Argh! Gaming is just growing over my head. Faced with the choice of either spending more quality time with Claudia and gaming, I’ve decided to – sadly! – stop all my gaming activities. 
We’ll see how it goes and perhaps I’ll resume a monthly game in 2009…
At the end of the D&D 3.5 era, there are still interesting offerings to be had.
Not much seems to be going on at Necromancer Games. And Clark Peterson has announced his strong support for 4E.
I have no idea what Goodman Games are doing. Last I heard they were going to do 4E. I think I shall buy some of their old Dungeon Crawl Classics 2nd hand on Ebay…
Anybody I should be checking out?
I’m sort of interested in what Expeditious Retreat Press is doing because of their one-on-one line [1] and because of their flagship A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe (which I still haven’t bought) (a 2nd edition of the book was recently released).
I have no idea what Inner Circle Games is up to. I was interested in their Violet Dawn setting, but now I’m no longer sure.
I think settings require a high buy-in. That’s just not the kind of DM I am. I’m totally focused on adventures, right here, right now. Settings are dreamlike visions that help you write adventures or flesh out backgrounds. I’d rather buy more adventures, I think. Necromancer Games’ CityOfBrass, for example, is about the limit of how much setting I can take. The box is about ⅓ urban setting with shops, names, locations, ⅓ adventure with rooms, npcs, (tiny) maps, and ⅓ NPC stats and monsters.
Oh, and I’m still hoping to quell the urge of having to buy more adventures than I will be able to play in a lifetime!
Tags: RPG publishing
Comments on 2008-04-03 More 3.5 Goodness
Wow. I think you’ve got everything covered when it comes to adventures, Alex 
I highly recommend Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics - I’ve yet to find one that isn’t playable, and they’re great value for money. Just add the Mother of All Treasure Table, Mother of All Encounter Tables, Tome of Horrors and/or Monster Geographica series for a little more Monster variety, and you’ll have plenty of gaming material for years to come.
– greywulf 2008-04-03 10:45 UTC
I think the Eberron Campaign Setting is very cool. There are many sourcebooks, but just the core setting is enough to launch you into a full-fledged campaign, and I find myself often ignoring the canon material released in later supplements in favor of my interpretation of the world. Most D&D adventures can be easily adapted to Eberron (one of the core design conceits of Eberron is “if it’s in D&D, it has a place in Eberron”).
– Adrian 2008-04-03 11:48 UTC
I guess this should be advice but I basically just lifted it from a EN World thread called Trap an Egyptian-Style Pyramid. Celebrim’s answer stood out from the rest of them when I read through the thread. Celebrim is also behind the The Explicatae Incompositae - Being A Bestairy of the Sometime Lords of Chaos – Slaad Lord goodness! Anyway, this is what he wrote:
Ok… high level traps.
Remember that before this can work, you’ve got to be an order of magnitude more lethal than Tomb of Horrors.
Weird. I just discovered a Skype API Plugin for Pidgin/libpurple/Adium. It doesn’t really speak Skype: It requires Skype to be running in order to interface with it, apparently. Not quite what I was looking for, but I might give it a try anyway…
Update: I deinstalled it again because it required Skype to be running, and because chatting in Adium generated a duplicate chat window in Skype with the exact same content. I think I’d rather not use Skype on the Mac Mini where I don’t have a headset anyway!
Tags: IM 
In response to a thread on EN World about Suggestions for Speeding Up Combat I provided the following list:

None of the players liked the idea of there being a real timer or the DM hustling the players along.
Comments on 2008-04-07 DM Advice – Speed Up Combat
Looks good to me, Alex 
– greywulf 2008-04-07 19:56 UTC
I love me some PeerReview!
Thanks, GreyWulf.
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-07 23:06 UTC
One thing we did that worked well – we’d call out who was up on initiative as well as the next person. The next person was supposed to start thinking about their action while the person currently up actually rolled their dice and stated their moves, etc.
Everything you mention is something we did in our games and worked well.
– Adrian 2008-04-08 09:00 UTC
Time for a podcast update… Last update: 2007-07-28 More Roleplaying Game Podcasts .
Check out RPG Podcasts if you’re looking for more.
Tags: Podcast RPG publishing
I keep thinking about Spirit of the Century by Evil Hat Productions. It’s a game that uses the Fate rules, and Fate is essentially Fudge. I was in love with Fudge in the days when all we had was Gopher servers and Usenet… I think. I don’t really remember any details. I reviewed Gatecrasher by Grey Ghost Press on 1998-01-06. [1] Ok, maybe we did have the web by by then. But still. I wrote that over ten years ago… Time flies.
Anyway, Fudge, Fate, open gaming… Fate 1.0 apparently was a particular rule set based on the Fudge toolkit, Fate 2.0 was a rewrite using the OGL, and Fate 3.0 was used for Spirit of the Century. And with that, we’re finally back on topic!
I was considering buying Spirit of the Century. But I don’t think I’d find enough people around here interested in trying a Fudge game. That’s why I’ve been able to resist temptation. USD 30 for the 420 page softcover and PDF + USD 16 for shipping… Yikes!
But wait, there is a Spirit of the Century SRD available. You can also get it as a PDF from the Fate RPG download page. The version by Abrahm Simons uses a two column layout. Very nice.
What I’ll do is browse the SRD, think about it, check to see whether anybody is interested, wait a little, and figure out what to do.
Open gaming rocks.
If only shipping weren’t so expensive.
Tags: RPG publishing
Comments on 2008-04-08 Temptation – Spirit of the Century
I was in the same position a while ago. I’d love to run an SoTC game, but convincing players to deviate from d20 is a real challenge. It’s D&D, d20 Modern or nothing these days
I think FUDGE’s openness frightens people. Wonder where I’ve heard that before……….
Reading through the rulebook, it’s great and very evocative of the setting. If you can get the players on board, I say go for it. Wish I was there to join in!
– greywulf 2008-04-08 22:37 UTC
The Independent Insurgency uses a song by the Hub City Stompers called Chatterbox. When I understood some of the lyrics, I laughed out loud:
Hilarious. Reggae music (or Ska?) about the internet. It even mentions Helvetica!
Tags: Music
I have an embedded link to Google Analytics on this site. Here are some interesting stats for the last month:
| Browswer | Visits | % visits |
| Firefox | 1,278 | 54.41% |
| Internet Explorer | 691 | 29.42% |
| Safari | 159 | 6.77% |
With all that talk about IE still being the market leader… I don’t know. Perhaps this means that corporate people are stuck with IE but at home people use Firefox?
| Sources | Visits | % visits |
| google (organic) | 1,169 | 49.77% |
| (direct) ((none)) | 519 | 22.09% |
| enworld.org (referral) | 107 | 4.56% |
| mediamac.comon.dk (referral) | 80 | 3.41% |
| google.com (referral) | 41 | 1.75% |
I wonder what “organic” means in this context. I don’t post a lot to EN World but apparently my sig has some enticing links.
The mediamac.comon.dk referrals are due to a Danish person posting a link to 2008-03-21 Send iTunes Tracks To SqueezeBox.
| Source | Visits |
| 1,169 | |
| yahoo | 32 |
| search | 11 |
The Google predominance is amazing. I’m assuming “search” refers to search.ch. They have a nice alternative to Google Maps: map.search.ch.
Compare:
| Landing Page | Entrances |
| Diary | 258 |
| RecentChanges | 251 |
| MondayGroup | 168 |
| ShackledCity | 154 |
| 2008-03-21_Send_iTunes_Tracks_To_SqueezeBox | 104 |
| Oddmuse_and_WebDAV | 39 |
| SlackWare | 36 |
| AtlantisGames | 35 |
I guess the two D&D campaign pages come as no surprise. The iTunes page we already mentioned. The rest are surprise: Oddmuse and WebDAV? Yikes, that was a lot of time wasted! And I haven’t played any Atlantis in years, nor have I used Slackware…
Oh well. What do I learn from all this?
Uhm… I dunno. What do you use Google Analytics for?
Tags: Web
Comments on 2008-04-10 Google Analytics
I might be responsible for many of the landings on the ShackledCity page. That is the page I have in my bookmarks, but then I usually just navigate to RecentChanges to see your latest game reports and musings on RPGing.
– Adrian 2008-04-11 13:05 UTC
Hm, so you’re not using an RSS feed reader? I think my fingers would fall off without BlogLines (or whatever other tool or service you choose to keep up with changes all over the net).
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-11 15:32 UTC
I suggested American Gods by Neil Gaiman to the English bookclub a while back [1] and I’m reading it right now. Unfortunately I have a German translation because the German publisher did not translate the title. I visited Amazon Germany, searched for American Gods, and ordered a cheap copy. And it turns out it was German. Oh well.
I’m nearly through, and I’m not too enthusiastic about it. Somehow there’s just not enough going on in the book. Hanging from a tree and references to old mythology can be great. Just look at The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay. I’ll finish the book now that I’ve nearly made it. But I don’t think I can recommend it.
Comments on 2008-04-12 American Gods
…and I rate this as one of my favourite books of all time. Each to their own, eh? I dunno. Maybe something got lost in translation 
– GreyWulf 2008-04-12 16:31 UTC
I enjoyed it as well, though I can’t specifically say what I liked about it now, for some reason. I do know that reading American Gods led me to read Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, which I absolutely loved.
– Adrian 2008-04-12 22:16 UTC
I found American Gods pretty good too. Made me go out and buy other Neil stuff. And don’t get me started on Terry Pratchett, I have pretty much everything by him…
– AadityaSood 2008-04-13 17:21 UTC
Hm. I wonder what part of American Gods I missed. Did you look up the gods and wonder whether the were well represented? Was it the story about the kobold and the backwater town? The final battle? Odin being a cheap trickster? The thought of modern gods of TV and news?
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-13 20:29 UTC
IIRC (in fact I know IRC because I searched your blog
) You also didn’t like “The Sandman”, maybe Neil Gaiman isn’t just for you. This sometimes happen, I personally don’t like asimov too much….
– PierreGaston 2008-04-14 09:38 UTC
Indeed… 2007-10-19 Sandman. 
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-14 09:53 UTC
Hello Neil Gaiman is freeing one of his books and if I remember correctly it is American Gods. Head to his blog http://www.neilgaiman.com/ (very good, updated often) to find out more.
– Dragica 2008-04-17 15:56 UTC
I just saw that you run a one-woman game-coding company very close to where I live and work. If you have a cool project, let me know… 
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-17 16:43 UTC
Lately I’ve been thinking about prestige classes and new feats. I’d really like to get a lot of bang for my buck, and I’m not sure I like what I hear about the Complete series by Wizards of the Coast. Blackdirge Publishing has a few PDF products out there for around USD 2 each containing prestige classes (the Master at Arms series). The Order of the Stick forums have a review of some of the prestige classes.
Hm… In Peter’s Dragon Coast game I’m playing a swashbuckler and apparently I’m going to be the “tank” – this is not going well from a powergaming perspective, I can tell.

Tags: RPG
publishing 
Comments on 2008-04-12 Prestige Classes and Feats
The prestige classes in the Complete series are of widely varying quality, but I think this is true of every supplement from every publisher. I think the problem with prestige classes is that what each player wants out of them is very different. Do you want the most powerful combo for the least skill/feat/multiclassing investment? Do you want to represent a specific organization in your game world? Do you want to realize a character concept that cannot be effectively achieved with feats and multiclassing alone? Even if a prestige class is well-designed, if it has nothing to do with a character you are playing (or will play in the future), then it is worthless to you.
In terms of feats, I really like Complete Warrior and Player's Handbook 2 because they vastly increase the options for fighters. Complete Adventurer has some good feats, too. Complete Divine and Complete Arcane are just mediocre, but they do open up a lot more options in terms of metamagic feats and alternate uses for turn undead (in fact, Complete Divine includes some pretty abusive stuff – Divine Metamagic and Divine Spell Power can be used to outrageous ends), and the warlock core class in the arcane book is really well done, I think. Complete Mage introduces reserve feats, which are an attempt to address the resource management issues experienced by spellcasters, and I think they are a pretty good patch, though not a true fix.
– Adrian 2008-04-12 22:14 UTC
One player is in Brazil, another is sick, and a third can’t come. It’s just Marco and Claudia! All three of us went to the same bakery to get croissants and bread or cake, and we spent two hours on the balcony eating breakfast and basking in the April sun. Good times.
Belflin and Corian decide to investigate the missing body up in Bostwick and with Flax’ help they discover the secret passage down into an old crypt. Behind a secret door they find the bones they were looking for, a fresh corps, and four ghouls. An easy fight!
Behind the double door they find an Unholy Blight trap and two wraiths. They retreat as fast as they can, organize Jeffar and “mayor” Wycheck (even though the two don’t seem to like each other). Together, they beat the wraiths and discover the amazing Rod of Death. This rod would be worth about 75,000 gp to a priest of Nergul, god of death.
A 150 ft drop into the Underdark is ignored.
The party then turns south and decides to investigate the missing workers in the Thorfax mines. I had planted this seed myself in order to introduce a beholder outpost. But with only two characters in the party (a ranger level 7 and a sorcerer level 8), I had to switch plans. I had already been toying with a cloaker outpost, Belflin already hated cloakers with a passion, and KoboldQuarterly #4 featured a “Cloaker Ecology” – I hadn’t really read the article, but there it featured stats for a so-called dread cloaker. Cool.
So I quickly invented some caves and let the party know where five miners had disappeared in the last few days and weeks. I figured that these miners had been kidnapped (“grappled” by a cloaker and carried away) and they had tried to drop some of their items, trying to lead their fellow men to the cloakers. It turns out that the end result was too confusing and I pointed them towards the caves with extra high ceilings. Corian knows the Fly spell so finding a tunnel leading towards a separate set of caves with the five miners and five cloakers was no problem.
The party fought one cloaker guarding the access to the caves, another cloaker guarding the miners, and three cloakers pursuing them. The last fight was a very close call. When one of the cloakers had the archer paralyzed I wondered what to do – coup de grâce? Then I figured that it would try to enslave Belflin instead. It carried him back to the slave pit, took all his gear, and moved away. Beflin was unable to stop it.
In the mean time, Corian was fighting the last cloaker with the help of his fourth level cohort. The sorcerer prevented the cloaker from grappling him, withstood a stupor moan, and brought the cloaker down with some Magic Missiles and Flax flanking. Who would have thought that we have such a tough sorcerer in our party?
The party brings the miners back to safety, get an ordinary longbow and some arrows for Belflin, and the next day they go looking for some cloaker butt to kick. It doesn’t take them long to find the dread cloaker in his lair. They beat him eventually…
Challenges overcome: Four ghouls CR 1, two wraiths CR 5 (XP shared with two NPCs), trap CR 4, five cloakers CR 5, a dread cloaker CR 7.
Tags: RPG SundayGroup VaultOfLarinKarr
For anybody who loves to watch people talk, to think about all the crap people blather, who likes to join dysfunctional conversations with nonsensical comments and find out that they are a perfect fit, I recommend:
Smerdyakov mentioned Expelled! (2008) on #hcoop and with some googling I found a review by John Rennie subtitled No Integrity Displayed. for Scientific American.

I remember two books by Richard Dawkins on the subject. I’d recommend The Blind Watchmaker.
I used to be subscribed to Scientific American. I stopped reading it when I realized that I still didn’t get the articles on Physics where as the articles on Biology seemed boring and trivial.
As I grow older, I might have to take it up again. 
I’m listening to A Distant Mirror: Comparing the 14th Century to the 20th by Barbara Tuchman. eMusic had a promotion allowing me to download 25 songs and one audiobook. This was the audiobook I picked.
I like history, but I’ve never been too interested in medieval history. But I’ve slowly been working my way up from AncientHistory to Byzantine history and on to the medieval ages. My renewed interest is certainly also due to the incredible 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast.
Maybe I should look at the Medieval Sourcebook again. Back in the days – when the web had just started – this was an incredible collection of links.
Also note how lousy it is to name your files as follows:
Barbara W. Tuchman_A Distant Mirror_359_Part 359 of 541.mp3 Barbara W. Tuchman_A Distant Mirror_35_Part 35 of 541.mp3 Barbara W. Tuchman_A Distant Mirror_360_Part 360 of 541.mp3
I’m listening to the audiobook on my iAUDIO instead of my iPod because I didn’t want to import the entire 700MB of the book into iTunes. The reason being that I want to keep my iTunes library on my primary harddisk because the external disk’s ventilation is just so damn loud. The primary harddisk has only 60GB of space, and the iTunes library is already taking 33GB. Hence the complication. I’m assuming this would not have bothered the iPod. But then again, who knows. My iPod still has tons of free space. But I can’t copy the audiobook to it without breaking iTunes synchronization. I think. Maybe I’ll look into this again.
Tags: Audio Books Byzantium Gadgets
Comments on 2008-04-15 A Distant Mirror
So I reorganized the 542 files into folders containing ten files each using some shell scripting and some sed power. Cool!
Today I pulled the iAUDIO G3 out of my pocket and wanted to listen to it. I was greeted with a blinking logo. WTF? Uhm… Some googling around leads me to hints about limitations of the little bugger â “limits of 650 song files and 50 folders.” I download the manual and scan it… Nothing is mentioned.
But there it is, on their forum: “There are limitations in total number of PLAYABLE media files including folders supported by iAUDIO players: […] 50 folders and 650 files. [1]
Uhhh… 542 files, ten per folder… That’s right. 55 folders!
I think I just got teleported back into the electronic dark ages.
Oh and firmware upgrade? Needs Windows.
This is insane.
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-16 17:12 UTC
Tags: iAUDIO
Music
Gadgets
MP3 
Isn’t wine’s ASPI good enough to do firmware updates ?
– AlokSingh 2008-04-17 08:40 UTC
Wow. Apparently Wine does in fact support OSX. I’m surprised. The Wine download page seems to support OSX only as the commercial CrossOver by CodeWeavers, however. [2]
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-17 14:53 UTC
Next try. Rename the files. Create twenty subdirectories. Go through all the files in order using some shell scripting.
ls B*.mp3 | sed 's/^\(.*\)\(Part .*\)$/mv "\1\2" "\2"/' | sh
for d in `seq 19`; do mkdir $d; done
i=0; d=1; for f in *.mp3; do ((i++)); mv "$f" "$d"; if (($i==30)); then ((d++)); i=0; fi; done
I think it’s working now! 
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-18 16:32 UTC
Oh and did I mention I think I like muCommander?
Norton Commander!! 
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-18 16:33 UTC
The ENnie Awards are a “an annual fan-based” set of awards given to “game designers, writers and artists […] and the final winners are voted upon by the gaming public at EN World.”
With the PDF market so big, and gaming time so limited, many people depend on reviews. I do, too. And when a product gets nominated for an award, or gets an award, or makes first place, that is important to me. That how I pick how to spend my gaming bucks.
Via Crothian [1], who has been a judge for many years.
Tags: RPG publishing
So I clicked on that “Custom” button in iTunes for the encoding rate. I used to have it set to 160 kbps. Apparently this meant CBR. The new dialog offered VBR, various quality settings, and so on. So I started googling and once again I was told that LAME was the only encoder to use. But… I have a Mac! I like iTunes!
Well, it turns out that there is a LAME bridge for iTunes! Which I installed. And now I use --alt-preset standard understanding as little as before, but feeling much better about it.
LAME rocks!! 
Hahaha…
Oh man, look at these pictures!
Comments on 2008-04-16 Steampunk Star Wars
You should also take a look at [1] and related posts on his site. Enjoy. 
– NoufalIbrahim 2008-04-16 11:55 UTC
Sillof’s work is awesome, isn’t it? I’m partial to his Gaslight Justice League too.
– GreyWulf 2008-04-16 11:56 UTC
Those are pretty freakin’ awesome.
Totally unrelated, but this is also totally awesome.
– Adrian 2008-04-18 08:14 UTC
James, our ShackledCity DM is unavailable this Sunday. I proposed to play some old skool D&D in honor of Gary Gygax.
I’ve decided to pick up an old version of the D&D rules. Check out the Editions of Dungeons & Dragons and look for “Red Box” and the “Rules Cyclopedia”. We’re going to use the Labyrinth Lord rules, which reimplement those rules. When I bought the Rules Cyclopedia PDF, it turned out that the quality of the PDF was not too exciting. That’s why I’m picking this OGL (en) reimplementation. It can be printed without problems.
But back to the Red Box.
I fondly remember my astonishment back then. A Canadian friend called Jason Burford introduced us to AD&D and that was our system. A while later a guy called Igor Simonides invited us to a game of D&D using the Red Box rules. There was no distinction between race and class! There was just 3d6, in order! It was weird. We didn’t want to play it. But now I really want to take another look.
The irony is that Gary Gygax wrote the AD&D rules where as the Red Box was a revision by Frank Mentzer of a revision by Tom Moldvay of a revision by John Eric Holmes of the original rules by Gygax and Arneson…
So we’re only indirectly using the rules of Gary Gygax. Then again, Labyrinth Lord is dedicated to Tom Moldvay, so take a look at Robert Fisher’s D&D ID overview to figure out where we stand. 
And we’re going to play Palace of the Silver Princess. In fact, we’re going to play the original, orange-cover edition of that adventure by Jean Wells. I’ll have to check it for playability, though.
I’m going to prepare a few spellbooks, some standard equipment, a few options, and a few sets of arms and armor to make character creation quick and easy.
This is going to be fun! 
→ 2008-04-20 Palace of the Silver Princess
Tags: RPG 
Comments on 2008-04-17 Old Skool Coming Up
Basic D&D (and the whole BECMI series, by Frank Mentzer) is the D&D I cut my teeth on, when I first started playing in the summer before my first year of middle school (1989). My first character was a fighter named Redhammer. I quickly moved on to AD&D 1st edition, somehow snagging the early printings with the extremely old skool covers; I played my half-elf thief, Slyeth Foxfingers, and his life-drinking intelligent short sword, Leech. Two years later I was playing AD&D 2nd edition (which had been out almost since I started playing D&D) as Garric, human fighter with 18/00 (ogre!) strength. But BECMI D&D was where it all started for me. I even DMed for the first time in Basic D&D, for solo campaigns involving an elf, and Redhammer’s younger brother, Redsword (gawd my names were awful back then).
– Adrian 2008-04-17 20:36 UTC
Oh, there’s an online Labyrinth Lord character creator!
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-17 22:27 UTC
I absolutely loved red box D&D; It was by far my favorite.
I played 2nd Ed. AD&D as well, but it always seemed more complicated; I found myself spending more time reading & trying to figure out the rules, whereas with Red Box, I focused more time on making creative dungeons.
So my favor definitely went to red box & Mystara.
– LionKimbro 2008-04-22 07:10 UTC
In the idle hours of spring, the mind wanders… There’s a slight difference between the English word “Sodomy” and the German word “Sodomie” – even Wikipedia mentions it: “From this biblical narrative the word ‘Sodomy’ is derived and has henceforth come to be synonymous with anal intercourse (particularly between two males) and sometimes also to describe human-animal sexual intercourse (also known as bestiality or zoophilia); this is the primary meaning of the cognate German language word Sodomie.” [1]
Anyway, today I was looking for music by The Pogues. One of their albums is called Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash (1985). Today I also looked at the iTunes store. And guess what they call the album? If you guessed “Rum Sy & the Lash” you win as many laundry machines as you can carry.
Hilarious.
There’s even a Wikipedia article about the album: Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash – Wikipedia claims that the title is “adapted from a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill” and provides this quote: “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers, and the lash.”
I love it.
The quote. I’m talking about the quote.
Update: Finally I found that Churchill did not utter these words. On Wikipedia’s page on The Pogues there’s a note pointing to Quotes Falsely Attributed To Him by the Churchill Centre, which says that “Churchill’s assistant, Anthony Montague-Browne said that although Churchill had not uttered these words, he wished he had.”
This was also posted to EN World [1].
Today we spent a few hours playing through the orange-cover Palace of the Silver Princess available for free from Wizards of the Coast using the Labyrinth Lord rules. These rules are a “retro-clone game system” designed to take us “back to the basics of old-school fantasy gaming”. The rules are dedicated to Tom Moldvay, author of the Basic Set. Check out the nice list of D&D book covers by Robert Fisher to get some context.
The party managed to steal the ruby in the end!
I had three players. We started with Belfin the elf, Darn the elf, and Marcus the cleric, all on first level. Belfin hired three retainers and promised them that they got to keep the padded armor and short sword he bought them if they came along for this adventure.
Beflin got replaced by Solarus the cleric, Darn got replaced by Darn the second, also an elf, and Marcus got replaced by Wilford the Witless. Later Solarus got replaced by Grump the dwarf, Darn the second got replaced by a nameless cleric, and Wilford got replaced by Archibald the Wise. We lost count of the retainers we lost. Often the party had as much as nine people in it. Ordinary humans came along for armor and weapons, elves and clerics came a long if they got a share of the treasure. Many a cleric died before being able to cast a single spell. More than one retainer ended up turning into a PC. The system is DEADLY.
The last party got to level up in the caves by popular vote of the players. Not much later they found the lair of a harpy that owned over 6000 gp. Remember how the orange book had many empty rooms that you had to stock yourself. I had added this one myself, thinking that the random treasure I had rolled would help them level up. Well, the nameless cleric ended up on level three, so hopes were up again.
The rules left me with some questions. Maybe somebody can help me out.
Other stuff I noticed:
It was fun for a one-day adventure. We’ll be happy to return to D&D 3.5 in our next session.
The following is stuff I didn’t write in my EN World post.
If I were to compare it to D&D 3.5 directly:
Tags: RPG
LabyrinthLord
Old School 
Comments on 2008-04-20 Palace of the Silver Princess
Definitely less treasure than the last time I played BECMI D&D. Then again, it was a total Monty Haul campaign, before I knew it I was 9th level and building a keep and taming a dragon to use as a mount.
I definitely think that D&D has evolved for the better. I will readily admit that I like playing heroes, growing to mythic or superheroic levels. I like growing attached to my character, and having a long, successful run in a campaign. I like PCs that are the central protagonists of the game’s evolving storyline, and not grist in a mill, to be ground down by all the deadly horrors that lurk everywhere. I like the tactical richness and character optimization of 3.x, and not the arbitrary monotony of Basic/AD&D combat.
But that is just me – perhaps I am not as hardcore or old skool as I’d like to think 
– Adrian 2008-04-21 13:50 UTC
w00t – they get about 16500 gp on their first session!! 
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-21 21:54 UTC
Today I found a note on Mike Hensley’s blog linking to a post in the Help Me Wrap My Head Around Classic thread on Dragonsfoot. The post’s author was Frank Mentzer and it said:
Indeed. 
– AlexSchroeder 2008-05-22 18:44 UTC
A while ago Paizo ran a contest to find the “RPG Superstar”. Today I was looking for unique magic items and wanted to go back to those contest submissions. They have been taken offline. 
Yes, I know that the contributors basically signed off their rights to Paizo when they made their submissions. That gives Paizo legal protection against others taking the submissions. There’s no need to prevent non-publishers from taking these submissions for their own games, however.
What’s up?


Grrr.
Tags: RPG publishing
You can check my current status message on a website (and this post used to transclude the text back into Oddmuse again).
The status itself was sent to a Twitter Bot via GTalk, who posted it to Twitter, which got picked up by TwitterAdium and set as the status message for all my accounts in Adium, which in turn was picked up by a JabberLand bot I had added to my contact list, and included on that first page I linked to. Scary.
I’m sort of looking for the way to set all my status messages from a single place. This seems to work!
I still don’t get the Twitter craze, but perhaps I need some more friends on Twitter to appreciate “it”.
Via GreyWulf’s Ten Reasons Twitter Will Take Over The World.
This reminds me of LJ Bot (Frank) – if you send him a message using your Talk acount, the message will turn into a LiveJournal blog post.
A long time ago I had a proof of concept using a programmable bot that did the same thing for Oddmuse. 
Bots rule.
Tags: Twitter Adium Software Web Bots
Comments on 2008-04-22 Twitter
If you want to add more friends, I recommend using Twubble. It scans your friend’s freinds and lists those that occur in more than one of your friend’s lists. The idea is that if several of your friends like what they say, chances are you will to. And you know what? It works 
I picked up around 100 new folks to follow using Twubble, and a fair percentage of those followed me back in return too. Which is nice. The sheer noise of 300 people actively tweeting is terrific!
– GreyWulf 2008-04-22 19:06 UTC
And you didn’t think bots checking your contact lists was creepy? I guess I’m still under the influence of events in the Internet dark ages where friends discovered services that kept contact info up to date and started out by sending an email to all your contacts. That was very creepy.
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-22 19:10 UTC
That’s one of the (many) things that makes twitter so cool. When everything is public, privacy doesn’t matter. 
– GreyWulf 2008-04-22 19:46 UTC
Ah… I tried it and now I get it. Not creepy. Plus you’re my only friend on Twitter so Twubble doesn’t find any friends of two friends.
The creepy part is “We can check if anyone in your email contacts already has a Twitter account” – you just provide your email adress and your password… Oops!
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-22 20:13 UTC
Yeh. I’m unsure of those too. There are far too many services requesting your gmail username and password these days. In an ideal world, gmail would provide an rss feed of all your contacts. Now, that would be cool…….
– GreyWulf 2008-04-22 21:51 UTC
Ok, it seems that today a friendly American idiot discovered that I have joined and is registering the feeds of a gazillion American politicians as “follower”. Twits, all of them!! If I don’t block them I’m in fact increasing their pagerank. How do I deal with this? I don’t want spammers!
AIM was great in the old days: If somebody did something annoying, the mere doing of the act enabled recipients to give you a “warning” – and that automatically prevented you from adressing anybody whose warning level was less than yours (ie. almost everybody else except for the very people that you warned instead). That meant that as long as you were polite to strangers you had zero warnings and no problems.
I don’t want to just block spammers. I want to block them and deny them the use of the service for a while. That’s true Web 2.0 Spam Protection!

– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-24 21:44 UTC
Spammers are the only reason I think guns are a good idea. Them, and politicians. And old people in queues. And…. hmmm. I better stop now.
In twitter, I just ignore the spammers. They’re welcome to follow me, but I won’t do the same back so I don’t get to see what they’re trying to peddle. I don’t care if it gets their pagerank up; that’s Google’s job to fix an abuse of their system.
– GreyWulf 2008-04-24 23:12 UTC
Grrr. The blocking cycle requires way too many clicks. Click on the list of followers, wait for reload, click on the block button, click on the ok button, and repeat.
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-26 08:40 UTC
Also strange: Several total strangers have started following me. One appears to be a D&D player. Another appears to be a journalist in Zürich. They have no apparent spam agenda, so I’m not blocking them.
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-26 22:58 UTC
Hi Alex, I’ve read this and checked if you are already on Twitter. Doing so, I accidently sent you an invitation by e-mail. I hope you don’t mind. 
– Stefan Bucher 2008-05-04 15:04 UTC
Of course not. 
– AlexSchroeder 2008-05-04 19:29 UTC
Things that make me uncomfortable:
Tags: Work Life InstantMessaging
Found somewhere on the web.

Comments on 2008-04-24 Marriage
Skip the middleman. Find someone you hate and give them a house.
– Marco 2008-04-25 06:40 UTC
My best friend’s girlfriend asked me to be best man at the wedding she’s planning for my best friend, and I’m having a hard time figuring out how to respond.
– LionKimbro 2008-04-25 19:57 UTC
Across time, space, and cultural barriers all I can say is that here in Switzerland the best man is also supposed to help organize the wedding itself. Claudia & I did this for her brother and it was a lot of work. 
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-25 22:29 UTC
I must be a really old fart, inflexible and set in my ways. When it comes to The Pogues I still love Sodomy, Rum, And The Lash and If I Should Fall From Grace With God and as I listen to all these other discs I find that I don’t really like the new singers (does one say “vocalist” these days?) – Shane MacGowan was teh bestest!
To bad he had (still has?) such a drinking problem.
And I love Wikipedia. 
Belflin, Silas, and Auroleva delve into the Underdark, looking for the temple of Belphegor, the evil god of fire.
On the first day, they meet some Gnolls, but using sign language the two groups pass each other. During the night, the gnolls come back. The party feigns sleeping, and the gnolls decide to attack! The fourteen gnolls did not last long and a chest loaded with 1300 gp was discovered. Some sort of tribute to be paid, maybe?
On the second day, a wraith was fought and bested, and a group of Crushed Skull orcs was met later that day. One of the orcs knew Giant and gave Belflin directions to the ogre caves. The party followed the directions, got overtaken by the orcs by nightfall, but again nothing happened.
On the third day, the party reached a big cave and discovered a red dragon called Thuskamasker in an abandoned Belphegor temple. The dragon graciously agreed to a gift of 1300 gp in a wooden chest and let Belflin go.
The party also found a secret door with an Infernal inscription but did not investigate.
And the party got into a fight with some ogres. Their surviving leader Klusko offered to find a hexagonal gem for 1000 gp after all but two of his clan were killed. Belflin, growing suspicious, decided to search the premise and discovered the very key they were looking for in the ogre’s treasure chest.
Hurray! 
The party also befriended a lonesome & lost hobgoblin and finally arranged for him to become Crus’ servant.
Challenges overcome: thirteen gnolls CR 1, one wraith CR 5, ten ogres CR 3, Klusko CR 7, hobgoblin CR 1
Tags: RPG SundayGroup VaultOfLarinKarr
Something’s amis… Belflin’s 9th level and got the same XP as the 8th level guys.
See how honest(/stupid) I am?
– Marco 2008-04-29 06:50 UTC
Sometimes you’re unlucky. But in this case, 36’000 is enough for level nine.
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-29 10:13 UTC
From time to time I get the urge to rip some old CDs and listen to them again in a sort of “genre completion” action. I listen to some old grunge music used for Levis’ ads decades ago (Inside by Stiltskin I think) and realize there must be another CD somewhere with a Levis track (Spaceman by Babylon Zoo). That leads me to look for another CD produced by Tori Amos: Pet. And then my mind travels to Nirvana, Bon Jovi, Jimmy Hendrix (weird, eh?) and ends up with a weird collection of CDs. And I realize that I can no longer find a CD by Mano Negra – the band Manu Chao belonged to before he started singing like a sissy.
I must have given it away. I faintly remember giving it to zeno.
Old music is weird.
Tags: Music
I liked Til Schweiger’s movie Keinohrhasen (2007). Simple romantic comedy and I liked it anyway. 
I also liked Nora Tschirner. I remember seeing her in Kebab Connection (2005) and liking her very much back then.
Getting older is creepy. It always creeps me out if ordinary people – co-workers, actors, clients – are born in the eighties. Where were they when I listened to Stevie Wonder wagging his head and singing I just called to say I love you... (dominating the charts for week after week after week).
And here’s another creepy thought: Thank God the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was reunited, for Tschirner grew up in East Berlin. I remember feeling old when my little sister didn’t know what the Iron Curtain was. Before long I will have to admit that I was born in the last millennium!! 
But you have to admit, it is hard to resist these rabbit guys.
Anyway, I sort of recommend it as light entertainment. Depending on how expensive your local movie theater is, you might want to join a DVD sharing club instead. Here in Switzerland I recommend runDVDrun.
Tags: Movies
My old d20 favorite M20 got published – in German, no less! [1]
Tags: RPG publishing
Hmm, a big decision on April Fools’ Day? is it really wise?
– PierreGaston 2008-04-01 09:58 UTC
C’mon, I mean, gaming is only taking, like, 75% of your time. You should stop sleeping so much. Mountain Dew is good for that
– Adrian 2008-04-01 16:06 UTC
Hah, I see that nobody fell for it!
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-01 23:10 UTC
It is suspicious when, on the 31st, you are tallying XP, and then on April Fool’s Day, you are dropping all gaming until 2009. Tallying XP is not the the work of an RPG-tortured soul – or is it…
– Adrian 2008-04-02 06:57 UTC
Still, it was a good one. Your involvement in your activities is so huge (I mean some people put their .emacs online, others start emacswiki.org) that an overdose sounds very natural. I just hope claudia was not too disappointed
– PierreGaston
Hehe, she didn’t know… And to be honest, EmacsWiki hardly produces any work these days.
– AlexSchroeder 2008-04-02 13:29 UTC
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