Author Archives: Andy

Scorched earth

Where there’s a buck to be made

Massively-multiplayer sweatshops. I’m not sure exactly whether this is funny, disturbing, or just downright bizarre.

The horror that came to Arkham

I love board games. An entire closet in our apartment is filled with them. Unfortunately, most of them fall into the Nerdy Wargame category, and so perhaps aren’t the ideal choice for a fun after-dinner boardgame with guests.
Our lack of accessible boardgames has plagued Michele and me for some time now. To help fill that gap, we recently acquired a new boardgame called Arkham Horror, which while definitely Nerdy is at least not a Wargame. It’s a quirky game based on the early-20th-century horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft.
Michele and I played a few turns of it this evening to get a feel for the rules and gameplay, and thus far it seems very fun and interesting. As in any game worth playing, the goal is to stop a Horror From Beyond Time and Space from entering our world and laying waste to the titular city of Arkham. Up to eight players take on the role of intrepid investigators who travel around Arkham finding clues, collecting useful items, fighting (and fleeing) monsters, and trying to stop the Cthulhu entity from appearing.
Once we get a full game in, I’ll have more solid details to report. But based on the bit of it we played this evening, here are some quick impressions:

The production values are very high. The gameboard is very sturdy and nice-looking, as are most of the components. Most of the pieces are made of thick cardboard.
As the screenshot above may indicate, there are a lot of playing pieces and cards. It’s a bit overwhelming and bewildering when you’re setting it up for the first time.
Arkham Horror has some definite RPG-like elements–each investigator has a unique set of vital stats, and you can collect weapons, spells, and other goodies to increase your odds of survival.
Interestingly, all of the players are on the same team–they aren’t really competing with each other for a single winner. Either you all work together to defeat the Cthulhu Mythos or you all lose. Even in the few turns that Michele and I played, it was clear that a good level of cooperation and assistance between players would be necessary to succeed.
Turns are structured well so as to minimize the time you need to spend waiting for other players to take their turns. Everybody gets a chance to act on every turn.
With all of the investigator stats, abilities, items, and game locations, it’s a bit complicated to learn–it was at least 2-3 turns before I really started to “get” how the game worked. However, once you get the hang of it, the game actually seems to move quite quickly.

Those are just initial impressions. I’ll try to remember to report back in more depth once we’ve gotten a full game in. Time will tell how entertaining the game proves to be, but thus far I’m extremely pleased with it. It’s very unique–like a cross between Clue and Dungeon. I think it’s a safe bet that this Halloween, we’ll be hosting an Arkham Horror game night.

Into the mouth of (massively multiplayer) madness

Malleus maleficarum

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Ha! You suckers feverishly clicked on this link thinking it was going to be about the infamous 15th-century witch-hunting manual, but in reality this is just another one of those “life update” type posts that, ubiquitous as they are, threaten to drag the entirety of the interweb down into the abyss of self-absorbed tedium. So here we go:

As my wife and fellow Rosicrucian agent Michele has noted already, the two of us are planning a trip to Germany this autumn. Of you who have been there, I ask: what should we do with our two weeks in the Holy Roman Empire?
Also, Michele is really smart.
If you’ve got room on your prayer list, here’s something to keep in your prayers.
Congratulations, Peter and Vanessa!
I’m using the Opera web browser again, after years of adulterous flirting with other, less worthy programs.
Michele and I have continued our Warhammer RPG campaign, and continue to enjoy it. For a while now, I’ve been gearing up to run a summer campaign of the Castles and Crusades RPG, but scheduling and other difficulties are making it tough to get that started.
I saw Batman Begins and liked it a lot. In other film-related news, I keep meaning to post some thoughts about Revenge of the Sith, but cannot shake the dread certainty that the world doesn’t really need Another Blogger’s Thoughts About Revenge of the Sith.
My sister is coming out from California this week to visit!
My workplace has a fully-functional Pacman arcade cabinet. Who would’ve guessed that a successful, high-scoring Pacman game required so much strategy and practice?

I’m tired and rapidly approaching total incoherence. Time to sign off.

Ignorance is no excuse!

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Spotted on an online forum:

I realize that I might have offended some people, but I think this needs to be said. I’m tired of radiation getting a bad reputation. We are constantly bombarded with radiation in our everyday lives, only it’s such a small amount that the exposure is nominal. Ignorance is no excuse to perpetuating myths of radiation. –some forum poster

Radiation’s always getting a bad rap!

Surviving Warhammer

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This afternoon, I finished running a Warhammer RPG scenario for Michele. (This is the game mentioned in the previous post.) We played the “introductory adventure” from the back of the main rulebook, and both had a great deal of fun with it. Here are some quick impressions of the adventure and the game itself:

The setting is gritty and depressing–an interesting twist on the “heroic swords-and-sorcery” genre. The game picks up in the aftermath of a massive, Empire-shaking war that has left much of the world in a shambles. From the characters’ perspective at least, the world is falling apart around them, and there’s no good news on the horizon.
This added a fun sense of desperation and urgency to the whole affair, I thought.
The characters seem really “grounded” in the game world. They have believable jobs and roles in the setting. Michele made three characters–a Dwarf mercenary, an Elf apprentice wizard, and (most entertaining of all) a human peasant charcoal-burner (yes, a person who burns charcoal for a living). All had definite careers and motivations in the Warhammer world, instead of just belonging to that rather nebulous “wandering adventurer” career.
Combat is deadly; no matter how tough you are, you’re only one or two blows away from getting maimed or killed. All it takes is one solid hit. This makes combat feel a lot riskier, as well as more tense and exciting. In a lot of games, you have ample warning (i.e. dropping hit points) that a fight is not going your way; in Warhammer, you could pretty easily go from perfect health to death in a single round. Also, the game has some impressively gruesome critical hit tables (reminiscent of, but not as detailed as, the ones in Rolemaster).
The first thing Michele did after her first combat encounter was buy all the armor her characters could afford. Two of her three characters were severely wounded, and this from a rather “routine” encounter with some mutants.
There’s a definite undercurrent of gloom and horror in Warhammer. The game features “insanity points” which characters gain when they view horrifying or sanity-shattering sights; this gives it a fun Call of Cthulhu vibe (although Warhammer’s insanity points aren’t as central to the game as they are in CoC).
The adventure we played (“Through the Drakwald,” included in the main rulebook) was quite good. It was unexpectedly heavy on mood and roleplaying opportunities. Michele’s characters ran into one big combat encounter, and spent the rest of the time trying to figure out the adventure’s central mystery as it unfolded around them.
The adventure also involved several meaningful but difficult moral choices.
At two separate points in the adventure, the events taking place made me feel really sad. As in, emotionally sad. Fantasy RPGs do not usually trigger emotional responses in me, but this one did. Maybe it’s the humidity.

Those are my immediate reactions. In summary: Warhammer is an excellent game. I’m hoping to continue playing it with Michele (and anyone else who wants to join). If you’re looking for a game that takes traditional fantasy tropes and gives them a grim and unusual spin, it’s definitely worth checking out.

This is your RPG character on drugs

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OK, time for a little geeky RPG humor. Earlier this week I came across a humorous little essay written by a gamer who blames his favorite character’s descent into madness and addiction on the cruelty of the adventure’s author (some profanity, you’ve been warned). It’s a bit long, but worth getting to the final page, where we are treated to this cautionary tale:

And finally, just to put the icing on the cake, we encountered a drug dealer in a pub, and in a mad moment I sampled the goods. Which were good. Which were *very* good. When I took some I felt like I was on top of the world, that I could do anything, that no-one could stop me. These drugs worked, and I said yes!
One dose gave you +10%/+1 to EVERY single attribute bar attacks. My weapons skill was up by 10% (i.e. 58% instead of 48%). My ballistic skill was up by 10%. My toughness was up by 1. My initiative was up by 10%. My intelligence was up by 10%. My leadership, my cool, my everything, etc. etc….
It was great. Time after time I’d roll the dice and say: “I made it… because of the drugs!” Time and time again they saved my skin, and I wasn’t going to let the 50 gold crowns a week cost get me down. And who cared if every time I took a dose, General Tangent (the GM) rolled some dice behind his screen.

Great. Now I’m going to have to resist the urge to shout “I made it… because of the drugs!” every time I roll dice during a game.
Oh, and the cruel author of said adventure published a response. All very amusing stuff.

I don’t know what he’s talking about, but he’s pretty cool

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I was surprised to learn this week that Umberto Eco has a new novel out. That’s wonderful news, to be sure. I also came across this interesting interview with the man himself. This tidbit amused me:

His second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, took eight years to write. It was about three editors at a Milan publishing house trying to link every conspiracy theory in history, including that now famous one about the medieval Knights Templar and the secret of the Holy Grail.
‘I know, I know,’ he says with a laugh. ‘My book included the plot for The Da Vinci Code. But I was not being a prophet. It was old occult material. It was already all there. I treated it in a more sceptical way than Dan Brown did. He had the excellent idea of treating it as if it were true. Millions of people believed him. They took it seriously, but it was all a hoax.’
The Da Vinci Code is one of the few novels to have sold more than The Name of the Rose, I point out. Must be quite galling, that. He shrugs. Has he read it? ‘Yes.’ Did he like it? He shrugs again. ‘It’s a page-turner.’

I’ve not read The Da Vinci Code myself and can’t comment on it. But I know who would win in a Brown vs. Eco deathmatch.

The Staging Point

a microscopic cog in the catastrophic plan