacking Natural Simplicity
Random musings on books, code, and tabletop games.
Gentoo idiocies
Ok, so you deprecate qpkg, and remove it from the user bin directories without providing a replacement that has all its functionality, but continue to use it and hide it in /usr/lib/gentoolkit/bin/qpkg? That's idiotic.
What is WFRP ABout, Really? Walter Jon Williams on Wodehouse
What is WFRP ABout, Really?
Nobody says it better than James Wallis:
D&D is about quests for glory and riches; WFRP pretends to be the same, but in fact is about the PCs' day-to-day fight for survival in a universe that hates them. If you don't finish each adventure worse off than when you started it, your GM is doing something wrong.
Walter Jon Williams on Wodehouse
I devoured a whole lot of Wodehouse in my teens, in those formative years when I was devouring a lot of Delany and Zelazny and Robert Heinlein. I eventually gave up on Wodehouse because I realized that all the Jeeves stories had the same plot. I've come back to them since becoming a full-time writer because I've realized exactly how hard it is to write 90 books with exactly the same plot, and it is not a skill to be sneezed at.
Player Finder Utilities
J H Kim comparies Player Finder Utilities.
Runequest Reborn?
Well, it looks like Mongoose is serious about their new version of Runequest. It's also apparently going to be an “Open” system, so that publishers and individuals will be able to able to produce new derived works using the Runequest rule. Moreover, it's going to get its own treatment of Glorantha, too. I sure hope this turns out well, but I also hope it doesn't prove a problem for HeroQuest.
Slime Oddity
For some reason, clisp version 2.35 installed from the FreeBSD ports
doesn't have :PC386 in *FEATURES*; without this, Slime from CVS
stops with a continuable error:
** - Continuable Error
INTERN("*DOCUMENTATION*"): #<PACKAGE SYSTEM> is locked
If you continue (by typing 'continue'): Ignore the lock and proceed
The following restarts are also available:
SKIP :R1 skip (COMPILE-FILES-IF-NEEDED-SERIALLY #)
STOP :R2 stop loading file
/extra/sw/src/slime/swank-loader.lisp
ABORT :R3 ABORT
And after that, even if you continue slime is never able to connect to swank.
Recent Reading; Sales of Midlist Authors
Monday, 3 October 2005
Recent Reading
This is a couple of weeks of reading.
The Game of Kings, by Dorothy Dunnett, copyright 1961, copyright renewed 1989; Vintage Books/Random House, May 1997. First in the Lymond Chronicles.
Queens' Play, by Dorothy Dunnett, copyright 1964, copyright renewed 192; Vintage Books/Random House, May 1997. Second in the Lymond Chronicles.
Eight of Swords, by David Skibbins; Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Minotaur/St. Martin's Press, April 2005. An interesting mystery.
A Gladiator Dies Ony Once: The Further Investigations of Grodians the Finder, by Steven Saylor; St. Martin's Minotaur/St. Martin's Press, June 2005. The second collecton of Roma Sub Rosa short stories, after The House of Vestals. I think I like this series of Roman mysteries the best of the ones I've read.
SPQR VII: The Tribune's Curse, by John Maddox Roberts; Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Minotaur/St. Martin's Press, April 2003. While Saylor's Gordianus and Davies' Falco are to some degree outsiders amongst the inner realms of Rome's political machinations through which they often wander, but Roberts' DeciusCaecilius Metellus the Youger is definitely an insider. I think it was one of John Maddox Roberts' "Roman Empire in Space" SF books that introduced me to the Roman Empire (at one remove) when I was a youngster.
SPQR IX: The Princess and the Pirates, by John Maddox Roberts; Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Minotaur/St. Martin's Press, June 2005. I've apparently missed SPQR VIII: The River God's Vengance.
Recent Viewing
Recent Viewing
The I Inside, 2003; directed by Roland Suso Richter, based on the play Point of Death by Michael Cooney with a screenplay by Michael Cooney and Timothy Scott Bogart. Unsatisfying.
Recent Viewing
Recent Viewing
Serenity, 2005; directed and written by Joss Whedon. It was good.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 2005; directed by Garth Jennings, based on the book by Douglas Adams with a screenplay by Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick. Disappointing: it's like they made a movie out of the some of the same pieces as the book, but left out all the humour. Now I have to reread the books to make sure they're still funny.
Roleplaying: Heroquest
Neel Krishnaswami explains how Heroquest turns setting into rules effortlessly.
In one of the comments on that article, Brand Robins said:
I just remembered something I said to my Grave of Honor (A Game of Thrones with HeroQuest rules) group when we got started: "HeroQuest is really, really good at supporting your vision. If you know what you are doing, have a feeling for what you want, and push your narration then HeroQuest will support you better than just about anything else. If you don't have a good vision or feel, however, or if you're looking to have the system tell you what happens or suggest courses of action seperate from naration (as most games do) then you're going to be SOL."
All of my actual play with the system has backed that up in my experience. When you go into HQ with a vision, a good flow of narration, and an understanding of what you are after it supports you brilliantly. It does not, however, particularly help you in developing those things if you don't already have them. Thus the frequent complaints (on RPG.net and similar) that it breaks down into a "bean counting game."
In an entry on his blog, Brand Robins talks about medium length/detail contests in HeroQuest.