Golden Anvil

Whoops! Looks like I missed a posting. What can I say... it's been busy around here lately.

In Episode 2, the group made their way out to the comet where the loot was stashed. There was a little trouble along the way with the sensors, which wasn't noticed until they reached the comet. This forced a bit of a delay while repairs were made. The young man who hired them to retrieve the goods revealed that they could broadcast a certain signal that would cause a transmitter to send out a response allowing them to pinpoint its location. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite remember the numbers needed to send the correct signal.

Last monday was the first game of our GURPS firefly campaign. I promised to fill you all in on the characters in the group. I also need to fill you in on the story so far before we get another session in and I find myself falling behind.

Let me start with Mia, played by MrsKheldar. I'll start with her, because MrsKheldar already filled everyone in. See the last comment in my prior post about this game in case you missed it.

Monday night our roleplaying group finally got together to start working on characters for our upcoming GURPS Firefly game. Everyone has had tricky schedules lately, or there's been bad weather, or something has just come up for like the past month since we played Og, so it was good to finally get moving again.

We spent a good chunk of the evening just talking about what kind of character everyone was going to play without even pulling out character sheets and thinking about attributes and skills and such. This was really useful, because everyone was able to get help with fleshing out their characters and adding interesting details.

I don't have a lot of time tonight to go over everyone's characters, so expect a dump on that next week. For now I'll just say that we've got a very interesting group of characters put together, and it should be a lot of fun to play.

That title is Og-speak for the name of tonight's adventure: "We Go Hunting". This is the caveman game where everyone only has 3-8 words they are allowed to use off a list of 18. You can explain what you are doing, but all conversation must be in character, using only your list of words.

The game started off with everyone deciding that the clan was low on food, so they were going to go find some food. A run in with a "big big thing" left one of their members (derk) unconscious, so they dropped him off back at the cave, and brought derk's son (derk derk) along for more food hunting. After more looking around for food, they came back to the cave again, and found that derk was missing.

I receive a monthly roleplaying magazine called Pyramid released as PDF by Steve Jackson games, the ones who publish my roleplaying game of choice (GURPS). They articles are usually not dependant on any particular roleplaying system although they sometimes include stats appropriate for GURPS. This month's issue was themed around post-apocalyptic adventuring. You know, after the nuclear bomb kind of stuff, or zombie survival. That kind of thing.

In general, it was a fairly good issue, but there was one article that just got my creative juices flowing. The article present a number of equations that would be useful in doing statistical modeling of populations. It talked about birth and death rates, reproductive rates, age distributions, growth limits, short and long term effects of things like wars, etc. It also provided links to online resources for furthering your own research.

Well, tonight was the first time our gaming group has gotten together for about three or four weeks. Monday is our usual play night, and I intend on keeping everyone up to date with what goes on.

Right now our group consists of me, MrsKheldar, RaNae (our teenaged friend from church), and two guys and one gal from my work. We all meet at my workplace, and MrsKheldar usually brings food for everyone. We've been playing for something over two years now, usually once a week, although sporadic at times due to scheduling problems. We've been playing a supers game set during World War II time period.

Having just finished up our last adventure prior to Christmas, we decide it was time to put the old campaign to rest for now (who knows, perhaps we'll pick it up again sometime) and start into something new. So, we spent a portion of the night talking about what we wanted to play.

Copying a meme started by Optiker, I poked around a little to see  what was the oldest thing I have still sitting around that wasn't just sitting in a box somewhere.

I think I've got five categories of such things.

1) Games (roleplaying and such mostly): I've got Car Wars stuff here that dates back to early highschool. Now technically, I haven't played it in a while, but I really want to. Doesn't that count for something? I also have some Lost Worlds stuff that dates back to highschool. I've played that more recently, but it's still been a while. I'm sure I've got a couple other games that date back to at least late highschool.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm working on writing a program that will generate families for use in roleplaying games. Well, things are coming along rather nicely. Today I got a good chunk of the visualization routines in place. That means I can now view my output as something other than raw XML. There are still some issues that I need to take care of. Some things aren't aligning properly, I'd like to display more information about the dates when things happened, and for now, family members who died without children are not displayed (in order to save display space), but I'd like to show all those compacted into a single box so that their presence isn't lost.

One way or another, it's still good progress. Probably it's well enough along that I start doing more work on improving the simulation engine (adding details, making it customizable, tracking major events, etc). When it's done, I should be able to make builds available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. We'll see.

Well, with the new year firmly arrived, it's time to get back in the habit of writing blog entries. My objective is to have 2-3 posts per week. We'll see how long that keeps up.

It's been a nice vacation, and I'm not particularly looking forward to going back to work. Mostly I've had the chance to read, watch some movies, and play some games.

Still, I've found some time to begin preparations for a roleplaying game I've been planning to play with Sareth. It'll be a mixed political/action game where Sareth plays a prince who is trying to recover his birthright. I'll be using the Reign system, which I recently discovered. This system has rather interesting rules to handle characters who lead or are part of a large organization.

Man it's been a long time since you've read anything here. You shouldn't be so lazy...

Well, last time we played our Monday RPG, we finished up the adventure. The group managed to escape out the window of the Houses of Parliament (into the Thames) and swam down the river to the area where their ship was docked. There was some difficulties with drowning, but pretty much everyone made it. Not a whole lot else happened, and the group managed to leave without much uproar, the ship loaded with a cargo bound for Hong Kong.

Then gauntman (the player of the Professor), took over as GM for the rest of the evening. He'll be running the next adventure in Hong Kong. By the end of the evening, the group (minus me, as my character wasn't introduced yet) got into Hong Kong, and left the ship to do a little shopping for the ship's cook. After an encounter with some pick-pocketing kids, and some inscrutable merchants we finished up for the week.