Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Helltaint - a HERO System Campaign

I'm planning on starting up a supers game using the 6th Edition Hero System Rules.  I'll be using just the Basic Rulebook for simplicity.  I don't know how long it will last, but I promised Kaye a superhero game, so he's going to get one. :)

However, I'm not a huge fan of your standard superhero universe.  And I don't think the players would really fit into one, so I devised a universe where I think they could have fun.  I'm sure there is a comic book or setting that's exactly like this, since it uses so many common tropes, but I haven't seen one.

It's called Helltaint:

Helltaint

Next Monday, AD - During the morning commute to school and work, microscopic rifts opened in the very fabric of the universe.  Earth was bathed in varying levels of preternatural energies from another dimension.  Most were not affected by this strange radiation, but in the weeks and the months afterward, creatures exposed to high levels began to develop mutations, changing form or ability.  On rare occasions, inanimate objects began to change as well.

As doctors tried to understand what happened, some victims rapidly changed into vicious, powerful monsters bent on destroying all around them.  Governments worldwide began research projects into the new, inscrutable energies, and formed rapid response teams to deal with the horrific abominations that were commonly referred to as 'devils.'

Within a year it became clear that some of the radiation victims did not become devils, instead developing stable super powers like a hero out of a comic book.  Most tried to hide their powers, fearing a backlash from those who considered them 'tainted.'  Organizations, both legal and otherwise, started to recruit or kidnap victims to further their own ends.

Scientists eventually discovered the microfissures in the space around Earth, and theorized that they could be coaxed open with enough power.  This research culminated in the TORCH Project at CERN, in which a rift was opened, allowing an army of otherworldly, nightmarish monstrosities to ravage the Swiss country side.  While they had no standard form, they were all called 'demons.'

The TORCH Project caused instabilities in microfissures worldwide, allowing one-way traffic to flow at random times from the other dimension that immediately was labeled 'Hell.'  Governments developed methods to close the portals, and built teams to deal with the open gates as soon as possible.  This did not stop the microfissures from randomly emitting preternatural energies, however, creating new devils and Helltainted from the creatures of the Earth.

Ten Years In the Future, Now - The world is a dark place for the victims of the radiation - called  the Helltainted.  When discovered, governments, corporations, or organized crime groups draft, forcibly employ, or enslave them. Those Helltainted who escape detection from humanity don't have it easy, since the devils and demons can sense Helltaint and feast upon it.

Powerful new technologies have been built from extradimensional knowledge, but it remains under control of those in power.   Genetic monstrosities powered by Helltaint have been created in labs, and of course, have escaped into the wild.  Monster sightings reported on television may not have an extradimensional origin.

While humanity tries to ignore the chaos brought on by the Helltaint, it grows.  Monsters fight in gangs on the streets. Wars between nations escalate as new powers are developed.  Hundred foot tall demons march out of rifts and begin to eat skyscrapers.

It’s a perfect time for adventure.

- Ark

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Planetfall


Two Clan Jade Falcon mechwarriors were surprised when they exited the dropship and were met by the combined forces of Middle Earth.

- Ark

Monday, September 3, 2012

Recent Draw-rings


I've been filling up the sketch book.  Enjoy.  Or not.

- Ark

All Battlemechs to Warp Factor 8!


Here I am directing our Battletech forces to victory.  Okay, so no one on my team actually followed my glorious plan, so we all lost miserably.  See?  People should listen to me.

And yes, I always wear my Starfleet uniform while commanding a Battlemech lance.  What?  Don't you? LONG LIVE FASA!

- Ark

Friday, August 31, 2012

Parallels in the History of Operating System Development and Role Playing Game Design in Relation to the Old School Renaissance


(I suppose I could have picked a more boring title for a blog post, but it would have taken a lot of effort.  Hopefully the content will not be.  Well, at least to some.  This post kind of got out of hand and morphed into more of an essay, but is still maintains the style and inaccuracies of a blog post – so forgive the confused and melded style.)

Back when I was a kid, people were pretty unsure about what D&D was - much less all of the rest of TSR's products that revolved around the game.  I'd explain simply that D&D was a game with rules and procedures on how things worked, much like an operating system.  A module like Keep of the Borderlands was like a software package, or program, you'd run on the OS.  I, as Dungeon Master, was like the CPU of a Commodore 64, interpreting the rules and providing feedback to the users, or players.

Nobody understood.  It was 1982, for Pete's sake.  Pre-Macintosh – if you can imagine such a thing.

The Past is Prologue

Step back a decade to the swinging 70's.  About the same time that Gygax and Arneson were designing the first iteration of Dungeons and Dragons, researchers at Bell Labs were developing an operating system called UNIX for a honking big computer called the PDP-11/20.  Like the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, UNIX was cryptic, spooky, and not for newbs.  You really needed to know what the hell you were doing to make it work, but if you did - wow - you never saw your wife again.

Bell Labs was a part of American Telephone & Telegraph, and as a behemothic monopoly, AT&T was subject to all sorts of governmental regulation.  One rule was that AT&T was forbidden from entering the computer business.  So, AT&T gave copies of UNIX away freely to whatever business or university that asked.  UNIX proved to be very popular since it gave system administrators a much easier interface to control how a computer ran, and provided a common platform for programers to write their programs.

Times, They are a-Changing

Then, in 1983, the U.S. government broke up AT&T into smaller companies and removed many of the regulations that controlled the giant.  Bell Labs decided to monetize UNIX.

Complete and utter chaos reigned as everyone tried to make their own UNIX, sell it, and sue competitors off the map.  Some lawsuits are still going on to this day.  To many businesses, UNIX was a hot potato.  Upstarts like Microsoft and Apple stepped in and succeeded in business where UNIX should have more logically reigned.

Microsoft and Apple had something going for them, though.  They concentrated on the USER, not the system administrators, with graphical interfaces and a click-drag mentality.  In fact, the Windows and Macintosh operating systems, in an attempt to simplify maintenance, took power and capabilities away from the admins, infuriating power-hungry computer science students everywhere.

In this same era, role playing games were undergoing a shift away from a kit mentality.  Role playing games once had more of a open point of view, where the game master took the rules only as a suggestion and borrowed ideas from other sources.  A large part of running a successful game was up to the game master’s ability to come up with new rules on the fly.

Newer games supplied more rules and attempted to be a ‘complete package’ for a game master, so that less preparation was involved, as well as on-the-fly making up of rules.

Furthermore, games like GURPS and Champions provided rules for creating exactly the character a player wanted to run in a game, while games like Vampire: The Masquerade seemed to shift RPGs from a gauntlet one had to survive into a cooperative social gathering where turmoils of the inner psyche were examined.  The person running the game became a ‘storyteller,’ rather than a ‘master’ of the game.

Free as in Speech, Not Free as in Beer

There was a backlash to the user-friendliness of graphical operating systems and the corporate greed that suffocated UNIX.  Hippie nerds at the University of California, Berkeley kept the old, free version of UNIX alive, writing additional features and increasing the types of computers their version of UNIX, the Berkeley Software Distribution, would work on.   At the same time, a computer anarchist named Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation, an organization bent on allowing software, and its source code, to be freely available to everyone.

These two movements gained steam in the 1990’s.  The Berkely UNIX, or BSD, was carried over into a multitude of projects, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, each with different goals.  And a Finnish man named Linus Torvalds began to reverse engineer UNIX and make it his own in a form he called Linux.

Linux was developed under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Public License, or GPL.  Software written under the GPL had to be distributed with the full source code.  That way, no company could take Linux, alter it, and sell as their own.  Everyone would always ‘own’ Linux, and no one could steal it and make a profit.

BSD’s license was slightly different.  BSD was free to everyone, but corporations could take it and use it in whatever way they wanted, changing it and reselling it however they wanted.

The operating systems of the Open Source movement caught on like wildfire amongst software developers.  Students devoted huge amounts of their free time to make the operating systems better and better.

Linux itself became so popular that it began to threaten Window’s dominance in the field.  Microsoft’s competitors, such as IBM, pumped huge amounts of money and the time of their own software developers to improve Linux and help bring Microsoft down a notch or two.

Free as in Games

The desire to create a more open environment for intellectual property spread to the gaming world as well.  One of the earliest was Fuzion, which had an open-source type licensing, which basically allowed others to use the Fuzion game system in their own product.

In a strange move in 2000, Wizard of the Coast, who had recently bought TSR, open-sourced the bulk  of Dungeons and Dragons via its Open Game License.  The OGL was very similar to the Free Software Foundation’s GPL, allowing free distribution of the core System Reference Document – and derivatives, as long as a copy of the OGL was included, and due credit was given.  That doesn’t exactly seem to be WOTC’s intention with the OGL, but that’s what happened.

Thus, the Old School Renaissance was born.

Very quickly, people began to reverse engineer the earlier editions of Dungeons and Dragons and legally distribute the ‘new’ rules.   The earlier versions of D&D had not been in print for decades so and those who wished to play them had a difficult time.

While some have argued that the rewrites of D&D could have been done anyway, since rules cannot be copyrighted, only text, the OGL gave publishers the legal ‘safety net’ to do so.  Game distributions such as Swords and Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord take advantage of the license.

Open Source – Old School

The open sourcing of UNIX as Linux and the BSDs caused ripples and waves in mainstream computing.  Linux and OpenBSD’s focus on security forced Microsoft to address security issues with Windows.  Many ideas brought to Linux and the BSD’s by volunteers made their way to Window’s as well.  Apple completely tossed their original Macintosh operating system and replaced it with a BSD derivative, still in use today and known as MasOSX.  The Android phone operating system uses Linux as it’s core.

To put it in simple terms, a relatively small group of people with some free time, and a desire to keep operating systems and software open to the public, changed the face of computing.

Similarly, the Old School Revolution, taking open and available components of Dungeons and Dragons, reversed engineered the game, making it available to all.  Hobbyists and game companies can now publish content for the game, and even different versions of the game, as they see fit.

The somewhat nebulous goal of the somewhat nebulous Old School Renaissance was to bring back an older style of gaming.  The OSR succeeded in that.  But like Linux and the BSDs, the OSR caught the attention of the big boys.  WOTC, owners of Dungeons and Dragons, is currently redesigning the game to be more like its earlier versions.

I find some gratification in being there, at least in a tiny way, for both of these revolutions – both as a software developer and a old school game player.  It’s nice to see grass-roots, heart-felt movements be successful.

- Ark

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

OSR is Dying


It is official; Netcraft WOTC now confirms: *BSD OSR is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered  *BSD OSR community when IDC Dragon Magazine confirmed that  *BSD OSR market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers tables. Coming close on the heels of a recent  Netcraft WOTC survey which plainly states that  *BSD OSR has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along.  *BSD OSR is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin Game Master comprehensive networking play test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict  *BSD's OSR's  future. The hand writing is on the wall:  *BSD OSR faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for  *BSD OSR because  *BSD OSR is dying. Things are looking very bad for  *BSD OSR. As many of us are already aware,  *BSD OSR continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

All major surveys show that  *BSD OSR has steadily declined in market share.  *BSD OSR is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If  *BSD OSR is to survive at all it will be among OS RPG dilettante dabblers. *BSD OSR continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save  *BSD OSR  from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes,  *BSD OSR is dead.

Fact: *BSD OSR is dying.

[ okay, if you recognize this ancient USENET and Slashdot troll, then you are an old, decrepid uber-nerd with a penchant for obscure alternate operating systems. ;) ]

- Ark