We usually don’t get home till around 4am, though, and that means that I’ve been too tired to play D&D4e at Blacktown Games Day this month. I probably won’t make it back until Winterfest, and of course, I haven’t been around to GM as I promised last post. Both suck greatly.

On the other hand, I’ve signed up for a weekly Call of Cthulhu game at Ministry of Game at St Ives, which is a hell of a long way to travel, but hey, it’s Call of Cthulhu.

What’s more, it’s the classic campaign Masks of Nyarlathotep. I ran the first scene for a group about a decade ago, before the group imploded, and I’ve been waiting on The Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion before I try it again. But I’ve also longed to play the damn thing for almost 20 years, and it looks like I might finally get the chance. Understandably, I’m very, very excited at the prospect.

Apart from that, not much to report. I’ve been too busy running around and studying and settling in, sadly, to write the scenario I’d hoped to enter into Chaosium’s Halloween Adventure Contest. It’ll either have to wait for next year or find its way into a monograph to see the light of day; it’s pretty intrinsically tied into Chaosium’s Lovecraft Country supplements, and it’s not the kind of thing I could sell to another publisher like Miskatonic River Press.

I’m (glacially) gathering research materials for another monograph, but it’s such a huge undertaking that it could well be years before I can even start writing it. By then, though, Scrivener for Windows should be stable and feature-laden enough to take on the task.

And that’s about it. On the subject of games, though, I’d like point you towards Asylum: Exit Australia, a web-based simulation of the travails of a refugee suffers when seeking a safe, new home.

TV network SBS commissioned the game to support their series Go Back to Where You Came From (which I’ve not seen yet, but intend to as soon as I can make time). Design house Chocolate Liberation Front—how’s that for a name!—has obviously put a lot of thought and effort into the game’s design. Although its production quality is impeccable, I hesitate to call it good; I think harrowing is a more accurate assessment. Nevertheless, go play it now.

Old friend Adam R rather nicely invited me to see Sir Terry Pratchett speak at the Sydney Opera House, and a good time was had by all and sundry. I’ve been meaning to catch Pratchett ever since I was wee lad in Canberra, and was glad to get the chance before his Alzheimer’s exacts too great a toll.

I’ve had a short story published in Issue 19 of The Unspeakable Oath, which you can pick up in PDF, or in PDF and in print. Look for Dying Sunlight at the back of the magazine. To my knowledge, it’s the only Call of Cthulhu-related magazine currently in print, so if you’re you’re a fan of the game, please give it a look.

(No word on the fate of God Wills It Thus, however. I’m not holding out too much hope, but stranger things have happened…)

I’m also bandying about an idea for Chaosium’s 2011 Halloween Adventure Contest. Hopefully, I can get something written and playtested before the July deadline. (I also have an idea-and-a-bit for one or more MULA Monographs, but they’ll be well down the track: I need to establish a regular gaming group first.)

In other gaming related news, I attended Eyecon 2011 on Easter/ANZAC Day weekend, in and around long train commutes and the ANZAC Day Dawn Service at Martin Place. Not much sleep was to be had, but the games more than made up for it. Aside from my usual staple of D&D4e Living Forgotten Realms modules, I also played the vaguely OD&D-inspired Gencon 1976 and got my first taste of GUMSHOE-powered Mutant City Blues with Law & Order: Heightened Crimes Unit.

(Katana Geldar gives a good summary of the con over at Level 1 GM, incidentally. I played Law & Order and a D&D4e game or two with her, and yes, that is my shiny pate at the bottom left of her con photo. My male-pattern baldness is famous now.)

Starting from June, I’ll be helping run Living Forgotten Realms games at Blacktown Games Day. They’re running a little short of GMs at the moment, and well, it suddenly struck me that it’s been nearly six friggin’ years since the events of the Three Years of Sundays (here and here) burnt me out.

I need to hop back on that particular horse. And besides, I’d like to get a fortnightly group going. Playtest some stuff. Maybe even run an epic Warhammer FRP 2e campaign.

And that’s about it, so far. We still need to get the rest of our stuff from Young and Cowra, and now that there’s actually work available, I need to get myself a job. Mim needs to recover from her ailments. Charmaine needs to adjust to the madhouse she’s found herself in. And the cats need to settle into their new home.

I don’t know how much time I’ll have to blog in the near future, but you can always keep track of me via Twitter.

Blue Mountains

It’s been nearly two months since my last blog entry, but they’ve been a very busy two months indeed! Entirely too busy, in fact. And by busy, I mean stressful.

It became clear that Young wasn’t working out for us, so we resolved to move back towards Sydney. For a start, Mim couldn’t get her regular prescriptions written without paying a $65 consultation fee (for a $5.60 medication on the PBS), and we wanted to be closer to Mim’s daughter Charmaine.

So whilst we looked for new digs, Mim and I stayed with an old friend of hers in Blacktown, a harrowing experience to say the least. Our host’s driving talents nearly cost us our lives, and despite our near miss, I still came away with cracked ribs—which I wasn’t allowed to mention publicly, lest it jeopardise our accommodation. (Needless to say, our host wasn’t all there.)

Shortly thereafter, Charmaine broke up with her boyfriend, and moved in with us. And shortly after that, our erstwhile benefactor had some sort of mental shortout and tossed all three of us out onto the street, leaving us to live in our car. Via SMS. Via her daughter. For 36 very tense hours, she locked our cats—without food, water or ventilation—in her back room, and we weren’t even certain we’d ever get them back.

We’d just managed to secure a place in the Blue Mountains, and fortunately—I can honestly never express adequate gratitude—our friends Chris and Nikki let Mim, Charmaine and I sleep in the lounge room in the interim. Once we’d finally retrieved them, Arthur the Rabbit graciously allowed our babies to borrow his hutch. By the end of the week, though, we were headed up into the mists.

Meanwhile, the NSW state election raged, but Mim and I were powerless to help numerous old friends who ran for office. Although many succeeded—notably the new Members for Kiama, Menai, Oatley and Coogee—their fortune has done little to assuage our guilt. Sorry, guys. Next time.

For the next week, we lived on blankets and inflatable mattresses, which our friends Ali and Samara generously lent us. However, cats and inflatable mattresses don’t mix. Try telling that to six distressed moggies: rather than have them cry all night outside our door, I spent the week sleeping on the hardwood floor in the kitchen, huddled around the oven for warmth.

Chris and Nikki once again came to the rescue, donating their old lounge. Later that night, however, Mim found her leg trapped under our car’s rear tire and was rushed off to hospital. As painkillers helped Mim explore unplumbed corners of her consciousness, Chris and I dashed to Young and back to pick up a trailer load of essentials. Including our bed, which Mim serenaded on our return. At length.

I’m beginning to worry about Mim’s relationship with that bed.

To be continued…

Congratulations to James on his well-earned win and many thanks to the folks who voted for God Wills It Thus.

(I’d have probably been equal second-place had I done so, but seriously, who votes for themselves?)

The Real World:

• Ed Husic MP discusses a matter of importance: the value of citizenship and the reprehensible discrimination Muslims suffer in Australia.
• The American Book Review give us their list of the top 100 opening lines from novels.
• Remember Tienanmen Square and the man with the shopping bags? He mistook the tank for a bus. (Not really, but I know people who believed this was real.)
• My last links post looked at the purchasing power of $1 billion. Wealth distribution in the US is just as obscene, if not moreso…
• Speaking of wealth distribution, what happens when someone steals Paris Hilton’s birthday cake and gives it to the poor? (Who cares if it’s true? It’s awesome!)
• Economics humour: Japan’s Phillips curve looks like… Japan!
• Know any web developers? Then you should point them to Things Real People Don’t Say About Your App—it’s a great guide to things that really piss customers off.

Roleplaying:

• RPGNow has an earthquake relief bundle: $20 gets you over $330 worth of gaming PDFs, with the proceeds going to the Red Cross to assist victims in Christchurch. And Two Scooters Press offers this bundle to delay a single mother’s impending blindness from retinitis pigmentosa.
• 2011 looks to be a busy year at Chaosium. Another edition of Call of Cthulhu is on the way. We’ll get a Cthulhu Invictus Companion and a new, expanded third edition of Cthulhu by Gaslight. We might even see the second edition of Beyond the Mountains of Madness in English! (They’re also looking for ideas for a hardback to be released later this year. I’d like to see a revised Shadows of Yog-Sothoth finally released.)
• Miskatonic River Press’ epic Cthulhu Invictus campaign, The Legacy of Arrius Lurco, is on its way, too.
• James Maliszewski looks to Chaosium’s new Call of Cthulhu as the very essence of how to release a new edition. And maybe he’s right: CoC players are uniquely placid about edition changes.
• Campaign Mastery features a very in-depth, continuing series on pulp gaming, a must-read for fans of Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu.
• Runeslinger (from Casting Shadows) looks at chases in Call of Cthulhu, and the value of running away.
• If Call of Cthulhu (and Trail of Cthulhu) are a little too complex and rules-heavy for your tastes, KORPG Games offers Call of d6-lite, a simple, one-page alternative.
• The blog Exchange of Realities certainly looks worth delving into, dealing as it does with the intersection between fiction and roleplaying techniques.
• Geekcentricity defends mediaeval gaming, and shows the benefits of quasi-historical settings over pure high fantasy.
• Planet Algol reveals the real reason why there are no Dwarf women.
• JP Chapleau delivers a cogent opinion piece on the future of D&D 4e, the RPGA and the Living Forgotten Realms campaign.
• The Red DM delivers an equally cogent plea for game designers to adhere to the KISS Principle, over at The Red Box Blog.
• And in a similar vein to Inkwell Ideas’ link from Sunday, the awesome Chuck Wendig reiterates that worldbuilding is a kind of masturbation. (Oh, and I like italics, too.)

Of course, there aren’t many old links here, but I suppose that’s what you get for going from the top of the pile… So yes, there’s still plenty more to come. In the meantime, check out The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets’ 20 Minutes of Oxygen.

Image via Wikipedia

Further to yesterday’s collection of links:

The Real World:

• Are cities governed by predictable mathematical relationships? Physicist Geoffrey West thinks so.
• The New York Times compares IMF indicators of advanced economies.
• The Australian government has spent more than $5.5 billion over the past decade to reduce carbon emissions. They aren’t getting very good value for money.
• A billion dollars will buy you a Maybach 62 Landaulet luxury car, a Gulfstream G550 personal jet, a 104m yacht, a 7-bedroom mansion near Silicon Valley, an island in the St Lawrence Seaway (complete with a castle to use as a summer home), and a Patek Caliber 89 watch to time how long it takes to travel between them all—with enough change to stay in the Imperial Suite of Paris’ Park Hyatt Vendôme for 112 years, should you get bored with your surroundings. And then things get really obscene…
• Even if you don’t own a Maybach, you can use SQL injection to avoid speeding fines. (For the less technically minded, the camera reads and executes the text across the car’s front bumper; it’s a command to erase the camera’s entire database of stored number plates!)
• Michael Lewis provides the inside dirt on the Irish economic collapse, over at Vanity Fair.
• Movies get a lot of things wrong about serving in the military. Cracked.com examines just five of them.
• National Geographic explores the catacombs of Paris; meanwhile, the Japanese government plans to excavate the research headquarters of Unit 731, the secret biowarfare R&D group infamous for live testing on prisoners in WWII.
• The public, third-party release of 3D printing designs for Settlers of Catan pieces has raised new questions about intellectual property and games.
• A British immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by putting her on a terrorist watchlist whilst she was visiting relatives in Pakistan. His actions were only discovered three years later, when he went for a promotion—when the routine security check revealed that he was married to a terror suspect.
• Are you geeky? Are you hungry? Then head over to The Necronomnomnom and get cooking! (Just save me some, okay?)

Roleplaying:

• This ravine—featured at The Hopeless Gamer—is one of the coolest pieces of miniatures terrain I’ve seen in a long while.
• Author AncientHistory shares three bizarre book-related behaviours and rules for reference works for Call of Cthulhu, over at Yog-Sothoth.
• And if you need a character and are stuck for time, try Scott’s 1920s Call of Cthulhu Character Generator. Alternatively, RPG Plotter offers this cut-down character sheet and rules mods for Call of Cthulhu.
• Morten Greis, of Roles, Dice and Fun, is writing an outstanding series of articles on running a Delta Green campaign. So far, he’s written an introduction to Delta Green, a primer on handling investigation, house rules, a discussion of campaign structure, and examined cosmology and Mythos tomes and intricacies of plot and character. Better yet, there’s more to come…
• The Red Box Blog suggests that as XP directly relates to combat ability in D&D, it’s an inappropriate reward for roleplaying. Prophecy Points may be the answer, but the Red DM acknowledges problems with some players. Perhaps Chaotic Shiny‘s Prophecy Generator might provide part of the solution?
• Reality Refracted has a very nice series of articles on crime in RPGs, which goes hand-in-hand with Dungeon Mastering‘s thoughts on forensic investigation in D&D.
• Big Ball of No Fun delivers some commonsense about common knowledge in-game, and Roleplaying Tips tells you how to improve your game through nonverbal communication.
• The subject of children and RPGs is starting to creep its way into the blogosphere. Kobold Quarterly has a good primer from Uncle Chris and Dungeon Dad, but the advice therein applies just as much to new adult players as well.
• And finally, Gaming Brouhaha reviews one of my all-time favourite RPGs, Tribe 8.

Bonus Link: Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death. And, yes, there’s plenty more where these came from…

Image via Wikipedia

Well, it happened again. GenCon Oz was cancelled for another year.

Since the convention’s failure to appear in 2010, organiser Ian Houlihan had been building hype for its return. For three weeks, the management had promised a Special Announcement to its thousands of Facebook fans, and at 12:36am on Friday, they finally dropped the bombshell:

One of Brisbane’s largest games and entertainment Expos “Gen Con Australia” regrets to announce that the annual show will not return in 2011. Show licensees, Eventions Creative Event Management Pty Ltd have concluded that the show cannot proceed in its current format, in today’s economic climate and will also forgo the renewal of their license from Gen Con LLC for future years.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people are outraged. The first comment, delivered a minute later, was simply: “fuckkkkkk you”. And then better-articulated outrage, followed by commiseration, before finally degenerating into a series of ad hominem attacks at those who dared to express their dismay in the first place.

Several convention organisers and professional event managers have told me that GenCon LLC’s licencing requirements forced Eventions into a financially untenable position. Others have hinted the lengths to which Houlihan had to go to secure finance, and the impact on his and his family’s physical wellbeing.

By all accounts, Houlihan’s enthusiasm and commitment to bringing GenCon to Australian shores were exemplary. But the decisions he made, the risks he took and his delays in informing the public all took place in a business context and not in some abstract fandom utopia: they had real consequences not just to Houlihan and Eventions, but to the wider tabletop, electronic and cosplay communities.

So, too, has the domestic gaming industry suffered, from established operators seeking to expand their custom, to new enterprises who rely on the existence of a national flagship event like GenCon Oz in order to enter the market. And at a time when Brisbane hospitality and retail sectors need every last dollar in order to recover from nature’s cruel caprice…

Given recent flood damage to Brisbane, it’s not so surprising that GenCon Oz should be cancelled; Brisbane Convention Centre is, after all, only a block from the river. However, there was no mention of the series of natural disasters which have plagued Queensland this year—once again, as in 2010, Eventions blamed the state of the global economy.

But Australia was barely touched by the financial crisis, and now that the Australian Dollar has achieved better-than-parity with the Greenback, Australians are flocking to purchase imports. Whilst shipping personnel to our shores might be a more expensive proposition for overseas companies, they can capitalise on the exchange rate to increase their profits on merchandise, as can local distributors. The impact of the global economy is marginal at worst.

What GenCon Oz lacked—its Facebook page said as much last year—was capital. Although its attendance reportedly made it the second- or third-largest such convention in the world, stallholders complained that these figures didn’t translate into sales, or at least not enough to justify the exhibitors’ fees and the cost of travel to Brisbane. GenCon Oz’ failure to deliver in 2010 had also shaken retailers’ confidence, and by December, the convention was reduced to holding a fire sale on merchandise to raise funds. All the while, its fans were promised a triumphant return in 2011.

Despite its failures, GenCon Oz still had fan goodwill in spades. Given the country’s first taste of large, US-style conventions, Australian fans looked forward to a repeat of 2008, even given 2009′s poor organisation and aggressive security presence, and the collapse of 2010′s show two months out from the event. But with this latest news, delivered after 18 months of empty promises, that goodwill seems to have soured.

In short, the GenCon Oz brand has become tainted and any subsequent licencee will need to spend several years rebuilding trust before an event of similar magnitude can even be attempted. Celebrity guests, all too often the drawcard for non-gaming attendees, will be less willing to lend their names—or allocate their time months or years in advance—to an event whose reputation and continued existence are in doubt.

For all intents and purposes, GenCon Oz is dead.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s been nearly six months since I’ve had a reliable Internet connection. However, there was one spot in the house at Young where I could get sufficient coverage to browse Twitter on my mobile, and I got into the (bad) habit of emailing interesting links to myself to view later.

That was some 2200 links ago. I can’t find anything in my inbox now. So, I’ve finally decided to go through them and share the best of them here. Most of them were of only passing interest, but a few were worth passing on:

The Real World:

• The New York Daily News examines the potential impact of the collapse of Borders in the US on the global book market. You might expect Australia’s heavily protected market to be insulated from this, but Australian chains Borders and Angus & Robertson have collapsed, too. Author, member of the board for competing chain Dymocks, and former NSW Premier, Bob Carr points to this protectionism as a major influence on this domestic crisis.
• DARPA is one step closer to a workable cyborg moth. (But you can still kill it by rubbing gold dust into its chest.)
• The cast of Band of Brothers are reuniting to skydive to raise funds for a memorial in Normandy to the late Major Dick Winters.
• The New York Stock Exchange has become irrelevant as a source of capital, writes Felix Salmon in the New York Times.
• Salon’s Laura Miller reviews The Last Ringbearer, by Kirill Yeskov, a Russian tribute—and sequel—to Lord of the Rings, written from Mordor’s perspective. Follow the links for Yisroel Markov’s free PDF English translation.
• Email may’ve killed the letter, but social networking is killing email, according to Stowe Boyd.

Roleplaying:

• If you’re at all interested in game design, Play the Past is a must-read.
• Ruthless Diastema Games is great for its focus on RPGs in the classroom.
• 6d6 conducted an experiment to determine an ideal pricing point for RPG PDFs. Whilst their sample size was too small to draw hard conclusions, their findings are nonetheless interesting.
• This is My Game reports on the Virtual Table beta test (good to see WotC has gotten around to it…) and ruminates on common failings in encounter design.
• And speaking of encounter design, Rory at Blog of Holding shows us how to make a D&D 4e combat encounter in five minutes. Better yet is this YouTube tutorial on on-the-fly encounter design with Monster Builder and GELWorks’ D&D4 Combat Manager.
• In a pair of excellent posts, Mob United asks why RPGs suck, and what they’re good at.
• Inkwell Ideas has a great post on worldbuilding. Screw top-down and bottom-up: build the areas essential to the story and move out from there.
• Although pitched at a D&D 4e audience, Neuroglyph Games’ intriguing look at religion (beginning here and here) can easily apply to any fantasy RPG.
• In my 25+ years as a gamer, I’ve only rarely touched on the subject of romance. Delphine T Lynx tackles the subject ably at Roleplaying Tips. (While you’re at it, Hannah Lipsky’s 5 Non-Epic Prophecies is a gem.)
• It’s not exactly new, but The Story Games Names Project is available as a free PDF, and is possibly the best free naming resource since Kate Monk’s Onomastikon. Wikipedia has a nice guide to elements of British place names, incidentally.
• Hill Cantons has some very nice old-school D&D stuff for download.
• Dungeon’s Master lists six items essential for any D&D 4e adventurer.
• Risus Monkey is reading JRR Tolkein’s The Hobbit and taking notes. Check out the Middle-Earth posts starting with “An Unexpected Party”.
• And finally, as an extra-special treat, Daniel Solis gives a peek at his technique for art direction and book layout. Watch it in fullscreen and be amazed.

Granted, it’s probably not my best work. I had to shave its 2100-word outline down to the competition’s strict entry limit of 1500 words, and was stranded four hours away from my research materials as I wrote most of it. Nonetheless, I hope it’s at least entertaining. Or that it makes sense.

You can find it, and its worthy adversaries, at The Fairfield Project. Go have a read.

DGML members can vote on their favourites until Sunday, 20 February, at the DGML’s Yahoo Groups page, and the winner’s entry will be published in the June edition of The Unspeakable Oath. I’m not saying to vote for mine, but if you’re a member, give one of them a go—you’ll help out a budding author in what’s all too often a thankless avocation.

Every year, the Australian Chapter of the World Peace Bell Association, headquartered in Cowra (where Australia’s Peace Bell stands), holds a poetry competition. This year’s theme was “A Message of Peace.” This was my entry:

Silence reigns, our arms laid down, and flames now cooled to ashes,

No frenzied screams, nor violent words, nor blood to vex the senses.

Borne through desperation to tarry, eye-to-eye,

To plot conciliation and bury wounded pride,

Two men sit and weigh their words,

And watch and wait and ponder—

For neither wish to give their ground,

Nor relinquish any plunder—

Their tongues, concealed, like blunted swords,

Their brows are knots of anger,

But their armies are exhausted,

And their terms now put to paper.

With a flourish, sowed the seeds of battles yet to come,

Divided lands and chattels by means which flattered none,

For though rhetoric named them enemies, they wilfully conspire

To enact a foul betrayal, to kindle smothered fires—

As we watch and wait and wonder at the aftermath of war,

Rebuild our lives and learn to live, bereft of cannon’s roar.

Perhaps, then, comes a time for a betrayal of our own:

To smash the fears of hollow men; to tear their ruses down;

To wound their wiles with whispers; to shamelessly unite

To thwart their plans for bloodshed; to quench their flames of hate;

To raise no hand in anger, nor with heedless words condemn

The innocents of other lands to sate our violent whims;

To stand with pride and honour, and pardon past abuse;

To boldly cleave together to advance the cause of peace.

Hindsight may acquit the men—their aims may turn out faithful,

Their virtue unimpeachable, their tongues be naught but truthful—

But how great the cost, should we be wrong, our hope and trust misplaced,

Our soldiers marching back to war, our lofty ends disgraced?

No! We are better than the hollow men! The burden falls to us

To bear upon our shoulders our just and solemn trust,

For in our darkest hour, our deeds alone affirm

That amity shall rise once more, and peace, undaunted, reign.

For some arcane reason the Australian chapter of the World Peace Bell Association chooses to separate entries from its local area into a separate category (possibly *ahem* due to its close affiliation with the local Council…), which meant I couldn’t qualify for the big, Fairfax-sponsored prize in the Open category. Nonetheless the Poets Union (who judged the competition) had this to say:

Commencing with a well-constructed image of the peace-makers at the negotiating table, the poet lets us know in no uncertain term that, though enemies, these leaders ‘willfully conspire/ to enact a foul betrayal to kindle smothered fires’ of war. He emphasises the possibility of betrayal of the people by the leadership and calls on us all not to blindly hope and trust, because the result will be ‘our soldiers marching back to war’. His final triumphant stanza uses all the power and muscle of rhyme and rhythm for its persuasive strength to bring the poem to its superb conclusion.

And I won first prize in the local category. Better yet, though, were the expressions of the local National Party dignitaries as they squirmed through the obligatory reading…