I’m standing on the edge. The brink of eternity, staring out at the vast nothing that is before me and the long and distant nothing of the landscape that extends off to nowhere behind me. I’ve been here before many times, but something about this time feels different. Just one small step forward is all it would take to go from standing on the edge to plunging down into the nothing that yawns open before me. Turning around again, careful not to lean too far in any direction I stare back at the landscape behind me that led to this place. The reddish-tan ground is covered in random patches of low, dry scrub, struggling to eek out an existence in a place that receives little water.

This weekend I got a chance to play in a demo of a new RPG game, Houses of the Blooded. What makes this RPG different from most others on the market is that it is a cooperative narrative RPG with the mechanics designed specifically to allow the players to directly add or alter the game world. That's right, the players can actually narrate a change to the story that the GM can just roll into the game.

I've spent a little time over the last several years (wow, has it been close to a decade already) playing around with a piece of software, Lightwave 3D. I've done a few minor projects with it, such as a Dancing Antibody, and recently decided that maybe I should spend some more time learning. So, in an effort to learn more about 3D animation and Lightwave in specific I started to build up a model by following a tutorial I found online.

Updated October 18

I wanted to get a dice tower/dice boot for use in at least one of my current RPGs (1st Sunday of the month Shadowrun 4th Ed Missions), but I couldn't find one at my FLGS as the item was apparently out of production. I started to dig around on the Net and found a few places that either had instructions for modifying the Chessex Dice Boot (covering the acrylic with felt) or making one from various kinds of wood that one can find at hobby stores like Michael's. Also there were a number of wooden towers available for sale, but at $50 and several weeks to delivery I wasn't willing to buy any of those. So, I dug out my two boxes of old Lego sets and built myself a tower similar to one that I had seen on another site.

The great thing about having a Friendly Local Gaming Store (FLGS) with a decent game room is that other players are willing to come in and Demo various game systems. This weekend I got a chance to try out Savage Worlds (SW), the current game system from Pinnacle Press. The game system is designed to be a generic/universal type gaming system for use in any number of settings from Old West (ala. Deadlands Reloaded) to Pulp-like settings (ala. Slip Stream).

Ahoy, Me Hearties and welcome to National Talk Like a Pirate Day. That's right ye land lubbers, today is the day when all real men take back the decks of their mighty ships and make those scurvy dogs walk the plank into the bright blue sea. So grab your grog and find a wench or two to chase.

Updated: Aug. 23, 2008

I got a chance to play in a small tournament of the Star Wars Miniatures this past weekend. I’ve gotten minis from various sets over the past few years for use in the Star Wars Roleplaying Game (D6, not D20). I put together an army together (Imperial) and headed off to my FLGS. Eight other players were there that day and we each got to play three matches each with ones success in one game determining who they would play in the next. I lost each of my matches, but still had some fun. The interesting thing was the players that came out on top were all using smaller armies of more expensive and rare (or very rare) army units. This isn’t really surprising to me as that seems to be the case with almost every collectible game (card, minis, etc…).

A friend of my father, Dr. Urs Staufer, invited us all down to Tucson to see the Phoenix Mars Mission Command Center.

I've been playing around on occasion with 3D animation software, specifically Lightwave 3D for a bit of time, but haven't really spent the time needed to really learn to use the software and get good at it. So, I was playing around with it a bit over the last few months and created an amusing little test animation of an Antibody doing the Can-Can. It's basically three capsules merged at the joint (each one was positioned 120 degrees apart). I created the eyes with a globe and then boolean removed them from the "head" area so they are recessed in a nook designed for them.
Bones were then extended from the center out into each capsule to create the knees and neck. The collar (which isn't very visible in this animation) was wrapped around the upper capsule and then spikes were cloned around it.
I keep meaning to go back in and extend the length of the animation but haven't yet found the time to do so.

So, I updated the myminicity fetcher to also have the ability to post a report to a web forum (vbulletin) after it gets done going through the various cities it has been asked to work with. To do this I added a few options to the script to take in the location of the forum, the thread ID that you want it to post to and the username/password that it needs to log in to the forum to post. To make it a little easier to use I have included a .bat file that can be edited to hold the username and password and other options and then just double-click the .bat file to run the fetcher. Not much else has been changed in the script beyond this.