The Diary of A Simple Man

Through a complicated chain of events I tried my first online gaming (the first of a two-shot scenario) this week. It was pretty fun! D&D fifth edition on the Foundry virtual tabletop. I'm looking forward to the next session next week.

It made me want to find an online campaign or two, possibly, and also to start one of my own. If anyone has any suggestions on good online services I could use to run a RuneQuest III campaign, please share them with me. Thanks!

I've neglected both my RuneQuest site and my commuter rail site for months. I'm planning on doing something for the RQ site (maybe that article on charms; if anyone wants to help me on it, please let me know), but in the last few days the good old MBTA/MBCR gave me the inspiration for a couple of posts on the Charlie on the Commuter Rail blog.

Remember those stairs at Ruggles? The ones that were crumbling last December? They're worse. MUCH worse. Photos over on the Charlie blog.

Zines
I almost forgot: I don't know if anyone is tracking it, but I've annotated and posted a shitload of zines on my RQ site lately. Twenty-three of them since late June. Just in case you're desperate for something to read. I haven't given up on the sheetless roleplaying article, but it's basically gone into slow-motion for a while. I'll definitely finish it within a month or so, though.

LJ Backup
I've been manually backing up my LJ. Did all of 2003 (it was only half a year anyway), and am up to October 2004. It's a bit tedious, particularly since none of those old posts are tagged at all. I've been adding tags to them before backing them up, which definitely slows the process down. On the other hand, this means that there are a lot more posts that have been tagged; politics and Sebastian in particular have expanded a lot.

Shogun
I don't know if anyone here is a fan of Shogun (the novel by James Clavell), but if you are, or if you're interested in Japanese history, you might find this interesting: Learning from Shogun - Japanese History and Western Fantasy. It's a PDF with a number of academic essays about the novel and how it relates to the actual Japanese culture of the time. It's a bit disillusioning, in places, but that's inevitable. There's also an essay by one asshole of a professor who made up a clever little bit of wordplay to insult fans of the novel and ignorant Japanophile Westerners in general; he's so pleased with himself over his little coinage that he uses it about five hundred times in his essay, filling me with a powerful urge to kick him in the balls, hard. Still, the rest of the essays are pretty interesting.

It arrived in the mail on Saturday: the playtester's copy of Basic RolePlaying, The Chaosium Roleplaying System. I'm very excited and pleased. A few quick first impressions:

1. It's huge. 399 pages! I hope the size doesn't scare newcomers off.

2. The cover is cool; I like it a lot. But again, I have to wonder how it will look to newcomers:



3. They spelled my name right. Whew!

4. I'd been worried about the magic system. No more worries - the magic system is very much in the tradition of RQ and classic BRP. There are some slightly different names for spells, but classics such as Bladesharp are effectively unchanged (it's now called "Sharpen").

It's going to take me a LONG time to read and properly analyze this behemoth! I have GOT to find a group to play it with!

I did a lot of work on my RQ site today. Added a 31-page annotated zine, created a new installment of Chatter (for site-specific posts), and cleaned up lots of odds and ends. There's still plenty to do, but it's nice to have the site a bit more up-to-date!

I should probably do some publicizing, but it's been so long...the odds are that most of the addresses on my update list are dead. I haven't sent anything out to it in a couple of years at least!

I've posted five more annotated zines and an article since Monday. I also have another annotated zine ready to go on the site; I just need to link it up (I figured I shouldn't put too much up at once, so I'll probably post it over the weekend).

One of the new zines is a one-shot that I'd totally forgotten about; it was called Babble-On 5, and I wrote it for a Babylon 5 APA in 1995.

I've also managed to get good copies of some of my other zines, the later ones that I wrote for Interregnum. I'll be scanning those as well.

I bogged down on the sheetless roleplaying article, so while I was taking a walk I mentally threw out all the text and started writing it as if I was telling a friend about sheetless roleplaying. That gave me a much better start, I think.

By the way, my guestbook, polls, and quizzes - all of which were free services from a company called Alxnet - are totally dead. I can log in to my account there, but when I try to actually view or modify any of my services, I'm automatically logged out. I tried to email Alxnet and got this result:

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This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

toolmanager-support@alxnet.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.1.1 <toolmanager-support@alxnet.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual alias table (state 14).

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Looks like I'm screwed. I'll need to find a new guestbook service, I guess, and some new quizzes and polls too - otherwise I'll have an unbalanced number of icons. Does anyone want to suggest a quiz/poll site that's reliable and not too obnoxious? Or some other cool feature that would work well on my RQ site?

Woohoo! We spent $55.90 and bought a combo printer/scanner at BJ's. It's an Epson, and it scans surprisingly well. I used it to turn an old zine of mine into a PDF in remarkably short order.

I wish it had been able to use OCR, but that didn't seem to be an option. I'll just have to make sure that the link description is fairly detailed when I add it to my RuneQuest site.

Anyway, here's a quick link to the zine. It was first published in July 1992.

Rack & Rune #9: Remember SPI!

Contents:

• "From the Closed Shelves", including reviews of Lord Dunsany, The God Box by Barry Longyear, Superstoe by William Borden, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Kim by Rudyard Kipling


• "Random RuneQuest"


• Review: Sun County (RQ scenario pack)


• A critique of TSR


• Computer Problems


• Comments (Collier, Swanson, Blacow, Derryberry, Erlandsen, Jorenby, Keller, Phillies, Plamondon, Butler)

I'm going to be able to start adding ALL of the missing zines now. *glee*

I'll need to redesign the zine page a little first, though. And I'll also have to do some work on them; the scan quality is excellent, but I want to add modern-perspective notes to them, just as I did for the zines I put up earlier.

Advice: I've been going a bit insane with the advice column; it's really kind of addictive (obligatory joke: "Now I know how George W. Bush feels about wine and cocaine". Updated version: "Now I know how George W. Bush feels about wine, cocaine, lying in order to send poor young people off to die in Iraq, and shredding the Bill of Rights^* )".

Anyway, I've answered 44 questions so far. My current average rating is 5 (which is perfect, of course), and I have 70 feedback points. Of course, I'll probably be crushed by the first less-than-perfect rating I get. :/

HAH! I walked away from my computer before posting this, came back, and sure enough, someone just gave me my first "4". Most unfairly, too. I was the only person to even TRY to answer her question! Oh well.

RuneQuest: Something strange: I was just added to the Mongoose RQ playtest group after all. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Greg Stafford's remarkable rudeness, though, so right now I'm not very excited. Still, I'll check the rules out soon.

Dreams: Another funny thing: The night before last I dreamed a neat and funny idea for a roleplaying scenario. I even dreamed that I was writing a snatch of poetry for it. When I woke up, I ran to the computer and noted it all down. The couplet wasn't bad, I guess (it sounds a little familiar, though), but it doesn't actually fit into the scenario at all:

I could not save him, although I tried;
I rode to live, he lived to ride.

Health: It was a sinus infection. I'm 99% sure. Steady pain in the lower sinuses, and random pain EVERYWHERE. Every little movement hurt. Every bump hurt 10x more than it should have. So I took a lot of Tylenol over three days, and used saline on my sinuses just before bed for two nights in a row.

But man, the saline hurt. Even WITH Tylenol, the sheer pain kept me up for more than an hour each night. Agony. On the plus side, I didn't have to use the saline or the Tylenol last night. I'm mostly better.

Apology: Apologies to Kat for kinda stealing her subtopic style. But come to think of it, I used to the the same style back when I was writing for The Wild Hunt and Interregnum.

So maybe she stole it from me.

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^* Except the Second Amendment, of course.

Lots to tell, not much time to tell it right now. I've been busy fighting the new RQ wars.

Sidenote: London. What the hell? Why do these things only happen when I'm out of touch? On 9/11/2001 I was unconscious and going under the knife as the first plane hit; I was heavily drugged for the following days. For the London thing, I was on vacation in Maine and completely out of touch with the media. What can I say?

I'll try to slap some photos up...let's see.
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I also got a chance to hit the Boothbay Harbor library porch. I love that porch; they put out a bunch of books, and you can pick them up for a dime each. Awesome! This time I picked up the following:

• War Beneath The Sea (paperback) - Bonham, Frank


• The Spirit of Dorsai (large trade paperback) - Dickson, Gordon R.


• To Your Scattered Bodies Go (paperback) - Farmer, Philip Jose


• Tales of a Korean Grandmother (hardcover) - Frances Carpenter


• Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to Stay Awake By (hardcover) - Hitchcock, Alfred (ed.)


• Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Terror Time (paperback) - Hitchcock, Alfred (ed.)


• North and South (paperback) - Jakes, John


• The Princes of Earth (hardcover) - Kurland, Michael


• Tiger By The Tail and Other Science Fiction Stories (hardcover) - Nourse, Alan E.


• the HORSE in the CAMEL suit (hardcover) - Pene du Bois, William


• Henry Reed, Inc. (paperback) - Robertson, Keith


• The Book of the Dun Cow (harcover) - Wangerin Jr., Walter

And all for $1.25. Amazing!

Some company called Mongoose Publishing has announced that they'll be putting out a new version of RuneQuest - "a completely new system that will look and smell like the original", a phrase which does NOT fill me with confidence. If it's a new system, it's not RuneQuest!

There has been a lot of discussion on a thread over at the RPGnet forums. And I, of course, couldn't resist putting in my own two cents.

And now I'm REALLY gone on vacation...