Categories
Roleplaying

Legends Walk!

Legends Walk! by Tim Gray is a fairly massive (169 pages!) shareware roleplaying game about superheroes in a modern setting with their powers derived from mythological sources. A lot of work has gone into this, with detailed descriptions of gods and the powers each one can provide, lots of background, detailed rules for combat and everything else, a skill list, GMing advice – there’s a professional level of detail here.

The mechanics use a simple dice pool (similar to something I thought of myself, actually), with nice explanations of the design decisions for certain features (why dice don’t “explode” in the default rules, even though it’s suggested as an option). And the attributes are a bit peculiar, with intelligence split into “wisdom” and “ingenuity” (perhaps to simulate differences between specific gods?). But very impressive overall.

I think I’ll still go with Powergame this Bigor, though, because preversely, because it’s so much shorter and fannishly presented, it’s much simpler to wrap my head around.

Categories
Resources short

Wallpaper Photos

Some pretty photographic wallpaper pictures

Categories
Resources

Secret Doctrine Online

The Home Page of The Theosophical Society of Pasadena, California is a treasure trove of information about Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky and her writings (which they present online).

Categories
Oddities

Everybody does it

A roundup of links that everyone’s blogged, that are all over the daypop top 40, etc. etc.

  • The Switch to Linux ad When you’re holding the moon for ransom, you value stability in an application…
  • Japanese Emoticons (smileys) are very cool, and based on the idea that you smile with your cheeks, hands and eyes, not just with your mouth, like in boring old western sideways smilies.
  • Oh yeah, and a judge ruled that the X-Men aren’t human. This at the request of Toybiz, who wanted their action figures to be cheaper to import (see, if they’re not human, that makes the figures toys, not dolls, which is better business, for some silly legal reason). Great Wall Street Journal story.
Categories
Resources

Portrait Gallery

A Portrait Gallery of historical personages, brought to you from that same University library web site that put up all those wonderful maps.