Cover of Grenzland #3 Issue 3 of Wanderer Bill's Grenzland fanzine just landed in my mailbox yesterday, with, among other things, an NPC class written by me ("The Anointed of Abyssal Slaughter"). It mostly was me combining the given topic of the issue with an interest in NPC classes a while ago. The 'zine also contains a one-page dungeon by Alex Schroeder ("The Crown of Neptune"), a game report ("Schiffbruch"), rules for…
I bought a Razer headset on a whim while in the electronics store earlier. I don't think I will do that again. To get the fuil features I paid for I had to register and give more private details than I had to give for working in one of the biggest banks of Europe.
Why does an electronics company want those kind of details from me. Why do they want me to give all that to use what I already paid for?
The Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy Wargaming
The Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy Wargaming by Mike Monaco, is a free pdf download published at CMU Press under a CC BY-NC-ND license, and dealing with the history of the eponymous (if a bit incongruously titled) Fantasy Wargaming roleplaying game system. Yes, it turns out you can write whole books not only about DnD. At least if it's something as weird as that game at least.
The original game Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All (or just Fantasy Wargaming in some editions) was a 1981 book by Bruce Galloway, a clear variation on Dungeons and Dragons, based on Galloway’s home rules. Unlike it’s competition it was not afraid of using actual historical concepts like astrology and occultism in it’s descriptions, although it also was written so densely it was hard to make sense of it in any shape or form by someone not already familiar with roleplaying games. And, well, it was called Fantasy Wargaming.
Which made this a problem, as the game was published both in the UK and the US by mainstream publishers obviously trying to break into the nascent TTRPG market. The most available version was most likely the one published by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, which made the game available to many people who did not have any experience with roleplaying games before.
Unfortunately one has to say, as the game’s size (300pgs) and conceptual denseness made parsing the book quite a feat, meaning if people used this as an introduction to roleplaying, it might not have been very successful.
The Story of Fantasy Wargaming goes into this, and into the development of the game. It could have been a bit more thorough and a bit more critical, but for what it is it’s a nice look into the environment that created it. And well, it’s free.
(I learned about this book from an episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast which had the author on and talked about this project. Well worth a listen)
@zdl@gmkeros.wordpress.com@gmkeros.wordpress.com the question I would pose is how much of a competition CnS really was 5 years after it's release. But yes, you are right.
asked in the #irc channel and found out @ngircd does not allow interlinking of different ircds. which is a feature I thought would be quite normal to have for IRC, but it seems not.
ngIRCd at least is dead simple to set up. others don't make it that easy to get a small server running.
Oh dear me. I just visited the Mandela Effect subreddit to read a post and comments about how "the sun used to be yellow, and now it's white," and I think a lot of these folks are not doing well.
If someone describes feeling like everyone, including their family and friends, is avoiding a topic and trying to deceive them, well... "scientists replaced the sun, and it's a conspiracy" is not the most obvious conclusion.
@artemis most normal people have left during the reddit migration and because the meme faded away, and the ones that remain are those that hold on for deeply held beliefs.
People are entirely too trusting when it comes to #ai. Yes, this technology might, MIGHT deliver acceptable results. But people expect things from it they really shouldn't. And they definitely need someone to double check if it doesn't, you know, leave out core sections of the document they try to create.
(Personally I wouldn't trust any information generated by AI)
@CrypticMirror eh, it was Heyne, I always got the feeling that publishing house was the stereotypical megacorp that didn't care about what editors or authors thought.
In fact I spent some interesting 30 minutes on the Frankfurt book fair listening to a group of Heyne executives dissing their current bestselling author who was having an author event at the other side of their stand.
(It was Dieter Bohlen, so nothing they said was likely untrue)
@javi@dianeduane oh right now it already died down a lot. that article consistently pulls in higher numbers than the rest, but whenever Diane links to it it's like a tsunami.
John Faed, Warlocks and Witches in a dance (1855) I am not a fan of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. In fact I am not a fan of the 4th edition either, or the 3.5th edition, or Pathfinder (the 3.75th edition) for that matter. Actually I burned out running 3e and that was the impetus to go back to older edition, retroclones, and the OSR.
#Agile is basically project management esotericism.
The smartest people have managed to build processes on top of it that work, the same way that some churches have worthwhile charities that do good work, but that doesn't mean the core of the methodology isn't mumbo jumbo.
(ah yeah, going for both developers AND the faithful today in one fell swoop, what am I even thinking?)
@W99 my current company is not bad with that, for the first time it feels like stuff actually gets done. But previous encounters with Agile were basically little more than time getting wasted in daily stand up meetings where we never had anything to say and nothing ever was of consequence for us.
And from what I heard from my colleagues they had similar experiences in other companies.
@nixCraft I always wonder about that fast-paced environment thing.
You basically can't find a job that doesn't have that. Is that supposed to be a good thing?
also the Agile thing is of course perfectly valid, it's not like anyone can explain what Agile is supposed to mean anyway
"After taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find. The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist.
Children were not being sexualized. She could find no examples of critical race theory. She examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children how to be a good friend and a good human."
@Lana I don't want to be too much of a negative ninny, but this is all "no shit sherlock" territory, and if they wanted to see that before they would have
Sliding into your DMs