Lacking Natural Simplicity

I was happy to see that Keck Publishing released another Mini Six/OpenD6 game recently (added to DriveThruRPG.com on June 29, 2021): Fallen Earth: Battle for Freedom!. I've updated my look at Mini Six and related games.

My copy of the Delvers to Grow Omnibus written by Kevin Smith and produced by Gaming Ballistic arrived today. It is a book to help folks quickly make characters for Steve Jackson Games's Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, a “Powered by GURPS” dungeon crawling fantasy game.

Anyway, I've read it and it looks very useful.

I really want to run a Dungeon Fantasy RPG campaign with this and all the other stuff that Gaming Ballistic's Douglas H. Cole has produced for his Nordlond campaign setting.

Here's a small dungeon I drew on a 3×5" index card some time ago. (Probably in 2008 or so?)

This is here mostly to give me a concrete example of this happening.

I have a directory, with two files in it, ab.txt and a-c.txt. Which sorts first when I do a ls? It depends on what locale is set. Like this:

$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 ls
ab.txt       a-c.txt
$ LANG=C ls
a-c.txt  ab.txt

Same thing happens with the sort command:

$ cat >a-c-first.txt
a-c.txt
ab.txt
$ cat >ab-first.txt
ab.txt
a-c.txt
$ LANG=C sort ab-first.txt
a-c.txt
ab.txt
$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 sort a-c-first.txt
ab.txt
a-c.txt

I found this surprising when it first broke some code I was using, since I'd spent so much of my existence in LANG=C (I'm still surprised that Unicode has existed for more than half my life), but once I set LANG=en_US.UTF-8 because I was using UTF-8 characters in my documents I found I was in a different (sorting) world.

I'm posting this mostly to remind myself if I ever have to fiddle with this again.

I use a version of groff installed from git because some of my documents depend on fixes that are coming out in the next release, 1.23.0. I install it on my macOS machine in /usr/local/sw/versions/groff/git. (The directory hierarchy under /usr/local/sw/versions is where I put programs that I compile from scratch, to keep them separated from the programs that come from the operating system and/or package managers. I often have more than one version of a program installed, therefore the versions component of the name.)

Because the groff that is first in my path is the new one I installed, and because man on macOS knows to look for man pages according to what your PATH is, when I say man groff_ms I get the new man page for groff_ms. Yay! Unfortunately, it gets rendered with the old groff that macOS supplies, version 1.19.2, which doesn't include the .SY macro that current versions of groff supply in their man macros, and which they use in their man pages, so it renders wrong. A typical example is that when it renders groff_ms(7) the groff -ms and groff -m ms are missing from the lines in the SYNOPSIS section. Boo!

Luckily, man takes a -C option that lets you specify an alternate configuration file (on macOS the default one is in /private/etc/man.conf), so you can supply one that specifies the absolute path to the newer groff you are using. So I added

alias man='man -C ~/local/etc/man.conf'

to the appropriate shell startup file. And I can add

(setq Man-switches "-C ~/local/etc/man.conf")

to my emacs configuration so it uses the right version of groff too.

But a modern groff produces ANSI escapes for bold and underline, rather than the older convention of over-striking via the backspace character with the same character for bold or with the underscore character for underlining. My pager, less, can deal with that, but something in emacs doesn't like that, leaving the buffer with groff_ms(7) with underlining on every line.[1]

Eventually I figured out that the old style over-striking via backspaces worked just fine with emacs, so I added the -P-c option to the invocation of groff in the NROFF definition in my modified man.conf file. That tells groff to pass the -c option to the grotty output driver, which tells it to use old-style backspace over-striking.

This seems overly complicated.

I suspect I'll need to do something different on the Linux boxes I use.

DEFINE       nroff   /sw/versions/groff/git/bin/nroff -mandoc -P-c

One simple improvement on B/X D&D and OD&D that wouldn't have been a change in the rules, just a change in presentation, that I've wished that the B/X and OD&D retro-clones had made was adding a “Saving Throw” entry to their spell descriptions, like that of AD&D. As it is, you have to read the spell description to figure out if a saving throw is allowed and what it means.

Basic Fantasy; Labyrinth Lord and Advanced Edition Companion; Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy and Advanced Fantasy; Sword & Wizardry Complete, Core, and Whitebox; and Delving Deeper, all fail to do this.

I'm really surprised that Old-School Essentials didn't do this, with all its other improvements to the presentation of B/X style games.

Oh well. Maybe OSE will add it in a later edition.

Last edited: 2021-07-25 13:23:05 EDT

I had not known about C.L. Moore's disappearance from the science fiction scene and her struggle with Alzheimer's disease and her eventual coma and finally death on April 4th, 1987. I don't remember having read C.L. Moore at that time; I came to it much later, when I was reading swords and sorcery and sword and planet fiction in the 2000s, rereading old favorites and reading stories I'd not read before. That's also when I read the Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury story in this collection, though I'd read her John Eric Stark stories and novels sometime before. And the 2000s is also probably when I first read Manly Wade Wellman's stories of Hok the Mighty.