Chatter #86 - July 16, 2008

January 6, 2009 -

Anniversary: Happy New Year to all! I also should note that this site has now been online for over twelve years. I wonder what that would be in dog years?

Site hacked: The site was infected at least twice over the past few months; I believe that I've figured out the source, and taken steps to block it permanently. The server was also hacked very recently, and that too has been fixed. The internet has become a much more dangerous place than it was twelve years ago!

RuneQuest Panel: A RuneQuest panel has been scheduled for the upcoming Arisia science fiction convention in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's a great con, now in its twentieth year; the first Arisia was my first convention, and I haven't missed one since. I'll be a panelist (in fact, currently I'm the only scheduled panelist) on the RQ panel, of course. In fact, I have to admit that this panel was my suggestion. If any readers feel like stopping by and chatting about RuneQuest (including all versions of Basic RolePlaying), the panel is currently scheduled for room 201 on Sunday at 5 PM. The con itself runs from Friday, January 16th, though Monday, January 19th. Of course you'd have to either buy a membership or a day pass to get in. Here's the panel description:

RuneQuest Reborn: Out of print for a decade, the classic skill-based RPG is now being published by three different (and competing) game companies. What's going on? Why three different versions, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?

Zines & sheetless article: Sure enough, I got sidetracked and haven't done anything more with zines. I'll have to do something about that, although for the moment I'm preparing for Arisia (I'm scheduled to be on ten panels, including the RuneQuest one). No further progress on the sheetless roleplaying article, I'm afraid - in fact, it had completely slipped my mind until I re-read this page! It's strange how my mind completely lost track.

Typically I get much more involved in genre stuff after Arisia, though, so there should be a lot more updates in the next few months - assuming that the site or server doesn't get hacked again. I'm hoping that the Chaos Project will eventually go up in an interactive format, too, but that's not really under my control right now.

October 17, 2008 -

Recovery: My elbow is healing remarkably well; it didn't need surgery, just physical therapy.

RuneQuest Rules Hit Locations: I've made a few posts over on the RQ-Rules list on a thread about targeting hit locations. Might as well copy them here.

Combat skills and modifiers: how about adding the ability to sacrifice skill for time? Say, allow an attacker to be one strike rank quicker at a reduction of 10% to their chance to hit. I'd suggest that the skill cost for each additional strike rank reduction should be double the previous cost, i.e. -10% for the first SR, -20% for the second, -40% for the third, etc. - with a minimum limit of 1 SR. The skill reduction would apply to all attacks made that round, so if the combatant took a big reduction and made a fast attack and then a second attack (or more), those later attacks - even though not hastened - would still be made at a penalty.

Targeting hit locations: Here's an idea which is probably crazy: How about instead of allowing direct manipulation of the hit location, each SR of delay allows an additional d20 hit location roll? Then the attacker can chose which of those d20s to use. This would leave in an interesting amount of randomness (which would reflect the possibility that some locations would simply not be open to attack in a given round), while improving the chance of hitting a desirable location.

It would also eliminate the need to create a specialized chart for every different creature type.

Zines: I'm down to just SEVEN more zines. After that, I'll have to come up with new content. That article on sheetless roleplaying is still in the works, too. If anyone would like to see the working copy, please drop me a line.

July 22, 2008 -

Basic Roleplaying at last!

I received my playtester's copy of Basic RolePlaying, The Chaosium Roleplaying System on Saturday. It's huge! 399 pages.

I'm reading the character creation chapters now, and so far I'm absolutely delighted; it's even better than I expected. It's very true to the spirit of classic RuneQuest, far more so than the version put out by Mongoose. The optional rule sets allow an extremely faithful recreation of the RQIII system. The magic system, which was a point of concern for me in the playtest, is better than I'd hoped; it includes the battle/spirit-magic spells from the original Basic RolePlaying, and is thus entirely compatible with RQ. For example, "Sharpen" in the new book is identical to the RQ spell "Bladesharp".

I just hope Chaosium offers a hardcover edition, because I'll buy one.

On other fronts...

Zines: I've annotated and posted a lot more zines in the last few days. What's more, thanks to Joe Teller (the former assistant editor of Interregnum, he helped Kiralee McCauley after she took the reins) I've been able to post a PDF of the complete issue of Interregnum #1 - and it's only about 5MB! Curtis Taylor let Joe scan his copy, so I owe both Joe and Curtis my thanks.

July 18, 2008 -

The end of "Rack & Rune": I just finished annotating the final two issues of my old zine, Rack & Rune*. They'll go up when this installment of Chatter does. I have to say, annotating those old zines was quite a trip down memory lane, even though the lane was washed out in spots! I'll miss Rack & Rune, strange though that may sound. Of course, I still have 18 more zines to convert, scan, annnotate and post; the issues of "The Log That Flies" that I wrote for my own APA, Interregnum.

By the way, does anyone know if zine titles should be in quotes, italicized, or what? I'm confused!

Update the look?: Okay, I have to ask. Having spent a year away from the site, I may be looking at it with fresh eyes. It does look awfully dated, doesn't it? Is it time to think of a major redesign?

Speaking of which, I did a quick and relatively minor redesign on this page. I worked a long time on the runic background art years ago, but the fact remains that it does make it harder to read text. So I'm using these white boxes to make Chatter easier to read.

Basic RolePlaying site: I can't remember if I ever came right out and said it, but I've been working with a small group of people - well, primarily one person these days - on a new site that supports Chaosium's new Basic Roleplaying system, AKA "The Chaosium D100 System". It's called Basic Roleplaying.Net, and it will include the new version of the Chaos Project. I plan to contribute other material to that site as well, but I'll also be posting the same stuff here. CBRP/D100 is much closer to the spirit and tradition of RuneQuest than Mongoose "RuneQuest", which I'm not particularly supporting in this site.

One thing I should probably write up for both this site and the BRP site is my idea of skill-enhancing charms.

Sheetless Roleplaying article: Still working on it. Well, still thinking about it, anyway. It's definitely going to happen, but I can't say when; I hope it won't be too long. I've set it up as a Google document, but it's still in the very early stages.

* - Rack & Rune #22 appeared in the final issue of The Wild Hunt, and I don't expect we'll ever see another issue.

July 16, 2008 -

Changes: Okay, I have to admit it. I neglected the site for far too long. That was probably because I haven't had a chance to play RuneQuest in a long, long time. What finally got me to start working on the site again? It's simple: I became so frustrated and disgusted with the political situation here in the US that I finally had to have something to distract myself with. It was just a coincidence that I picked up a combination scanner/printer last month, allowing me to scan the 30+ old zines which have been laying fallow in my file cabinet.

Zines: Reading and annotating those old zines has been a real trip down memory lane. Some of them make me cringe, of course. But it's not as bad as I feared. And I'm actually really enjoying some of the later ones. I just finished annotating Rack & Rune #19 today (a monster-sized issue, 31 pages!) and was surprised at how readable it was.

It's also kind of disconcerting how much I've forgotten.

Oh well. There are lots more zines to go - 21 in all.

Zine conversions: I've had all sorts of problems converting my old zines. This is Chatter, so I can talk about the technical details without apologizing, I guess!

Rack & Rune hasn't been a problem, in a way. I saved copies of each zine, and bound them into a notebook. So scanning them has been a straightforward process. The image quality isn't that great, I'll admit. That's not the fault of the scanner; rather, the problem is that the copies I saved were several generations old, copies of copies of copies. And of course the earlier zines were originally printed on a dot-matrix printer.

What I dislike about scanned zines is that they're not text-searchable. The whole page is an image. That almost certainly means that the results can't be cataloged by Google, for example. To get around that, I've been creating extensive tables of contents for each scanned zine on the main Zines page. I'm even including the full name (when possible) of each person that I commented on in that zine; that way, maybe some of my old fellow contributors and writers will come across the site while doing a vanity seach.

The one drawback is that the new TOCs make the ones for zines that I've already posted look very skimpy. So now I'm thinking that I may need to go back and re-do the TOCs on the older zines.

There's another conversion issue that's kind of weird. Virtually all of my old zines were created on Publish-It! 4.0 for Windows. That program hasn't been published in a long time, though. It still works, amazingly enough, but crashes completely when I try to output it to Acrobat. So I have to print the zines out (at least that works) and scan them. Which once again results in zines that can't be text-searched.

Many of the old zines also lack art. Some or all of the art is missing. For the most recently-written zines, that's because of a glitch in Publish-It. I can insert new art and print them out anyway. For the older zines, though, I generally didn't print them with art. I didn't have much art in electronic form, you see; that sort of thing was much more rare in the 90s! Instead, I'd insert blank spaces and frames in the layout, and then photocopy art from books of Dover clipart, reducing or enlarging the art as needed.

I'm inserting electronic clipart as needed, but for technical reasons I sometimes have to make the art much smaller than the frames or spaces. It doesn't look great. Still, beggars can't be chosers!

Sheetless roleplaying article: I recently realized with a shock that I'd never written or posted an article about sheetless roleplaying. This is a huge omission on my part. I've talked about sheetless gaming at Arisia on various panels over the years, and I know I've promised to post an article more than once. What can I say? I forgot! So now I've started work on the sheetless roleplaying article. I'm hoping to do the concept justice.

BRP: The Chaosium System / Basic RolePlaying started shipping late last month. I haven't received a playtester's copy yet, and I'll admit that I can't wait. It should be here any day now...I hope. I have to admit that I feel kind of guilty about getting a playtester's credit, much less a free copy; I didn't think I'd provided that much useful feedback.

The Chaos Project: Alxnet, the free service I used to create the site guestbook and the Chaos Project, is pretty much dead. The Alxnet site still exists, and I can even log on to my account. But when I try to view any of my web-tools, I'm instantly logged out and receive an error message. Emails to Alxnet are met with a permanent fatal error.

That means I've pretty much lost the guestbook forever. Fortunately I saved every entry of the Chaos Project a while ago, so unless someone entered one in the last year or two - unlikely, it was pretty much unreachable - I have all the data. I entered it all into a Google spreadsheet, so it's saved.

The Chaos Project is now viewable over on BasicRolePlaying.net. It can't be modified - nobody can add an entries to it - but you can view everything, and with any luck it will soon be fully open for business. Registration will be required to add entries, but anyone will be able to read and search entries. I think it will also be available directly from this site, but if not I'll include a link.

Well, that should do it for this entry!

Ongoing Chatter #86: July 16, 2008