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Recently Joshua Petronis-Akins asked in the Pendragon RPG Google+ community: Could anyone sell me on Pendragon? What makes it cool?

Coming from a D&D background, this is what made us want to play Pendragon RPG and The Great Pendragon Campaign:

• a multi-generation campaign—play your knights, their sons, and their grandsons
• the annual cycle—every session is about the adventures during the summer and the “levelling up” in winter
• personality traits—knights have multiple traits that come in opposing pairs such as just vs. arbitrary and usually whenever you increase one, the other decreases; these traits sometimes get used to determine what the character does in spite of what the player might wish

I really like the combat system: your skill is a number; roll below this number to succeed, roll the exact number to succeed critically. In a round, there is no need to roll for initiative. It’s all opposed checks. If you want to fight multiple opponents, you must split your skill between all your opponents and roll for each one. This is devastating. If you hit, roll damage. The opponent checks whether this value is higher than their knockback stat. If so, succeed at a horsemanship test or fall off the horse. Armor reduces damage. You can further reduce damage using a shield, but only if you had a “partial success”—only if you succeeded in your check but lost against an opponent who succeeded with a higher roll.

Critical hits count as 20. If your skill rises above 20, just add that much to your roll. If your skill is 23, you roll 1d20+3. Thus, your crit range in effect is 17–20.

It’s interesting, it’s different, and it still works.

Our campaign is still in the Anarchy period.

There’s a German campaign wiki, if you want to take a look: Ritter von Salisbury.

Things we’re not that much into:

• the resources game—gaining manors, building fortifications, hiring men, the minutiae of earning your taxes, paying for upkeep
• the family events—we switched from the table in the rulebook to Telecanter’s Dramarama (with a few changes once we discovered that too many of our relatives kept eloping with butchers and tax men)

I bought the books in 2011 from RPG Now, and they’re still doing fine:

The party had just finished The Eternal Boundary and had found a treasure map that would lead them into The Gray Waste. I prepared a very linear adventure that you can see on the on the right. I decided that the map represented an incomplete list of dangers to be overcome:

• near the roots of Yggrasil sleeps the dragon Níðhöggr…
• in the woods the “children” of Hekate roam freely, the trolls of Niflheim (I’m claiming that Hel and Hekate are the same)
• there are big, flightless birds in the swamps with big hands instead of wings and they are called Diakka…
• there is a plain where nightmares ride, the mighty horses of black riders…
• the larval petitioners live in the sea of fog…
• the island of the black trees is the realm of a ghoul-witch

I also had a number of NPCs in mind:

• Njal, a priest and a drinker and a melancholy man who would act as a guide, if they wanted to pursue their connections with priestess Anja of the Freya temple
• Raud, another priest and a gloomy, apathetic victim of Hades, who can provide them with information about Hades and who’ll offer to lead them to Hopelessness and through its gate to Hades (but this is a false lead since this gate will lead to the upper layer called Oinos where the Blood War rages)
• Lissandra “gate-seeker” will contact them if they brag about the portal they know; she is described in Uncaged: Faces of Sigil; she can lead them to Alluvias Ruskin (in the same book) who will sell them “the holy axe with the wooden root-grip of wisdom” which will be required to travel to Niflheim via Yggdrasil

This was the first challenge: figure out whom to trust and discover through questions that Raud would lead them to the wrong layer on Hades since Oinos ≠ Niflheim. This was also the opportunity for them to learn about the apathy of Hades. One player expertly decided to spend 100gp on books with jokes, fart machines and other ludicrous things to drive away apathy and despair.

They don’t contact Njal but they do talk to Raud and end up going with Lissandra. They made such a good impression on her, in fact, that she decides to tell them about a merchant called Kherion Mallibrun (described in the section about Death of Innocence in the Planes of Conflic box). In return, he wants them to protect him from Hekate’s trolls.

This was the second challenge: take along a guide and avoid fighting rock pythons and giant squirrels on the branches of Yggdrasil.

The dragon is easy: the third challenge is simply to be quiet. The cleric is prepared and casts silence. No problem.

The woods and trolls present the fourth challenge: unbeknownst to the players, I had decided that the forest houses both wolves and trolls. Even though the party was silenced, the wolves had picked up their scent and the trolls were following the wolves. One player who plays a character that can fly decided to take a listen and fly overhead. He soon discovers the wolves and using the fillings of a little rocket full of itching powder they disable the wolves’ scent ability and the flying character distracts and enrages the trolls until they break off the chase.

In the village, they see that the merchant is selling colorful textiles and the fifth challenge is finding a guide to the island. They discover that there is a hunter of nightmares who will lead them in exchange for the funny articles one of the characters had bought. This part was all improvised but it worked well.

He warns them of the giant, flightless birds. Luckily they are slow. The party buys horses for the three characters in plate armor and can thus outrun the the sixth challenge, the Diakka birds.

I had thought that the nightmares would be the next challenge but at the table I suddenly felt strange using the nightmares as predators. As I had seen one of the players get really excited about the prospect of catching and taming a nightmare, I decided that the seventh challenge would be the temptation of catching a nightmare. The party would have to start a fight. And they didn’t…

The eight challenge had not been listed on the “treasure map”: flying yeth hounds. The party moved away from their baying (it’s effect only works within 100 ft.) and decided to avoid the dogs. It worked.

At the edge of the sea of fog, they left their guide who, when asked, said that all they had to do was ignore the larva. And they did. No talking, no eye contact, no listening. Again, the party used silence to bypass the ninth challenge. It worked.

Finally, they reached the witch, the tenth challenge. I decided to use witches from the Shark Den section of the Caverns of Slime, Vialashta and Kurmatesha, the four lesser witches, the tengu horn, and my own treasure I had rolled up. As you can see, I had prepared a different night hag in my notes (including a 65% magic resistance)… Oh well. There was a lot of talking, bluffing and haggling involved, a short discussion on the merits of both Odin and Hekate, but in the end, the orc witch has charmed the talking character and disappeared into the tent and the fight was on.

The party consisted of a cleric 5, a fighter 4, an elf 2, and some henchmen: two giant apes, a cleric 4, a fighter 2, and a magic-user 1.

The enemies:

• Vialashta, the one-eyed crow priestess of the orcs (HD 9; AC 8; Atk 1 orcish hammer (1d6); MV 9; curse at will, roll d6: 1. slowed, 2. blind, 3. stupid like an ox, 4. weak as a baby, 5. contract the plague, 6. crippling pain; save vs. spells to avoid)
• her four witches (HD 5; AC 8; Atk 1 cudgel (1d6); MV 9; curse 3×/day as above)
• Kurmatesha, the orc witch (HD 9; AC 9; Atk 1 staff (1d6); MV 9; spells as per her spellbook below); she has the horn of the mountain cedar which summons twelve tengu once per day: crow-headed, flying swordsmen (HD 5; AC 7; Atk 1 two handed glass swords (2d6); MV 9 fly); if attacked she will polymorph into a shadow wolf (HD 9; AC 7; Atk 1 bite (2d6); MV 12; howl of pain (anybody touching the ground within 60 ft. must save vs. petrification or be stunned for a round and save vs. death or suffer 1d6 damage from bleeding ears)
• the hanging tree (HD 15; AC 3; Atk 8 branches and roots (1d6 each); MV 0); the branches of the hanging tree are loaded with twitching corpses: twelve armless ghouls are hanging up there, unable to free themselves (HD 2; AC 9; Atk 1 bite (1d6); MV 12)

Kurmatesha is reduced to less than 10 hit-points in two rounds. She, in turn, blows the horn and summons the tengus, then polymorphs into a shadow wolf. The party then kills her and have a quick chat with the tengu. They want the horn (and their freedom), but one character is close enough to the horn to blow it again, at which point I decide that the tengu are all dispelled.

The second half of the battle is a running battle as the witches are standing under the hanging tree, cursing all that approach. With a desperate rush, a character delivers the arrow that has silence cast on it to the witches. The witches start releasing ghouls but they are being turned as fast as they are being released. Finally, when the crow witch Vialashta is finally held using magic, the remaining lesser witches flee into the sea of fog.

The witch tells them that the hanging tree is guarding the treasure and since they stocked up on oil and hadn’t used any of it, I decided that burning a 15 HD tree required 15 flasks of oil—and having bought 20 flasks of oil without having to use them against the trolls, that was no problem at all…

• 20’000 gold pieces
• 10 gems worth 1980 gold pieces (1000, 10, 50, 10, 10, 500, 100, 100, 50, 100)
• two pieces of jewelry (“the crown and sceptre of the Ulfides”)
• a halfling chain +1 and a small shield +1 (“the magic armor of a halfling hero with the heraldry of the Oxwrestler clan”)
• the horn of the mountain cedar (I already fear that this item might be too powerful!)

Tags: RPG Old School Caverns of Slime

Ever since I stopped listening to music on iTunes, scrobbling is absolutely broken. I listen to music on at least three different Apple devices, sync them with iTunes every now and then, checked “Enable iPod submissions” using playlist “zuletzt gespielt” which is defined as matching both of these rules: “last played in the last 3 months” and “media kind is not podcast” with live updating. I listen to music practically constantly. If you check my profile, you’ll note huge gaps everywhere. Why is that? Are the devices “overwriting” each other? iScrobbler says 586 items queued. Ok… All I’m seeing is two new items.

Update: Apparently I'm an idiot. It just takes a long time (a day?) to process the tracks submitted. Yikes, sorry for the bad press, iScrobbler!

That’s a lot of titles…

You’ll notice that The Beatles have made a big comeback in 2013.

2013

2012

Update: Apparently there's another abandoned scrobbler… ScrobblePod.

Tags: Music

Recently I left a comment on Philip Watson's thread on Google+ where he wondered whether players should know when their thief failed to hide. I said:

I let them roll in the open but will delay the roll until immediate consequences are at hand. Player says their character is hiding, no roll required. Orcs are coming. Now you roll—and if you fail, they spot you.

Consequences happen right after the result of the die roll is known. As a referee, I have have no “information advantage” and thus the question of unfairness doesn’t come up.

I was reminded of Courtney Campbell’s blog post On Skill Deconstruction: Why Roll for Resolution? He lists five reasons for rolling dice.

1. time constraints
2. in conflict with another entity
3. a serious consequence for failure
4. impossible to model at the table
5. (partial results can make the procedure more exciting)

I’m trying to have thieves succeed automatically whenever possible. I’m going to opt for dice rolling when the conditions listed above are true. If the dungeon has wandering monsters, each failed roll to open a door or unlock a chest means one check for wandering monsters. If there are no monsters, we don’t need to know how long the thief takes to unlock the chest. It will succeed eventually.

Tags: RPG

I just posted my nominations for the One Page Dungeon Contest 2013. I also liked the following entries.

• Erik-Karl Read, The Issue of Blipdoolpoolp: a small vertical dungeon, ocean, the tide and watery creatures.
• Heikki Hallamaa, The Diamond of Hishep-Ratep: a short tomb raiding adventure with grey aliens, a lovely combination.
• Josh Burnett, The Burial Mound of Gilliard Wolfclan: a short, simple and cute tomb raid with goblins. I liked the map and the elf leader.
• Jens Thuresson, The Giant's Dollhouse: a giant that petrifies and depetrifies people, go! I like the setup. I just wondered what to do about the rod in the end.
• Joe Pruitt, Echoes of Empire: I don’t think I can simply insert this into my campaign, but perhaps my campaign can use this sort of mini-game one day.
• LSF, A Stolen Spring: a beautiful map, a mage’s expedition gone wrong, a nice encounter to insert into your running adventure.

I saw Roger the GS’ recommendations the other day. What about your favorites?

Tags: RPG 1PDC

I’ve finished reading the submissions to the One Page Dungeon Contest 2013. As always, an interesting mix of styles. Less tombs than in previous years. The ever popular “get into the dungeon and trigger a trap” is there. Bandits, undead, but no pirates! This year’s popular rare monster must have been the gibbernig mouther. It showed up in three submissions.

Gibbering Mouthers:

• Intrepid Eddie, The Parched Throat
• Joshua J. Laboskie, The Lost Temple of Tyrandraxu
• Ramsey Hong, Something Happened At The Temple Near Glourm

I wanted to comment on my nominations for the contest winners. I’ve done this before (2010, 2011, 2012). Writing it all down helps me think it through.

• Daniel O'Donnell, Down Among the Dead Men: beautiful map; lovely visuals such as a well surmounted by the jaws of a giant shark or acolytes on stilts “tending” the undead in the water. It’s gruesome. It stands on its own and can be placed in my campaign.
• Gus L., The Brittlestone Parapets: a lovely amalgam of trench warfare, undead soldiers, Beowulf, D&D as an implied post-apocalyptic setting; and it comes with an inspiring map, an interesting list of random encounters, the witch comes with the list of spells prepared, one faction can be hired for a few weeks. It’s fascinating. It stands on its own and can be placed in my campaign.
• Jobe Bittman, Into The Demon Idol: an iconic image, a beautiful map, the giant grab pincer. Best of all: the option of reanimating it! A potential long-term change for your campaign. It’s tempting. It stands on its own and can be placed in my campaign.
• Misha Favorov, Court of the King of No Men: a map that allows multiple approaches; the most important notes are on the map itself. That’s what I love! The two simple magic items are interesting without being overengineered: a sword dealing wounds that heal within 24h, a hammer that can be thrown once a day, a rod that allows you to control the movement of an opponent (but nothing else). It’s sylvan. It stands on its own and can be placed in my campaign.
• Paul Gorman, Faery Ring to Alpha Ari: not the only adventure using myconids and various fungus effects, but what I liked in particular was the strange mix of fantasy and present day space exploration; the observatory and the tiny island on the one hand and a map that looks appropriate for a Mars colony. I also like how enemies come in all sizes from pixies to giant. I’m not sure it would simply fit into my campaign.
• Ramsey Hong, Something Happened At The Temple Near Glourm: a beautiful map with village and five dungeon levels; multiple stairs and entrances; notes on the map itself. This dungeon is beautiful. It’s terrifying. It stands on its own and can be placed in my campaign.
• Rob S, Citadel of the Severed Hand: another beautiful map with notes on the map itself; it also features myconids and “shroom effects”. The part I like is the tragic figure of the orc boss with his staghelm who hates the torturer demon because she has his son in her power. The entire setup with the two slaves is genious. It’s evil. It stands on its own and can be placed in my campaign.
• Roger SG Sorolla, Devil's Acre: when I first read about it on the author’s blog I thought that it was an interesting take on the complex of sin, vigil, prayer, temptation, saint and devils, and all of that in a D&D context. My campaign hasn’t featured these topics, however, so I’m not sure how well it would work for me.
• S. J. Harris, The Baleful Spring: a small tower always comes in handy. This one has a tower with an evil master and a ship with a neutral captain. I like the framing story: two diplomats trying to secure a peace accord have gone missing. It’s nothing fancy with a functional map. It’s useful. It stands on its own and can be placed in my campaign.
• Simon Forster, Church of Consumption: a beatiful map; another cult trying to raise a demon. Unfortunately it’s very linear. Strangely enough it appears to be open on both ends with major treasure sitting right next to one of the two entrances. But… it’s so beautiful. And I love the imagery of the cultists eating their dead god, the meat grinder, the ghouls dreaming about eating the same dead god, one day… It’s gruesome. It stands on its own and can be placed in my campaign.

The One Page Dungeon Contest is just so damn useful it amazes me every year.

Tags: RPG 1PDC

This topic ties together two topics that probably don’t see too much overlap.

1. I play role-playing games of the D&D old school variety.
2. I use Emacs to help me do simple stuff on a daily basis.

The problem: the party of characters my players run is huge. Even if there are usually only around ten characters that are part of a single session, there are more than thirty primary and secondary characters on the status page. Given the wiki table for the status page, how can I quickly add up the correct XP and gold values? Any XP gained is shared equally amongst the characters that took part in the session but any gold gained is distributed according to each characters share. Primary characters get a full share, secondary characters get a third of a share.

I used Emacs widget mode to create a page like this:

XP total:   805          
Gold total: 7191         
[X] Schalk
[ ] Uluf
[ ] Witschik
[X] Schachtmann
[ ] Sirius
[X] Logard
[X] Arnd
[X] Tinaya
[ ] Pyrula
[ ] Pijo
[ ] Garo
[X] Zeta
[ ] Pipo
[X] Fusstritt
[ ] Thor
[ ] Jack
[ ] Gloria
[ ] Hermann
[ ] Urs
[ ] Alpha
[ ] Beta
[ ] Gamma
[ ] Boden
[ ] Basel
[ ] Bern
[X] Nuschka
[ ] Moranor
[ ] Axirios Hectaxius

[Go!]

And here’s the code to do it:

(defconst fünf-winde-regexp "^\\(|\\[\\[\\(.*?\\)\\]\\][ \t]*|[ \t]*\\(1\\|1/3\\)[ \t]*\\)|\\([ \t]*[0-9]+[ \t]*\\)|\\([ \t]*[0-9]+[ \t]*\\)"
  "Regular expression to parse the Status page.
\(let ((str (match-string 1))
      (name (match-string 2))
      (share (match-string 3))
      (xp (match-string 4))
      (gold (match-string 5)))
    ...\)")

(defvar fünf-winde-buf nil
  "Source buffer.")

(defvar fünf-winde-xp nil
  "XP share.")

(defvar fünf-winde-gold nil
  "Gold share.")

(defvar fünf-winde-party nil
  "Charakters in the party.")

(defun fünf-winde-xp-and-gold ()
  "Hand out Gold and XP."
  (interactive)
  (let ((buf (current-buffer))
	(names))
    (save-excursion
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward fünf-winde-regexp nil t)
	(setq names (cons (match-string 2) names))))
    (switch-to-buffer "*Fünf Winde*")
    (kill-all-local-variables)
    (set (make-local-variable 'fünf-winde-buf) buf)
    (make-local-variable 'fünf-winde-xp)
    (make-local-variable 'fünf-winde-gold)
    (make-local-variable 'fünf-winde-party)
    (let ((inhibit-read-only t))
      (erase-buffer))
    (remove-overlays)
    (setq fünf-winde-xp
	  (widget-create 'integer
			 :size 13
			 :format "XP total:   %v\n"
			 0))
    (setq fünf-winde-gold
	  (widget-create 'integer
			 :size 13
			 :format "Gold total: %v\n"
			 0))
    (setq fünf-winde-party
	  (apply 'widget-create 'checklist
		 (mapcar (lambda (name)
			   `(item ,name))
			 (nreverse names))))
    (widget-insert "\n")
    (widget-create 'push-button
		   :notify (lambda (&rest ignore)
			     (fünf-winde-process
			      fünf-winde-buf
			      (widget-value fünf-winde-xp)
			      (widget-value fünf-winde-gold)
			      (widget-value fünf-winde-party)))
		   "Go!")
    (widget-insert "\n")
    (use-local-map widget-keymap)
    (local-set-key (kbd "q") 'bury-buffer)
    (local-set-key (kbd "SPC") 'widget-button-press)
    (local-set-key (kbd "<left>") 'widget-backward)
    (local-set-key (kbd "<up>") 'widget-backward)
    (local-set-key (kbd "<right>") 'widget-forward)
    (local-set-key (kbd "<down>") 'widget-forward)
    (widget-setup)
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (widget-forward 1)))

(defun fünf-winde-process (buf total-xp total-gold party)
  (message "(fünf-winde-process (get-buffer \"%s\") %d %d '%S)"
	   buf total-xp total-gold party)
  (switch-to-buffer buf)
  (save-excursion
    (let ((xp-shares 0)
	  (xp-share nil)
	  (gold-shares 0)
	  (gold-share nil))
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward fünf-winde-regexp nil t)
	(let ((name (match-string 2))
	      (share (match-string 3)))
	  (when (member name party)
	    (setq gold-shares (+ gold-shares
				 (cond ((string= share "1/2") 0.5)
				       ((string= share "1/3") (/ 1.0 3))
				       (t (string-to-number share))))
		  xp-shares (1+ xp-shares)))))
      (setq gold-share (/ total-gold gold-shares)
	    xp-share (/ total-xp xp-shares))
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward fünf-winde-regexp nil t)
	(let ((str (match-string 1))
	      (name (match-string 2))
	      (share (match-string 3))
	      (xp (match-string 4))
	      (gold (match-string 5)))
	  (when (member name party)
	    (setq gold (format (concat "%9d")
			       (+  (string-to-number gold)
				   (* gold-share (cond ((string= share "1/2") 0.5)
						       ((string= share "1/3") (/ 1.0 3))
						       (t (string-to-number share))))))
		  xp (format (concat "%9d")
			     (+  (string-to-number xp)
				 xp-share)))
	    (replace-match (concat str
				   "|" xp
				   "|" gold))))))))

I’m not sure I’m spending my time wisely, but there you go. I used to have a simpler piece of code that helped me distribute XP and gold separately. The drawback was that it would ask me for every person in the table “was this character in the party? (y/n)” and that’s a lot of yes and no replies if you go through the list twice.

It’s also a stark reminder that simpler old rules doesn’t automatically mean less work for the referee. With D&D 3.5, I had a spreadsheet to compute the XP gained based on challenge rating and character level. It wasn’t something to do quickly without a book in front of me. Now the complexity of the task has been reduced, but the number of characters has exploded to compensate!

Tags: Emacs RPG Old School

Once again, I’m syncing my wife’s iPhone using iTunes and half way through the process it claims that it can’t do it because the computer is out of disk space. With more than 9 GB on the main hard disk and much more on the external hard disk (and a link from ~/Library/Application Support/MobilySync to the external hard disk), this is simply impossible. Strangely enough, synchronization continues anyway.

Luckily I remembered what to do: open preferences, find the backup for my wife’s device and delete it. Done. Now I can sync without any messages interrupting it. Strange.

Tags: iPhone Apple

This is based on How to Convert Unprotected WMA Files Into MP3 Files. I’m leaving the instructions here for my future self.

for file in *.wma; do
  mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 \
    -ao pcm:file="${file%%.[Ww][Mm][Aa]}.wav" "$file"
  lame --preset standard "${file%%.[Ww][Mm][Aa]}.wav" \
    "${file%%.[Ww][Mm][Aa]}.mp3"
done 

Use locate lame|grep 'lame$' and locate mplayer|grep 'mplayer$' to find the location of your executables. On a Mac, they’re probably not on your PATH… I installed MPlayer OSX and iTunes-LAME to get the executables. You’ll need to do something similar.

This is the result I just used for some files with upper case file extension:

for file in *.WMA; do
  "/Applications/MPlayer OSX.app/Contents/Resources/External_Binaries/mplayer_intel.app/Contents/MacOS/mplayer" \
    -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 \
    -ao pcm:file="${file%%.[Ww][Mm][Aa]}.wav" "$file"
  "/Applications/iTunes-LAME.app/Contents/Resources/lame" \
    --preset standard "${file%%.[Ww][Mm][Aa]}.wav" \
    "${file%%.[Ww][Mm][Aa]}.mp3"
done 

Tags: Mac Music Software

Reading Raspberry Pi: WLAN einrichten… I bought the Nano-WLAN-USB-Stick 150 Mbps by hama.

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0424:9512 Standard Microsystems Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0424:ec00 Standard Microsystems Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get install firmware-realtek
Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig
Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut.       
Statusinformationen werden eingelesen.... Fertig
firmware-realtek ist schon die neueste Version.
0 aktualisiert, 0 neu installiert, 0 zu entfernen und 0 nicht aktualisiert.

Apparently I installed it already. iwlist wlan0 scan results in a lot of output. Including the network I’m looking for:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ iwlist wlan0 scan | grep Schroeder
                    ESSID:"Schroeder"

Set your network and password using sudo nano /etc/wpa.conf. This is what you want:

network={
 ssid="YOUR-SSID"
 proto=RSN
 key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
 pairwise=CCMP TKIP
 group=CCMP TKIP
 psk="WPA-PASSWORD"
}

Edit the list of interfaces using sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces and append the following:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa.conf

I was astonished to find some stuff relating to wlan0 in the file already. Anyway, I followed the instructions…

Restart and check:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  Hardware Adresse b8:27:eb:81:a6:af  
          inet Adresse:192.168.2.3  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Maske:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metrik:1
          RX packets:114 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:94 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          Kollisionen:0 Sendewarteschlangenlänge:1000 
          RX bytes:17450 (17.0 KiB)  TX bytes:14232 (13.8 KiB)

lo        Link encap:Lokale Schleife  
          inet Adresse:127.0.0.1  Maske:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metrik:1
          RX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          Kollisionen:0 Sendewarteschlangenlänge:0 
          RX bytes:1104 (1.0 KiB)  TX bytes:1104 (1.0 KiB)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  Hardware Adresse 80:1f:02:8f:91:26  
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metrik:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          Kollisionen:0 Sendewarteschlangenlänge:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

The last entry is shows that we didn’t get an IP number. Oops! It turns out that there is some other stuff in the /etc/network/interfaces file that might interfere. Commenting them out, I have:

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

# allow-hotplug wlan0
# iface wlan0 inet manual
# wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
# iface default inet dhcp

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa.conf

Still doesn’t work, however. I tried a few variants for the config files. Nothing seemed to work. This makes me so tired. I’m not sure I’m learning much. This is “fiddling with GNU/Linux” and frustrating.

Then I read How to install Wifi on a Raspberry Pi which tells you to install wicd-curses.

That seemed to work! Suddenly ifconfig provided me with an IP number for wlan0. I removed the ethernet cable, rebootet, and was unable to connect. Did the IP number change? Is DHCP taking too long? Why is bonjour not working? Patience! It just takes forever to boot. After a minute—long enough to write this paragraph--it suddenly worked:

alex@Pyrobombus ~$ ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
pi@raspberrypi.local's password: 
Linux raspberrypi 3.6.11+ #371 PREEMPT Thu Feb 7 16:31:35 GMT 2013 armv6l

Yay!

Tags: Raspberry Pi

The One Page Dungeon Contest 2013 is now officially closed. No more late submissions. This year I found two submissions in my spam folder. If you can’t find your submission on the contest page, let me know. This year I also got four late submissions, which is about average, I’d say. I asked the other judges and we decided to accept the ones I received. I have to draw the line somewhere, though… So this is it. Closed.

Here’s how to get all the files:

• Download the archive with All One Page Dungeon Contest 2013 Submissions (47 MB)
• Individual files on Wuala
• Individual files on Google Drive

72 Submissions!

Tags: RPG 1PDC

Recently reports have started resurfacing… (I’ve been following Jürgen Hubert on Google+.)

• The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi
• Of Course Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is Not an Enemy Combatant
• Six Claims on Detainee Torture, Skewered
• Despair Drives Guantánamo Detainees to Revolt
• Gitmo Is Killing Me

At one point I left the following comment:

The fall of the US from a spiritual leader of freedom and democracy when I was young – in the seventies and eighties I knew nothing of Vietnam and I grew up with American pop music – to a war mongering nation, to a nation that systematically tortures prisoners, a nation that refuses due process to prisoners, to a nation that imprisons so many of their own population, to a nation that uses cruel and unusual punishment in the form of Three Strikes and its variations – there are no words for this moral catastrophe. No words.

I’m still torn: was my decision do abandon my ranting online and turn into a gamer (HomoLudens) the right thing to do? After all, if we all retreat into our little shells, if we all tend to our little gardens, then nothing ever changes, right?

Tags: USA

I finally installed the new theme for Emacs Wiki. Feel free to leave comments on the Talk page. Bootstrap allows me to make all the changes at run-time, ie. add a few scripts including a script that changes the wiki’s HTML (emacs-bootstrap.js) and a new CSS file (bootstrap.css).

Since no changes to the script are necessary I can continue to provide the old theme for those that don’t feel like switching.

Tags: Emacs

As I was listening to the episode on Empedocles on the History of Philosophy “without any gaps” podcast, my thoughts turned to cosmology and D&D. Basically, there is a big cycle between the rule of Love, where all the elements mingle and everything is a single perfect sphere, and Strife, where all the elements separate, fire over here, water over there, and so on.

Implementing this in fantasy role-playing games we need to change some of the Great Wheel cosmology of Planescape. The inner planes are now the outer planes: The four elements are the chaotic forces pulling us in different directions. All elemental creatures must be very chaotic and enemies of life. At the center, where all elements meet, there is but a humongous sphere of gray goo. I guess all the slimes, puddings and oozes must be creatures of law Love. They bring all the elements together and none better than the gray ooze. Given all that, the world we know must necessarily be between the elements and the spherical goo, ie. on the spherical surface.

What about dungeons? What about the “mythic underworld”? I think we have various options:

1. The concept of Love that pulls the elements together is just as inimical to life as Strife: the civilizations that have gone before us have all been pulled underground, closer and closer to each other, until war and attrition destroyed them all; perhaps a few gaunt dessicated members of the old Atlanteans still live down there in the deepest depths, close to the gray goo, guarding their nuclear weapons and their nanotech weapons.
2. The concept of Love offers some form of transcendence over the material world; it attracts good and evil alike; it tests us, breeds us, selects the finest amongst us, and like zygotes we penetrate the deepest secrets to eventually reverse the great cycle, to break the stalemate.

In either case, monsters are drawn down to the center of things just as we are. The traps can be set by our competitors down there, or by the gray goo defending itself against unworthy plunderers.

I think we need one final idea to make it all work: How to explain the heavens and the moon and the stars if “up above” we expect to see the four elements?

1. Our known world exists where earth and air have started separating; the oceans is where the water is. If you sail far enough, there will be no more land and eventually, no more air. You’ve reached the plane of Water. If you climb the highest mountains, eventually you will realize that you have reached the wall of walls. Air ends and the plane of Earth begins. Up where the sun is, fire reigns. It has already left most of the known world. Whenever we light a fire, the flames leap up, up towards the sky, towards the sun, towards the great fire in the sky that burns far beyond the sky.
2. Alternatively, the known world is just like present day earth. The air protects us from space. Space is in effect the Void separating the four elements under the dominion of Strife and the gray goo under the dominion of Love (and its tiny crust of weirdness that is life).

Food for thought, in any case.

I like how the podcast provides two interesting links:

• Stanford Encyclopedia: Empedocles
• Classic Persuasion: Empedocles

The second link uses “font-family:comic sans ms, verdana, arial, sans-serif”. Comic Sans. You have been warned.

Tags: RPG

I got a Raspberry Pi from my employer. Nice! Installed Raspbian. Used HDMI to connect to the TV. That worked.

Note: I have a 2Gb and a 4Gb card and I want to give PiMAME a try (play arcade games using MAME), so I will need the 4Gb card for PiMAME. At the same time, I want to use Raspbian to play videos. That goes on the 2Gb card.

Connected Apple keyboard and mouse via USB. That caused repeating keys and all that. I read that the problem is a lack of power on the USB port. I could buy a USB hub as suggested.

One cable to rule them all. The cable modem is too far from the TV. Even if I did that, it would take my wireless network down. On my Mac Mini, I enabled sharing of my wireless connection with the ethernet (System Preferences → Sharing → Internet Sharing) and connected the Raspberry Pi to my Mac using an ordinary ethernet cable I had lying around. I was able to connect using ssh pi@192.168.2.3. You might have to guess the last digit?

Via ssh, I run sudo raspi-config and set it up: expand_rootfs, configure_keyboard, change_locale (choose de_CH.UTF8, pick en_GB.UTF8 as the default), set_timezone (Europe / Zurich), memory_split (64)… Maybe the memory split is already the default? I might have to switch on overclocking in the future in order to play games.

Following suggestions online, I wanted to get my Apple bluetooth keyboard working. First, I updated and upgraded my packages before doing anything: sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade and sudo apt-get autoremove.

Note: Do all this while connected to the Raspberry Pi via ssh. You keyboard needs to be paired and all that before it will work stand-alone.

Next, bluetooth: sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez-utils blueman. This installs a lot of stuff I probably won’t need. Oh well, I spent some time trying to sort through it and figured it wasn’t worth it. If you’re installing on a 2Gi card, you’re going to be running out of space real soon now:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ df 
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs           1838936 1751248         0 100% /

Try sudo apt-get clean to make some space:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ df 
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs           1838936 1567016    178880  90% /

In the end, this is how it should work:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0424:9512 Standard Microsystems Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0424:ec00 Standard Microsystems Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0a5c:200a Broadcom Corp. BCM2035 Bluetooth dongle

I guess the Bluetooth dongle has been recognized!

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
	E8:06:88:38:C6:2F	Apple Wireless Keyboard
	00:02:72:D4:E9:EA	DOC-PC

This was a bit more complicated:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo bluez-simple-agent hci0 E8:06:88:38:C6:2F
RequestPinCode (/org/bluez/5802/hci0/dev_E8_06_88_38_C6_2F)
Enter PIN Code: 0000
Release
New device (/org/bluez/5802/hci0/dev_E8_06_88_38_C6_2F)

Type 0000 RET on the Mac. Type 0000 RET on the keyboard. Not sure whether the “sudo” was required or not.

On we go:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo bluez-test-device trusted E8:06:88:38:C6:2F yes

Make sure the keyboard is “on” when you run the next step:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo bluez-test-input connect E8:06:88:38:C6:2F

Ok, time to give it a try… Remember that you’re probably using a British keyboard layout. The y key might be where your z is. This is important because the default password is raspberry ← note the y. Switch your keyboard layout: sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration has no effect? Try sudo vi /etc/defaults/keyboard:

XKBMODEL="apple"
XKBLAYOUT="ch"
XBKVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS="lv3:ralt_switch"
BACKSPACE="guess"

Unfortunately the option key still doesn’t work for simple things like []|{}. Sucks to be me!

For my Sony Bravia, I had to use the following in sudo vi /boot/config.txt:

disable_overscan=1
overscan_left=53
overscan_right=50
overscan_top=28
overscan_bottom=22

Don’t ask me why overscan is both disabled and its various parameters are set.

Copied various videos on to a USB Stick. Create a mountpoint using sudo mkdir /mnt/BIG_STICK and mount the drive using sudo mount -o uid=pi,gid=pi /dev/sda1 /mnt/BIG_STICK.

Play it using omxplayer /mnt/BIG_STICK/some_file.mp4 → it worked!

In order to avoid typing this every time, use ls -laF /dev/disk/by-uuid and note the uuid of the mounted stick. Then sudo vi /etc/fstab and start typing:

UUID=8805-CE39 /media/Cruzer8Gb vfat auto,users,rw,flush,utf8=1,uid=pi,gid=pi,dmask=002,fmask=113 0 0

But there was no sound! Well, there’s sound on the headphones out of the Raspberry Pi but no sound on the TV. I tried both HDMI inputs. I uncommented hdmi_drive=2 in the /boot/config.txt file. To no avail. When I tried aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav, however, it worked. Something about the .avi file, or about omxplayer isn’t working. Checking omxplayer --help I found the solution: omxplayer -o hdmi /media/Cruzer8Gb/some_file.mp4 → it worked!

A day later…

I wanted to sudo apt-get install libnss-mdns and install bonjour so that I can connect to it via raspberry.local instead of 192.168.2.3: sudo apt-get install libnss-mdns—but apparently it’s already installed!

alex@Pyrobombus ~$ ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
The authenticity of host 'raspberrypi.local (192.168.2.3)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 4e:e2:82:e5:e9:e5:5f:a9:b6:ac:53:f0:e2:3b:ac:c1.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'raspberrypi.local' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
pi@raspberrypi.local's password: 
Linux raspberrypi 3.6.11+ #371 PREEMPT Thu Feb 7 16:31:35 GMT 2013 armv6l

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Last login: Mon Apr 22 10:56:12 2013 from pyrobombus.local
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ 

Yay!

If you’re not using a Mac, you’ll need to install bonjour on your host system as well, I think.

Next I wanted to play a game using my Xbox USB controller (not necessarily the wireless variant). sudo apt-get install xboxdrv. Simply running sudo xboxdrv gave me gave me a lot of output. The driver must be working. The driver has a man page.

Tags: Raspberry Pi

Hellebarden & Helme ist mein Hausregelndokument für meine Labyrinth Lord Runde und dient als Spielerhandbuch bis zur 5. Stufe. Die aktuelle Version hat – auf Wunsch von Claudia – nun auch wieder Diebe drinnen und sie hat auch einen einseitigen, dreispaltigen Index. Keine Ahnung, ob das wirklich nötig war für ca. 20 Regeln.

• Hellebarden-und-Helme.pdf

Tags: RSP Old School

With Tenkar’s Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day came a plethora of blogs I had never heard of. I’ve been adding new blogs furiously to the Old School RPG Planet. (A planet is a feed aggregator—it shows an extract of all the various blogs I added, like a public blog roll. This particular planet is controlled by a wiki page, so anybody can submit new blogs.)

If you’re looking for new blogs to add, take a look. Perhaps you’ll find a new blog you like? I know that some people from the “early days” said that they felt the Old School Renaissance was shrinking. My thinking at the time was that this is now what’s happening. What is happening is that some people drop out, stop blogging. If you don’t add the newcomers, those who start blogging, your impression will necessarily be that the OSR is shrinking. Not so! Look at the number of blogs that participated.

If you already follow the Old School RPG Planet, please let me know if I added some blogs by mistake. I think I checked each and every new feed I added. If a feed seemed mostly about video games, or anime, or miniatures, I didn’t add it. Most of the blogs that were listed on the Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day post seemed to be very appropriate! Still, one never knows.

Let me know if you spot anything else that’s fishy.

And I'm only half way through! Phew!

Tags: RPG Old School

In 2006, Greywulf was a user of Oddmuse, a piece of software I was maintaining. It’s still used to run this blog/wiki. Greywulf kept talking about D&D and eventually I started reading EN World. There, I discovered Greywulf had a huge thread going. He proposed a minimal variant to D&D 3.5 and called it M20 (original files). I loved it and ended up starting a campaign using it. (It later converted to D&D 3.5.)

In 2008, I came across M74 and discovered the “old school renaissance”. I learned about OD&D and its use of a d6 for hit-dice and weapon damage. I was intrigued and wrote M20 Hard Core. I also wrote a little random character creator for my rules variant.

Some blog posts from back then:

• 2008-04-20 Palace of the Silver Princess – I played an old adventure using Labyrinth Lord
• 2008-08-06 Retro Clones – first mention of Swords & Wizardry by quoting Philotomy Jurament
• 2008-08-07 Hard Core M20 – first mention of M20 Hard Core
• 2008-08-07 Fight On – got my first issues of Fight On! magazine
• 2008-10-14 Cannot Please Them All – ran a play test session using M20 Hard Core and realized that my players prefer D&D 3.5
• 2008-10-25 Lulu Wishlist – I added Swords & Wizardry to the list because “I’d like to see a streamlined version of the little brown books” (OD&D)
• 2008-12-16 Lulu Wishilisti – I added Swords & Wizardry: White Box to the list, “although I’m pretty sure nobody will ever want to play it with me.”
• 2009-05-27 Fight On Issue 5 – got the 0e Swords & Wizardry Monster Book (Word file)
• 2009-07-24 Ennies – voted for Swords & Wizardry in the Ennies
• 2009-08-31 Lulu – Again – got Ruins & Ronin

(You can get the source files from the Swords & Wizardry download page.)

I was very impressed by Ruins & Ronin. If you check out the Sword+1 blog, you’ll find lots of R&R character classes for download in the sidebar. It really was an eye opener for me. Anything can be turned into a class! This is Do It Yourself D&D!

These days, I still play Labyrinth Lord. It was my first retro-clone. It didn’t have weird elves. I ended up liking race-as-class. As you can see from the list above, however, OD&D and Swords & Wizardry have been an important part of the journey. And I absolutely loved the Peter Mullen covers!

Today is Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day Blogfest! Follow the link and find a list of more than 100 other blogs writing about S&W.

Tags: RPG Old School

I like the Garamond font. This website uses it. Here’s how:

@font-face {
      font-family: 'Garamond';
      font-style: normal;
      font-weight: 400;
      src: local('Garamond'), local('GaramondNo8'), local('EB Garamond'), local('EBGaramond'), url(https://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/ebgaramond/v4/kYZt1bJ8UsGAPRGnkXPeFdIh4imgI8P11RFo6YPCPC0.woff) format('woff');
}

body, rss {
    font-family: Garamond, serif;
    font-size: 16pt;
    line-height: 20pt;
    margin:1em 3em;
    padding:0;
}

As you can see, if you have a font called Garamond, Garamond No. 8 or EB Garamond installed, then the web page will use it. Garamond No. 8 is what I use on my GNU/Linux system. If you don’t have any of them, it will download the EB Garamond files from Google Web Fonts.

I hope it works. Thoughts?

Tags: Web

On the mailing list for the One Page Dungeon Contest 2013, one of the judges asked me to go through the process again. I’ve used my reply to write this blog post.

The first thing to remember is that people can revise their submission until the very end. That’s why I personally don’t read them until the end of April.

The output of the process is a list of nominations from each of the judges. They can nominate as many or as few as they like. In the past, judges have nominated somewhere between 10 and 20 entries. Every judge determines their own criteria. There is no agreed upon checklist.

My own list of criteria will look very similar to what I wrote on 2010-02-05 Quality Dungeons. I find that having the checklist helps me score the dungeons.

I will compile all the nominations into a big spreadsheet and produce a list of winners. I’ll try to have at least three nominations from every judge on the list (ie. we are six judges and thus I expect there to be around 18 winners). I’ll also try to invent a category for each of the winners. It would be very cool if your list of nominations contained a suggested category. That is optional, however.

Last year, I wrote about the entries I nominated and the made-up categories I nominated them for, if you’d like to see an example of how I personally went about this.

Sometimes judges will then comment on the final list and propose to add a particular entry because of some very specific qualities they want to highlight and thus we might end up more winners.

Once we have announced the winners, they are invited to send me three picks from the prize list. Again, the data goes into a spreadsheet and I try to figure out a way to give every winner at least one thing that they are wishing for. Against all intuition, this seems to have worked so far! When in doubt, I’ll go back to the big spreadsheet with all the nominations on it and give precedence to those winners that received the most nominations.

This last element of the process is not entirely transparent. I wrote a blog post trying to defend the lack of transparency two years ago. I hope that it’s not a big problem.

Tags: RPG 1PDC

Ich hatte schon mal von Hellebarden und Helme geschrieben. Das Dokument ist nun vollständig. Alle Zaubersprüche bis und mit der dritten Stufe sind drinnen. Ich wollte natürlich “Zirkel” sagen, um die leidige Diskussion um Charakterstufe und Spruchstufe zu vermeiden. Aber egal. Ich habe noch eine Weile mit Claudia diskutiert, ob es sich lohnt, die weibliche Form für die Regeln zu verwenden. Sie war dagegen und meinte, das würde ihr ja nicht helfen, gleich viel zu verdienen wie ein Mann. War wohl nichts mit den tief hängenden Früchten. Für mein eigenes Wohlbefinden habe ich mich entschieden, über weite Teile “du” zu verwenden. Das tönt dann ähnlich informell wie dieser Blog. Was hältst du davon?

• aktuelle Version (PDF)

Mit über zwanzig Seiten ist das Dokument doch überraschend lang geworden. Schade, eigentlich!

Auf Seite 19 hat es unten viel leeren Platz. Ich weiss nicht so recht, was ich da machen soll. Ich hätte gerne ein paar gute, freie Bilder von Hellebarden! Leider gibt es im Handbuch der Waffenkunde: Das Waffenwesen in seiner historischen Entwicklung vom Beginn des Mittelalters bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts von Wendelin Boeheim (1890) nicht so viele gute Hellebardenbilder wie Helme. Kennst du eine Quelle von guten Hellebardenbildern?

Ansonsten bleiben mir noch die selber gemalten Bilder, welche am Rande etwas mit Zauberei zu tun haben… Vom Stil her passen sie leider überhaupt nicht zu den Helmen.

Meine Aufgabe für die nächsten Tage: Korrekturlesen und Leerräume in der Randspalte finden, wo ich noch den einen oder anderen Helm aus dem Handbuch der Waffenkunde unterbringen kann.

Oder Illustrationen aus den alten Fechtbüchern?

Tags: RSP Old School

Recently I got a submission for the One Page Dungeon Contest 2013. It was made using the Dungeon Tiles Set by ProBono on RpgMapShare. The tiles use textures from CGTextures.com.

I stopped when I saw a passage saying “One or more textures in this pack have been created with images from CGTextures.com. These images may not be redistributed by default, please visit www.cgtextures.com for more information.”

Then I found the following passage in their FAQ:

May I use these textures in my Open Source (Creative Commons, GPL, etc) project?

No. These textures may not be used in Open-Source projects. The licenses are not compatible. Almost all Open-Source licenses allow redistribution of the materials, and redistribution is not allowed for these textures.

Unfortunately, the One Page Dungeon Contest uses a Creative Commons license.

Tags: RPG 1PDC

Tags: DRM Copyright

Yes, the Spring Equinox has come and gone and now it’s time the run the 1PDC again! 3">3">

One Page Dungeon Contest 2013!

Dates: Submission deadline is April 30, 0:00 GMT (Tuesday evening). If you live West of Greenwich, you will have to send in your submission a few hours before the end of the month! Winners will be announced June 1.

Help spread the word!

Prizes & Sponsors: Do you have prizes to donate? Let me know → kensanata@gmail.com!

Submissions: Here’s how to submit your entry.

• Create a One Page Dungeon.
• Submitting a dungeon to the contest releases it under the Creative Common Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license with credit to the contest participant.
• The submission must have a name, an author, and a link to the license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
• The judges and readers play a variety of systems. Don’t waste valuable space with a lot of system-specific stats.
• A link to extra material on your blog such as wandering monsters, random events, adventure background, introduction, descriptions of tricks or traps are welcome for readers but will not be considered part of your submission.
• One entry per participant. Participants may revise/replace their entries up until the end of contest, with the last revision counting as their official entry.
• If your font size is too small to read, you will most probably not win.
• Many people will print your submission as a black and white document. Adding colors is no problem as long as the black and white printed copy is still good enough.
• Help us keep file size in check. A single page should not take more than an image with 3000x2000 pixels (1-2MB is cool, 5MB still works, 10MB is too much).
• Submission must be mailed in PDF format to Alex Schroeder → kensanata@gmail.com. Usually we can help you convert your Open Office and Microsoft Word documents to PDF.
• If you have a blog article talking about your submission, send us the link. We’d love to link to it from the One Page Dungeon Contest page.

Process: Here’s how we’ll determine the winners.

• Every judge nominates their favorite entries and proposes a category for each.
• We try to make sure that every judge has at least three of their nominations in the final list. The idea is to not only reflect popular opinion but to also capture some of the more eclectic entries out there. We’ll make sure that every judge is well represented with three entries each.
• Based on the categories proposed in the first step, we try to assign a category to each entry on the list.
• Judges gets to check whether their favorites are still on the list.
• We fix omissions and rename categories until we’re happy.
• We publish our list of winners!
• We will ask each winner for three items they’d prefer to win and any items they prefer not to win. Then we try to do a best match, giving precedence to those winners that got more nominations in the first step.
• All the entries and a special PDF with all the winners will be available for download at no cost.

Tags: RPG 1PDC

Doodling during a meeting…

Tags: RPG Drawing

Bin immer noch am Schrauben an meinen Hausregeln. Ich wollte ein einfaches Dokument für neue Spieler, die bei meiner Kampagne anfangen wollen. Deswegen wollte ich eine kurze Labyrinth Lord Variante für die ersten fünf Stufen. Angefangen hatte alles auf dem Campaign:Hellebarden und Helme Wiki. Als ich aber den ersten Spieler gesehen habe, der sich alles ausgedruckt hatte, war mir das nicht recht. Das sah ja furchtbar aus! Weil ich zudem vor wenigen Monaten meine FATE Variante Der Geist Mesopotamiens mit LaTeX gesetzt hatte, wollte ich das gleiche für Hellebarden und Helme.

Da ich schon einen Charaktergenerator für Hellebarden und Helme habe, entschied ich, das Regelwerk mit LaTeX zu setzen und das gleiche github Projekt zu verwenden.

Aktuelle Version (PDF)…

Tags: RSP Old School

Google Reader is being axed. I used it every day.

Evan Prodromou says on Google+

Why, it’s almost as if it would be in your best interest to run network services under your own control instead of using quote-unquote free ones run by someone whose priorities are not aligned with yours.

I might consider it. Years ago, I used rss2email by Aaron Swartz. The irony is that I’ll be reading my blog posts—in Gmail!

There are other alternatives. Here’s a crowdsourced list. I see that The Old Reader, for example. “It’s just like the old Google reader, only better.” Here’s a warning sign, however: “We’re in beta right now […]” Will it cost money eventually? How much? I’m not opposed to paying a little money. After all, I want the service to have a future.

Me on Twitter

I read a rant once saying: “Please, services on the Internet, take my money! I want you to have a decent business plan!”

So, run a network service under my own control, or pay somebody else…

As for running something under my own control, I must confess that I’m still averse to running PHP and MySQL on a server of mine. Somehow I keep thinking of the combination as insecure. I downloaded Tiny Tiny RSS and looked at it (also on GitHub).

There is also something about RSS that makes me cringe: If every blog reader installs a feed aggregator that checks its feeds every ten minutes, this won’t scale. A few central aggregators that poll feeds and serve their user interface when requested by users seems like a better solution from a technical point of view.

On my portable devices I’m using the Reeder app. Like many others, it depends on Google Reader. We’ll see what its creator will switch to.

Tags: Web

Auf Google+ hat Stefan Ohrmann vor kurzem eine Diskussion über den zunehmenden Umfang der Regelbücher angerissen. Passt irgendwie auch zum Thema Aufbau von Regelwerken.

Ich selber meinte hierzu, dass ich schon verschiedentlich bei Freunden Bücher und PDF Dateien angeboten bekommen habe, die so dick waren, dass ich schon von Anfang an weiss, dass ich diese Werke nie lesen werde.

Ich vermute folgende Ursachen für den steigenden Umfang der Bücher:

• Selbstpublikation haben oft ein Lektorat, welches nicht auf Kürze besteht.
• In den meisten Rezensionen wird beanstandet, wenn ein kurzes Produkt trotzdem viel kostet. Die Kürze wird nicht als Produkt einer Leistung geschätzt. Leider muss ich zugeben, dass ich auf einer emotionalen Ebene davon sicherlich auch betroffen bin. Es “fühlt” sich einfach nicht an, wie wenn es den Preis wert wäre.
• Auftragsautoren werden nach Worten bezahlt. So besteht kein Interesse daran, sich kürzer zu fassen. Ich vermute, dieser Effekt ist nicht besonders stark, denn oft wird so ein Auftrag die gewünschte Anzahl Worte nennen. Aber wer weiss, vielleicht entsteht entlang einer Wertschöpfungskette, welche mit der Länge der Texte Geld verdient, bei jedem kleinen Schritt ein kleiner Druck hin zu längeren Texten.

Was mich übrigens überhaupt nicht stört:

• Mehr Bildmaterial.
• Mehr typografischer Weissraum.
• Grössere Schrift.

Es geht mir wirklich mehr um den Leseaufwand, den ich nicht mehr zu leisten gewillt bin. Wenn ich viel lesen will, lese ich lieber ein Buch. Regelbuch, Hintergrundmaterial, Abenteuer – das mag für viele so gut wie Unterhaltungsliteratur sein. Nicht für mich.

Ausgezeichnete Diskussion auf dem Forum.

Tags: RSP

From time to time I want to write about player characters that I remember well. Recently DM Harald ran a few sessions using Moldvay’s Basic D&D and the Karameikos setting that came with it. We all rolled up characters and Jörg rolled up an elf with Charisma 3. He likes to play elves and that in itself is a recurring joke in our group. This time, however, it was payback time! This was an asshole. Arrogant. Disinterested. Unwilling to fight. Unwilling to come along. Jörg managed to stay on the thin red line separating character aggravation from player aggravation.

When we decided to go vampire hunting in Krakatos, the elf joined us against his own recommendation. We were, after all, just first level characters. After the first session, the elf had been charmed by the vampire and had joined his master as living blood snack.

The next session we managed to free him. Two or three sessions later, however, we were exploring Koriszegi Keep and had good reason to believe another vampire was present. Again, the arrogant elf tried to dissuade us. Again, we ignored him. As we were fighting ghouls climbing out of a hole in the ground, the battle turned against us. My cleric had been paralysed in the first round because he had once again used his cursed holy symbol instead of his real holy symbol. The arrogant elf received a mortal wound. (We’re using the Death and Dismemberment table.) He decides to grapple the ghould standing over my cleric’s body and fling himself and the ghoul down into the hole! Thank you, asshole.

We win the fight, descend into the hole, can’t find the elf’s body, continue into the next room, and see the body lying there, vampire mist covering the floor of the foul cave. Another character, a small lady thief, gets to work and saws off the elf’s head in order to prevent him from rising as a vampire minion at midnight. My cleric, no longer paralysed, is contacted by the vampire. L E A V E . H I M . T O . M E ! the disembodied voice says. I say to the small woman, “leave him be!” But she insists on cutting off the head. And she does. But now the vampire materializes, drains her into oblivion. We scream. The vampire crushes my gnome henchman’s skull. We cry. The vampire turns around. We run.

And all of that because of an elf that we didn’t like.

Tags: RPG Character

SVG Mapper now knows how to draw lines. These lines try to flow from hex to hex…

Example input:

2114 hill
2115 hill
2213 forest
2214 forest "Delan"
2215 hill
2314 forest
2315 forest
2414 hill "Forest Bight Fortress"
2415 forest
2515 forest "Boghra Little"

2214-2615 river
river path attributes fill-opacity="0" stroke="black" stroke-width="5"

include http://alexschroeder.ch/contrib/default.txt

Result:

I think that I’m not quite understanding how the viewBox is supposed to work. But anyway: these lines can be used for roads, rivers, borders, cliffs, and the like. If they’re very straight, they don’t look too good. There’s no random waviness. One feature I definitely have to add is providing more intermediary points such that the user can guide rivers around the hills or to allow rivers to merge.

Tags: SVG Maps Text Mapper

I’m a big fan of the Forgotten Depths. I wanted to use its map as the goal for my Text Mapper. As the mapper now allows the inclusion of other files, I’ve saved my library of colors and icons as default.txt and I’ve saved the map as forgotten-depths.txt. That’s why all you need to do now is include the map:

If you see white hexes, then I haven’t added any definitions for them, yet.

Tags: SVG Software Maps Text Mapper

I need help with SVG filters. This question is also on StackOverflow.

This is what I want to achieve:

Previously, I’d duplicate the text element, make the background white, and blur it:

  <defs>
    <filter id="label-glow">
      <feGaussianBlur stdDeviation="1" />
    </filter>
  </defs>
  <text stroke="white" stroke-width="5" filter="url(#label-glow)">Harald's Repose</text>
  <text>Harald's Repose</text>

I’m trying not to duplicate the text element. Here’s how to do it using filters:

  <defs>
    <filter id="label-glow">
      <feFlood flood-color="white"/>
      <feComposite in2="SourceGraphic" operator="in"/>
      <feGaussianBlur stdDeviation="2"/>
      <feComposite operator="over"/>
      <feComposite operator="over"/>
      <feComposite operator="over"/>
      <feComposite operator="over"/>
      <feComposite in="SourceGraphic"/>
    </filter>
  </defs>
  <text filter="url(#label-glow)">Harald's Repose</text>

Unfortunately the output of the Gaussian blur is very weak which is why I need to overlay it multiple times. What am I missing?

Update: As I’ve been experimenting with it, I’ve decided to drop filters altogether. When using Firefox and printing the map to PDF, the filters all result in bitmap elements that don’t scale well.

Tags: SVG Software

How to create new shapes for Text Mapper?

First, start with an empty SVG file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
     height="200px"
     width="200px">
</svg>

I like to draw stuff using the calligraphy tool (c). I usually simplify the nodes a lot (Ctrl+L), unify the shapes (Ctrl++), edit the nodes by hand (n) until you’re happy with the fewest number of nodes you can manage.

Now move the entire shape such that it is centered on the top left corner. This is (0,0) as far as SVG is concerned. Save it.

Look at the SVG file and notice something like this:

    <path
       style="fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none"
       d="m 7.647323,-20.341905 c -5.784973,-11.791839
       -36.204242,-5.139394 -43.951039,7.112364 8.922877,-5.977096
       34.793258,-11.641806 37.046343,-5.498373 -17.505656,0.485788
       -29.019956,5.940662 -33.027811,23.8472764 C
       -21.859546,-12.603312 -7.5022983,-14.191144 2.47485,-12.984161
       -8.2112223,6.06712 -19.987316,13.477858 -15.788864,50.225619 c
       3.988368,3.362713 8.6116517,-5.097214 4.510279,-7.531518
       -0.559084,-6.64895 -0.875559,-13.360661 -0.08632,-20.004922 C
       -9.6892813,9.718021 1.072969,-6.510207 8.835372,-12.256094
       26.823805,-7.758432 35.550312,0.1756144 34.450001,15.351883
       44.387089,3.7916614 29.882349,-11.701263 14.406587,-15.219388
       28.287217,-15.939127 40.549839,-6.589098 45.412784,1.4541824
       47.026796,-8.361333 28.866764,-19.205208 16.79733,-20.277164 c
       10.765708,-6.95198 25.316253,-3.074379 29.792108,3.226712
       -4.893545,-14.115874 -36.158133,-10.60357 -38.942114,-3.291453
       z"
       id="path3007"
       inkscape:connector-curvature="0"
       sodipodi:nodetypes="ccccccccccccccc" />

You can already extract this path and use it! Usually it takes several attempts to get the placement right. Once I’m happy, I turn all these floating point numbers into integers in order to save space. Personally, I use Emacs to do it (EmacsWiki:RoundFloatingPoints).

This is what I want:

m 8,-20 c -6,-12 -36,-5 -44,7 9,-6 35,-12 37,-5 -18,0 -29,6 -33,24 C -22,-13
-8,-14 2,-13 -8,6 -20,13 -16,50 c 4,3 9,-5 5,-8 -1,-7 -1,-13 0,-20 C -10,10 1,-7
9,-12 27,-8 36,0 34,15 44,4 30,-12 14,-15 28,-16 41,-7 45,1 47,-8 29,-19 17,-20
c 11,-7 25,-3 30,3 -5,-14 -36,-11 -39,-3 z

Example input:

0202 jungle
jungle attributes fill="white" stroke="#b3b3ff" stroke-width="3"
jungle path m 8,-20 c -6,-12 -36,-5 -44,7 9,-6 35,-12 37,-5 -18,0 -29,6 -33,24 C -22,-13 -8,-14 2,-13 -8,6 -20,13 -16,50 c 4,3 9,-5 5,-8 -1,-7 -1,-13 0,-20 C -10,10 1,-7 9,-12 27,-8 36,0 34,15 44,4 30,-12 14,-15 28,-16 41,-7 45,1 47,-8 29,-19 17,-20 c 11,-7 25,-3 30,3 -5,-14 -36,-11 -39,-3 z

Output:

Example input:

0101 jungle
jungle attributes fill="#9acd32" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"
jungle path attributes fill="#228b22"
jungle path m 8,-20 c -6,-12 -36,-5 -44,7 9,-6 35,-12 37,-5 -18,0 -29,6 -33,24 C -22,-13 -8,-14 2,-13 -8,6 -20,13 -16,50 c 4,3 9,-5 5,-8 -1,-7 -1,-13 0,-20 C -10,10 1,-7 9,-12 27,-8 36,0 34,15 44,4 30,-12 14,-15 28,-16 41,-7 45,1 47,-8 29,-19 17,-20 c 11,-7 25,-3 30,3 -5,-14 -36,-11 -39,-3 z
text font-size="20pt" dy="15px"

Output:

Tags: RPG Maps SVG Text Mapper

Recently I wanted to create a little hex map and I wanted to do it on an iPad, I wanted to eventually integrate it into my campaign wiki, I wanted it to be SVG based, and so on. All that meant, Hexographer wasn’t the appropriate tool. I needed to cook something up myself. Based on code I wrote nearly five years ago—the Old School Hex Mapper—I wrote up a little something.

I’m calling it the Text Mapper because it takes text input. No interactive fiddling with the map.

There are various sections of the input.

Map

This is simple. Coordinates, terrain.

# map definition
0101 mountain
0102 mountain
0103 hill
0104 forest
0201 mountain
0202 hill
0203 coast
0204 empty
0301 mountain
0302 mountain
0303 plain
0304 sea
0401 hill
0402 sand
0403 forest

The rest of the input determines how things look: what colors to use, what icons to display. When you start the Text Mapper, the input area already contains an example. Start with that before doing anything else.

Terrain attributes

Now it gets tricky. For every terrain we used, the script will generate a hex. We need to provide some SVG attributes! Need documentation? Check out the polygon in the SVG specification and click on show next to presentation attributes. That’s what you should be looking at.

# attributes
empty attributes fill="#ffffff" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"
plain attributes fill="#7cfc00" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"
forest attributes fill="#228b22" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"
hill attributes fill="#daa520" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"
mountain attributes fill="#708090" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"
sand attributes fill="#eedd82" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"
coast attributes fill="#7fffd4" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"
sea attributes fill="#4169e1" stroke="black" stroke-width="3"

Icons

In order to add little icons, you can specify a path per terrain.

If you don’t want this path to be black, you need to specify attributes for the path element.

plain path attributes fill="#76ee00"
hill path attributes fill="#b8860b"

And finally, the coordinates are simple text elements.

text font-size="20pt" dy="15px"

If you wanted a black and white map, for example, you could use different strokes…

empty attributes fill="white" stroke="#b3b3ff" stroke-width="3"
mountain attributes fill="white" stroke="#b3b3ff" stroke-width="3"
hill attributes fill="white" stroke="#b3b3ff" stroke-width="3"
forest attributes fill="white" stroke="#b3b3ff" stroke-width="3"

If you want to create new path elements yourself in Inkscape, you should draw them in a rectangle from (-100,-100) to (100,100) and extract the the path info from the SVG. Yeah, adding new icons isn’t easy.

I need to add more icons. I’d also like to add multiple icons for the same terrain such that the code will pick one at random.

I wonder how easy it’s be to add text labels, roads, rivers and borders.

The result of the above:

(Also on GitHub.)

Tags: RPG Hex Maps Software Text Mapper

Last year, I worked on an old school random character generator. With my new found interest in B/X D&D and the Moldvay equipment list in particular, I found it necessary to differentiate between Basic D&D prices and Labyrinth Lord prices. The most important price difference is the price of plate armor. No first level character can afford it when using Labyrinth Lord rules: starting gold is 240 at most and plate armor costs 450.

Here’s how to generate those characters (note that Moldvay is the default):

1. a random character
2. 50 compact characters
3. statistics on the characters generated

And here’s the same thing using Labyrinth Lord prices:

1. a random character
2. 50 compact characters
3. statistics on the characters generated

Don’t forget, the source code for the random character generator is available as well (Perl 5).

Tags: RPG Old School Character Generator

Für meine Labyrinth Lord Kampagne will ich eigentlich vermehrt auf die Preisliste des Basic D&D Sets von Moldvay (1981) zugreifen. Diese Liste ist deutlich kürzer als die Standardliste von Labyrinth Lord und beschränkt sich meiner Meinung nach auf die Dinge, welche für normale Abenteuer relevant sind. Wichtigster Unterschied ist sicher, dass die Plattenrüstung deutlich billiger als bei Labyrinth Lord ist. Ich habe für die Waffen auch versucht, einen kleinen Kommentar zu verfassen, der beschreibt, warum man diese oder jene Waffe verwenden sollte, obwohl sie alle 1W6 Schaden machen. Wer hier stutzt: Der variable Waffenschaden ist im B/X D&D und in Labyrinth Lord eine optionale Regel. Was ich hinzugefügt habe: gratis Holzpflöcke und Knoblauch (dieser ist in den Labyrinth Lord Regeln deutlich teurer), Bemerkungen.

• Word
• PDF

Alle Waffen machen 1W6 Schaden.

Alternative Regel für den Verbrauch von Munition: Wird beim Angriff eine 1 gewürfelt, ist die Munition verbraucht.

Bessere Rüstung macht langsam.

Kommentare gerne hier oder im Forum.

Tags: RSP Old School

Für Harald’s Karameikos Kampagne wollte ich mal schnell eine Karte zeichnen. Für die oberirdische Karte habe ich Inkscape verwendet. Das ist etwas komplizierter als nötig aber immer noch besser als Pixel malen. Die resultierende SVG Karte konnte ich dann hochladen und das sah etwa so aus:

Als Schrift habe ich Blackadder ITC verwendet. An vielen Orten online hiess es, diese Schrift sei “free” – aber Microsoft verlinkt auf fonts.com, wo die Schrift $29 kostet. Hm.

Online und mit deutlich weniger Funktionsumfang bietet sich die Verwendung von Google Docs mit der DungeonFu Vorlage an. Auf der Webseite von Jez Gordon findet man noch Verweise auf DungeonFu aber die neue Version will nicht so richtig funktionieren. Meine Empfehlung: Verwendet einfach die DungeonFu 1.0 Vorlage.

Man macht sich eine Kopie der Vorlage, kopiert und rotiert herum bis man zufrieden ist, und wählt dann File → Publish to the web... und klickt sich durch. Am Schluss erhält man eine URL, welche man als Bild anderweitig verwenden kann. Das sieht dann so aus:

Die Höhle ist ganz einfach gemacht: Man malt sich ein rechteckiges Zimmer und wählt dann in der Liste unter dem Linienwerkzeug Polyline aus, malt einen “Rand” rund um das ganze und färbt es schwarz ein.

Mit Strg+G kann man Objekte gruppieren. Das lohnt sich, wenn mal ein Raum steht, weil dieser sich dann leichter verschieben und duplizieren lässt.

Wenn man übrigens mit zwei Browserfenstern arbeitet, im einen hat man die Vorlage offen und im anderen die eigene Karte, dann kann man Objekte nicht einfach kopieren und einfügen. Man muss jedesmal Edit → Web clipboard → Copy shape to web clipboard wählen und im anderen Fenster dann entsprechend Edit → Web clipboard → Shape und die richtigen Objekte auswählen. Irgendwie mächtiger, aber irgendwie auch mühsamer.

Kommentare hier oder auf dem Forum.

Tags: RSP

The Red Heart Fortress was an example on adventure prep that got published in Fight On #8. At the time, Calithena had mentioned on the forum that he might be interested in half-finished notes etc. I submitted the following:

Red Heart Fortress (redrawn)

The essay that went along with it wasn’t published but it’s available on this blog together with the colored original I used for my own game.

Tags: RPG Red Heart Fortress Fight On

Recently Harald Wagner wondered on Google+ “Is anyone but me writing short vignettes (three to five paragraphs) of background stories for important locations / items in their games even though they’re never meant for publication and most probably no one will ever be able to figure out all the details in game?”

In the old days, I used to write longer notes to myself:

Notes on an enemy camp where the red dragon ruled

These days, if there is any background at all, I try to make it part of the adventure. I find that whenever there are written things to be found, my players want to read what they say. Often modules will have nice hand-outs for plot-relevant stuff, but no list of titles and short blurbs for libraries, correspondence, stone tablets, and so on. I always have to improvise. Whenever I forget to prepare such a list of things to read, I feel a facepalm coming up as we reach that point during the session. The players ask: “What do the books say?”

In this case, I did not forget to prepare ahead of time. There were stone tablets to find and information about the dungeon, the setting and its history to be found.

Stone Table Notes

Here are the beginning of my Caverns of Slime. Some coherent notes to help me get an overview of what the adventure is all about.

Ooze Lord Ideas

Again, a dwarven stronghold, with a few coherent sentences. “The dwarves are a suspicious, isolationist lot. […]”

Red Heart Fortress

I wrote more about this particular example back in 2010. When I rewrote this for inclusion in Fight On! #8 I also cleaned up the notes a bit. You can better see what I’m aiming for, but since it’s “cleaned up” it doesn’t reflect actual notes from my gaming table.

I think these examples also illustrate that I want my notes on my maps!

Tags: RPG Keep It Short Red Heart Fortress

A problem I often have is spell books. What spells are in those books? Which spells has the magic user memorized? What about his apprentices and friends?

Here’s my solution to this dilemma:

1. No caster has memorized a spell twice.
2. I create a master spell book and related casters just use subsets of these.

This works with my conservative interpretation of spell books (but does not depend on it) and  it gives every group of magic users a distinct flavor.

Recently I was wondering how to write it down, however. I used to just write down the master spell book. That slows me down when figuring out which spells lower level casters know. Here’s how I wrote it down for my neogi deathspider spelljamming mages (these have a level of 1d8). The important part is the second column. I also like to include alternative spell names in order to add flavor.

(I’m not sure, perhaps it would make more sense to sort this table by the second column?)

Tags: RPG

How do your players map the dungeon? I used to describe it in detail: “thirty feet down the corridor is a door on the left, and a further ten feet it ends in front of yet another door.” This was cumbersome and frustrating. Then I mapped for my players: “Give me the map and I’ll draw it!” This was slow and broke the flow. As a player, I discovered that I liked mapping as our DM kept talking. The resulting maps were crude, wrong and great fun. Thus, when Youseph Tanha said on Google+ that this has slowly driving him insane, I decided to look for some examples.

My map of a Set temple:

This is what Bruno drew:

Another example. Recently I was running my party through Tower of The Changer by Aos:

(PDF available)

This is what Claudia drew, rotated by 90°:

Looking at the comments left on Youseph’s post, I guess this is very similar to what Joseph Bloch is doing:

I describe the surroundings to the players, but I never give them precise dimensions unless it’s something about 30’ or so. I use vague descriptors such as “the corridor goes a long ways” or “this is a very large rectangular room; the door you came in is near the middle of one of the long sides.” – Joseph Bloch

Tags: RPG

Fight On! magazine is going to cease publications after one or two more issues…

Here’s what I’d like to see:

1. somebody to keep it going
2. PDFs of past issues available for free

Any suggestions for similar magazines? I listed some last year. Did I miss any newcomers?

Tags: RPG Old School

I’m slowly, very slowly, preparing for the separation of Emacs Wiki and my own web presence (this site). Where as Emacs Wiki runs on ThinkMo.de in Germany with excellent uptime costing $20/month, most of my other projects run on Eggplant Farms in the United States. All the old links should still work—I’m a strong believer in Cool URIs don’t change. Just don’t be surprised if you’re being redirected from emacswiki.org/alex to alexschroeder.ch.

Let me know if you spot anything that doesn’t work: broken links, missing icons, error messages.

Tags: Web

The problem with Google+ used to be that joining it gave you nothing. You needed to circle some people. Those people could potentially read what you wrote. For them to actually see it in their stream, however, they would have to circle you back. Alternatively, you could just post for all to see, but that doesn’t announce yourself to others, thus they won’t circle you, thus they’ll never see you in their stream.

Now, if you keep posting to your circles, and somebody new stumbles upon your profile, they see nothing. If you did not any public posts, then there’s nothing to see. That’s why people kept saying that you had to list your interests on your profile for others to figure out which circle to put you in. Hopefully you would in turn—based on their posts you saw—put them in the appropriate circles. This situation was better if you posted publicly, but it also tended to annoy some people: they just want to see posts on a particular topic, not see your political ranting and all that.

I sent Google feedback saying that I wanted to announce some of my circles on my profile such that people would automatically know how to sign up for them. Instead, we got Communities.

I think that in addition of working like instant forums, Communities can work just as I intended. Here’s how: Pick a circle like RPG. Instead of posting to the circle, post to the RPG Community. Tell others that this is what you are doing, eg. on your profile. The others add you to their circle and join the RPG Community. Now they’ll see your RPG posts without ever going to the Community. In fact, neither you nor they will ever “look at the Community”. All you’re doing is tagging the posts. This works because if you have circled people and they post in Communities both of you joined, you’ll see their posts in your stream. This way, the simple membership expresses interest in a circle. What do you think? It sounds like an excellent solution to me.

The benefit is that you, as the author, don’t need to circle your readers. At the same time, newcomers can go to the Communities, check out who writes interesting stuff and circle the authors. It’s no longer symmetric.

The drawback is that now all your posts are effectively public—and obviously so since you posted to a public Community. If you want to draw a thin line, you can switch of the setting “Show your Google+ communities posts on the Posts tab of your Google+ profile.” Unfortunately, this also stops announcing your interests unless you link the communities you are posting to from your profile.

There is also the additional drawback of potentially annoying the people that want to treat communities like a forum. I’ll have to try it in order to know for sure.

Yet another drawback is that people that have me circled but haven’t joined any of the Communities I am using will not see those posts. I used to post to the RPG Circle, but now I’m posting to the RPG Community. If they are in my RPG Circle but haven’t joined the RPG Community, they won’t see the post unless they visit my profile. Well, to be honest I haven’t posted much of anything at all, but that would be the plan.

My current RPG communities:

• OSR
• Pendragon RPG
• Rollenspieler (deutschsprachig) (German RPG)
• RPG
• Roleplaying Games
• Encounter Critical
• Sci Fi OSR
• Spelljammer
• Planescape
• Traveller RPG
• Diaspora
• OSaRtists
• Jeux de Rôles (French RPG)
• Five Minute Maps
• MEGADUNGEON
• Tekumel
• Labyrinth Lord
• Fans of Frog God Games (I’ve been a big fan in the past, not sure about now)

I don’t think joining communities for systems I don’t use or Google+ Hangouts makes much sense (since I get to play a lot offline).

My current software oriented Communities:

• Emacs
• Church of Emacs (probably useless)
• Eclipse Zürich (not really my thing)

Any other suggestions?

Updates:

• Zürich
• Story Games
• Interactive Fiction
• Map-Making in Games
• RPG Graphic Design
• Oddmuse
• Tekumel

Tags: RPG

Gerade eben sah ich eine Frage von Thorsten Panknin auf Google+ zum Thema Burning Wheel. Ich habe mit Burning Wheel Revised zwei Einzelspiele geleitet (einmal Heian, einmal das Zombiebäreneinführungsabenteuer aus einem der Bücher), eine kurze Kampagne über das Netz geleitet (nur zwei Mitspieler, ein Abend Welterschaffung, sechs Abende für die Kampagne, Campaign:Krythos), und einmal in einer kurzen Kampagne am Tisch mitgespielt (wieder sechs Abende, Campaign:BurningSix). Was ich ihm auf alle Fälle geschrieben habe:

Ich wollte Burning Wheel immer gerne haben, habe Burning Wheel Revised gekauft, Zusatzbänder, Heian Setting, Jihad Setting, wollte meine Freunde überreden, es auszuprobieren… und als ich es dann probiert habe, war es lasch: die einfachen Dinge zu kompliziert (sobald man beim Kämpfen das einfache Gegeneinanderwürfeln weglässt), soziale Konflikte wollte ich lieber ausdiskutieren statt mit LSD-Schere-Stein-Papier auswürfeln, die Charaktererschaffung war langwierig und mühsam (endlose Zahlenschaufelei und tausend Fehlerquellen, dabei war die Anzahl Karriereschritte und die von ihnen vorgegebenen und erlaubten Fertigkeiten das einzig Interessante), überhaupt: Rüstungsverfall, Trefferregionen, Deckung… Da schläft mir das Gesicht ein, bis wir weiter kommen. Grundsätzlich mit extrem viel Meta Diskussion, weil die einzelnen Schritte nicht trivial sind oder gar ausgehandelt werden müssen, und demzufolge fehlt mir die Immersion. Ein Metaspiel mit Artha (Heldenpunkte) finde ich immer noch schrecklich, weil damit ein Teil der Spannung wegfällt, die Konflikte verlängert werden, der Spieler irgendwie entmündigt wird (kann er nicht richtig spielen kriegt er keine Punkte?). Der Tonfall des Autors, die Emo Magie, Lebenspfade, diese öfter kritisierten Elemente finde ich immer noch gut.

Zum Thema Artha bzw. Heldenpunkte und zum Thema soziale Konflikte habe ich auch mal was auf Englisch geschrieben: I don't like Bennies, Role Play, not Wish Fulfilment.

Kommentare hier, auf Google+ oder auf dem Forum.

Tags: RSP

In the anonymous rant The Wikemacs Experiment: 300 Days Later, the author claims “The biggest problem is that it is insecure. […] Anyone can edit any of the pages that contain Elisp code.” The same sentiment was expressed by Alex Bennée in a comment on Google+: “What is really needed is a way to be sure that the source for the emacs extension your updating hasn’t been subverted by someone else with ill intent.”

I said:

Experiences and ideas of “what is really necessary” vary. As for myself, I’ve installed code from all over the Internet without reviewing the source. Installing it from a gist or git repo is hardly a different experience. If you want to figure out whether a source is trustworthy, you do the usual things: do people link to the code, how long has it been around, what about recent checkins, that sort of thing. Or you get into the crypto business of signing releases.

You could of course say that every day that passes without a problem increases our false sense of security… I have no answer to that. All I can say is that if security is your problem, using gists and github is not the solution (as you say yourself). The source of the insecurity is our habits, our culture of downloading and installing anything and everything. I’m not sure how you’ll ever make sure “that the source for the emacs extension your updating hasn’t been subverted by someone else with ill intent.” That seems pretty impossible to me unless you limit yourself to the core Emacs distribution (and even that’s not a guarantee).

People on the #emacs channel keep asking “is there way to do X” and thus my impression is that finding stuff is a more pressing problem. I feel that encouraging people to create a page on the wiki saying “here is code to help you do something” is the solution to that problem.

But then again, I guess we all differ in what we consider to be the most pressing problem.

Alex Bennée the correctly points out that using “a user locked solution like a gist or git repo you can at least be assured what you’re installing has come through one person who you’ve trusted to a degree before.” I guess that’s true. We’ll see whether people start switching over to using gists instead of editing wiki pages. I said in an earlier comment:

I added gist support […] because it was easy to do, not because it will encourage existing authors to move their elisp code on wiki pages to github. If at all, it might encourage future elisp authors to transclude a gist… But then again, there’s nothing preventing them from linking to a gist right now. Perhaps it’s also a generational thing. People that have been living without github and gists don’t feel a particular need to start using it.

Interesting times.

Tags: Web Security Emacs Wiki

I just read a rant about Emacs Wiki and it’s alternative: The Wikemacs Experiment: 300 Days Later. Check out How Emacs Wiki Works for some context from my point of view. Anyway, the anonymous author says: “Maybe someone could work with Alex to add gist-style code snippets to Oddmuse, and make it so that code can be cited inline on Wiki pages, so that anyone visiting the page is automatically looking at the most up to date version of the code.”

Let’s take this random gist as an example. Click on the “view raw” button. Use <include text "..."> to transclude it:

(setq abg-elisp-external-dir
      (expand-file-name "external" abg-elisp-dir))

; ...

; Add external projects to load path
(dolist (project (directory-files abg-elisp-external-dir t "\\w+"))
  (when (file-directory-p project)
    (add-to-list 'load-path project)))

Actually, I added an Emacs Wiki feature using two lines of code that add support for fancy inclusion:

<include gist "https://gist.github.com/1236665">

It only works over there, however. See EmacsWiki:Gists.

Anyway, the same also works for Lisppaste:

<include text "http://paste.lisp.org/display/134703/raw">

Results in:

;; Set XTERM resources as so
;; 
;; metaSendsEscape: false
;; altSendsEscape: false
;; eightBitInput: true

;; Verify with cat > /dev/null command that pressing alt-a
;; alt-b and so on produces single >128bit char (will look
;; like a with a hat

;; once above is working in emacs do

;; Prevent pressing esc O from triggering binding
(define-key (get-input-decode-map) "\eO" nil)

;; tell emacs Meta is 8th bit
(cond ((fboundp 'set-input-meta-mode)
      (set-input-meta-mode t))
    (t (set-input-mode t nil t)))

I don’t think there’s a nice way to include the colored version, unfortunately.

Update: I added support and minimal Lisp highlighting for the following:

<include lisppaste "http://paste.lisp.org/display/134703">

It only works over there, of course.

Tags: Emacs Wiki

These days my players are exploring the Forgotten Depths. I added Tower of the Changer (from Metal Earth). It mentions Dilvashti the Carrion-Sculptor (from Planet Algol). Looking at my campaign and the existing Frankenstein arts, I decided that a level 14 Vivimancer using Theorems & Thaumaturgy (from The City of Iron) would be ideal.

What can I say? Some of the best stuff out there is free. Thank you, RPG bloggers!

Also, my blog needs more metal.

Tags: RPG Old School

African-flavored fantasy adventure gaming

I just leafed through it and I liked what I saw! It makes me want to add an African-inspired section to my campaign right now.

I liked the art. The pieces fit together, had a unified style, made me want to play or meet those characters.

Remember, I didn’t read those 180 pages. But some of my impressions regarding the rules: standard six attributes but smaller modifiers: 3 → -2; 4–7 → -1; 14–17 → +1; 18 → +2. There are four cultures with half a page of background followed by a large number of interesting one-paragraph character backgrounds that grant you a number of skills. Skills go from 0–4. I’m not a big friend of skill systems, but it doesn’t bother me too much.

There are four classes: warriors (fighters) and three classes with magical abilities—griots (bards), marabouts (clerics) and ngangas (magic users).

The “fighters” have access to a very simple feat system. I’m no friend of the feats in D&D 3.5 or Adventure Conqueror King, but this system here only takes a single page and doesn’t constitute a feat tree and only concerns fighters. I think this works for me.

There are three kinds of “bard” songs (minor, great, ancient) and characters get access to the more powerful variants at 4th and at 7th level. I like the simplicity of the system. The effects of these songs persists for as long as they are being sung.

The “clerics” can invoke miracles (spells) from a variety of spheres. They are spontaneous casters with a certain number of miracles/day limit. Each sphere comes with a list of spells. Thus, by gaining access to more spheres they get more choice in spells. Their favorite sphere gets them a minor magical ability.

The power of “magic users” comes in the form of rituals and spells. Known rituals can be performed as long as the characters have the necessary time and resources (many cost money). Spells are “memorized” by creating little fetishes and “cast” by triggering them.

The various classes are an excellent demonstration of how to rewrite the standard descriptions to conjure up a different atmosphere and invoke the new setting.

There is a one-page quick reference after the rules section. Excellent idea.

There is a lot of material explaining how to run a sandbox campaign without just copying what he said in Red Tide and An Echo Resounding. Excellent!

Three pages on how to play—responsibility of players, responsibility of the referee, how to start the first session, this kind of stuff, short and succinct. Another three pages on typical pitfalls: how to use combat in your game, how to handle character death, how to handle investigative games, how to handle magic items, how to handle unfamiliarity with the setting. All of these are a great introduction to people unfamiliar with sandbox play, I think. Thinking back to my recent game mastering career and remembering the D&D 3.5 Dungeon Master Guide, I’d say that these pages here come with all the relevant advice that you need.

The domain game uses Might, Trouble and Treasure as the kingdom stats. In An Echo Resounding the three stats were Military, Social and Wealth. If you’re interested in a short overview of An Echo Resounding, check out my summary. The concepts are similar. These stats are used to resolve the kingdom turns. The game does not come with units, resources to build, mass combat and all the other things An Echo Resounding introduced.

As for creating adventures: the book comes with an empty map for a dungeon, a building, an estate, a shrine, a cave; it comes with tables for cults, magic user spells, non-player characters, cultures, names, adventure elements; domain game rules incl. building costs, henchmen, hirelings, magic items, treasures, monsters—all suitably themed! I think this is awesome. The book also comes with a lot of advice on how to go about creating adventures, how to think about the set (the place), the actors (denizens, non-player characters) and props (treasure, items), and how to put the three together. Skimming through this section, I found myself nodding along.

There is an index, which is something I appreciate. There’s also an annotated bibliography for fiction, history, mythology, religion and pictures. This should be useful for people like me with practically no experience with Africa.

All in all, I think this book would be an excellent book. With its 180 pages it looks much like a slightly expanded B/X D&D with an African theme. It has plenty of good advice and ideas for beginners and sandbox newbies. Personally, I think many games lack the succinct guidance a new referee needs. The D&D 3.5 DM’s guide didn’t have it. I don’t think my favorite variant of the game has it, either: Labyrinth Lord is quite bare bones. At the same time, Spears of Dawn is not simply a collection of house rules tacked onto B/X D&D. The infusion of the African setting into every paragraph and its strong focus on teaching the reader how to run a sandbox campaign sets it appart.

I highly recommend it. Then again, remember I haven’t read it in depth (and I probably won’t unless the campaign moves into an African direction).

Tags: RPG Old School sandbox Sine Nomine Kevin Crawford

I just rewrote my Tag Cloud to use the Google Treemap.

What it does is the following:

1. The cloud action runs the old code (text representation).
2. The tagcloud action runs the new code.
3. The new code basically takes the example Google Treemap and replaces the data with my tags. These tags are not nested.
4. On click, we call the tag action which shows the last blog pages with that tag.

Try it! → Tag Cloud. (I realize that the tag cloud isn’t very interesting in and of itself. I just enjoyed using the Google tools and learning a little bit of Javascript on the way.)

$Action{cloud} = $Action{tagcloud};
$Action{tagcloud} = \&MyTagCloud;

sub MyTagCloud {
  print GetHeader('', T('Tag Cloud'), '');
  # open the DB file
  require DB_File;
  tie %h, "DB_File", $TagFile;
  my $max = 0;
  my $min = 0;
  my %count = ();
  foreach my $tag (grep !/^_/, keys %h) {
    $count{$tag} = split(/$FS/, $h{$tag});
    $max = $count{$tag} if $count{$tag} > $max;
    $min = $count{$tag} if not $min or $count{$tag} < $min;
  }
  untie %h;
  # ignore 90% of all tags
  my @values = sort values %count;
  $min = GetParam('min', $values[int($#values * 0.9)]);
  # https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/treemap
  print <<EOT;
    <script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      google.load("visualization", "1", {packages:["treemap"]});
      google.setOnLoadCallback(drawChart);
      function drawChart() {
        // Create and populate the data table.
        var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([
          ['Location', 'Parent', 'Mentions', ''],
          ['Tags', null, 0, 0],
EOT
  foreach my $tag (sort keys %count) {
    my $n = $count{$tag};
    next unless $n > $min;
    print "          ['$tag', 'Tags', $n, 0],\n";
  }
  print <<EOT;
        ]);
        // Create and draw the visualization.
        var tree = new google.visualization.TreeMap(document.getElementById('treemap'));
        tree.draw(data);
        google.visualization.events.addListener(tree, 'select', selectHandler);
        function selectHandler() {
          var selection = tree.getSelection();
          var item = selection[0];
          window.location = "/alex?action=tag;id=" + data.getValue(item.row,0);
        }
      }
    </script>
EOT
  print $q->start_div({-class=>'content cloud'});
  print $q->p(ScriptLink('action=tagcloud;min=0', T('Include all tags')),
              Ts('(currently showing tags with more than %s occurences)', $min));
  print $q->p(Ts('Or switch to a %s.', ScriptLink('action=cloud', T('text format'))));
  print $q->start_div({-id=>'treemap', -style=>'height: 1000px;'});
  print $q->end_div();
  print $q->end_div();
  PrintFooter();
}

Tags: Oddmuse Javascript Google

Inspired by a link to LaTeX templates Brad Murray had posted recently on Google+, I decided to try and spend a few hours moving a German FATE variant of mine (inspired by the simplicity of the Diaspora core but with skills appropriate for a Mesopotamia or Ancient Greece setting) to LaTeX. I really wanted to use the Tufte template.

I really hate editing the text such that section beginnings and endings fall on page breaks! But I think it worked. I’m not quite sure whether it it actually significantly better. After having spent a few hours refreshing my LaTeX skills, I guess I’m just happy it’s done! What do you think of the layout?

• Original created with Open Office: Der Geist Mesopotamiens (original).pdf (source)
• New edition created with LaTeX and the Tufte Style: Der Geist Mesopotamiens.pdf (source)
• The original was created on a wiki: Der Geist Mesopotamiens (source)

Tags: RPG LaTeX

Inspired by a link to LaTeX templates Brad Murray had posted recently on Google+, I decided to try and spend a few hours moving a German FATE variant of mine (inspired by the simplicity of the Diaspora core but with skills appropriate for a Mesopotamia or Ancient Greece setting) to LaTeX. I really wanted to use the Tufte template.

I really hate editing the text such that section beginnings and endings fall on page breaks! But I think it worked. I’m not quite sure whether it it actually significantly better. After having spent a few hours refreshing my LaTeX skills, I guess I’m just happy it’s done! What do you think of the layout?

• Original created with Open Office: Der Geist Mesopotamiens (original).pdf (source)
• New edition created with LaTeX and the Tufte Style: Der Geist Mesopotamiens.pdf (source)
• The original was created on a wiki: Der Geist Mesopotamiens (source)

Tags: RPG LaTeX

In 2012, I basically took pictures using Instagram, shared them with Facebook (part of the family), Twitter (another part of the family), Flickr (my favorite), and I used IFTTT to send a copy to Picasa Web because I felt that I’d like to have some pictures for people to see on Google+.

But then, when Instagram changed its terms of service (they rephrased them somewhat) and I decided that I might want to look into using something else for a bit.

I liked the new Flickr app somewhat.

I tried organizing my pictures on Picasa Web but was unable to create a new empty album in order to move some of my pictures in the Scrapbook album. When I selected more than 300 of the pictures and tried to move them, it also told me I could not move more than 100 at a time. I was confused. It looked like the user interface could use some improvements. I even started up my local Picasa copy and wasn’t clear on how to use it to manage my albums online. Perhaps you can’t. I was not impressed. It looks as if I’m not going to abandon iPhoto any time soon. Then again, I really want to abandon iPhoto one of these days because I hate it’s opaque storage regime.

Also, the lens or the protective plastic cover of my iPhone camera is scratched. The photos from the main camera now all look hazy. The terrible quality had resulted in me taking a lot of self-portraits from the second camera.

Since I didn’t want to use Instagram too often, I have uploaded the pictures to Flickr directly. This means that I haven’t posted any pictures to Facebook; I haven’t posted any pictures to Twitter, and none where uploaded to Picasa Web.

Strangely enough it doesn’t bother me.

Maybe it bothers me a bit because I’ve been using simple photos of my daily life as a replacement for status updates for my family and friends. We’ll see. Perhaps I’ll post status updates again. Or I’ll abandon Facebook. Or resume the use of Instagram.

Tags: Pictures Software Web

I think of myself as an Old School RPG blogger. Looking back, these are the posts I’d recommend.

2012-01-24 Changing Gameplay Over Time

“The promise of ever changing game play is what makes D&D interesting. The reason this works, I think, is because the spells you gain don’t simply scale. The game changes if you can be invisible and fly. The game changes when you can dimension door and teleport. The game changes when you can travel to the planes. Outside of the specific rules, the tradition also encourages changes to the game when you reach name level and build a stronghold, and it changes once more when you start to forge alliances with and wage wars against neighbors.”

2012-02-09 How To Write A Module

I finally finished Caverns of Slime in 2012. This blog post is a write up of the guidelines I used to write this high level adventure.

2012-02-09 Social Skills Revisited

This is more of a link to an article Courtney wrote on his blog regarding interactions with non-player characters. In terms of my approach to the game, Courtney remains one the most influential bloggers. “I enjoy the acting at the table because it’s funny. That’s why I prefer not to replace social interactions with dice rolling. But that doesn’t mean that social interactions cannot be quantified. Have a list of needs, traits and desires ready and pick two.”

2012-02-18 Ode to Ode to Black Dougal

“Reading Ode to Black Dougal really made me appreciate the Basic/Expert edition of D&D by Moldvay, Cook & Marsh. Let me link to his awesome series, B/X is my Favorite.”

2012-02-28 I don't like Bennies

“I’d rather agonize over a decision to fight, I’d rather weep because of the blows of fate bringing me down (and not because I made a deal with the referee and got a fate point for it but because I made a mistake).”

2012-03-04 Old School Fanzines

Basically a list of links to RPG fanzines. I assume this might remain a useful resource for a few years.

2012-05-09 Commenting As I Go (1PDC)

2012-05-12 More One Page Dungeon Recommendations

2012-05-13 More Recommended Dungeons

2012-05-22 Even More Recommended Dungeons

2012-05-30 The Last Batch Of Favorites

I’ve run the One Page Dungeon Contest 2012 again and these are the entries I personally recommend. If you don’t have the time to look through them all, look through these.

2012-05-22 Thinking About Solar System RPG

A return to the topics of this year: I like change over time, I don’t like unified resolution mechanics. “Abstract combat, abstract conflict resolution, and I’m wondering whether as a gamer, I might prefer more grounding.”

2012-05-15 The Forgotten Depths

I really liked inventing monster stats for this One Page “Dungeon” (actually a one page hexcrawl). This is when I decided that I want to quickly invent my own monster stats when writing stuff up so that I’m no longer bound by any licensing terms.

2012-06-20 Hexcrawl Procedure

The step-by-step instructions of how I run my hexcrawls and the assumptions I’m making. Something to add to my Swiss Referee Style Manual.

2012-07-06 Training Players

How I handle lies, promises and torture at my table. Basically, I don’t lie to my players, the non-player characters keep their promises and I don’t want to hear about torture at my table.

2012-08-15 Unbalanced Encounters Are Fun

“I think the key here is that what brings me back to the gaming table is the same thing that makes slot machines addictive. It’s called the variable ratio reinforcement schedule: a reinforcement schedule in which the number of responses necessary to produce reinforcement varies from trial to trial, according to Wikipedia.”

2012-08-24 Ursomancy

The first of a handful of posts where I tried to extract useful bits from my Caverns of Slime adventure. I feel that these bits make a nice blog post, allow people to comment, allow people to learn about the adventure without having to download and read more than thirty pages. I know that I download a lot of stuff that I end up not reading.

2012-09-01 SVG Character Sheet

I posted a number of times about the a little web application I wrote that generates random Labyrinth Lord characters including random equipment. You can also use it to just link to a good looking character sheet of your own from a forum, wiki or blog. All the values shown can be changed using URL parameters.

2012-10-11 Traveller, Spelljammer, Planescape

My campaign had taken a turn towards Planescape and Spelljammer, and I discovered that I could use the Traveller subsector random map generator for my Fantasy campaign.

2012-11-17 How To Build A Dungeon

Much like the hexcrawl procedure I had posted earlier this year, this post talks about three dungeons I used in my games and how I went about developing them.

And I think that’s it! The blog posts I returned to, the blog posts I felt are worthy of being read again. If you want more stuff to read, there is a similar overview for 2011.

Tags: RPG Retrospective

I’m looking back at my blog and trying to remember the things that happened.

Google+ replaced Twitter, for all my talk about role-playing needs. For a while, my tweets were all about gaming. These days I use Twitter as an alternative to RSS for the kind of news that I might want to look into every now and then without wanting to read everything.

1. EFF
2. BoingBoing
3. Techdirt
4. Anonymous

(Although I’m following Ars Technica on Google+, so perhaps everything will end up on Google+, eventually.)

I also have a few friends on Twitter that aren’t very active elsewhere.

I’m not sure how long I’ll be hanging out on Twitter and Facebook. I heard somebody say that Facebook is for the important people you know and Google+ is for the interesting people you don’t know. 2012 was also the year I stopped using identi.ca (a free, federated Twitter alternative).

I think that in general this blog has had few readers to begin with and has lost some. There are less comments because I write less about Emacs and tech issues. I guess I get a few comments on Google+ every now and then. I have never been one to try and maximize comments, however. I’m getting what I’m aiming for, I guess.

In general, therefore, the blog has also lost a bit of urgency. I no longer post little one-paragraph posts talking about the movies I saw. (Before yesterday it was Cloud Atlas which was nice, but not mind-blowing; yesterday it was The Hobbit part one, which was very beautiful; I could spend hours in Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth. Today I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild which reminded me of one of the best movies in recent years, Winter’s Bone. But then it started to stretch and had some surreal elements I didn’t like, so in the end I wasn’t as happy with it as I was at the beginning.)

At the same time, with the ads and the privacy issues of Facebook and Instagram, operating my own blog has become more important. I still host my pictures on Flickr and I’m happy I never stopped doing that. I pay their hosting fees and hope this means I don’t need to suffer ads and privacy violations.

My blog still uses Oddmuse. It’s a Perl script that I’ve been maintaining for over a decade, now. It still works! I use the same software for Emacs Wiki. Since many people are used to the many editors of Wikipedia and the features of MediaWiki, they criticize my choice every now and then. 2012 was no different. This time, however, I wrote a longer reply: How Emacs Wiki Works. (In fact, a separate wiki called WikEmacs was created using Mediawiki. I’m not sure how well it does.)

One of the benefits of the services I no longer like that much was that they allowed me to keep in touch with my family. My sister, my cousin and my mother in law are on Facebook. My mother, my half-sister and my half-brother are on Twitter where we all have private accounts linked to each other such that it occasionally feels like a family chat. I’ve started using Instagram as a way to tell people that I’m alive and invite the occasional comment by automatically uploading the pictures to this family chat on Twitter and to Facebook. I think it worked really well and now I’m not quite sure what I should be using instead. Rely on IFTTT?

The use of Instagram and all the ironic hipster hate online has revealed that I had already been a hipster long before it was cool!

There was also a tiny flash of activity on Community Wiki. A Facebook group for the wiki got created. Fierce editing did not resume. Wikis as a discussion medium seem to have gone the way of the Dodo. When I look at MeatballWiki, I don’t understand what’s going on. The wikis I was interested in as a discussion of social media are no longer active. Perhaps social media must be discussed using itself. I wonder where Instagram gets discused. Using screenshots?

Tags: Social Media Twitter Facebook Google Flickr Instagram

Recently I started extracting the monsters from my Caverns of Slime adventure and posting it on this blog. The idea is that this way, people might spot something they like without having to go through the thirty or fourty pages of the adventure. It also makes it easier to leave a comment on a particular element.

When I wrote Caverns of Slime, I decided that all of the magic-users in the adventure would have a complete spell book with new names for all the spells. I hoped that referees would then pick the effects from obvious matches in their rule book or improvise something interesting. That’s how I handle it. Does this work for you? Would you have preferred me to use the standard spell names and list new spells at the end as appears to be the standard approach these days?

ghoul

HD 3; AC 6; Atk 2 claws and 1 bite (1d6 each); MV 9; victims need to save vs. paralysis or be paralysed; these ghouls prefer to eat their helpless victims during combat; in subsequent rounds roll a d6 and loose 1. eye, 2. arm, 3. other arm, 4. liver, 5. heart, 6. brain; mutilated corpses rise as ghouls within the hour and grow terrible claws if an arm or two was lost

bulbous demon

HD 13; AC 6; Atk 1 bite (2d6); MV 3; victims need to save vs. paralysis or suffer the same fate as a ghoul victim; can only be hit by magic weapons

lemur

HD 1; AC 6; Atk 1 bite (1d6); MV 3

psychic lampreys

HD 5; AC 5; Atk 1 bite (2d6) and 1 psi storm (save vs. paralysis or faint for 1d6 rounds); MV 3 fly

spider warrior

HD 5; AC 3; Atk 2 weapons and bite (1d8, 1d8, 1d6); MV 9 climbing

Kilistrexta, arachnid queen

HD 12; AC 3; Atk 1 bite (1d6); MV 6 climbing

giant spider, intelligent

HD 6; AC 3; Atk 2 claws and bite (1d6 each); MV 9 climbing; save vs. poison when bitten or fall unconscious as your internal organs are slowly digested; terminal damage after one hour; these are effectively spider barbarians, cruel and angry, always trying to rob and steal from their city dwelling relatives; they respect violence

giant ant

HD 4; AC 3; Atk 1 bite (2d6), acid spray (3d6); MV 9

great mother of the ants

HD 15; AC 4; Atk 1 bite (3d6), MV 3; pheromone powers: all giant ants will know when their queen needs help; the acid vapours in the queen’s cave require a save vs. poison every round to act

gargantuan centipede queen

HD 12; AC 3; Atk 1 bite (3d6), MV 6; save vs. poison or die in excruciating pain within three rounds

Atraxaka, arachnomatrix, is willing to trade in spells and information

no stats given but I’d base her on the arachnid queen: HD 13; AC 3; Atk 1 bite (1d6); MV 6 climbing

Spells of the arachnomatrix (level 13):

Atraxaka also knows how to build a rod of electric destruction (shoots lightning bolts for 3d6 at will with a 5% chance to hit somebody near the intended victim unless the wielder has four arms to aim it with).

Tags: RPG Old School Monsters Caverns of Slime

A while ago, I worked on Caverns of Slime for Fight On! #14. I recently made it available as a free PDF. (I should add a license to it: Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike for the text!) Here are some of its monsters I wrote up.

This list also contains two instances of rituals. I describe them as follows: “Rituals are the ceremonies and prayers that take many minutes to perform, usually powered by demon lords and devils.” The first monster can be summoned by a ritual that player characters can be taught by “a winged pig man with four legs and wielding a blood falchion.” The last monster, on the other hand, performs a handful of rituals that player characters can learn through observation.

Bel, Slayer of Men, a summoned demon

HD 10; AC 2; Atk 1 flaming whip (no damage but on a hit it grants +4 on the hit with the sword in the same round and on a 20 it disarms the opponent), 1 flaming sword (3d6); MV 9; flaming aura deals an extra 1d6 to everybody nearby; immune to non-magic weapons; immune to fire); this may be the same ritual that the mage-wraith in the Warrens of the Troglodytes had learned

Merquishti, a giant intelligent spider hungry for meat – and conversation

HD 8; AC 4; Atk 1 bite (1d6); MV 15; when bitten, save vs. poison or fall comatose for 24h; can set up area web traps); it speaks the language of giant spiders, a dialect of subsurface elves and the common tongue of all demons; if asked about gold, the spider will know that a knight’s golden armor was carried down this way by devil worshipers a “very long time” ago; if asked about the destination, the spider will mention a city of evil half-spiders preying on the caverns and tunnels below; when the conversation ends, the spider considers capturing a party member by triggering a web trap (save vs. wands or be trapped in a web; the web prevents spellcasting; trapped victims need to deal 20 points of damage using a dagger or a similar small blade; free allies can aid trapped victims using larger blades

Earth Elementals surface, eager to take back any gems the party may have “stolen” from the deep earth

HD 6; AC 0; Atk 1 bite (2d6); MV 9; immune against fire and electricity; can melt into the surrounding rocks in one round

Nixies enjoying a bath, apparently ignorant of any males approaching

HD 3; AC 8; Atk 1 bite (1d6); charm man 3×/day, kiss of water breathing for charmed men at will

Stone Polyps are growing on the stone walls, immobile, with their arms limp and soft; as soon as a warm creature passes nearby, however, they activate

HD 6; AC 0; Atk 1 bite (2d6), 8 tentacles (save vs. petrification of fall unconscious and be dragged towards the mouth); MV 3

Shroom Lord is growing his own circle of psychotic colors

HD 15; AC 5; Atk 1 smash (2d6), 1 lick (poison); MV 9; licked victims must save vs. poison or be charmed

The shroom lord can be observed for days as it sings its telepathic praise to the Gibbering Fungus God. A very patient person interested in mushroom magic can learn the following rituals through simple observation:

1. the care of magic mushrooms requires an appropriate dark and humid cave, spores, a rotting corpse and a lot of spit; when cared for, these will grow up to three feet in height within four days; the mushroom will keep for a single day only
2. the summoning of the Gibbering Fungus God requires a deep hole in the ground and a fresh magic mushroom; partake of the mushroom and sing the psychic psalm of the greatest mycelian panopticon (learning it requires some form of ESP even though anybody may notice that psychic energies emanate from the shroom lord as it sings to its flock); the fungus god will materialize in the form of a huge toad head within half an hour; licking it will grant servants visions of the future; on a failed save vs. poison these visions are confusing and wrong, otherwise they act as powerful and lurid divination magic (the divination magic will only work for those people that ate of magic mushrooms grown with their own spit)
3. the circle of psychotic colors requires a circle of at least six magic mushrooms; each mushroom must be sacrificed a small animal such as a cat; the animal corpse is absorbed by the magic mushroom and a few hours later these mushrooms can be activated with a touch—save vs. poison or roll a d6:
   1. close your eyes for just a second and fall asleep immediately
   2. chase an erotic fantasy and run away
   3. bad trip paralyzes you with fear
   4. drop weapons, bend over and barf
   5. close your eyes and enjoy the visions
   6. everybody else seems slow and stupid, take two actions

Another monster, related to the circle of psychotic colors: any enemies that fell asleep because of the spores will die over night and rise as a spore zombie.

Spore Zombie

HD 2; AC 8; Atk 1 bite (1d6); when smashed, anybody in melee must roll a d6 as described above

Tags: RPG Old School Caverns of Slime Monsters

Nach dem Aikido Training gestern hatte ich das Gefühl wieder krank zu werden. Kopfweh, die Nase läuft. Habe ängstlich Fieber gemessen, aber war nichts los. Dann habe ich mir ein schönes, ausgiebiges Frühstück gegönnt. Bin extra in den Laden gegangen, um Zopf zu kaufen. Freitags habe ich frei. Seit dem Claudia 100% arbeitet, habe ich wieder einen Tag “frei”. Ich habe stundenlang Questionable Content gelesen. Ein Webcomic wie eine Soap. Freunde, Quatschen, … was wir früher in der WG “Reden über Sex und Beziehungen” genannt hätten. Erstaundlich, wie empfänglich ich dafür bin. Dann habe ich im Prinz Eisenherz Sammelband 2 weiter gelesen. Comics aus den Jahren 1939 und 1940! Am späten Nachmittag habe ich mich dann aufgerafft, Haare schneiden zu gehen. Zurück gekommen und Abendessen gemacht.

1. zwei Tomaten und Mozarella Salat
2. eine Scheibe Dinkel Brot
3. ein Stück Apfel und Mandel Wähe
4. eine Avocado
5. eine Schüssel Glacé
6. ein Whiskey
7. ein Whiskey
8. noch ein Whiskey

Wahrlich ein Problem, alleine Comics zu lesen, Alkohol zu trinken, französische Musik zu hören – im Questionable Content werden immer wieder mal Indie Bands erwähnt, und so habe ich meine alten CDs mal angeschaut. Dinge, die ich schon ewig nicht gehört habe; Dinge, die ich nicht einmal digitalisiert habe. Im Moment: des Visages des Figures. Ich vermute, die CD hatte ich damals wegen dem Lied Le vent nous portera gekauft. Wenn es nicht so kalt wäre, hätte ich das Bedürfnis, hinaus in die Stadt zu rennen, Freunde zu treffen, … der Comic macht mich fertig, haha. Wenn meine Schwester und meine Cousine hier wären, würde das wie am Schnürchen laufen! Aber in der Nähe wohnt niemand. Kinder bekommen, weg gezogen, die alte, verrauchte Bar schon seit zwanzig Jahren nicht mehr betreten, irgendwie fehlt mir etwas. Bald bin ich so weit und höre mir wieder Notre besoin de consolation est impossible à rassasier von den Têtes Raides an.

Tags: Life

I need a simple one page summary of An Echo Resounding for the players in my game.

Every location on the map can have values. These are measured in three categories: military, wealth and social. These values are provided by different kinds of assets.

1. customs cannot be changed: the people living in a particular location might have a spartan culture resulting in a military value of 4
2. buildings can be built and torn down: barracks provide a military value of 2
3. processes can be implemented and aborted: military spending converts the wealth of a location to military value at a rate of 2:1

Some buildings a domain might start building:

Yes, since the militia can’t move, it essentially acts like a building: an immobile asset.

Total up all the value provided by the assets in your domain.

Compare your domain’s values to the upkeep cost of all the units in your domain. Units are usually mobile and consist of roughly a hundred individuals.

Some military units:

Every month, the player domain gets two domain moves. The bold ones are the important ones.

1. attack a location (with units)
2. disband an asset
3. establish an asset (requires three successful checks: difficulty is 12 + sum of the values provided, roll d20 + bonus based on your domain’s existing values, all difficulties go down by one with each failed roll)
4. establish or erase a location (on the map)
5. move a unit
6. punish atrocity (needs scapegoat)
7. rectify disruption (removes 1d4+2 points of disruption)
8. repair an asset (heal units for many hit-points as the domain has military value, distribute at will, scarce units require 2:1 and rare units require 4:1)
9. solve an obstacle (requires a unit of a particular type at hand to reduce the local obstacle by 1d4 on a successful saving throw + bonus based on your domain’s appropriate value, see table below; failed saves result in a point of disruption)
10. withdraw treasure

Military units were listed above. The other unit types also have upkeep costs:

Tags: RPG

What motivates a referee? I think positive feedback is a key element. I’m not just thinking of players thanking you for running the game or players saying that they like your style. What I really enjoy is players who get excited when they’re thinking of the next session, players who’re sad if they have to miss a session, players who tell other people about the funny things they did, the terrible things that happened. Player engagement is intoxicating, infectious.

DM Peter recently ended one of the campaigns I’m playing in, citing lack of player engagement. It’s a tricky subject: who is responsible for it, how do you measure it, how do you foster it? Here’s what has worked for me.

Alpha players are always at the forefront of everything. They edit the campaign wiki. They write a log. They never loose track of their character’s experience, wealth, equipment and encumbrance. Their characters have plans. Their characters have issues. If you get one or two of them, that’s great. I found that my games can take a lot of casual gamers, however. Not everybody needs to be an alpha players. Quiet people, hard working people, parents, people with little time between sessions are just as entertaining at the table. Realizing this has made it possible for me to enjoy more games. If I need more games to fill the time between sessions, I run more games or join more campaigns.

Session reports are a measurable by-product of our games. Long session reports that cast the events in a mythical light, provide more intimate glimpses of the characters, provide extra details and entertaining complications are great. There will always be players that don’t have the time to write such session reports and there will always be players that don’t have the time read such session reports. Preposterous, you might think. And yet, this thought will set you up for disappointment. If one person keeps a few notes on the back of their character sheet and can bring everybody back up to speed at the beginning of the next session, that works just as well. Realizing this, I have cut down on my session report writing. These days, I don’t write to entertain, I write to remember. A short list of events is all that is required. Now I no longer feel close to session writer burnout, I’m no longer disappointed by the disinterest of my fellow players.

Player contributions are an inspiration: I try to encourage players to contribute little elements to our fairly traditional game. Sometimes the personality traits of a player character turn out to be the personality traits of an entire culture. Sometimes the ambitions of a player can shape an arc of the campaign. Sometimes, however, none of the players seem to be willing to contribute anything other than playing their character. In this case, a referee might feel cornered into the role of the untiring entertainer, a thankless job of crafting adventures for unappreciative players. This can be deadly for a sandbox campaign. I have found two solutions to this problem in my campaign:

1. Recurring villains and big bosses are ideal. They get mentioned at least once every session. Their goons can be defeated, their lieutenants keep showing up, they keep looming in the distance. The lich queen of grey elves. I think that an invisible enemy doesn’t do the same job. We want players to engage with their nemesis. How can they hate unknown forces? There can be betrayal at the very end, there can be reveals further down the line, but in the end, the players must feel like there is a constant, personal threat by a limited number of known enemies that they can focus on.
2. Achievable goals are the positive counterpart to villains. I present these as opportunities for players. There’s a dead god and some people still pray to him. Maybe a player takes it upon himself to revive the dead god. There are temples to a god of justice and rumors of her paladins. Maybe a player want to pursue this? Maybe a dead character can be offered this choice in order to get revived? I think the key part here is that these are options presented to the players as part of the setting. These are not part of character creation. I also think it’s important to keep introducing more of these goals such that players have a real choice. Don’t invest a lot of work into these options before a player has picked it. Start developing it once players are hooked.

Addictive elements to game play. Yes, it’s mean. It’s called the variable ratio reinforcement schedule: a reinforcement schedule in which the number of responses necessary to produce reinforcement varies from trial to trial, according to Wikipedia. I feel that’s why unbalanced encounters are fun. There can be two or three sessions where practically no treasure is found and characters gain less than a hundred experience points each and other sessions where the major hoard is found and each character gets a thousand experience points or more. Knowing this puts some of them on edge. They want to make sure not to miss the one gold session that will pay off big time.

I hope these points help you adjust your expectations and help you increase player engagement in your campaigns.

Tags: RPG Sandbox advice short

Recently, Rachel wondered about Warrior women: how to include female characters in a historical RPG?

I left a coment:

I think I’d go for genre conventions, thus if we’re playing a historical RPG, then the histories written by men are my guide. For my Pendragon campaign, for example, I felt that the fiction and the campaign focuses on the deeds of men. The rules also have a separate section for female characters that I could have ignored but which decided to keep in the game, wondering whether they’d add variety. Later I realized that it was going to be hard for me to run adventures mixing martial prowess and female characters created with these rules and so I ended up with an all-male cast of characters.

For me, that is a reason not to play a historical RPG. I’d prefer a fantasy or alternate history version where we either have characters of all genders or the game is about the inequality itself. Much like I don’t like to have slaves in my games unless we’re playing a game about fighting slavers.

I don’t enjoy importing real world problems into my games unless we can engage with them.

If we create characters again, I think simply allowing female knights using the exact same rules as male knights is what I’m going to do.

Just to be clear I practically don’t play strictly historical role-playing games. We play in Fantasy Japan, we play in the Gaslight Twenties where H.P. Lovecraft was right, we play in a D&D madness that is but vaguely inspired by the medieval ages and the classification of polearms—none of that requires any gender imbalance.

An excellent rule of thumb I like to pursue in my fantasy role-playing games is something I once read on a blog post elsewhere. When introducing a non-player character, roll a d6:

I remember when I was young, all my characters were between 16 and 18. These days all my characters are in their thirties. All my non-player characters where men unless they were a witch. Rolling a die forces me to randomize where I apparently have prejudice. That is a good thing.

Tags: RPG

I have a cold. Third day at home. No more fever today, but my nose still seems to contain more on the inside than one would have thought possible when looking at it from the outside.

When I’m awake, I play a lot of Skyrim. Amazing how closely the weather seems to match the weather outside. Switzerland in winter… To be more precise, all the big cities are in the flat lands north of the Alps and south of the Jura Mountains (a bunch of hills, we’d say). In winter, the sky is usually overcast. If you want to see the sun, you have to go up. We live under a leaden sky. In the cities, the snow melts quickly. Outside, patches of white on brown grass.

Tags: Life Switzerland Skyrim

Amit Patel writes about the move from unstructured to structured information. He says he loved to start writing in an unstructured environment such as Google Wave, work, comment, threads – but at the very end it was hard to move towards a structured set of documents:

I want a tool that lets me hold unstructured conversations, then extract portions of conversations that led to a task, and move them into my task tracking tool. Unstructured comes first for me; structure is what I add later, once I understand what structure I want. Databases and most structured tools I use get this wrong — they ask me to decide the structure first. Spreadsheets, Wikis, Wave, and most unstructured tools also get this wrong — they let me easily work without structure, but don’t offer me a transition to something structured. – Amit Patel [1]

Alex commented on the page and said: As a wiki developer I’m interested in this how to move unstructured page content into a structure.

He came up with a few use-cases:

1. A page full of brainstorming, thread mode stuff, interjections. You’d like to select a region on the page, pick “Copy to new page…” from a context menu, type a new name and do it.
2. One a page, you’d like to tag a page without having to edit it.
3. You’d one page with a hierarchical list of links to server as an outline. On any page, you have a link that allows you to look at this outline and use checkboxes (or radiobuttons?) to select where in the outline this particular page belongs.

I started to think of things I use that are already somewhat there.

I wrote a front-end for a wiki that essentially collects bookmarks. Note the link to a bookmarklet and the source code at the bottom. Take a look at the actual wiki collecting all these links. Note how the links on its HomePage and the unordered lists on the linked pages define the outline that is shown by the add-link script. Note that the wiki can be told to reassemble all these top-level pages, too. (Look for the “All In One” page.)

What do you think—is this a way out of the impasse?

People keep saying “reworking is hard” (→ LackOfReworking, AttackTheDocumentMode). And it is. People don’t do it. But imagine people trying to “rework” a conversation they’re having. Nobody does this! People sometimes “rework” conversations when they record interviews and rework those into articles to publish. But it’s rare compared to the gazillion of other forms of communications we have.

Let’s think of some:

People will summarize – and selecting parts of a page and saving it under a new name supports that. There’s an unsolved problem, unfortunately. The summary doesn’t belong to the LinkLanguage, since the old, messy page gets to keep the page name. Perhaps our support for summarizing should move the current page to the discussion page and just keep the summary.

People will reorder information – and moving pages to nodes on an outline supports that. The page itself remains untouched, of course. All we’re doing is putting a link into the appropriate nested list.

People will categorize

People will subscribe (or “follow”, or mark in some way to stay abreast)

People will share in a broadcasting way (think of “retweeting” etc).

WikipediaRefactoring

In WikiPedia, refactoring can be frequent, especially on pages where many people want to control the narrative. Or. where rules tend to dictate a structure. WikiPedia appears to be a rare exception among wiki sites, however.

WhyLackOfRefactoring

Why does it happen? Why is refactoring not common in wikis?

Do people see the activity as a “defecting” in cooperation dynamics? (meaning, do people see refactoring your work as a non-cooperative activity, and leaving your contribution/“voice” intact as a cooperative approach?). Do people need permission to change contents of wikis, in order to feel “ok” doing it?

Is there a way to set a recurring example, where at least 3 or more people consistently refactor as a primary activity?

Learn more...

Over on the Hill Cantons, Chris wonders about Mastering Wilderness Description at the Table. Back in 2008, I wrote Keep It Short. I still try.

He pointed to the opening paragraphs of The Willows by Algernon Blackwood and illustrated how he’d strip it down. I’m willing to go further than that, however.

Here’s what I wrote:

In my experience, brevity is the most important. Players care about doing things, they care about treasure, monsters, interactions. That’s why they are perfectly happy with this: “After leaving Vienna, the Danube spreads out and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles. You see a vast sea of low willow-bushes before you…”

I guess it has an anchor (Vienna), an object (Danube), a change (spread), nature (swamp), some mood (miles upon miles), some detail (low willow-bushes), direct addressing (you see) and little else.

In terms of process, the most important feedback is what players are doing. As soon as one of the seems to be paying attention to something else, I cut the description short and go directly to “something happens!” or “what do you do?” Then, upon enquiry, I improvise more detail as required. This is rare and confirms my suspicion: my players value brevity above all.

When I wrote Caverns of Slime, I was also trying to keep things short. When I wrote How To Write A Module, I said: “In order to further aid improvisation every location starts with a sentence or two setting the mood, a list of impressions (sounds, sights), a list of names to use—little things that I’d appreciate as a referee.”

Here’s an example:

“The tunnel opens into a big cavern. On the ceiling, you see a glowing city with light bubbles and hanging bridges and gray webbing holding everything together.”

At the far end of the cave lies a lake. The stone wall rising from the water is wet. A dark fungus moss grows here, fed by water raining down from a black hole above. Flying or climbing up this wet tunnel will lead you to the realm of the Shroom Lord.

• spider webs cover every hanging house
• rope bridges connect platforms
• this huge mass of webbing is secured by glowing glas balloons
• water is diverted from the Fungus Falls at the back and distributed using wooden half pipes
• occasionally ropes reach down to the cave floor below
• the cave floor itself is covered in broken bones, the fallen remains of what the spider people feed upon

This city is one of the few places down here where the party can make friends and rest.

The above is then followed by events (encounters, monsters) and non-player characters (in this case, a spell-casting aranea).

Tags: RPG short

  I was talking on my Facebook about some difficulties I was having
  writing out my life philosophy.  I work on creating new societies,
  and I'd like to be able to succinctly share my own thoughts on my
  orientation towards life.

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Peoples, I've started work on tkhelp.  This is a tkinter support module.  I'm actively looking for collaborators, so please email me (LionKimbro@gmail.com) or call me (206.427.2545) if you want to participate in some way..!

Here are the links of import:

• Google Doc: about the project  -- policy, expectations, goals, ...
• Github  -- the source code

Here's a little bit about what it does.

Here's a basic setup:

>>> import tkinter
>>> import tkhelp
>>> tkhelp.setup()
True
>>>

That that setup() call does for you, is initialize the global Tk() instance, and then withdraws the window that (for whatever reason) tkinter or tk automatically assumes you'll be wanting.

(If you did want that window, call tkhelp.setup(withdraw=False)instead).

Now, create a tkinter tree...

>>> toplevel = tkinter.Toplevel(name="toplevel")
>>> b = tkinter.Button(toplevel, text="b", name="b")
>>> b.pack()

And, ask to see the widget hierarchy:

>>> tkhelp.print_hierarchy()
** tk [6095814] <Tk> **                           200x200+0+0
     toplevel [6817202] <Toplevel>                116x26+25+25
       b [919100] <Button>                        18x26+49+0

("print_hierarchy()" is a bit wordy;  you can also just use "hr()".)

The number within the brackets [] is the tk widget ID#.  The string within <> is the tk widget type.  The values on the right are width,height,x,y.  The indentation shows the nesting.

There are also functions for easily retrieving widgets, and getting information about them.

>>> tkhelp.wid("b")
919100
>>> tkhelp.fullpath("b")
'.toplevel.b'
>>> tkhelp.name("b")
'b'
>>> tkhelp.wclass("b")
'Button'

Note that, in all of these examples, I used the tk "name" for the widget "b" to identify it.  But you can also just as easily use the ID for the widget, or the full path.

>>> tkhelp.fullpath(919100)
'.toplevel.b'
>>> tkhelp.wid(".toplevel.b")
919100

("wid" is short for "widget id."  I'd use "id", but it's a built-in Python function.)

Of course, you'll want to access the widgets themselves, as well.

>>> tkhelp.find(".")
<tkinter.Tk object at 0x0000000002554390>
>>> tkhelp.find("toplevel")
<tkinter.Toplevel object at 0x00000000026A4588>
>>> tkhelp.find("b")
<tkinter.Button object at 0x00000000026BDB00>

These are very, very rudimentary capabilities -- and yet, incredibly helpful if you are working with tkinter.

This module is all about making tkinter easy to use, without putting a heavy layer on top of tkinter itself.  I'd rather give increased visibility to what is going on in tkinter, than put a layer on top.

If you are interested in learning about where I am going with this, or interested in contributing, please consult the Google Doc I've created for this project, or leave comment on this post.  I can be reached also at LionKimbro@gmail.com, or 206.427.2545 (Seattle, USA).

Download the code at github.

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Has anybody written a general tkinter assistance module?

• supplies functions/tools to examine the widget hierarchy from the shell
• wraps idle binding and .after scheduling, so that you can review bindings (like a task manager), see what's going on, pause/continue (control) idle executions
• setup Tk & withdraw in 1 call
• return the full path for a widget
• standardize access to the text content of Text, Entry, etc.,.
• ... (and anything else that makes life with tkinter generally easier)

Has anyone created such a thing?

I'm somewhat baffled that tkinter has been around for more than a decade, and yet, to my knowledge, nobody has written a module like this.  The tkinter field seems to me to be stuck in time.

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The battle contenders:

• XML-RPC
• SOAP
• REST
• JSON-RPC

It is the year 2012.

It appears to me that this is what the reputations are like:

 Technology    General Opinion    Lion's Opinion  Difference        
============  =================  ==============  ===================
XML-RPC       0   (neutral)      +++ (great)     undervalued       
SOAP          --- (evil!)        --- (evil!)     valued correctly  
REST          +++ (great!)       ++  (good)      slightly overvalued
JSON-RPC      ++  (wow!)         +   (ok)        slightly overvalued

It is the year 2012.

One of the questions people asked over and over, when comparing REST & XML-RPC, is this:  "What's XML-RPC have that REST doesn't?"

  Q: What does XML-RPC have that REST Doesn't?

Here's my answer:

  A: Primitive typed data transported effortlessly.

When you use XML-RPC, you basically get a wormhole from one environment to another.  The data types (numbers, lists, strings, dictionaries,) all transfer seamlessly.  XML-RPC takes care of encoding the data types, and then un-encoding the data types.

When you use REST, you have to define an XML structure for encoding your data, and then you have to define another XML structure for receiving your response.

But with XML-RPC, you don't have to do either of those things.  Because this is what you have with XML-RPC that REST doesn't have.

So stop asking that question!

REST & XML-RPC:  Different Purposes.

• XML-RPC gives you native function calls across the Internet.
• REST gives you data structures across the Internet.

Native Function Calls are Fine.

There is nothing wrong at all with using native function calls.

I have heard REST people argue on esoteric lines that we should only be using data structures and "representational state transfer" and such gobbledygook.

Nonsense;  There are plenty of great times when you just want a simple API that just works.

And that's what I've encountered so far with XML-RPC:  simple APIs that just work.

It takes near zero effort at all to set them up and make them work, on both the server and the client sides.

I work with service APIs all the time.  Sadly, they are in SOAP.  So many times, I'm working with them, and I think:  "Geeze, if this were XML-RPC?  This would just work.  There is zero reason that they need to detail the nuts and bolts so extensively here.  Just accept a key-value dictionary, rather than deeply defining these complexities with namespaces, nested types, and on and on."

However, I do not ever think to myself, "Gee, I wish this were REST, and that I was writing out code to encode and decode XML structures."

Yes, it is easier to write a "simple" XML encoder and decoder for basic data, but even simple things take time.  Far easier still is to have primitive types go out, and to receive primitive types coming in.  Because then I don't need to write an XML encoder or decoder at all.

Again:  That's what XML-RPC gets me.

REST is good too -- for what it's for.

I have nothing against REST.  I love making a GET and seeing exactly the data structure I asked for.  And then I love pulling out the URL for the next chunk of data -- a pointer value within the data structure.

Wonderful!

You can traverse the data structures in so many ways!

But you know what it's not?  It's not an automatically functioning API call.

So when I just want to call "server.creditAccount('lion', 300)", it's easier to just use XML-RPC.  I don't have to think about POSTs, I don't have to formulate an XML data format;  I just ... call it.

A Brief Note on JSON-RPC.

Great!  It's...  exactly the same as XML-RPC.

Except it's JSON!  Everybody loves JSON, right?  Primitive types!  Awesome!

But how can people be soooo excited when it's JSON, and soooo blase (or worse: "That should be REST!") when it's XML-RPC?

I'm pretty sure that the reason people are excited is because of the "JSON sugar" halo effect.

But really, with both of these RPC mechanisms, you never ever see the underlying transport.  Unlike SOAP, they work so great, and so "there's-only-one-way-to-do-it", that the implementations just work.

So who cares at all whether it's XML-RPC or JSON-RPC?

Again:  When they work, (and they do both work,) you never ever ever see the underlying transport.

I don't care either way about XML-RPC or JSON-RPC;  I just want things to work.  If the JSON excitement is enough to get JSON-RPC implemented and defaulted everywhere, fine.

But if your system permits XML-RPC, but not JSON-RPC, and you're wanting JSON-RPC, -- don't hold out.  Don't go, "Oh, I won't do this.  That is XML-RPC.  I heard that XML-RPC isn't RESTful."

A Wish.

The only thing I wish was easier in XML-RPC, and perhaps in JSON-RPC too (haven't had as much experience with it), is: SSL.

Just make the SSL easier to negotiate, and we're golden.

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  After Sakura and I made the Pinkie Pie party, (4 days, nonstop motion,) we spent 2 days winding down.

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  I'm over the hangover, now comes the clean up..!  {;)}=

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There's a theme that's been moving around in my thoughts a lot lately:  It's the theme of the body.

A post or an event or both is stirring in me; In broad strokes, it will reference:

• Embodiment & Spiritual Reality
• Embodiment & Spiritual Practice
• Embodiment & the Arts
• Embodiment & User Interface
• Embodiment & Sexuality
• Embodiment & Charisma
• Emboidment & Ideas
• Embodiment & Creativity
• Embodiment & Writing
• Embodiment & Chakras (New Age & Science)
• Maps of the Body/Bodies

And finally, and perhaps most significantly to me:

• The Limits and Traps of Embodiment

The last part will make use of solid criticism of the Esalen Institute (California New Age equivalent of a "Think Tank") as part of a broader criticism of (what I'll call) "The Embodiment Movement."  I will juxtapose with Damanhur, to demonstrate the difference between a society of Embodiment, and a society of Embodied Ideas.

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One of the themes I work on is creating new mediums for programming.

But what about in the mean-time, where we only have plain text?  Well, I think it's underutilized.  We can out-Lisp Lisp by string interpretation.

I've written before tkinter-based code before for creating GUIs out of text representations.

X- Tagged Text Browser ---------------------------------------------X
|                                                                   |
|  tags: [.tags_input........]    "- text_out -------------------"  |
|                                 |                              |  |
|  found:                         |                              |  |
|  [=entries_found===========]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [                         ]    |                              |  |
|  [=========================]    "------------------------------"  |
|                                 (save_edits)              (quit)  |
X-------------------------------------------------------------------X

(A GUI, represented in ASCII text.)

One of the fundamental mechanisms making this possible is code for reading (say) 2-Dimensional representations in characters of rectangles.

I think I have, 3 times, for different libraries, written 2-D rectangle recognition code.

Let me tell you, it's a real bore.

Here is an example of what some such code looks like:

# Extend right, from the top-left.
        # It is possible that there is a label here.
        while extend_right.scan_char(h_char, 1, 0) is not None:
            pass
        if extend_right.at_topright_corner():
            label = None
        else:
            extend_right.scan_char(" ")
            label = extend_right.read_label()
            if label == "":
                return None
            extend_right.scan_char(" ")
            while extend_right.scan_char(h_char, 1, 0) is not None:
                pass
            if not extend_right.at_topright_corner():
                return None
        r_corner_char = extend_right.char()
        if r_corner_char is None:
            return None
        # Extend down.
        left = self.PRN.cursor(self.PSX, self.PSY+1)
        right = self.PRN.cursor(extend_right.PSX,
                                     extend_right.PSY+1)
        if ((left.char() == l_corner_char) and
            (right.char() == r_corner_char) and
            left.at_bottomleft_corner() and
            right.at_bottomright_corner()):
            l_v_char = None
            r_v_char = None
        else:
            l_v_char = left.char()
            r_v_char = right.char()
            if l_v_char is None: return None
            if r_v_char is None: return None
            while ((left.scan_char(l_v_char, 0, 1) is not None) and
                   (right.scan_char(r_v_char, 0, 1) is not None)):
                if (left.at_bottomleft_corner()
                    and right.at_bottomright_corner()):
                    break
            if ((left.char() !=  l_corner_char)
                or (right.char() != r_corner_char)):
                return None

(This is just the beginning.  It goes on and on, and then there are the support functions, and then there are the variants, ...)

It's boring.

It's the programming equivalent of shoveling dirt.

While I worked on the code, over and over and over again, and painstakingly debugged it, I kept thinking, "I need regexes...  I need regexes...  I need some kind of 2-dimensional regex..."

But every time I looked at how regex languages, I thought of two things + 1 conclusion:

1. Boy, this is really complicated.  It's like writing freaking compiler optimizations.
2. This is really boring stuff.
3. I don't have time for this.  <- the conclusion

I'd think it over off and on across time.  And then recently, I got an idea how to do it pretty easily.

I realized that there is a very small set of things that I am doing, and a fairly easy way to make the machinery for it.

So here's the language I came up with:

c type      flags description
= ========= ===== ====================================================================
> direction       head right
< direction       head left
^ direction       head up
v direction       head down
0 tar             start a measurement
I measure         1st time: store measurement I,  further times: require equivalence
J measure         1st time: store measurement J,  further times: require equivalence
K measure         1st time: store measurement K,  further times: require equivalence
S recording       1st: start recording, 2nd: stop and store, 3rd: start anew, ...
R require         require the next character (literal)
r req-meta        r! = req. nothing;  r[A-Z] -- req. from set;  r[#] -- req. from recorded
! move      ----- go until requirements can't be met, then pause
. move      1E--- take a step if requirement is met, otherwise: ERR out
, move      1---- take a step if requirement is met, otherwise, pause
X accept          all done!  accept what was found

Then I wrote an "engine" that reads the instructions, takes a function for reading a character from a position, takes a start position, and the character sets fed in (for lower-case alphabet "r" requirements,) ...

...and it worked!

So the code for scanning a rectangle is like so:

R+>. 0R-!I R+v. 0R|!J R+<. 0R-!I R+^. 0R|!J X

Here's one of the rectangles that it scans:

+----------------------------------+
   |                                  |
   |     x--------------------x       |
   |     |                    |       |
   |     |                    |       |
   |     x--------------------x       |
   |                                  |
   +----------------------------------+

I used that in one of the test cases.

Reading from the start, it says, "Require a +.  Head to the right.  Eat one character, or fail.  Now start measuring.  Require a dash, and go as far as you can.  Save the distance traveled in register I.  Now read a +, but head down this time.  Start measuring again.  Head down, gobbling up the pipes. Mark how far you went in register J.  Gobble up a +, heading left.  Start measuring again.  Gobble all the dashes.  Now, check your distance with register I.  Is it good?  Keep going, otherwise -- abort, this isn't the rectangle we're wanting.  Now gobble the +, heading up.  Start measuring again, and eat all the pipes headed up.  Check against register J.  Good?  Ok, you're done!  Accept."

If you wrap the whole expression in S's ("store this to a list of expressions,") you get in your response:

"'+----------------------------------+||||||+----------------------------------+||||||"

...which is a pretty dang cool way of verifying that your code works, if you ask me:  a complete track record of everywhere that the code went.

It's been a while since I've blogged about programming, and I don't really have a storage system worked out for posting & sharing the code.

But, here's the header (and docstring):

@note_function("2d", "space 2d line lines recognition recognizer ascii " +
               "character characters machine machines abstract")
def recognizer_2d(instructions, read_pos_fn, start_pos=rt_zero,
                  registers=None):
    """Abstract 2d recognizer.
    
    read_pos_fn(rt_pos): -> return a character representing the position;
                            will be compared against the requirement
    
         RC>.  0R-!I  RCv.
            C---------C
      0R:!J :         : 0R:!J
    (checks):         :  (records)
            C---------C
         RC^.  0R-!I  RC<.
    
    Returns:  dictionary on success;
              None on failure
    
      {"I":  goal for I measurement (or None)
       "J":  goal for J measurement (or None)
       "pos":   position rectangle
       "step":  step rectangle,
       "recorded_text": list of recorded strings}
    
    Spirograph pg. 48
    """

Note that: because it takes a function to identify characters, this function can be used with any 2-dimensionally indexed schema.

For example, you could use it with graphics, by supplying a function that returns a "X" for a non-black pixel, and " " for a black pixel.  (Or some related scheme of translating pixel colors into character codings.)  Then the very same function (and codes) can be used to identify rectangles (and what have you other simple/rectilinear shapes) in graphical images.

This is the first time in a very long time I have posted about my coding adventures online.

In particular, I am writing for Planet Python, because Python is my favorite programming language in the world.

For those who don't know me, my interests are in what I call "Visionary Programming" and "Improvisational Programming."

That is, I like to write code to support a way of programming that allows you to get from a visionary idea, to an implementation, in as short a time as possible.  (For example, I wrote the engine here in 1 unfocused lazy day that involved a lot (too much) of listening to Dubstep on Youtube...  I probably put in 3-4 hours of real work on it.)

Much of this involves working on remaking the representation of software ideas.  When you have a solid representation, (which can take some time to find,) you can then experiment and find alternatives very quickly, and flow around like water.  It's a lot of fun, and really gets to the magic of programming: the "Wow!"

Please let me know if you had a good time reading this.  Thank you!

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  2011-09-20 7:00PM Tuesday -- Jigsaw Renaissance

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(This is a post that I sent out to the davinci mailing list;  The email list for Jigsaw Renaissance.)

(If you are in or near Seattle, and interested in participating in any of these, please contact me here or by email or by phone [206.427.2545], and please tell me which one(s) you are interested and availabilities.)

  ** NOTEBOOKS **

Post-Script:

When you contact me, please let me know (most important:) Which event caught your interest?

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Boy, has a lot happened.  (And: Not happened.)  Okay, let's see.  I'm posting right now about engagement.

Three posts that are related, that have come up for me:

• Seb Paquet noted this post: "Quests as Organizing Principle."  This one makes me think immediately of Jigsaw Renaissance and the question of "How do we get people active?"  It is interesting to me that the "moonshots" listed (experiment frequently, internal market, communities of passion) are all core elements of the working of the Federation of Damanhur.
• AlexSchroeder noted Engagement Economy on CommunityWiki:EngagementEconomy.  This looks like it has a lot of good ideas in it.
• What the Web Should Be - I don't remember who I saw linking to this, but I remember thinking:  "This is a question and an activity/experience that generates the kind of emotional response and resonance that we're looking for."

I've had extraordinary difficulty getting the "Metaphoric Projects" run going at Jigsaw Renaissance.  I think the material is good, but I'm having difficulty getting people to come to it.  People come, but they are always friends.  Friends are incredibly helpful, but if people are coming to the event just to see me, or because they want to support me, it doesn't make for the right experience.

I've roughly identified possible failure points:

• Advertisement:  "Does this advertisement produce something of interest?"
• Aura:  "Do people believe that if they come to Lion's event, that something exciting will happen?"
• Spiritual:  "Am I creating a second-hand experience?"

Now I am stepping back and re-evaluating everything.

I haven't emailed James yet, just haven't had the time since returning from California last Sunday evening.

But what has been developing in the back of my mind is: ...

Shoot, no time.  Well, I'm just going to post this as is.

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I'm typing this from my dad's living room, in Watsonville, CA.

My dad passed away last Thursday.  I took the first flight I could, but I couldn't get down in time -- by the time the doctors saw that his situation was much worse than they had thought, it was just a matter of a few hours.

My family, the family that I grew up in, has never been very public.  We have always kept things close to the chest.  Nor do I feel particularly gifted at oratory.  So, no speech.  I'll just say that I love my dad, and my dad loves me, this has always been the case, and this always will be the case.

References:

• George MacDonald, writing "To Mrs. Norman MacLeod":
  "Either one must say and the other must believe that there is ground for everlasting exultation, or comfort is but the wiping of tears that for ever flow."
• Meditation XVII, John Donne
  "The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another."
• Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night:
  "Do not go gentle into that good night,
  Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

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Aaron asked a good question after the prior post:  "Why did the others fail and why would one we create not fail?  If it does not fail, can it be better?"

Where communities fall apart:

I think most communities fail because of the basic four:  money, power, love, and sex.  Tamera reports in their early days (2 communes prior) that they were heavily ecologically focused.  They almost blew apart because of interpersonal problems.  They completely shifted their focus:  How can we live together?  And focused almost exclusively on those questions.  This work quickly showed solid results:  They survived, thrived, and grew.

They developed insights into interpersonal problems and global war.  "How can activists save the world from war, when activists themselves are involved in such daily mundane dispute with one another?"  Things like taking out the dishes, but also things like jealousy, leadership, power, allocations, etc.,.

I believe this is the key thing.

After that, there is also economic self-sufficiency.  If I gave two pillars, it would be (I) interpersonal relationships (money, sex, love, power,) and (II) economic self-sufficiency, or the capacity to generate business.  This was the conclusion Armen and I came to, reguardless, after the House of Clay blew up.

This is more tactically focused here:  What are the fission points, where people come to live together?

Where movements fall apart:

But more broadly, -- why did (say) communism fail?  Why was(/is?) the anarchist community movement -- so full of good ideas and ideals -- so impotent?  These are the two strains we inherited in the 20th century from the 19th century.

I believe the anarchist strains reached many critical insights, but were crippled by discussion, conversation, and political theory.  If you want to talk and argue about political theory, Anarchist groups are a great place to go:  You can argue ideology till the cows come home.

As for the communist strains, they were crippled by violence, and overpowering hunger for state power.  The result is obvious in hindsight.  It turns out: you need a theory, and you need to be willing to move slowly.  The greatest lesson I take from the communist strains is that things grow organically.

Even those anarchist who went experiential -- and I am now thinking of Twin Oaks specifically, but I think this is true of the entire category, perhaps even 50-90% of North American communities, ecovillages, etc., -- even those anarchists who went empirical -- I think they tended to fall to the same problems: talk, talk, talk, argue, argue, argue, separation, separation, separation.

Spirit & Imagination

It's at this point where draw a line around Damanhur and Tamera specifically.  If there are others, I don't know them.

This is about enthusiasm, inspiration, creativity, and sex.

This is where things start to get "hot," vital, and charismatic.

The thing is -- we can't afford to make systems out of either life or ourselves.

What I mean is:  So often, when I read about efforts that are creating societies, I find that spirituality is instrumentalized.

That is, it is treated as if:

1. The human being has an irrational desire to create art.
2. This irrational desire is pleasant.  It makes good warm feelings.
3. Stopping up that desire has produced a lot of unpleasantness.  Our society doesn't fund artists.
4. So, let's make a society where arts are celebrated.
5. Then we'll be happy.

Or let's say:

1. Human beings seem to bond better when there is some sort of spiritual belief system connecting them.
2. We really need to make a happier, healthy, more wholesome humanity.
3. Well, let's make up an arbitrary spiritual belief system, with basic wholesome values, so that we can live in harmony.

In each case, spirituality and art are "pieces" or "objects" or even "obstacles" on the way to Placating the Order, Placating the Harmony, or Getting My Good Night's Sleep.

This is where I differentiate between the Anarchist traditions and the Spiritual societies that I care about (like Damanhur, like Tamera.)

The Anarchist traditions are by history (and to a degree, essential ideology) anti-spirituality, anti-theology, anti-church.  So recent flirtations with indigenous cultures and spiritualities appear to me to be fairly "new" (last 5 decades?) for the Anarchist tradition.  I would point to Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.  Anarchists still very much feel this trauma, though.  And Anarchists are still very much afraid of Spirituality.

So I think the closest that the Anarchist can come to Spirit, Spirituality, in most cases, is a sort of:  "Well, we might need this, so let's manage it, let's contain it.  We can make a nice garden, and call it our "sacred" garden, and if you have your own garden and it's different, we'll let that be sacred too.  Because really, we don't want to be divided by ideas of the sacred -- we're tired of that:  Can't we all just get along?"

What happens here, though, is that we've split ourselves off from true participation in life, turned ourselves into Sims with "art-meters" that just need to be sufficiently high (for placation,) and turned life into a matrix.  There is no inner fulfilment here, and we yank the meaning out of life.  "But at least the war is over."

Maybe.

But perhaps what's going on here, is that there's a fear -- a fear that Spirit is "too hard," or that life itself is "too divisive," or that Reality is just too hard for humans to connect with.

I am of a radically different position.

The questions of the Spirit are primary.  They are the key to the future.

Here I would rather answer the question, -- not "Why did societies fail?", but rather:  "What are tragedies of prior religious and spiritual movements?"

There are some fairly obvious ones:

• War:  Warring between religions.  Intolerance of difference.
  
  • Contrast:   Indigenous cultures did not go to war against each other over religious beliefs.
• Ossification:  Embrace of the book over the spiritual truth.
  • Contrast:  Esoteric traditions, such as ECKANKAR.
  • How you get from "Man's problem is that he knows in his heart the difference between Good and Evil,"(Genesis 3:22) to "We can't know evil, unless it's told to us from a book," I have no idea.  Really!
• Otherworldliness:  Totalizing priorities around the afterlife, an afterlife completely disconnected from our activities in this world.
• Dependence:  Dependence on others;  Not taking responsibility for the construction of life within ourselves.  Relying on others to tell us the difference between good & evil, right & wrong, the path to take.  Reliance on priests, rather than inquiring into the nature of truth ourselves -- and religions that support this.

I just pulled these out of a hat;  There are 100 more things in there, at least.

I think we're treating art and spirituality as little holes that just need a little bit of sand pushed into them, and then the road will be smooth.

My difference is that I think that spirituality is the road.  "Art," a word I increasingly grow uncomfortable (because it works like a cover of the interesting things inside,) is the vehicle of language for communication with divine forces and practical new realities.  Art is not for decoration.  Art isn't even art.  All of life is pounding at us from the inside, trying to get us to listen, and "art" is the word we use to brush them aside and force our network of highways onto the world in its place.  (Who Framed Roger Rabbit? articulates this beautifully.)

This is the direction of the future;  It is utterly clear to me.  It's all a matter of midwifing ourselves, being baptised by the spirit, now.

I'd write more, but I need to go now.

You can make societies that are non-spiritual.  But I see no value in the effort.  I don't see how it can touch me.

"Foxes have their holes, and birds have their nests, but where does the son of man lay his head?"

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I have lots of little pieces for you today.

• I've ordered several books for several people in response to emails from my last post.
  • These offers are standing.  If anybody wants one of the books I talk about in these posts, let me know, and I'll have Amazon ship a copy straight to your address.
  • I do request that you write in any books that I send you -- and I request that you put your contact information at the beginning.  These are social books for social purposes.  I also request that you either give them back to me when you are "done," (for a time at least.)  If it is impractical to give them back to me, give them to someone else -- because, frankly, that's what I'm going to do myself, regardless.  The key thing is to keep the books in circulation, and contribute our experiences to the books and to each other.
  • The books that I bought for people since my last post were all Dieter Duhm's:  The Sacred Matrix (x1), Future Without War (x1), and Eros Unredeemed (x2).  I hope to build a library of the books that I mention, and keep them on constant rotation.  In the past, I've lent out Damanhur: The Story of the Extraordinary Italian Artistic and Spiritual Community, which has been my guide for a number of years, and which I still draw incredible value from.  John Dugan started me on this one, when he bought 5 copies for Spiriata, and we all read the book together.
• There's a website I want to point you all to:
  • Mettanokit: Changing the World - A Vision
  • Why do I want to show this to you?
    • Because, usually, when I'm talking about New Societies, I make such heavy reference to Damanhur and Tamera, Damanhur and Tamera, Damanhur and Tamera, that I think people go, "Oh, well, here are two groups that have this vision, but really -- is this a general global vision?"
      • And I'm always trying to say, "This isn't just two societies.  This isn't about Damanhur, or Tamera specifically.  This is about reality - esoteric reality, Reality with a capital R.  This is about the dreams inside the heart of the human being."
        • At Tamera, they call it "The entelechial form of life."
        • At Damanhur, they simply call it "The Real."
      • I'm always trying to say: I don't want you to see this as "these people" and "those people" and "that philosophy."  Rather, I'm trying to get you to make a personal connection between what's in here (pointing to your chest,) and what's out there (pointing to activity in the world.)
        • Because your heart and spirit and liveliness and dreams and vitality are full participants with the world.  You are a full participant in this world.  You aren't a side-show.  You aren't an NPC.  Life loves you and needs you and sustains you.
          
          • I know it doesn't seem this way, because it seems like every moment, the way our world is structured right now -- there's a sign everywhere that you are one of the least important things in the world.  And our whole world and philosophical systems religious or naturalistic conspire to tell you: "you aren't important, you aren't a participant, you are like a spec of dust."  You could go one way or the other way, and it doesn't matter.  Or if it matters, but it just matters because you're going to be condemned if you do something wrong.  But that isn't what's true.
      • What I mean is that if you think really hard about "What can the world be like?  What is an extraordinary, meaningful, heart-based, desirable, generous world?", -- if you apply your intelligence and your dreams and your heart to this question -- I think that you will come to a surprisingly similar answer.  And I don't think that that is an accident.
    • So here's a clear instance of other people talking about such things.
    • Honestly, I go by stuff like this all the time.
    • And as I've said before, this is historically what Communists and the Anarchists have reached for.
    • It's because it's real.
    • You can turn on Star Trek and see it.  There it is, sitting in our hearts, waiting, waiting, waiting for us to act.
• One of the phrases I am playing with lately is, "We can achieve new societies within this lifetime."
  • I was reading Evolver, and someone was saying, "But a spiritual revolution is way off, in the future, maybe generations away, after an alien interventions, after system collapse, after the chaos," -- and I remembered what my teachers in ECKANKAR and Surat Shabda Yoga always taught me...
    • Lessons of the esoteric traditions:
      
      • "Spiritual Freedom is possible in this lifetime."
      • "You can realize God in this lifetime."
      • "You can have a direct personal understanding of these truths, free of dogma, without intermediary, from within yourself."
  • ...and I realized the symmetry.
    • The religions have always been saying, "God is for after you die.  Just obey and everything will be good for you in the next life."
    • And so with the social body, people are saying, "A society of dream is for after your lifetime.  Just obey and follow the main stream, and everything will be good for the people in the future, when the great dream becomes real.  Eventually.  For somebody."
    • More symmetry:  The outer and the inner mirror one another.  The spiritual inner life and the spiritual outer life are connected joint by joint, chakra by chakra, node by node.
  • So I'm realizing, just how essential it is, that we come to see the remaking of our society as a fundamental task that we all participate in.  That it is our job, our destiny, to participate in.
  • So how do we do this?  I have a few ideas.
    
    • Consciously remember the society of dream, and the making of the society of dream.
    • Challenge the myriad forces that say, "You can't do that!", or "You shouldn't do that!"
    • Reflect, within ourselves, listening for the voice of the divine speaking to us within -- speaking to us always, at all times, personally and cosmically.
    • Draw connections between the inner spiritual path of a person, and the outer spiritual development of the world -- and vice versa.
    • Bring immediacy to the questions of life and meaning.  Everything else is sleepiness, lulling in a dream world.
    • Bring realism to our quest.  We cannot afford to continue (what Damanhur rightly called) "the great, crazy dream of Waste."
  • So I will be saying to people now:  "We can achieve new societies within this lifetime."  It is meaningful, and it is worthwhile to do so.  It requires effort and working with others, but the effort is rewarding, and you are not doing this alone --  The spirit moves us, and the hearts of the other people engaged with us as well.  There are people further ahead and many people behind -- we can move, we can go in a working heart-sensed direction.

Ah, shoot, I have so much more to say, on (what can appear on the surface to be about:) radically different things.  But I need to go now.

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I'm adjusting to the dramatic shift in time-availability that comes with working a 40-hour work week.  When you factor in all the suplemental factors, I think it's more like a 70-hour consumption.  It's not just transportation (5 hours,)  other inefficiencies creep in too:  Lunch breaks (5 more hours) are not the same as "usable time."  More formal dress requires care.  The relationships and situations and things of work occupy your thoughts and your imagination when you are not at work.  Doing laundry one load at a time rather than in bulk.  Cost in energy, and "wind-down," because we hammer everything into the middle 8.  Communicating with people less frequently, thus increasing the backstory-share time, which means less time for the more exploratory content.  There are all these hidden costs.

For point of reference:  If you sleep 8 hours a day, you have 112 hours in a week.

So you need to be very careful with your hours, if you are on a mission, as I am.

On the flip side:  I am grateful for the work I have:  I love the environment, I love the people, I love the product.  And the pay is good -- The pay is what I need:  It takes money to make new societies, it takes resources.  I'm paying off debts at a rapid clip, and then socking away what I gain here, so in a few years time, I should have the capital needed to fund a space, time, and supports necessary for the material work.

I have learned a lot in the past several weeks.  I really mean that -- I have learned a lot.

Let's get straight to it.

• I visited James Carleson, Willow Bl00, and a few other fascinating people at Bucketworks.  I did this right before I was employed.  From this gathering many important connections have developed.
  • James Carleson is mentoring me on experience design - specifically by way of "No More Secondhand Art."  I plan to produce an experience based on this book and James' guidance in about a months time at Jigsaw Renaissance.
• I met with 3 people who have lived at Tamerans for different periods (one week, 6 months, and 2 1/2 yaers) to learn from them what I can.
  • I learned an incredible amount of things here, and got many of my questions answered -- about how Tamera runs, about how the Forum works.
  • We also went over the story of the House of Clay, and in particular focusing on "How did it fail?"
    • That's a complex story in its own right, but one crucial insight came to me, was that they used the Forum (comparable to Spaceship of Imagination) for rather different purposes.  For us, it was mainly focused on, "How do you help express dream in people?"  But at Tamera, at Zegg, they focus the method towards social transparency.
      • This is a key point, because according to Tameran philosophy, (and I see that they are correct,) establishing trust is job #1 of a community effort, and trust comes from transparency (I have learned this from Damanhur, Bucketworks, and now Tamera.)
  • I received an invitation to an event called Heart Play that delves deep into process arts.  I went the following week, and witnessed many things there.
• I have been reading The Sacred Matrix, Eros Unredeemed, and Future Without War.
  • If you are making societies, these 3 books are must reads.
  • Especially Future Without War, which I think is misnamed:  I think it should be called, "Practical Logistics for Making New Societies."
    • There's some stuff in there also about making a future without war.
      • I jest.  The whole point of all of this stuff is to make the dream that lives within humanity a living reality.
      • "No war" is an essential part of that dream that lives within humanity.
      • Yes, we really are going towards a future in which there is no war on Earth.
      • Yes, I know that it is hard to imagine with today's mind.
      • But that's really where we are going.
      • But we need to move strategically.
      • And we need to learn.
• I have met with Robin Debates of Jigsaw Renaissance.
  • This was incredibly encouraging and enlightening.
  • I saw very clearly how "field" works, in my conversation with her.  This is a Tameran concept that I will explain more in the future.
  • I got to see the pin-points of modern consciousness more clearly;  In particular, the struggle presented by the Being v. Becoming models, and the resolution provided by the intrinsic dream that is emerging.
  • The things that I learned here were more in feel and motion -- like getting trained by a sophisticated martial artist in the details of movement.
• I have been discussing the formation of a mystery school with Lee Ann, who is making herself "first student" in order to help me work out the kinks on how you do something this.
  • Part of this has been the dissection of the mystery school I was principally educated under, Eckankar.  It is surreal to go back to something like this, and piece together how it works.
    • Eckankar does not "teach" in the traditional way: a curriculum and graded tests.
      
      • Rather, Eckankar creates a virtual reality world populated with actors, places, principles, and then immerses the student in that world.
      • Eckankar suggests resonant questions, and then gives you tools to find the answers to the questions on your own.
      • There is a monthly study course in Eckankar (which I never took -- I was too young to!), which basically helps the person keep their attention on dreams, love, the general principles.
    • The basic beliefs of Eckankar nicely outline the structure;  Looking back now, I see things here that I didn't see when I participated some 20 years ago.
      • #1-4 outline the basic tenants of the esoteric tradition.  I take each one of these for reality, so I do not want to call them tenants -- for myself, they are manifest reality.  But when you are teaching something, it is helpful to break it down.
      • #4-7, though, (and yes, that is an overlapping tenent there,) are what define Eckankar as an alchemical tradition.
        • Embedded here is non-dogmatism (#6,) inner exploration, the path and intimate connection between the individual and God, the practical engagement in the world, the capacity to learn, etc., etc.,.
        • By "alchemical," I am referring to a traditional that is based on personal experience and experimentation.  This is the only way that a soul can learn.  Minds can learn in other ways, but the soul can only learn this way.
        • Thus, curriculum is de-emphasized -- in place of curriculum, you have immersion and tools.
    • I have been comparing and contrasting Eckankar's mode of education with Damanhur and Tamera's methods.
      • Damanhur (considered as a school for the soul) utilizes many, many creative modes of immersion.  (Not communication!  Immersion.)
        • Creative Modes of Damanhur for immersion:
          • Dance.
          • Story.
          • Esoteric physics.
            • Damanhurian esoterics is startling, beautiful, and amazing, if you have a taste for this kind of thing.
          • Symbols and their decyphering.
          • Community, the life of the community.
          • Ritual, tradition.
          • Interactive theater.
          • Journey.
        • There is hardly any aspect of life in Damanhur, frankly, that is not made for the development of the soul.
          • This is by conscious intent and design.  Damanhurians seek to give meaning to everything.  But they don't just seek to:  They actually do it.
            • For example, in the parking lot -- the bricks in the ground.  The bricks are arranged to make patterns.  The patterns etch out symbols.  The symbols themselves have meaning.  They are likely a blessing and/or a protection of some sort.
            • Compare Native American "art."  As Peter London so exquisitley points out in his book, Native Americans did not consider themselves to be "artists."  They were not busy trying to "decorate" the world around them.  Rather, when you see a totem pole -- every single sign and symbol and line and curve and color means.  Beautiful it is, but beauty was not the point.  Rather, history, story, magic, direction, understanding, wisdom, power, -- this was what they were for, this was what they were doing.
            • And so it is at Damanhur.
            • And does it have an affect?  You better believe it.  Just walking around Damanhur feels like something radically different.  There is such a thing as atmosphere, and it is palpable and persisting.  It can heal minds, hearts, and bodies.
      • Tamera I know less about.  But I can see a few things already.
        • It is definitely in a similar genre, but I don't think to as intense a degree as Damanhur.
          • That's because of the Damanhurian work ethic, which is very strong.
          • Also, I think Tamera comes from a more academic tradition:  Thus, they rely more on the essay form.
          • Paul suggests that perhaps it's because the Tamerans are German and not Italian.
        • That said, the basic principles are there.
          • The Tamerans speak of fields, and taking time to immerse yourself in the field.
          • They largely rely (I think, I suspect) on people talking and conversing amongst themselves in in-between times in order to get the core theological understandings out there.  If someone is puzzling over something, and a large group of people already know how that puzzle works, then indeed people really can learn by osmosis.
          • Since the technology works, you can see it working, so you can understand it much more clearly.  You don't have to puzzle when it is transparently operating in front of you.
            • By "technology," here, I am referring to the spiritual-mental-social understandings, techniques, elements, etc., etc.,.
          • And, the Tamerans are engaged in the arts as well.
          • They also live imagination (or such is my take on it,) which I believe to be of central importance to spiritual society.  A spiritual society that is not itself poetry is no spiritual society, by my book.
            • This is a message that I want to talk a lot more about, more broadly.  A big part of my mission is the genuine linking of science and spirituality, in which neither side is bulldozed.  The connector piece is the imagination, which is where the world of dream touches the world of the material, and both find fulfilment within the other - to put it extremely mildly.  That I do not express this more vigorously is purely a sign of my own personal lack and immaturity.  We are all works in progress.
  • Lee Ann is exploring with me how to create a mystery school, and alchemical tradition.
    • Lee Ann has been incredibly patient with me.
    • Lee Ann has really been pushing me in the right ways to communicate effectively, and to understand and focus on the right pieces.
      • The previous blocks of information about Eckankar, Damanhur, and Tamera, have come from my conversations and explorations with Lee Ann.  I know "the things," but it is the conversations with her that help me give form to it all in a way that is understandable.  Her questions help me get to the next essential piece.
  • Speaking of which, I really need to meet with Joshua Madara.
    • I'm sure there are many questions I struggle with, wherein he'd immediately know the answer.
    • Joshua, if you are reading, please email me.  And if one of you know Joshua, please let him know that I need to talk with him.

Um, there's a lot, lot more going on, that I wish I could write more about.  I wish I could write about how my understanding of sexuality in society has transformed dramatically, and I wish I could write about the New Culture society and what the Heart Play event was like.  I also wish I were telling you about the 3-year plan I've developed, and the mission to find 10 people over 3 years, and then start a 3-year experiment.  And about experience creation and ...

But it's just going to take time to work it all out.

Stay tuned.  I'm going to try and post once a week.  Feel free to email me too.  Post comments.  All of the above.

If any of you are in the Seattle area, and want to read one of the books I have mentioned here, let me know, and I will lend it to you.

If you are further abroad, let me know you are interested, and I will order the book for you, have it shipped to your house.

Take care all,

With Love,

Lion

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Yesterday, I stopped at Jigsaw Renaissance to see Willow, when I happened to chance upon Robert Gilman, who was convening about some work he is doing.  Our meeting went something like this:

Lion:  "What are you working on?"

Robert:  "I'm working on making it so that municipalities can make use of each others' best found practices.  Building codes, public policy, ..."

Lion:  "I'm frustrated with building codes.  The building codes force you to build in unsustainable ways.  Lip service is paid in the codes to "this is not intended to stop experimental building..," but in practice, it does."

Robert:  "That's where my work comes in:  This is a system so that, once people find out how to build sustainably in one place, that work can be quickly important into another municipality.  You'd still go through the same legal channels, but you'd be able to quickly pull in the codes once the population had approved them."

This is important;  This is the kind of infrastructure work we need as a society.  It is one thing to build an ecological building, but another entirely to make it possible for that to become a legal reality for hundreds of millions of people.

As a society-maker, my thoughts are:

• Why does Robert Gilman have to work alone?  Why isn't there a supportive community around him?
• Why does Robert Gilman have to work alone?  There is a dream and a spirit alive in his work, but the society we live in doesn't reflect that back to him.  He's boldly trecking it out for all of humanity, but he's got to feel a sense of loneliness and isolation -- our way of life simply isn't about idealism, to any degree.
• Why does Robert Gilman have to work alone?  Why doesn't he have a team of people who are just as interested, working with him?

I look through his pages and recognize a kindred spirit and a teacher.

Here are some of the articles I'd highlight:

• The Eco-Village Challenge - "The challenge of developing a community living in balanced harmony - with itself as well as nature - is tough, but attainable."
• Guidelines for Eco-Village Development - "Eight steps to creating your own sustainable community."
• The Village and Beyond - "Networks of villages may be the next major social form."
• A New Relationship with Time - "...Almost all the increase in free time from 1965 to 1985 went into additional TV viewing."
• Stories, Facts, & Meaning - personal account
• Shed Your Dread - "...Wouldn't it be wonderful if the sustainability movement responded to this by doing its inner as well as its outer work, by becoming known for its joy as well as its effective solutions, for its fearlessness in the face of tumult, and for its twinkle-in-the-eye esprit?"

Here is someone who clearly has seen something of the new world -- and not just the new world, but the spirit that motivates it.

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