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.

a videro grame review

Fateful Lore is the first outing from Fantaseel Interactive. It's a tiny Japanese-style retro RPG for your phone (iOS or Android). You play a lone hero trying to save the kingdom. You level up by defeating monsters. Along the way you learn some spells, all combat related. You spend gold on potions and better equipment (though you can find a few of both in dungeons). You visit towns, dungeons, towers, etc. on an overland map.

 

 

The world is just big enough that I got lost a couple of times.  The first spell you can cast (for zero points) is Teleport, which always takes you back to the starting castle. It's very handy in the first third of the game. Also, I had trouble navigating the second tower (the mini-bosses live in the towers) and got frustrated at one point. So I cast Teleport to go home. By the time I got back to the tower, I had leveled up. Which was nice.

 

I'm no JRPG player, but I think this style of combat screen will be familiar to a lot of people. Also, I adore that the slimes in this game all show up in their own buckets. Sometimes they bonk you with the bucket rather than use a normal slimy attack.

 

 

This is an example of a dumb little detail of the sort that makes this game delightful even though it is super vanilla. These wizards are having a wizard convention in a basement. Not in a dungeon, just an ordinary basement. If you go up those stairs, you find yourself in a cottage where a peasant couple are complaining about the noise and regretting renting their basement to the wizards. This has nothing to do with the plot.

 

Look at this adorable little pink demon! The first one of these I encountered almost kicked my ass. Nearly all the monsters are cute as heck despite being deadly.

The developer says the game takes about 8 hours to play through. I spent a wee bit over ten to complete the game, but I am not very good a video games. But I enjoyed those 10 hours. A couple of the dungeons were a bit too twisty and the mini-bosses more grindy than I like, but overall I recommend Fateful Lore to any casual dungeoneer.

True Fact: The last phone game I gave a crap about was Snake on my Nokia.

 

one more quick one on the OGL

 I am going to quote myself from an unrelated kerfuffle in 2005, with one edit:

Also, the fact that one or more decision makers at White Wolf WotC actually thought the first policy was okey-dokey and that the customers wouldn't react still leaves me a tad bit uneasy. "Yay! Coke decided not to put dogshit in their beverages after all!" is not exactly a cause for celebration. Why didn't anybody at the Coca-Cola company understand the blindingly obvious fact that no one wants to drink dogshit?!?

this is a comment on the current OGL kerfuffle