Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Torvalds vs. the Honey Badger

It's thrall good.
I suppose it was my fault.  At least it was my causative action that began the chain of destruction - but listen - I had my reasons.  We were on the trail of an entire village of zombies.  Well, now we believe they were just regular people mind controlled by illithids, but at the time all we knew was that a herd of zombies was bearing down on our home village.

This is the 2e game being run by Crazy-Ass Tim, in which I am playing the sexy elf ranger lady Chartreuse.  One of the party members is Torvalds - the most useless first level magic user in the history of all D&D ever.  Yeah, I know - a boastful boast - but it's true - and even more so as the session unfolded.

So Torvalds rides an ox.  Everywhere.  Even places where oxen do not fit.  But traipsing through the woods following zombies was a bit much for the ox this time around.  Torvalds blew his animal handling roll - and the ox bucked him off and bolted.

The zombies were headed to destroy our town.  Torvalds was about to lead us on a wild-ox chase of ridiculous proportions in the opposite direction.  The ox had Torvalds' spell book - the only thing that makes him even vaguely useful.

So I shot the fucking ox.

Regretfully, the arrow didn't kill the ox.  But as Torvalds became enraged about what I had done, Merwyn's character chased after the ox and hacked it to death.

That's when Torvalds attacked Mervyn's character.

As the two first level characters began to tussle, my character Chartreuse got sick of the whole thing, turned around, and raced after the zombie horde to rescue her village.

Meanwhile, Torvalds actually killed Merwyn's character - dead.  Surprising, yeah.  The Boy thought that such a murder was horrendous and attacked Torvalds, smashing him down below zero hit point.  The Boy has a conscious, though, and only did subdual damage.  He then left Torvalds face down on the forest floor and raced after me.

I was busy tackling zombies and slapping them awake.  The Boy didn't think to tell me that one party member was dead and another was face down unconscious in a zombie infested forest.  But the horrifying screams alerted me that something was wrong.

Torvalds' recess playmate.
Torvalds awoke to a visit from a random encounter - a playful honey badger.  Crazy-ass Tim decided that the honey badger wouldn't do hit point damage - but instead - structural damage.  So, the playful honey badger ripped Torvalds leg off.  Thus the screaming.

So we ran back to where Torvalds was and tried to fight off the honey badger.  The honey badger was, of course, tough.  It ripped off another one of Torvalds' legs.  We continued to attack, and finally took honey badger down.  But even in death, honey badger didn't give a shit and ripped off Torvalds' left arm.

We applied tourniquets, and did massive amounts of cauterization with torches, and brought Torvalds back from the brink.  It really only worked because Crazy-ass Tim is a mean bastard of a DM.  But we had rescued our useless magic-user.  Yay!

Meanwhile, our entire village was slaughtered and burned to the ground.  So, I'm thinking that Torvalds deserves his fate.  Regretfully, he is even more useless than before.  But Kaye continues to play him without a hitch - reveling in his one armed, no leggedness - and declaring himself the Sorcerer Supreme.

The Boy has taken to calling Torvalds the Burrito Supreme.

- Ark

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Gerard K. O'Neill


 "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?"

Near the end of the space race, a high energy physicist named Gerard K. O'Neill became interested in space colonization.  He had already expressed his interest in space by applying for NASA's Astronaut Corp in the mid 60's, but papers from his students convinced him that designing self-sustaining space habitats could be a worthwhile endeavor.

In his first paper on the subject, "The Colonization of Space", published in 1974, O'Neill wrote:
"It is important to realize the enormous power of the space-colonization technique. If we begin to use it soon enough, and if we employ it wisely, at least five of the most serious problems now facing the world can be solved without recourse to repression: bringing every human being up to a living standard now enjoyed only by the most fortunate; protecting the biosphere from damage caused by transportation and industrial pollution; finding high quality living space for a world population that is doubling every 35 years; finding clean, practical energy sources; preventing overload of Earth's heat balance."
Soon, NASA became interested in O'Neill's research and began funding his efforts.  O'Neill tied many different concepts and technologies together to come up with feasible ideas for space colonization, including solar power, the L4 and L5 Lagrange points, asteroid mining, and magnetic mass drivers.  NASA enlisted other scientist into investigating space colonization, resulting in a golden age of such research. The U. S. Congress, soured on the high cost of space activities - including the Apollo program - withdrew most of O'Neill's funding before the end of the decade.

The ideas that resulted from O'Neill's research are still fascinating.  They open a door to plausible science fiction.  Simply looking at his designs and reading a bit about them are enough to get the mind going.

The first type of space habitat O'Neill' envisioned is a modified Bernal sphere - an idea for a space station developed in 1929.


The Bernal sphere came in two sizes - Island One, which was the smaller, and Island Two, which was larger.


The first two of O'Neill's 'islands' were relatively  simple affairs - big old spinning balls in space.  Island Three was another matter.  Island Three, which has come to be known as the O'Neill Cylinder, is comprised of two separate space stations.  These two gigantic cylinders spin around each other, creating a much more stable system than just one cylinder, which is apt to start spinning from end to end and squash everyone inside.


Yep - that means that Babylon 5 was inherently unstable.  I suppose Vorlon technology kept it upright.  Not only is the O'Neill Cylinder concept more stable, but look at the view!


When you lump O'Neils designs in with the Stanford Torus style of space station, you get all of the space station you could need for a good hard science fiction setting.  And these puppies - especially the  O'Neill Cylinder, make for absolutely great mega-dungeons and Jim Ward Metamorphosis Alpha style gaming.

So go dig through the Internet and do up a science fiction campaign right.  Screw artificial gravity generators.  Do it the old fashioned way - and build a habitable colony to boot!

Anchors away.

- Ark

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

In the OSR . . .

Without further ado . . .


Yay.  I can draw cartoon boobies.

I had meant to write about five gazillion blog posts over the Thanksgiving holiday.  Instead, I wrote butkis.  Nada, zilch . . . nothing.  Not even a Dungeonspiration posts.  I suppose I could could apologize - but I really dislike when people apologize for not writing enough in their blog.  It's like they did something wrong.  Advocating genocide in your blog?  Okay, that's wrong.  Not posting enough?  NOT WRONG.  Lazy maybe, but not wrong. :)

So I've been drawing a lot, fiddling with different styles and whatnot.  The elf chick popped out when I was actually trying to draw something else - but I decided to color and ink it anyway - since I liked her expression.  But just the picture was kind of weird, so I gave it a caption.

POOF - it's a MEME!

Yay!  It's the "In the OSR . . ." meme!  Everyone jump on the bandwagon and go create something - a poem or macaroni art or whatnot.  Try to be actually funny - unlike me.

Like so much of my OSR art, I'm giving this to the community.  I doubt that anyone really wants it - but feel free to repost, spindle, and mutilate.

Ohhh - btw - I won an award!  Thanks Tim! (Not Crazy-Ass Tim, but the Other Tim.) Apparently, my blog is 'quirky.'  I had no idea.  I'm going to have to go look that up in the dictionary to find out what it means.

- Ark

Saturday, November 19, 2011

More Retro



Yeah - more stuff that doesn't have to do with gaming, but I was particularly happy with this one.  I'll try to keep more game related art on the blog.  After all, I have a deviantArt account to toss all the other stuff on. :)

Enjoy.

- Ark

Friday, November 18, 2011

Rather Gamey Cheesecake


Okay, so it has nothing to do with gaming.  More practice drawing.  This is an attempt to draw in a 'retro cartoon' style.  The reference, she is here.

This was done by hand with Sharpie and colored pencils, because the only pc that can run Photoshop was being used at the time by The Boy for SKYRIM.  Sheesh. ;)

Enjoy.

- Ark

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Dreams


It's been a stressful couple of months at work, and yesterday, due to several breakages, I needed to work through the wee hours of the night.  I had about four hours to cram a nap into before starting the debug, so I collapsed in the bed and fell asleep almost instantly.

Then came the dream.

I was living in a village inhabited solely by children, in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland criss-crossed by water canals.  There were five of us: me, a black girl with very long dreads, and a a nerd boy who looked like a cross between Rick Moranis and the cartoon dude on the 'For Dummies' books.  The two others were, like so many people in dreams - faceless, but there.

We played all day amidst the ruble of the once quaint town, carefree as the kids on that old Star Trek episode were where all the grups died.  But all was not well in paradise.  There were evil dwarves afoot.  Not that they were short - or hairy - or looked or acted anything like dwarves.  But they were dwarves - that was for sure.  And they travelled in submarines that looked suspiciously like the CSS Virginia (or Merrimac, as it is improperly known.)  They travelled down the canals that stretched across the open prairie, hunting children.

Luckily, we were psychic, so we knew trouble was coming before the first cannon balls started flying.  We also knew that an evil old man had sent the dwarves after us - with the purpose of killing us.  He had killed all of the children except us, and wanted us gone too.  He lived in a city far away filled with only old people and lots of chain link fences.  So we decided to go there.

I have no idea why we thought going to the city of the old people was a good idea.  But that is what we did, narrowly escaping the evil submariner dwarves (that looked a lot like blue meanies, but not blue.)  There were lots of barbed wire and minefields to get through - and search lights remarkably like the eye of Sauron from the cartoon to evade.  But we made it the city.

The city was like a postcard from New York circa 1973 - sort of like Sesame Street - but filled with old people.  They were nice to us when we got there.  We talked to a very nice old man who said he could help.  But suddenly my psychic powers revealed that he was the evil old man - the kingpin - the murder of all the world's children, so we hot-footed it out of there.

That's when the F-14 Tomcats began strafing the street.

We ran down the stairs into the subway station.  The trains weren't running, however.  Instead, the subway was cram-packed with junk - toys, swing sets, stuffed animals, and tons of yellow school buses.  It was so packed we could hardly move - and overwhelmingly claustrophobic.  We hunkered down between two overturned buses, trying to avoid the fighter jets.  I'm not exactly sure how, but the F-14s made it into the station.  Their machine guns blared.  They shot the faceless kids.  They killed the nerd.  They riddled the black girl with bullets.  Then they turned the guns on me.  I could feel the pain as each of the bullets hit - and then I died.

Needless to say, I was very surprised when I woke up.  The places where I was shot were on fire - hurting something fierce.  But after the confusion wore off, I chuckled a bit.  Then I saw the clock and that I had only slept three hours - and the amount of adrenalin I was pumped full of wasn't going to let me get back to sleep.

Many hours later, and most of my work done - I'm a bit punch drunk - and still a bit perplexed and fascinated by that dream.  I'm sure my therapist (if I had one) would have a field day with it.  But it does inspire me.  I'd like to game in a world like that - as horrific as it sounds.

So go dream something weird.  Go on now - don't be shy.  Really freaky.  It will probably inspire you. Oh, and feel free to report back here on your weird-ass dreams.

;)

- Ark

[Since I died in my dream does that mean I'm immortal now?]

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

The Talk, Part Two

This conversation happened a while ago, and was of monumental importance, but like so many things of monumental importance, they get swept up in the hubbub of life.

We were driving to the YMCA where The Boy has his swimming lessons twice a week.  This was before daylight savings time kicked in (or out - I can never remember how that works,) so it was still light then, as opposed to now, when we drive to the Y in the dark.

"So," I said, "We've played Pathfinder several times now.  How are you liking it?"

"I like it a lot," he nodded his head in an exaggerated fashion while adjusting his swimsuit.  The boy was born a swimmer.  He couldn't have been a few months old when his mother took him into the pool and he desperately pushed away from her - convinced in his little head that he could swim like everyone else.

"You remember we were just taking a break from 4e so we could see what Pathfinder was like - right?" I asked.  I didn't want him to think we had abandoned his favorite game.

"Yeah," he watched the traffic out the window.  Today was one of those once a month 'safety' days at the Y, where the class was less about swimming and more about responsibility.  The boy really wasn't impressed with such days.

"I want you to know that I haven't forgotten 4e.  We can start back up any time you want."

"No, that's okay," he said.  The Boy has had a lot of swimming classes, working all the way up from Polliwog to Shark.  Soon in his future may be the swim team, and perhaps, one day, he may become a lifeguard.  It's up to him and where his love of swimming takes him.

"Huh?" I said, "Don't you want to play 4e?"

"No, that's okay.  Pathfinder if funner.  It's more freer like Labyrinth Lord and you're not stuck with all of those powers.  It's simpler and I can do more of what I want to do," he told me.

I almost ran over a cluster of children while turning into the YMCA parking lot.  "Really?" I asked, "I thought 4e was like your home, and you felt more comfortable in your home."  I was trying to suppress a smile.  Finally, he was over the 4e phase and we could focus on good old-fashioned D&D.

The Boy shook his head while getting out of the car and grabbing his towel.  "No dad, just because a role playing game is your first one, doesn't mean it's the best or the funnest.  Don't you know that?"

I collected my sketchbook and pencils from the back seat and quietly followed The Boy into the YMCA, reflecting deeply on what my son had just said.

- Ark

(FYI, the original 'The Talk' posting is here.)