Critical-Failure Dice

I need to get myself some of these critical-failure dice, which replace the "1" (for critical misses, of course) in the 20-sided die by the f-word. I want some!

And I especially like the new rainbow version of these dice!

Update (8/05/19): My dice arrived today!

Contribute to Science with your Dungeons & Dragons Backstories

Yes, really.

For science! I'm collecting D&D character backstories for training neural networks. Submit as many as you like. https://t.co/phclLHHfR3

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) September 18, 2017

(Tip of the cap to Jennifer Ouellette.)

A Wikipedian Text Adventure

Someone wrote some software to turn Wikipedia into a text adventure in a really nice homage to Infocom. I approve!

Mobile Phone = Cursed Pet Rock?

I agree with this tweet.

This description of a cursed magic rock from an ancient (1981) issue of DRAGON magazine is basically just a cell phone. pic.twitter.com/EmyrWqcpNb

— Robert McNees (@mcnees) May 29, 2017

(Tip of the cap to Sean Carroll.

Rogue Government Twitter Accounts

The tweets in the Rogue POTUS Staff Twitter account are very interesting. (At minimum, it is very entertaining, though in the 2017 world of "fake news", one also has to be cautious about whether accounts like these are real ones.) Also take a look at this list of accounts (including several Resistance accounts). And it all started with a National Park Service Twitter account going rogue.

As I mentioned a few days ago on Facebook, "National Park Service Twitter Account Goes Rogue" would make a great event card for the 2K16–2K17 version of Illuminati. (I don't know of any plans for one, but given that the world feels now that way, it simply has to happen.) The dystopian fiction novels and movies also seem to have missed out on that. Well, some probably do have something like that, but truth is definitely stranger than fiction. The Rogue POTUS Staff account is also right out of dystopian fiction (except that now it's dystopian fact, or "dystopian nonfiction", if you prefer).

Indeed, like now feels like an Illuminati, with some aspects of Paranoia involved for good measure.

Update: Here is one version of a meme that has been going around during the last few days.

Dice for Visually-Impaired RPGers

Take a look at this 20-sided die for visually-impaired gamers. This is awesome.

Dice: Choose Your Weapon

Yes, my main dice bag was originally purposed to contain bags of coffee beans — what could possibly be more appropriate for me?

I have lost and gained a few dice over the years, but here is the current collection. The boring lavender set is the first set I bought specifically for RPGs.

The d20s that are meant especially for fire and poison are obvious. There are one or two I can argue for acid. I ought to get one for lightning (and for ice, for that matter).

"Brimstone Angels" Series of Forgotten Realms Novels

This evening I just finished the 4th book in the Brimstone Angels series of Forgotten Realms novels.

I read the 3rd book on the series last fall as part of my read of The Sundering series (which is the main track covering the transition from 4th edition Forgotten Realms to 5th edition), and I bought the first two books to introduce myself to the characters in that book. However, I decided to read the book, The Adversary, to go through the whole Sundering series (though with occasional break to read other books, such as following Drizzt Do'Urden and one or two things from other genres, as some of the books in The Sundering series weren't all that great) before getting back to the first two books.

I found that I enjoyed "The Adversary" a great deal. It was one of the best D & D novels I had read in a long time. It is well-written, and the characters are interesting --- and I also do enjoy Planar beings and politics in my novels. (I really dug the Planescape setting back in the day.) The occasional draconic swearing mixed in with the English also reminds me of Firefly, so that is a nice touch too. To keep this track going, I decided to read the 4th book first and will treat books 1 and 2 as preludes. (Book 4, called Fire in the Blood is also very good.) I'm not sure if I will get through them both before the 5th book comes out in December (and I would like to jump to that to keep the story going), especially as I want to read the next Do'Urden book that comes out next month.

Every time I go on sabbatical and have some more time or it's the summer and I have more time, if I find a good fantasy novel, I am reminded how much I enjoy them --- even though during the school year, it's hard to spend much time at all reading novels. Around the last month or so, I have tried to make it a point to at least read a little bit of a novel on most days. (It would be really nice to keep that up; it makes me happy.) I also really miss playing in a D & D campaign, so between wanting to find a way to play RPGs regularly again and enjoying a really good D & D novel, I have been thinking about D & D a lot lately (including reminiscing about adventures from days gone by, browsing a bit through some 1st edition books, etc.). I used to have so much more time for reading novels and playing D & D, and it would be really nice to recover that. I have become so busy in the last few years.

So, this is my book recommendation for the day. I think it's been quite a while since I blogged about a novel!

Kam Torrye: Rogue Demon Hunter (My New Pathfinder Character)

For those of you who are interested, here is my new Pathfinder character. This gives the details of my flame oracle (with the tongues curse) for any of you who want to try to decipher my handwriting (and are interested). He's a rogue demon hunter.

I previously wrote a shorter description when I made some decisions about the character but hadn't yet determined the details.

Update: It turns out that Firestorm has 11th level as a prerequisite, so clearly I need to fix that.

Oracles, Tongues, and Finding Paths

My new Pathfinder character is a Lawful Good 'Oracle' who has the 'Flame' mystery and the 'tongues' curse. I chose 'infernal' for the language of the tongues. I have mega-charisma and a rank in intimidate (class skill), so I plan to roll intimidate checks when I start speaking in tongues.

The GM is requiring all characters to be good, so I figured the LG but divine-touched oracle who others will think is possessed because of his curse will cause lots of trouble --- I mean 'interesting role-playing opportunities' --- for the party.

Archives of Dragon Magazine are Online

The archives of Dragon magazine are online. Very cool! (This is a very nice resource for role-playing.)

(Tip of the cap to Andy Sayer.)

Petition: Ethnic and Gender Diversity for the 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons

Well, I think the title says it all. Here is a link that describes a petition that aims to increase ethnic and gender diversity in the depiction of humanoids and other creatures in the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

If this actually works, this would constitute a nice step towards addressing some issues in geek culture (e.g. objectification of women) that I wish were not present in it. If the literature is written more appropriately (and the pictures drawn more appropriately), then it could help a lot---and at minimum it would be a good start.

(Tip of the cap to Gemma Wright.)

It's not Wikipedia, bit it is a Start

I apparently have a wiki entry as a "writer" at BoardGameGeek because of an role-playing game article I wrote for Polyhedron in 1999. (I got the publication as a winning entry in a contest to design a character based on a picture published a couple of issues earlier in the magazine.) Somebody else wrote the page, and I just now added links to my blog and my Oxford home page.

I'd prefer an entry in Wikipedia, but I think I will need to become a bit more famous first. (And I'm not crass enough to write my own page.)

It is nice, however, to be have an entry on a gaming wiki. Ideally, the Legends of Caltech movie project will eventually land me with an IMDB entry.

Fatescape

I just joined a Planescape campaign. Well, it uses the Planescape world, but it uses the Fate system and 'fudge' dice. I am happy to play with an easy mechanical system in a world that I love.

I am a bariaur, "wanderer" (Ranger is the closest class equivalent, if one wants to think in such terms), member of the Sign of One faction (the ones who believe that they are the centers of the universe and everyone else is just a figment of their imagination), and a psionic wild talent with metacreation. Oh, and I'm also chaotic neutral. :)

This character won't cause any trouble at all. I swear...

Dragon*Con: Day 2

Yesterday really wiped me out, so I decided to be lower-key today.

I again got tons of cool pictures, which I will post once I get back to North Carolina. I made sure to eat breakfast (unusual for me) because I was too tired to have dinner last night, and that definitely helped. I then split time between the art exhibit and some of the 30-minute mini-concerts---where I could sit down, listen to some cool music, and take pictures. I bought a t-shirt in the art gallery from the artist who I believe is responsible for 'Houses and Humans'. (For that matter, I recognized a couple of artists from signatures amidst pictures on covers of D & D novels and also pictures in D & D game products.) The picture shows a dragon on top of a crushed house, roasting a chicken and sipping some tea. How very English! I want to buy a picture to hang on my wall in my flat, and the problems is that there are so many cool things that I don't know what one or two things to get. And there's part of the art gallery at which I haven't even looked yet! I'll do that tomorrow. (I also want to head back to the dealers and exhibiters halls, but that might not happen until Monday.)

Then I had lunch with a friend (who came down for 2 days of Dragon*Con) [+ his wife] who was a fellow math postdoc at Georgia Tech but with whom I also overlapped a year at Caltech. After that, I wandered a bit and decided to get in line early for the Firefly panel with 4 alums of the show. (I have a nice picture of the panelists---did I ever mention that I like my camera's zoom feature?) I figured that I could get good pictures of passersby while waiting in line, so I occupied my time that way. The line ended up being outside much of the time, but thankfully the breeze was nice, I never ran out of photo ops, and only one person who walked by told us that it was not too late to turn away from evil. The panel itself was meh, though it had a couple of shining moments and the stars certainly have an excellent rapport with each other. After the panel, I played in a 3.5-ish D & D game (it was heavily modified, including the magic system---but for 4 hour sessions at cons, this helps quite a bit) based loosely on a part of the first book in the Death Gate Cycle. It's too bad we were in the Air realm; the first book was painful to read, but it was necessary because it set up all of the other stuff. In truth, though, very few aspects of that world were overly relevant to the game. The event was team run by 3 DMs, and a huge group was split into 3 groups of 9-10 people each, and each group was assigned a different mission---so in essence three different games were going on simultaneously (though if one group wreaked havoc, others could use it to their advantage). This is way too many people per DM, in my opinion, and our group included 2 small children who were often bored/distracted and went on side quests. (And in one case, needed in game to be prevented from destroying any chance of success in the mission---a little bit of magic from my character did the trick and resulted in profuse thanks from every adult at the table, especially the boy's mother.) It was a bit of a challenging real-life scenario in which to game, and the huge amount of background noise in the room didn't help, but we made it through and most people seemed to have fun, so things worked out well in the end. (I was often very frustrated, but I strongly suspect that the 9 people around the table and horrible background noise were much larger factors than the children occasionally needing to be reigned in.)

Then I went back home, and here I am.

Dragon*Con: Day 1

I am exhausted, and today was only the first day. I was back in my hotel room at 7pm---much earlier than I was planning---because of how tired I am, and I am better of conserving strength for the next 2.5 days. This is one reason it's nice to have a room in one of the nearby hotels instead of a few metro stops away, as then it's easier to crash for a couple of hours and then come back for more on the same day. Alas.

I got up at 6:30 am and was at the registration just after 8am. (It would have been a bit earlier, but I got slightly lost. Things are split in 4 different hotels this year, and things were only in 2 different hotels the last time (2004) that I attended Dragon*Con. I then spent about 2.5 hours in line, though I was occasionally able to get pictures of people in interesting costumes. (I took a ton of cool pictures today, as expected. People-watching the plethora of people in costumes and taking pictures of them---and in this type of thing, they are very good sports about it; it's really rather nice---is one of my favorite parts of the Dragon*Con (and similar events).

I then headed off to pick up my gaming tickets that I bought a while back and then to enter my pseudodragon monk (named "Quasi", of course) in the Cheesegrinder, which is a deadly survival dungeon that is (obviously) very cheesy, has lots of character death, and encourages cheesiness and min/maxing skills by the players. Some of the dungeon rooms are also rather clever, though Quasi had some trouble with the very first room, which was called "Rock You Like a Hurricane". D'oh! (One of the people running the show made sure that that song was playing once we started the room.) Quasi is tiny, so he was absolutely useless in that room. In fact, he successfully passed 3 rooms and failed 1 (the party couldn't handle "Rock You Like a Hurricane", and it was mathematically impossible for Quasi to harm the huge elementals in the room, so he just tried to hunker down and prevent the hurricane from smashing him into the walls) without ever getting a chance to make a single attack! I wanted to use my spring attack and DC 23 poison sting. :) Quasi was maxed for saves, armor class, and immunities, but unfortunately he was incapable of doing anything more than a trivial amount of damage. (As a tiny creature, the physical damage---which was just about all he could do---gets really lessened. Quasi was built to be hard to kill but not to be able to dish out damage.) Unfortunately, Quasi wasn't immune to petrification (but was immune to many other things), so when the party entered the room with 4 medusas riding 4 basilisks, there was some trouble when he had to make 8 saves in the surprise round. I could only fail on a 1 because of my massive fortitude save, but unfortunately my d20s did their usual bit and got me one. One of the party members could have turned stone to flesh before it was too late, but he decided to cure light wounds on himself instead. That's ok---I was hungry and had already been playing for 3 hours. The Cheesegrinder is better organized than it used to be (granted, I don't know which year from 2005-2010 this happened) and the trophies they give out are much fancier. Quasi is a contender for the "WTF Award", which is given to the character that the DMs deem the strangest. He's not really a contender for anything else, but there is actually a chance that I'll end up in the Tournament of Champions this year (just like in 2004).

I know that for years I have been bragging about my award-winning pixie from the 2004 Cheesegrinder, when I lasted something like 11 rooms (taking about 11 or so hours) and then finished 2nd overall in the tournament of champions. Well, it turns out that after I demonstrated how broken pixies can be with that character, they were retired from PC choices because of me. The guy who runs the game specifically remembered both my character and me because of this. Score! As it mentions on the website, it is considered a nice player accomplishment when one is able to do that within the rules. And, of course, then such characters get retired, so one has to find another way to do it. (I wouldn't want to play the same character twice anyway.) Anyway, I have always really enjoyed the Cheesegrinder! I do realize it's not for everybody.

After I ate (and took pictures as I went along doing things all day, of course), I walked into the Walk of Fame a bit. There one could get autographs or even get one's picture taken with people---including several I'd be interested in---but one has to pay a nontrivial amount. (Among the ones there today, the cheapest of people I'd be interested in getting an autograph from was $25, but it's not worth it to me to pay that much for an impersonal autograph or to get my picture taken with someone. I'd rather just take pictures of people in costume. However, I will walk through again at other times just to see who is there. I am tempted to stand in a line if it's short just to say 'hi' even if I can't do anything else.)

I then went to both the dealer and exhibitor halls. I can't tell the difference between the two, but there was lots of cool stuff in both. (I'll want to go to at least the second of these again because I was very tired towards the end, and there are several booths at which I'd like to take closer looks.) The people selling ironic t-shirts kept complimenting me on the "Enjoy Crack" shirt I was wearing (actually, several others did as well). The only shirt I bought was the 2010 official Dragon*Con shirt, which is a nice blue tie-dye shirt. I bought several sweet new d20 dice (which I was planning anyway), and I also bought a d30 and a d16. Several of the booths had some really cool stuffed animals and others were from artists---I want to look at both of these types of booths more tomorrow---and one of the booths was by an indie retailer who makes her own stuffed animals, sculptures and other things. And she had a stuffed animal with which I absolutely fell in love---this is a gorgeous handmade stuffed phoenix for which I paid more money than a sane person would be for a stuffed animal. But it's *awesome*, and I can't wait to show it off! I have it packed up in a way to survive my trips back to North Carolina and then to Oxford, but I'll take a picture of it once I am back. This is the second most that I have ever paid for a stuffed animal, and the one for which I paid the most I bought on November 8th, 1986.

Plans tomorrow include the art gallery, a 3.5 D & D game from 6-10pm, more pictures (including finding a nice place to chill out and take pictures), and otherwise we'll see. Maybe I'll even go to one of the panels, which I have never actually done at Dragon*Con before.

What happens at Dragon*Con stays at Dragon*Con

I have arrived in Atlanta. My first Dragon*Con in 6 years starts tomorrow morning!!! 3.5 solid days of gaming and geekery starts morning!!! (That's right. For once, I am actually taking a proper holiday.) Stay tuned for some *awesome* pictures!

My hotel is near where I used to live, and seeing my old apartment complex upon walking out of the metro station felt very weird.

I have pre-registered for 2 games, though I might skip out on one of them because it starts at 10 pm on Sunday, and Monday after the Con ends I will need to prepare my slides for my cow synchronization talk at Georgia Tech on Tuesday. (Once Dragon*Con ends, I am going to switch to my academic visit mode, and I didn't get a chance to make too many of these slides yet, and this is an all-new talk.) The one I will definitely do is the 3.5 D & D adventure called "Into the Nexus" (which is based on the Weis/Hickman series of books on which you think it's based). The one I might not do is in a system called "Spirit of the Century". The adventure seems very cool, but I'm not keen on getting home at 3am on Monday. I'm also going to play in The Cheesegrinder, of course! My pseudodragon monk, who is immune to just about everything (though an anti-magic field would get rid of some of the immunities temporarily, as only some are due to race and monkhood) but can hardly do any damage at all, is ready to go. I finished 2nd overall 6 years ago, and the key is survivability, so we'll see how things go. In making this character, I had to actually look up weapon damage adjustments for tiny creatures! (And, yes, the characters are supposed to be cheesy too.)

As always, I'm also looking forward to the dealer room, the exhibit hall, and the art gallery. I didn't have a digital camera the other two times I attended Dragon*Con, so I expect to take tons of cool pictures. Lots of people will dress up in their finest geekery, so there is also great pleasure even in just sitting down, having some coffee, and people-watching. Plus I have several Firefly, Buffy/Angel, and Star Trek autographs that I'll try to procure. (And I'll try to get pictures taken with these people of course.)

Bring it on.

(By the way, these 3.5 days off constitute a tie for my longest vacation in about 3 years---well, it's tied with the 3.5 days off in a row that I took during my Shanghai trip.)

What Happens in The South Stays in The South

I am at Heathrow Airport right now, waiting for the first flight associated with my sabbatical this fall (though technically it doesn't really start until the fall term starts). My home base for 1 month will be Durham, North Carolina. I will be attending the opening workshop of SAMSI's 2010-2011 program on complex networks, then I will head off to Atlanta---where I'll be staying in a hotel just 1 block from where I used to live!---for Dragon*Con (My first one since 2004! Yay! Bring on the Cheesegrinder!) and a brief visit to my old stomping grounds Georgia Tech. Then I'll return to Durham to be at SAMSI before returning to Oxford. While at SAMSI, I'll be staying with Kin Chan '98, who I have only seen a few times since I graduated from Tech. I'll be back in Durham in November, January, and possibly parts of March or April.

I'll write more about Dragon*Con later, but three of the guests are former Firefly stars, so hopefully they'll be available for autographs.

Incidentally, I experienced a new indignity at the airport today. There was a brief security deal in the ticket line at American Airlines, and I was actually compelled to enumerate every piece of electronic equipment that I had with me. That took a while. :) Seriously, though, WTF?

Rokugan!

I just ordered the brand new 4th edition of Legend of the Five Rings RPG. (Second edition was d20, and I pondered but never bought the 3rd edition.) I hadn't previously heard about it---I found it when searching for the 3rd edition on Amazon---but 4th edition just came out on July 1st.

Now I should learn the system and DM a game in it. I really like the Rokugan setting, and I've been wanting to play a game in that setting for a long time. And I think learning a new system and playing in it will be very good for me anyway. Maybe because of my sabbatical, I'll even be able to do some DMing?

Living Bum RPG

I shit you not. This is a real role-playing game. Though the content seems rather insensitive, it seems that many of the proceeds are going to help the homeless, so I am intrigued by this.

(Tip of the cap to Louis Wang.)