Blackmoor Vituperative

From the West End Games Fan Site forum:

Princes of the Universe Needs you!!!

PREVIEW SAMPLE
http://www.godsendagenda.com/art/PotU_Sample.pdf

HELLAS was never intended to be just a single role-playing game — from the very start we had planned five books, and the second one even had a name: Princes of the Universe (after the Queen song). This book would expand the HELLAS universe in new and exciting ways, allowing players to see who the movers and shakers of the HELLAS universe were, both heroic and villainous.

As with HELLAS, we had planned Princes of the Universe (and, indeed, all the books in the series) to be an experience — full color, high-quality artwork, glossy cover, the works — and so POTU was designed that way from the very start. It’s truly a sight to behold.

That’s where you come in.

The number one thing you can do to help is spread the word. When you visit gaming sites and forums drop the HELLAS name and talks about your experience with the book. Direct people who may be interested in a good sci-fi game to the webpage and to the Kickstarter site.

With your help, we will be able to print Princes of the Universe in the way it deserves to be printed: in full color. All we’re asking is for your help and support now. If we can get enough support before our deadline, we’ll be able to augment our current printing funds with your added money and print our book in color.

We’re not asking you to spend more than you would normally spend for the book, but if you want to then we’re offering additional benefits for additional pledges, as you can plainly see on the Kickstarter page.

Here is the link http://kck.st/aZUGdU

Thanks for your help.

I wish these guys the best of luck. Publishing a role-playing game and breaking even (much less making a profit) is much more difficult now than it was back in the mid-1990s. They will need all the help they can get.

I want to run a gritty science fiction game or a modern fantasy game, using d6 Space, d6 Fantasy, and/or d6 Adventure. If I run the modern fantasy game, it’ll be in my Rough Magic setting. If it’s a science fiction game, I want to make up a new setting. I am tentatively calling it ZeroSpace. Here’s a blurb:

The Thousand Worlds are at war, and have always been at war: with the Veejhad, the Shi, and countless other enemies. Some are human. Some are not. Some are powerful. Some are hardly even worth mentioning. Some are outside of the Imperium. Some are within. Still, the wars rage on, as they always have, and they always will, using weapons that can destroy planets and viruses that selectively infect family members of known dissidents.

But that is far away. If you have seen combat, it was at least a couple of years ago.

The people of the Thousands Worlds are privileged beyond imagining. For the wealthy and the powerful, there is no disease, no hunger, no death, and no wish unfulfilled.

But you are neither wealthy nor powerful. You have known both hunger and disease, and no regen tank, clone bank, or offline personality backup will replace you when you die.

You are a member of the Imperial Grand Survey, part of the skeleton crew of Remote Observer Station 1AC5, a sensor array pointed into the darkness at the edge of the Outer Rim.

You see a supply ship every six months. The most recent was two months ago.

Your assignment is for five years. You have at least two years to go.

You aren’t going to make it to five.

I recently stumbled across a number of free-to-download game books published by West End Games (such as d6 Space). On flipping through them, I thought, “Hey: this is actually pretty cool.”

So I spent some time looking around for source material. I did find a bit (d6 Space Ships), but no setting material or adventures or anything like that. So I looked around for West End Games’ web site, only to discover that http://www.westendgames.com/ is no longer online.

Gone? Just… gone? How very odd. So I turned to that fickle friend, Wikipedia, and read the whole sad story of West End Games. Such a shame.

More’s the pity. On reading d6 Space, I got to thinking that this might be a palatable compromise between extremely rules-light games (like my neglected stepchild, Jazz) and more mechanically complex games like Mutants & Masterminds (which I like very much, but I confess the mass of game mechanics weighs heavily on me). I even wondered if it might be worth dusting off my affectionately misbegotten cyberpunk-immortal pastiche, Legacy: War Of Ages, revising it and rewriting it using the Opend6 game system. Or, heck, maybe even writing something altogether new….

But, alas, it appears that these d6 books are, like Legacy, no more than the weathered artifacts of a game company that strut and fret its hour upon the stage, and then was heard no more.

Here’s to you, West End Games. You rose higher, and fell further, than Black Gate Publishing ever did.

I am supposed to be playing in a Morrow Project game this evening, using GURPS. I have been reading the rules for GURPS (GURPS Lite, which is free to download).

I am debating whether to play or not. I said that I would, so I feel that I should, but I have been reading the GURPS rules, and there are so many things that I dislike (bad mechanics, like bell curve rolls; inconsistent mechanics, like sometimes needing to roll low, and sometimes needing to roll high; overcomplicated mechanics, like literally a dozen different weapon skills; etc.). I do not want to be the guy who comes to a game and complains about the rules the whole time. That’s no fun for anyone.

I am still a little behind on my classwork, so I should be working on that anyway.

Once I chose the color scheme (with the help of my modest Photoshop skills), I started the task of modifying the real thing. Here we go, step by step.

This is how it always starts.

First, we take it apart. I used masking tape to keep the screws together. After I had more than a few pieces to keep track of, I started labeling them and putting them into ziploc bags.

Everything has been disassembled and lightly sanded.

Everything has been washed and is drying.

The bits and pieces have been labeled and placed into ziploc bags. Note the bag labeled “unknown spring”. Yes, I have already lost track of where something goes. Sigh.

These are the ornamental bits I bought at Michael’s. The curlicue flourishes were something like $5 a pair, while the bag of little oval things was about $5 for a dozen.

And now those are lightly sanded and washed, as well.

The decorative bits are glued on (with cyanoacrylate), things have been washed again, and are drying.

Everything has been given a couple of coats of satin black.

I assembled most of the large parts (without screws), and took a photo to use as the basis of my color tests. There is probably a word for assembling something without using the screws, but I do not know what it is.

I thought the cylinder deserved its own photo.

This is the first coat of “antique brass”. I will go over this lightly with “brass”.

Masking off the cylinder was the single most time-consuming part. There are at least 50 individual pieces of masking tape on this thing.

This should be the last thing I need to mask off: the upper receiver, under the slide.

I painted the upper receiver black, and then gave it a mist of silver. I think that this gives it a nice retro “steel” look.

And naturally, the black paint seeped past the masking tape, and the masking tape stuck to the silver and pulled it off. I tried using some acetone to take the black off, and that did nothing, nothing, nothing… and then went through all of the layers of paint down to the yellow plastic. Son of a…

Okay. So I re-masked and then re-painted it (just in the damaged areas, to the best of my ability), and it looks okay. In retrospect, I should have sanded the edges of the damaged areas, because you can see those edges if you look carefully. But screw it: the whole point of steampunk is that things are hand-made, not mass-produced in a factory, so some minor flaws are acceptable.

Here we are. All the pieces have been painted, and are ready for assembly. You may not be able to tell in this photo, but I used a brush to paint some black in the creases and edges, to give the parts a “used” and slightly dirty look.

As I assembled the pieces, I used a kind of dry teflon-based lubricant on the moving parts. I think that this was a huge improvement over the silicone gel I used to lubricate the prototype.

Assembly has begun! And wouldn’t you know, I still do not know where that mystery spring goes. Not only that, but I have a mystery screw, now, too. I stared at it for a good long while, but eventually I had to give up and go disassemble my unmodified Nerf Maverick for comparison.

I immediately saw where the mystery spring was, but it took a long time for me to spot the mystery screw. It’s inside of the indexing mechanism.

And here we are: all done!

The best thing — well, maybe not the best, but a great thing — is that it works! My prototype fails to fire about 85% of the time. I think that is partly because it has so many layers of paint, and also because I used silicone gel for lubrication. Rev 6A has, at most, half the layers of paint that the prototype has, and I used a dry teflon-based waxed lubricant on the moving parts.

All in all, I am very pleased.

I have one thing left to do, but it will need to wait a while, because work and school are keeping me busy: I want to put black leather on the grip, where it is currently painted black.

This is my second attempt to modify a Nerf Maverick for steampunk costuming purposes. (My first attempt was in March 2010.)

I will eventually post all of the photos of this process online, but this blog post is specifically to address the color scheme. Rather than paint over and over until I like the colors, as I did with the prototype, I have decided to use Photoshop to try and apply different color schemes to see how I like them.

This is a photo of the gun with most of the parts placed where they are supposed to go, with the base coat of satin black.

This is what it would look like painted solid gold.

This is what it would look like painted solid brass.

This is what it would look like painted solid caramel metallic.

This is what it would look like painted solid copper. A friend of mine says this makes it look like it’s made of chocolate. Chocopunk!

This is what it would look like painted solid steel.

Color scheme 01. I don’t like the gold on the decorations. I thought that I would.

Color scheme 02. Base color is gold. I think it looks garish.

Color scheme 03. Brass with a lot of copper highlights. I like this one.

Color scheme 04. Brass with a bit less copper. I like this one better.

Color scheme 05. Black highlights on the slide and frame. Not too bad.

Color scheme 06. There are things I like about this color scheme, but I think it has too many colors. I do like the black on the grip.

Color scheme 07. I kept the black on the grip, and simplified the color scheme a bit. Still not quite right.

Color scheme 08. Black on the grip, simpler color scheme, and the flourishes are not highlighted at all. I think that this is the scheme I will use, but I will sleep on it.

Color scheme 09. Copper slide, and the decorations on the slide and frame are highlighted. I think I like scheme 08 better.

Color scheme 10. Black grip, black highlights, some more color on the cylinder.

Color scheme 11. Same as 10, but with caramel frame and slide decorations.

Color scheme 12. Something different: black frame, brass and copper highlights.

Color scheme 13. Same as 10, but with copper frame and slide decorations.

I had a little bit of free time today, so I whipped up a couple of dynamic affiliate links for DriveThruRPG, a very cool source of gaming PDFs.

The script can be called one of three ways. One way creates an affiliate link to one of the five newest items added to DriveThruRPG, the second creates an affiliate link to one of the five best-selling items, and the third creates a random link to an item on either list. I considered animating the affiliate links, so that a different item would appear every few seconds, but to be frank, animated advertisements annoy me. Actually, I do not care for advertisements at all — I hide them, as a matter of fact.

Does this make me a hypocrite? Maybe. However, these are not just advertisements — they are also news. For that reason, I think they are useful, even to people like me who routinely hide ads.

It’s my intention to add these to this blog and to RPG Library, the gaming community site I maintain, but I do not really expect to see much revenue from these. I mainly created them as a service to the gaming community. For that reason, I added a variable so that other people can replace my affiliate ID with their own, if they would like to use these on their own web site.

So check it out. If you have any questions, let me know, and I will try to answer them.

Update 2010-05-25: I added some error-checking in case the description field in DriveThruRPG’s RSS feed contains some bad tags. It doesn’t actually do anything with the errors, but it keeps the script from failing.

Update 2010-05-25, part 2: I expanded the script to be able to handle any of OneBookShelf’s sites.

It looks like I will soon have a gig with a company out of New York doing more or less what I would have done for the ebook publishing company, had I not screwed that up beyond repair. Just consulting work so far, but they are talking about bringing me on full-time. I am still kicking myself over throwing away the opportunity with the ebook company, but having a job will ease the pain the bit. More than a bit: it seems like a really good company. Small, well-funded, and with a product that isn’t going away any time soon.

I need to stop thinking about that ebook job. Regret serves no useful purpose. Ah, well.

By the way, Portal is free on Steam until May 24.

P.S. And when you’re dead I will be still alive.

This is pretty neat. The offer is valid for two more days, so don’t drag your feet.

The Humble Indie Bundle is a unique kind of bundle that we are trying out.

Pay what you want. If you bought these five games separately, it would cost around $80 but we’re letting you set the price!

All of the games work great on Mac, Windows, and Linux. We didn’t want to leave anyone out.

There is no middle-man. You can rest assured that 100% of your purchase goes directly to the developers and non-profits as you specify (minus credit card fees).

We don’t use DRM. When you buy these games, they are yours. Feel free to play them without an internet connection, back them up, and install them on all of your Macs and PCs freely.

Your contribution supports the amazing Child’s Play charity and Electronic Frontier Foundation. By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child’s Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you’d like.

And now, thanks to a humble donation from Amanita Design: all contributors are given a free copy of Samorost 2!

Bad news for people working at Hasbro on their D&D game line: more layoffs. Actually, rumour has it that Peter Schaefer left voluntarily, as did Andy Collins, but Jesse Decker seems to have been plain old fired. At least Hasbro didn’t do it right before Christmas, as they have in the past. Not like there is ever a good time to lose one’s job, but some times are worse than others. My best wishes to everyone, and I hope you land on your feet and find rewarding positions elsewhere.

On the bright side, experts seem to agree that whenever the Great Recession finally comes to an end, there will be a strong demand for skilled people in a variety of jobs in the USA. Check these out.

• The future’s 15 most wanted workers
• The 25 best-paying jobs for women

In almost entirely unrelated news, Jason Durall (who has done great work on a wide variety of games) answers a battery of questions about his Lords of Gossamer and Shadow (Diceless) game. Interesting stuff.