Zak update

good ideas from Mausritter

Mausritter is a fantasy role-playing game in the neighborhood of Bunnies & Burrows and the Redwall novels. Neither of those are my normal bag but I can see the appeal of playing a cute little mousey with a sword. My good buddy sarkos pointed me towards it and after a quick glance it has at least two things referees for other FRPGs could borrow:

1) Card/tile based encumbrance tracking. This is easier to show rather than tell, so I'll share an image from the Mausritter website:

 

 

As the website says, this "minimises bookkeeping and maximises hard choices." A physical medium like this can also make it super easy to adjudicate who is holding what in what hand. You ever discover that the mapper (who should be wielding ink and paper) is also the torchbearer and is holding a magic wand ready as well? Having a spaces labeled "right hand" and "left hand" that only fit one item card each solves that nicely. 

Also, I dig the six space backpack. If I used that I'd actually keep the items in the backpack shuffled and face down during combat. If someone wanted to get something out of their pack, they would turn over one or maybe two items per round searched. Do you make use of what you've found or do you keep searching?

2) Need a quickie adventure? You could do a lot worse than Mausritter's online adventure site generator to get started. It's not a complete dungeon generator, but it's enough to riff off of.

Forge beats Machine

HeroForge.com is ostensibly a website where you can design and purchase custom minis for your D&D game. My daughter and I use it the same way we previously used HeroMachine.com: we sit around with a couple of laptops and make characters as a funtimes art-type activity. Here's what I made in today's session.

Frog Detective!

Elizabeth requested I make an image of her, so
I decided she would be Princess of the Space Ninjas.

You know what is really fun? Dressing skeletons in outfits.

Also requested: Strong Bad.

Anybody else remember the Thumper from the
Spider-man segment on The Electric Company?
That show had the best spider-villains.

I am a bird-centaur with a scorpion tail and goblin ears.
Why do I exist?

 

The Space Goopies

 Had a weird but almost coherent sci-fi dream last night. Here are some ideas that might be worth stealing for someone.

A long distance space war starts as the result of a first contact gone wrong. Little is known about the alien race Earth is fighting. Apparently one dying eyewitness described them as "goopy."

They may be smarter than us. In order to try to end the war, they built a computer than can translate what we say into meaning in their own language. We can't do the same, so they understand us better than we understand them. This computer acts as a go-between but also allows the Earthicans to learn about their enigmatic foes by asking it seemingly harmless questions.

The one thing the people talking to the diplomat-computer were able to figure out was how differently the goopy approach to mathematics is. Goopy number theory isn't based on quantities like 1, 2, 3... but rather on rotations. Although they have their own squiggly symbols for them, the goopies count pi, pi/2, pi/3,.... Their idea of infinity is closer to our idea of the infinitesimal, as they count towards zero. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but that was my dream.