Blackmoor Vituperative

This is just too cute.

Gamers, let’s band together and see how much we can raise to help the people of Haiti.

Donate $20 and get a coupon for over a thousand dollars in RPG titles. After you make the donation, you will receive the coupon code in your email. It will also be available in your order history.

A listing of the free products available with this coupon can be found on our Gamers Help Haiti page.

(from Drive-Thru RPG)

I recently encountered a mapping program intended for role-playing games, called Hexographer. It is an easy to use application that makes colorful game maps. There is a “free” version (not free as in speech — free as in beer), and a pay version. The free version is pretty nifty. However, there are several problems with Hexographer that make me strongly advise people not to use it — not even the free version.

The online (free) version is a Java app. Under ordinary circumstances, you can simply download a Java app like this, and run it on your own computer. Why would you want to do this? Because web sites go down. They go away. (Remember Ar-Kelaan Hexmapper? Their Hexmapper software is available elsewhere, but the Ar-Kelaan site itself is no more.) It is a fact of life. If you want to be able to open your maps a few months from now, it is mandatory that you be able to run the app locally. Unfortunately, the author of Hexographer has crippled the app so that it can only be run on his server.

Strike one.

The pay version of Hexographer coms in two flavors: a “one year” license, and a “lifetime” license. A reasonable person would assume that the “one year license” means that you get free updates for a year, and that after that, you would need to upgrade or buy another license. That would not be ideal (open source is ideal), but it would at least not be unreasonable. However, the author of Hexographer has planted a time bomb in Hexographer — the software self destructs after 365 days. You paid for it, and it simply stops working. This is completely unacceptable.

Strike two.

The “lifetime license” is the cherry on top of this fruitcake. You might think a “lifetime” license entitles you to free updates for as long as the publisher continues to support the product. That is what a reasonable person would assume. A reasonable person would be wrong. In fact, the software will self-destruct after 365 days, unless the publisher sends you a new license EVERY SINGLE YEAR, FOREVER. “Defective by design” does not even begin to describe this mad scheme.

Strike three.

If you value your time — the time you spend drawing maps, and the time you spend role-playing with your friends — I strongly urge you not use Hexographer at all, not even the free version, until these horrendous licensing problems are corrected.

In the meantime, here are some viable alternatives, which may or may not fit your own particular needs:

• Arr-Kelaan Hexmapper (download, additional tiles)
• DampfKarte
• HexMapper
• HexReMapper
• Inkscape with the boardgame extensions
• Maptool
• Tiled

P.S. The Welsh Piper has a nifty article on using hex maps to facilitate world building. Check it out.

I have looked all over Richmond for black foamcore on which to mount my EZ Dungeons. I found some on Amazon for about $38 for a pack of 10.

I have discovered a competitor to E-Z Dungeons, called TerrainlinX. This is a nifty set of cardboard miniature scenery which are prettier than E-Z Dungeons, and in some ways easier to use, but also not quite as versatile or full-featured. I have purchased products from both sets, including the recently released Dragonshire: Deluxe Edition from Fat Dragon Games, and the two TerrainlinX sets, Himmelveil Streets and Himmelveil Sewers from WorldWorksGames. I haven’t actually built any of them yet — I do not know which to build first!

I have been wanting to make a music video using World Of Warcraft for a long time. I purchased a program called FRAPS to do the image capture, and started sketching out a storyboard.

Then I saw this: I’m So Sick, a machinima by Baron Soosdon.

I am blown away… and humbled. There is no way I could even approach something like this.

If you get sound and no video, you may need to install come codecs.

I am looking for someone who wants to try World Of Warcraft. If I refer a friend and they pay for two months of the game, I get a nifty zebra for my character to ride. And who doesn’t want a zebra?

So if you are interested in a free trial of World Of Warcraft, please let me know and I will email you the code. (It has to be a new account, not an old or inactive account.)

This is the neatest thing in tabletop RPG accessories I have seen in a while: inexpensive 3D dungeons, courtesy of DriveThruRPG and Fat Dragon Games.

RPGnet has a pretty good review of the Knights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide.

(This is for the tabletop game, by the way, not the computer game.)

Ten Ton Hammer has a review (or preview) of Jumpgate Evolution. So far, it looks pretty interesting.