Two days late (and a tweet or two short), here are my Follow Friday picks: @make Notes about awesome DIY projects you could be doing if only you had time. And skill. And tools. #followfriday @easdnewsflash Easton Area School District on Twitter. #followfriday @ChattyDM Because he never stops talking & yet still has plenty of … Read more
So it’s been two weeks at the gym, and about two weeks of cutting back my soda intake to about a can a day. It’s also been two weeks of getting used to the new digital scale at the gym (thus the decimals in the headline). Previously, the gym had had one of the old … Read more
As I mentioned earlier, my gaming group’s planning on attending MEPACon Fall 2009 in force and true to my word I’ve volunteered to run three events at the con: The Antares Run (Star Wars: Saga Edition), The Ruins of New York (Savage Worlds/The Day After Ragnorak), and Risk 2210. The convention is being held Nov. … Read more
It’s been about a year since I blogged anything about my attempts at geek fitness. Not because I haven’t been doing anything … but because I haven’t been doing it consistently. I’ve been going to the gym periodically, but but nothing like the regular 4-5 days a week I was doing it a year ago. … Read more
Nuketown’s been upgraded to Drupal 6, which is the latest stable version of the open source content management system. So far, things seem to have made it through the upgrade intact, though I discovered that the Image Assist module now only wants to display images that have been “published”. I think that my test instance … Read more
This is my first-ever post written on my family’s spiffy new Asus Eee PC netbook, aka “The Blue Dolphin”, so named because it’s small and blue, which led my wife to describe it as a baby blue dolphin on Twitter.
Anyway … we decided to get a netbook as a direct result of our summer vacation; I could have used it at Origins, and it would have been handy to have for writing on Butler Island on Lake Champlain (where we spent a week hanging out with family friends).
It’s a cute little machine — it ships with a 160 GB hard drive, wireless N support, a 4 cell battery capable of up to eigth hours of use (assuming you use the Asus power management tools), three USB ports, an SD card reader, an ethernet port and Windows XP.
I’ll forgive it for that last bit; I don’t have the energy to hack this thing to run Mac OS X, and if I have to run Windows, XP isn’t too bad (though I am curious about trying Windows 7 on it). The whole thing cost about $300 from Amazon. which made it a fairly inexpensive experiment.
One of my favorite parts of hitting the big gaming conventions is spending a few hours (or rather, a few days) browsing and shopping in the exhibit hall. Origins 2009 was no different, and while I’m happy to say I didn’t break the bank, I did come back with a goodly pile of product purchased at the show.
I didn’t go into the show expecting to pick up any Savage Worlds books, as our Weird Pulp campaign never really got off the ground, and we haven’t played the game in months. But then I went to the Studio 2 booth, and found the brand new Fantasy Companion supplement for Savage Worlds. Published in the same folio format as the Savage Worlds: Explorers Edition, this book repackages the fantasy species information from the previous hardcover release of the game and folds in a bunch of edges, magic items, and monsters from the various fantasy toolkit PDFs.
I like PDFs, but I’d been hoping that Pinnacle would release the toolkits in a dead tree edition. when I saw the Fantasy Companion on the shelf, I instantly picked it up.
The whirlwind of gaming known as Origins 2009 has come and gone. I had little time bask in the gaming afterglow; after I left the con I flew directly to Vermont to meet with my family so we could spend a week on an island on Lake Champlain.
Going from 24 hour gaming to an island with no indoor plumbing, no net access, and minimal power was a huge shift, but at least the lake does have a wandering monster…
So how was Origins? Good. Great even. It didn’t have the same maniac energy that GenCon has, nor did it have the same crush of people all trying to get somewhere at the same time. All of the events were in the convention center, which made navigating the con far, far easier than GenCon.
Going into Origins I’d heard that it had a great gamer vibe — meaning it was a place that people went to play games, rather than being more of an event-style, vendor-oriented show like GenCon. After going, I can agree with that sentiment. It’s a gamer’s con, with a heavy focus on board, card and miniature games. Indeed, while there was a serious RPG contingent, they didn’t have the same sort of sprawling setup that they have at GenCon.
Saturday began with the North Market waffles that my friend Cory and I had been craving all week. Strawberries and cream topped waffled cosumed, I headed to my Spirit of the Century game.
The game was run by David Moore (@vandermore) of The Gamemaster Show and included Mur Lafferty, Chris Miller of The Secret Lair podcast, and a host of friends from Twitter and Balticon. We spent the last few weeks creating our characters online – which was one of the best character creation sessions I’ve been in – and it was a blast to finally get to see them in action.
We each created 1920s, pulp versions of ourselves, recast as fictional characters. Drawing on my time as a newspaper reporter, I created Clayton Berkshire aka Clayton Jones aka The Constant Sentinel. He was a world famous reporter for the London Times who covered the Great War as a stringer and was so horrified by what he saw that he created the secret identity of the Sentinel.
My day started withthe uneven Star Wars event, Betrayal of Darth Revan. Uneven partly because of poor dice rolls and incompetence on our part, and poor adventure design on the part of it’s RPGA authors. It has too many encounters, and they didn’t obey Order 66’s The List, specifically the Rule of Six, which advocates making sure you have good terrain, and diverse opponents spread out to take advantage of said terrain. Perhaps the Order 66 community could take on rebuilding the problem encounters.
After stopping by the exhibit hall to pick up Six-siders and Spaceships, and taking some time to drool over starship minis, I headed to my second Star Wars game of the day: The Death of the Star of Agnor. In this New Republic era game I played a force wizard Jedi named Kava Starshade on a diplomatic mission.
The Star Wars game was sponsored by d20 Radio, the folks behind the Order 66 podcast. It was a good game, involving a pirate attack on a star cruiser. I played the Jedi as a diplomatic, somewhat pacifistic character, using his powers to nullify threats rather than kill them.
I ended the day hanging out with friends David Moore (@vandermore) and half the crew from our Saturday morning Spirit of the Century game). We put the finish touches on our characters and broke out a new game: Traitor.