A while back when the For Want of a Nail alternate history lexicon game was taking place, the theme of a trans-historical struggle of Bicycle vs. Zepplin emerged. Zepplins are the iconic alternate history vehicle, and bicycles were mentioned in the title of my first entry, which inspired others. Rob Macdougall had a brilliant essay [...]
From the Wikipedia entry on William Hope Hodgeson's 1912 far-future SF novel, The Night Land:
Powdered Water and Food Tablets
Hodgson's hero sets out into the Night Land carrying lightweight food tablets and a sealed tube full of "water-powder." When a small quantity of this powder is exposed to air, it absorbs water rapidly from the air, [...]
Via Anders Sandberg, here's Tobias Radesäter's Supergänget, a Swedish superhero roleplaying game entirely in comics form, reminiscent of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. As the players switch to their superheroic secret identities, the GM changes into his secret identity of game designer, and takes the reader on a fourth-wall-breaching guided tour of the game, including a [...]
James Wallis:
The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen will be re-released in the next two months
Rock.
I like to point out that there are more people in Israel playing the Baron's game then know of Wallis' book; and they are missing out on what is perhaps the most entertaining "game manual" ever written.
I did a stealth upgrade of the roleplay.org.il forums early Saturday morning, from a creaky old patched and hacked phorum 3 install, that had been modified by various hands, including Bo, Fogi and Hershko, and which still used visual Hebrew, to a nearly-new Phorum 5 version, with bells, whistles, RSS feeds and search that works.
Phorum [...]
Planetocopia, the World dream bank:
Planetocopia is a group of model worlds supporting intelligent life. Some of these worlds are set in our future, some are alternate Earths, some are purely imaginary experiments in planetology, biology, sociology. They fall into four series: Tilt!, Futures, the Biosphere Variations, and Caprices.
[via Kenneth Hite]
The geology and the maps are [...]
The two big Israeli geekfests are coming up in a couple of months, and neither of them have any web-presence so far. Bigor 2007, our annual multi-day roleplaying-centric event that is the ISRP’s tent-pole (flagpole?) is sometime in late March, Olamot (the SF&F and everything else con) should be sometime around then, and interested parties [...]
The Covenant looks like a pretty peculiar movie - one reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes described it as Harry Potter re-cast with underwear models, another says it really wishes it was Lost Boys; it’s like one of those teenage supernatural horror movies with sexy young actors, except with kewl powerz, romance and homoerotic high-school rivalry [...]
Lemuria Press - The Lock Down:
Dragon receives several letters from prisoners every week. I renamed Dungeon’s mail column “Prison Mail” as an inside joke because of it. Part of the charm is that almost no one else sends letters. I get plenty of mail, but almost all of the hand-addressed envelopes are from guys on [...]
Lou Anders: Bowing to the Future: The Power of Cool: Arthur Fonzarelli as Archetypal Shaman. A very interesting discussion of both the shaman archetype and the history of the Fonzie the character:
Can you imagine a Fonz whose cool isn’t strong enough to stake him out a space in a band of nerds? Surely, this can’t [...]
Paul Barnett explains what Warhammer Online is about with marvelous gusto: Some people get confused, and they go oh, I see, chaos is like the devil. No no no no, it’s not fire and brimestone, it’s chaos. It’s custard falling from the sky. it’s an arm turning into a sword, it’s the ability to [...]
The The Dungeonomicon (via Treasure Tables, which also provides a table of contents linking to the sub-sections) is a giant essay/online-supplement published as a post on the Wizards of the Coast web boards which discusses the internal logic of D&D, both the game and the setting (that weird sub-genre of fantasy filled with powerful magic, [...]
Charlie Stross explains How long does it take to produce a novel?
How long does it take to produce a novel
Robert Donoghue discusses pixel-bitching and tollbooths and other examples of dealing with passive challenges in RPGs, apropos Stephan King’s Dark Tower. For the GM like me who’s players wonder if something he’s just described is clickable [...]
Via Rob Donoghue, a meme for roleplayers:
Name 12 characters you have played in RPGs, before looking at the questions that follow. List your characters numbered 1 to 12, with the name of the RPG you played them in. Once you’ve picked your 12 characters, look at the questions and answer accordingly. (No peeking until [...]
In a thread about adapting Lost to a roleplaying game, someone popped up and mentioned a theory that the scripts of Lost are actually based on a roleplaying game JJ Abrams runs to his friends. Unfortunately, the page he linked to is in Spanish; However, the Google translation
is comprehensible enough to get some [...]