June 30, 2011

d20 Morningstar – and Twitter chat

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Tonight I am hosting the weekly #RPGchat on Twitter. Our usual hostess – @d20Blonde is away visiting family so I volunteered my services for the chat lead.  The topic is chosen and reminders have been tweeted, stop in if you can ..

The other project I have gotten into via Kickstarter is d20 Morningstar. This is a RPG using smartphones and GPS to play out a fantasy RPG. From the d20 Morningstar website:

d20 Morningstar is a mobile role playing game that mashes geo-location with d20 game mechanics. Players search their world for monsters, traps and other player characters; and then interact with those encounters to earn experience and loot.

This sound intriguing especially from the standpoint of being a Dungeon Master and setting up quests for other players. Think of setting up a quest in a park where the players smartphones/GPS are leading them through to the goal and fighting the monsters along the way, intriguing blend of reality and fantasy…

 

 

June 29, 2011

Technoir

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I was turned on to Jeremy Keller’s role playing project on Kickstarter called Technoir by one of our Twitter chats. Technoir is a hardboiled cyberpunk role-playing game set in a bleak and desperate future. I am certainly a sucker for Cyberpunk games and settings, I love that blend of tech with the bleak despair of a cyberpunk near future …

Technoir is a roleplaying game. You play protagonists like cyber-tweaked couriers, hard-nosed investigators, and drugged-out hackers making opportunities for themselves in a despairing world. Using a rules-light system with enough intricacies to spark new fires of hardboiled crime novels and cyberpunk science fiction, Technoir lets you coax, hack, fight, prowl, and shoot your way through a dark future. It features Transmissions—city guides brimming with plot nodes to inspire your high-tech adventures—that the GM uses to create tangled and compelling plot webs that expand and evolve as the players’ characters engage it.

This game funded at way over the goal and looks very interesting .

I sat in on a session of  Technoir in order to get a feel for the resolution and mechanics, I liked what I saw of this. The system is built for a narrative style of gameplay the RPGs have trended to lately. I like the simple dice pool mechanic the game uses for action resolution. It seems to be one of those systems which is complex at first but then rolls very quickly once you get the hang of it. In the below video Jeremy explains the basics or action resolution.

I really want to see more games going to the narrative style where the dice roll resolves the action, but the player comes up with the explanation of what actually happened. This makes the GM’s role that of filling in the blanks and moves the gaming experience much closer to the collaborative storytelling that tabletop RPGs have as their potential.

 

June 18, 2011

Yokai Attack!

Posted by ducoduos under gaming, History, Japan
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I picked up a copy of Matt Alt’s Yokai Attack! book recently, Folklore in general always interests me and since I picked up a copy of Reality Blur’s Iron Dynasty campaign setting to use for fantasy games set in old Japan with dark magic. Yokai Attack is an encyclopedia of monsters from Japanese superstition and tradition.

My favorite so far would be the neko-mata which are cats grown very old and which have gained paranormal powers. After a cat grows to a certain age its tail is said to split into two and the powers manifest. It is easy to imagine an random encounter for a group of adventurer’s in Iron Dynasty as meeting with a ferocious twin tailed cat who has the ability to raise and control the dead and has a taste for human flesh.

from the Wiki entry for bakeneko:

A bakeneko (化け猫?, “monster-cat“) is, in Japanese folklore, a cat with supernatural abilities akin to those of the fox or raccoon dog. A cat may become a bakeneko in a number of ways: it may reach a certain age, be kept for a certain number of years, grow to a certain size, or be allowed to keep a long tail. In the last case, the tail forks in two and the bakeneko is then called a nekomata (猫又?, or 猫股 “forked-cat”). This superstition may have some connection to the breeding of the Japanese Bobtail.

The connection between the folklore of the twin tailed monster cat and the Japanese bobtailed cats is one of those interesting crosses of superstition and reality.

 

May 21, 2011

Fish in the pond

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Fish in the pond by Bryan - oz4caster
Fish in the pond, a photo by Bryan – oz4caster on Flickr.

Woke up to an absolutely beautiful morning and decided to run out to a local park to get some fishing in. I have been fishing since i was a lad and have never really lost the bug. the peace and solitude, just being on a pond casting your line in the water and watching the water. Its a wonderful thing, just a perfect marriage of nature and man.So calm and clear, of course I did not get a bite. It was more about relaxing in the moment than anything else.love this photo of a sunfish from Bryan on flickr.

 

April 6, 2011

Commodore 64 retro computer

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The venerable classic computer that many of today’s geek first cut their teeth on was the Commodore C64.

Now Gizmodo tells us that the classic beige box is making a come back next month.

With the innards of a netbook (Atom CPU and Ion2 graphics) but including a DVD or optional Blu-Ray, instead of a cassette tape drive, and with plenty of USB/HDMI ports this will be a modern machine capable of being hooked to any modern monitor or HDTV (for an extra wave of nostalgia) . The keyboard is lovingly crafted to recreate the classic IBM feel and sound.

The system will ship with a Ubuntu Linux OS but will have an icon to launch directly into C64 OS for 8bit retro computing (games anyone?). They are working on a Commodore OS 1.0 complete with classic game package and will mail this to buyers when complete.

Link to CommodoreUSA webpage is here.

The geek in me wants this now!

 

April 1, 2011

RPGChat

Posted by ducoduos under gaming, Twitter | Tags: , |
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Thursday nights 9-10 on Twitter is the #RPGchat discussion.

In case you are not familiar; a Twitter hashtag discussion is where any number of people across Twitter converse on a topic.You simply add whatever the hashtag being used to your post and set up a search for that hashtag to view all the relevant posts by the people joining in.

On Thursdays from 9-10 EST there is an ongoing chat for role playing games (pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons style).

I am going to start archiving the discussions for posterity, with Tweetdoc generating a .pdf every Friday or as soon after as I can.

On 3-31-2011 the discussion topic was player buy-in, or getting players to feel really part of an on going campaign world. The archive at tweetdoc is here (go to the bottom of the page and scroll up to see the convo as it happened.

 

April 1, 2011

Nook Color

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After two weeks of owning a Nook Color, let me give some verdict.

Overall its a winner, color+touchscreen for an e-Reader is just what I was waiting for. Barnes and Nobles’s website does experience some downtime but its been minimal for me. What sealed the purchase for me was that you can buy (single issues) and subscribe to magazines.  In order to fit the full size magazine to a 7 inch screen they have an article view which displays just the articles’ text in column form (no ads, yay! but no photos, boo!) this is the one feature I love the most, being able to subscribe electronically to magazines.

The touchscreen works well although it definitely lacks some sensitivity, its hard to get pages to flip at times. You gotta wonder if B&N cheaped out there.

Battery life is good although the color screen does drain power, I can get a days worth of reading out of a charge.

The Nook is WiFi only so you will need wireless to download books and magazines.

hmmm, if you think prices on tablet computers are excessive then look at installing Android OS 3.0 on a Nook Color and get a 250 dollar tablet computer. Sweet, I am tempted to try this for myself….

 

 

 

March 28, 2011

New Tokyo Ramen Champion

Posted by ducoduos under Japan | Tags: , , |
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ramen from Shinasoba KibiBrian from Ramen Adventures checks in to update on the ongoing Ramen Champion contest in Shinjuku.

Its still going despite the blackouts in Tokyo although it did not seem crowded from his pictures.

Lovely bowls of soup, visually my fav is the Sinasoba ‘version up’ pork ramen.

Interesting way of voting for your champion too, just drop your spoons in the bin corresponding to your choice, 4 spoons is 4 votes. Who will win the ramen championships?

 

March 26, 2011

What can we learn from the Tohoku aftermath …

Posted by ducoduos under Japan | Tags: , , |
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I was reading my friend’s blog post “Tohuku disaster helps explain why I love Japan” and he struck a chord. If you are a Japan enthusiast and not reading Jamaipanese blog, then shame on you. To quote the relevant part

Japan itself isn’t perfect but seeing videos and pictures of Japanese citizens lining up for supplies, helping each other out and not looting and rioting says a lot about the people. In Japan from an early age you are taught to be considerate and to deter your personal interests for the betterment of the larger group.

One thing which has always fascinated me about the Japanese is their stoicism and efficiency; and the reaction in the aftermath of the tsunami was very uplifting to see, it was devoid of the panic and desperation that many recent disasters have sparked.

There also is the gaman effect. Living on an island prone to volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes  has bred a resilience and perseverance into the Japanese that other people would do well to learn from.

Work together and help each other, do not panic and you will go on. There is more strength in yourself than you would ever have known possible.

Ganbaru Japan!

 

March 22, 2011

The Road Home

Posted by ducoduos under China | Tags: , |
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We watched the movie The Road Home this weekend. An excellent movie about life and love and tradition.

from the IMDB:

City businessman Luo Yusheng returns to his home village in North China for the funeral of his father, the village teacher. He finds his elderly mother insisting that all the traditional burial customs be observed, despite the fact that times have changed so much, and that it involves many people carrying his father’s body back to the village – the road home. As Yusheng debates the complications involved in organising such a big feat, he remembers the magical story of how his father and mother first met and got together.

I love how Yusheng comes to realize what is so special about the past and the his mother’s insistence on observing the old traditions of the past for his father’s funeral. The significance of the road and what happened in his parents courtship becomes especially poignant when you realize how infrequent marriages for love are amongst the arranged marriages of rural China. His parents marriage was a break from tradition but with the changes of modernity Yusheng sees the importance of observing the old tradition of walking the departed home.

The Road Home is available through Amazon here.

 

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