I managed to watch the inauguration thanks to going out to get blood taken. I saw it on a TV set up in the corner of a tiny little roadside diner, the kind where the menu's title page is hand-written in thick marker and they have a faded "Roadkill Cafe" poster on one wall not too far from the folksy kitchen adornments. There were maybe two other ( Read more... )

I read the Song of Roland a while back. It's an interesting story, and worth a read. It has some fun bits of heroism set out against a starkly racist background - or to be more honest, it's more about culture than race. Though the image of Roland at the pass is very impressive, it's a bit undercut by the insistence that the Saracens are devil- ( Read more... )

So, new brainstorming exercise I'm playing with. It's actually kind of a bog-standard question: "What is this character's greatest fear?" If it's "new" to me, then I'm probably behind the times, right? Probably. But here's the context:

It starts with a villain. Let's say he's a Scarecrow analogue, which is largely true; Jonathan Crane is one of my ( Read more... )

Because apparently the castle bundt pan wasn't enough. No, once she proved she'd actually use the thing, and served up slices of delicious crenelated cake to guests, that gave them reason enough to get her the pan for castle cakelettes. So apparently Aileen will also be the master of delicious, delicious wargaming terrain.

And on a wholly unrelated ( Read more... )

One of the things that is tricky to wrap one's head around when one runs multiple games is that different games are built around different ideas of scenes or encounters. Storyteller, for instance, has got a very clear idea of how scenes make up chapters, which in turn make up stories. D&D, on the other hand, has been very meticulous about mapping ( Read more... )

Just to get the whole medical drama in one place. (If you don't care about medical drama, go ahead and skip; it's not terribly interesting, or at least as Aileen said, "It was very interesting for five minutes, then it got really tedious.") I'll do a post later on gaming scales of interaction, because I have some interesting theories on dungeon-as- ( Read more... )

I'll admit it: humans are my favorite race in fantasy, for all the reasons that Properly Educated and Tasteful Gaming Gentlepersons like to cite. They're interesting. They're familiar. If you do them right, they can nail all the exoticism that normally is invoked by most elf/dwarf types. I'm quite happy with fantasy games where there are a lot of ( Read more... )

It's not something I do often. I think the last time I gamed with someone new to the hobby was, um, sometime in the mid-to-late '90s. Last night I had two brand new gamers, a brother-sister pair, at the table. He was mid-30s, she late 20s; both well-educated, interesting people who simply had never thrown dice before. They were interested in D&D, ( Read more... )

• Living in North Carolina made last night interesting; it's still not decided, and it was back-and-forth for a while. I really wanted to see it go blue like Virginia, because I like the whole "look, you fucked up so bad that the South is turning on you and voting for a black guy" vibe.

• I really liked McCain's concession speech. It showed a ( Read more... )

...and then the political hatefest can hopefully die down to the usual dull roar. And I won't get any more robocalls from NASCAR drivers or Andy Griffith, or have to dump the anti-Kay Hagan/anti-Obama flyers in the recycling as soon as I walk back in the door. To be fair, I also immediately toss the Democratic mailings, but really all I've been ( Read more... )