A recent posting by another Savage player brought me back to the idea of using GraphViz in gaming. This particular example was in mapping player characters with their in game relationships to people, places, things and ideas to help a GM visualize how they are all interconnected. I went through the post and created several .gv files that have presets setup to make doing more of these easier should I continue down this path with my own games.

Updated Dec. 6 It's been a while since I last had something to write. Part of that is because I've been busy in a few new games. One of those is a campaign that is taking us through a very old module for D&D, The Temple of Elemental Evil. We're not even halfway through the Temple and our party has already suffered major losses and replacements within the party. I've been taking advantage of the shear scope of this dungeon to slowly improve my minuscule Lightwave Modeling skills.

Now this is an interesting find, especially given the current playtesting our gaming group is currently running through. The Pathfinder Random Treasure Generator V3.0. It offers lots of options for controlling the kinds of treasure given out. Magic can be set to low to reduce the appearance of magical treasures, or increased to make them more common. Do you want to give out more coins? or would you rather the party found gems and other items instead? How hard was the fight the party faced? What is the average level?

Blizzard has announced the next expansion to the World of Warcraft. The Mists of Pandaria. "Shrouded in fog since the world was sundered more than ten thousand years ago, the ancient realm of Pandaria has remained unspoiled by war. Its lush forests and cloud-ringed mountains are home to a complex ecosystem of indigenous races and exotic creatures -- including the noble and enigmatic pandaren. Will the mists of Pandaria part to reveal the world's salvation...

Updated Aug. 7

After doing the data collection for the D6 Probabilities with the presence of the Wild Die I thought I'd take a look at the Savage Worlds system and see how the probabilities show up for the open rolling of a D6 with a second die worked out.

No surprise, the results show a fairly linear falloff for the initial values (up to around 10 or 12 depending on the size of the second die rolled with the D6) with a lessening of the slope after that point (almost a sharp turning inflection point).

Another "Blast From the Past" that I recently ran across thanks to some gamer forums I read. Wildspace - A TSR Ad for something that looks like either a predecessor to Spelljammer.

One interesting problem I’ve occasionally encountered when doing stuff for various games is visualizing the paths through the game. The simplest one would be the path from one adventure to another for a party. A more complicated one would be an entire campaign with various adventures broken down by either level or some other gauge of experience for the game system.
One good example of the latter was posted to the Triple Ace Games site about the game setting Sundered Skies (a Savage Worlds setting). This graph was laid out in something like Visio by hand. Each of the adventures was clustered and linked to the next adventure in the series or Plot Point.

I haven't GMed in almost a decade. I was able to get a group of players to try out Savage Worlds due to some time off from a normally running D&D campaign (mix of 1st and 2nd Edition). I put together the basics of the mission in a few days and mostly winged it when it came to the combat stats.
Character creation only took about an hour (players were unfamiliar with the system, so building characters took a little longer plus I gave them advancements after creation so they weren't just basic novices).

Updated April 10,

We've been playing a campaign of Classic Dungeons & Dragons. The most recently completed module is the original Temple of Elemental Evil. If I recall correctly the completion of this module by our party brought the total body count for it with this GM up to almost 30 characters. We were also both the largest and lowest levels to complete it with most of the party being below level 7.
Attached is the character sheet that we've been using for this campaign which has started the second adventure. We're skipping the Pit of the Slavelords as that one has been "completed" by another adventuring party in this GM's already existing timeline.
Thanks to feedback from users I've found some ways to help improve the existing sheet.

Talk about a blast from the past. I recently came across a copy of FASA's 1990 Shadowrun Promo video. I never realized that FASA had ever done anything like this. In some ways it is much better than the current WotC ads for the "Red Box".

It features everything I'd expect from Shadowrun, and all with that old school late 80s amateur look to the sets. I was impressed by the fact that they actually did have some 3D animation in the video, but, as expected, it was very low polygons (just a few boxes with very few textures or shaders to their surfaces).