Mangy Mumbles

Christmas

2009-12-27T05:13:13Z

Because my family is "teh lamerz" when it comes to holidays, I spent the past few days with a gal pal. Her and her mom are a COOKIE FACTORY. I got there and literally every non-floor horizontal surface in her kitchen was covered in cookies cooling on aluminum foil. We then hung out, played games, and had fun.

Unfortunately, this fun also included knocking my external hard drive from the arm of the couch to the hardwood floor below. This did not please me. It now fails to function as expected or desired. Ubuntu recognizes that a 500 GB Seagate external drive is attached, but it fails to find a filesystem it can mount. This makes it a large, self-identifying paperweight with a blinking green light.

GOOD THING I GOT MONEY FOR CHRISTMAS.

Writer's Block: Starting from Scratch

2009-12-17T19:35:06Z

What would it take to get you to start a new life on a new world?

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I'd be willing to start a new life on a different planet so long as I won't be alone. Give me some friends or team mates or fellow colonists and I'd sign up for just about anything. Dangerous wildlife or not.

Carl Sagan - Glorious Dawn

2009-12-12T21:12:53Z

Apparently, someone decided to take quotes and sound clips of Sagan and remix them into a science song. It's actually really kinda cool, and keeps the same inspirational yet atheistic tone Carl Sagan always had. Considering today is the fifth anniversary of my grandmothers death, I needed a little something to cheer me up, and this definitely worked.

You can find more at Symphony of Science.

Writer's Block: The One Movie Everyone Should See

2009-12-10T18:49:27Z

What one film do you think everyone should see?

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Carol of The Great Old Ones

2009-12-09T09:18:43Z

Because there's nothing more awesome than Lovecraftian Christmas carols.

OGG

2009-12-04T06:00:16Z

Just converted my music from mp3 to ogg format. This proved to be.... amazing. Not only is ogg a completely free, un-licensed format, but it's also way better with space.

Bad Behavior, from the d20 post, went from 5.1 MB as an mp3 to 2.1 MB as an ogg with no loss of quality that I can hear. That is over a 50% reduction in space. When my d20 music alone was taking up gigs, this is huge.

Just wanted to let you all know in case you wanted to check out ogg or something.

d20 Horror Dump

2009-12-03T09:49:03Z

I dunno why but I'm tired from work and coked up on sugar and tea and I've decided to share some of the tracks I've been using during our d20 Modern survival-horror game.

Noel - Evergreen Unused. (I just think it's pretty). From the video game Obscure 2.
Ballet of Fools. Used when battling the Forsaken Husks. From Obscure 2.
Bad Behavior. Usually used when battling Jumbos. From Obscure 2.
Madness Ambient. Unused, but planned for dark places and when a character is insane. From Eternal Darkness : Sanity's Requiem.
Mansion Ambient. Used when exploring creepy yet not hostile areas. From Eternal Darkness : Sanity's Requiem.
Escape or Fight. Used during panic scenes when shit hits the proverbial fan. From Indigo Prophecy. This particular track does not loop properly.
Crime Scene Investigation. Used when exploring creepy and potentially hostile areas. From Indigo Prophecy.

Also, map of the police station they explored last session! The reddish stuff in the halls is a black, evil energy which the party believes is deadly. It therefore provides a very good blockade. This, like all the other places the characters have visited, is a real place.

And again... digital character sheets! Which were also custom made for this campaign! Because I have an over-abundance of time!

The Big Bang Theory

2009-11-26T02:05:26Z

If you haven't watched it...

DO.

If you like nerdy comedy, that is (your secret is safe with me.)

d20 Apocalypse

2009-11-08T06:32:53Z

Logan Blitz : Cage fighter Tough hero.
Gunnery Sergeant Carrie Lawrence : Ex-military Fast hero.
Dr. Christina Shultz : Biochemist Smart hero.

A guy who is really good at punching things and two characters with more than a few ranks in Demolitions. Yeah. This is gonna be interesting.

I am more than a little sad no one picked any psychic feats. Hilariously, only the cage fighter meets the requirements.

LOLthulhu

2009-11-05T18:11:54Z

Diet Cthulhu : Just for the fhtagn of it. Same great taste but with less ph'nglui mglw'nafh.

I've been working on a Call of Cthulhu-style d20 Modern campaign after reading a bunch of Lovecraft's writings. Pretty much, it's just d20 Modern with the addition of the Sanity stat (SAN). In everything, however, there is humor.

Balloonboy

2009-10-16T23:38:37Z

So, I TOTALLY missed the balloonboy LOLDRAMA but I managed to catch up on all the excitement and horror thanks to a few dedicated individuals on my f-list.

To apologize for my absence during the drama, I will post pics.

Your Skill level has increased!

2009-10-12T00:25:41Z

So, being a bachelor pad, we don't have much in the way of proper ingredients. Still I managed to make something...

Bacon cheeseburger casserole.

It is as amazing as it sounds. I think I now have another skill rank in Craft (Delicious Food).

One Nation Under Cthulhu

2009-10-10T20:09:12Z

Why put up with paintings of Jesus holding the Constitution, when you can have Cthulhu do it?

Not Ready

2009-10-09T03:30:02Z

Found a picture of Sammee while organizing the pictures on my computer.

It's been less than a week since he's been gone, and already I came home to find a cat in my house. Apparently, dad wanted one. Naturally, it has to like me most of all, even though I am not ready for another pet.

Bitch bitch bitch, I know. Mostly I just wanted to share the picture.

R.I.P. Sammee

2009-10-03T00:41:37Z

And it's done. It went fast once we got it going... I don't think he really figured out what was going on. I knew it was coming, from the day we got him I knew one day I would have to watch him die, but god damn it hurts so much. I have never in my life cried so hard as I did over his body.

The Essentials

2009-10-02T06:24:55Z

Because I've been doing a shit ton of reinstalling due to me trying new versions of Ubuntu and also fucking them up horribly, I figure I might as well make a spot to hold code that will make my reinstalling easier. This code block enables the medibuntu repository as well as installing gnome-do, thunderbird, banshee, sound tools, speedcrunch, xournal, inkscape, pyroom, extra compiz settings, extra themes, and new codecs.

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get -q update && sudo aptitude install audacity soundconverter banshee gnome-do gnome-do-plugins ffmpeg thunderbird deluge wine compizconfig-settings-manager unace p7zip-full speedcrunch xournal inkscape firestarter pyroom ubuntu-restricted-extras ubuntustudio-sounds ubuntustudio-theme ubuntustudio-icon-theme gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly libdvdcss2

My plans for this weekend...

2009-10-02T03:00:14Z

Tomorrow: See best friend. Put dog down. Suppress guilty feeling that I was a bad owner.
Saturday: Look for jobs again. Play video games. Suppress guilty feeling that I was a bad owner.
Sunday: Celebrate my 21st birthday by getting which-way-is-up drunk. Use alcohol to suppress guilty feeling that I was a bad owner.

Movin' movin' movin....

2009-09-25T17:23:06Z

Got the keys to a new place and we're gonna be moving this weekend.

Obviously, there has to be a giant storm on that exact date. Watched the radar and the time lapse shows several different patches of green converging from all different directions right over my house, turning from green to yellow to red to magenta.

MAG-EN-TA

This is gonna be fun.

"PFFFTT! It tastes like a candle...."

2009-09-20T00:49:46Z

So, my grandma brought home a candle that smells like a birthday cake. Like, exactly like a birthday cake. We actually started craving white cake, so we got some.

Now I can honestly say that someone's cake tastes like a candle.

Aether Mathings

2009-09-17T22:14:46Z

Aether must have a mass of 9.49205 × 10²⁵ kg and a mean radius of 25,515.86 km to have Earth-like gravity and Earth-like atmospheric pressure at the same depth.

OH GOD WHY DO I CARE SO MUCH ABOUT THE REALISM OF A FICTIONAL PLANET?!

Also, why is the final boss music of Eternal Darkness so damn catchy?

Not Right...

2009-09-15T12:33:49Z

Got in an argument with some friends and ended up walking two and a half miles home in the dark last night. I dunno what's wrong with me.

Campaign Creation : Races

2009-09-14T20:24:06Z

Okay, so I need to pick the native races that inhabit my game world. It's important to do this early because it can radically alter how the world's society develops. A peek in the Player's Handbook reveals these races...

Humans
Dwarves
Elves
Gnomes
Half-Elves
Half-Orcs
Halflings

Humans stay, since players need a baseline race. They're also easier to relate to than some of the others. Dwarves and their penchant for being underground don't really fit well in a world primarily composed of floating land, so I doubt they'll be at all useful or even make sense. We'll cross them off.

Elves. Oh god, how I loathe elves. They have the whole "we're perfect" thing going on, and there's roughly seven hundred different subraces optimized for any concept or theme one can think of. They're overdone and usually are the big, powerful, ancient race who live forever and have powerful magic yet are inexplicably just as advanced technologically as all the other races. I want to stay away from that convention. I could perhaps reduce elves to being a barbaric race, or perhaps even make them evil as a whole, and not just the dark elves. Those are interesting, and I might look into them later, but for now we're crossing elves off the list. Oh hey, no half-elves either. Two birds with one stone.

Gnomes typically have the inventor/prankster quirky style, but that could work to my advantage in this setting. Of course, the fact that it's cliche is reason enough to avoid doing it. Still, it's looking like I'm going to be hacking apart this list of races, and I'd like to keep something nonhuman. Actually, a primarily human setting with no other player races could be quite interesting. I'll keep gnomes on the backburner.

Half-elves are gone.

Half-Orcs are the standard musclehead race. They're designed specifically with barbarians and fighters in mind, and aren't really good at much else. They have no significant racial abilities beyond Darkvision, which they share with dwarves. They are there simply for the people who want to bomb their mental ability scores to boost their strength. That's fine and all, but I prefer a little more meat. Still, I think I could use them. Actually, why not just use an orc? Why have the half-breed be the player race but not the parent? Also, how can two completely different, nonmagical species have children? Are half-orcs sterile like mules?

Halflings are heavily inspired by Tolkein's works, no matter how much Wizards of the Coast may try to hide it. Halflings don't ever appear to have an important place in the game world, and are sometimes not even mentioned at all in the history. They're simply added in as an afterthought to be a small, dexterous race for rogues to play. Also, the race as a whole is often described as being traders, intermingling with other races as merchants and never having countries of their own. No countries of their own and their favorite class is the thief? I'm not a huge fan of parasites as a base race.

In fact, I seem to want to get rid of everything that's not human. I'm either specieist, or I have a strong desire for a very different world. That's fine. I'll make a few custom races. Also, I ought to go through the Monster Manual and see if there's any no-to-low ECL creatures I could perhaps promote to a player race.

+1 ECL Creatures

Bugbear
Gnoll
Hobgoblin
Lizardfolk
Planetouched

+0 ECL Creatures

Goblin
Kobold

This reminds me that I need to come up with a Flying template to add to animals and such to make sea creatures for a sea of air, because a hovering octopus sounds awesome. Looking at that list, I immediately like hobgoblin and kobold. Hobgoblins are on the very low end of the +1 level adjustment, so it wouldn't be all that hard to alter them to be a +0 race. They'll take the fighter race role that the half-orcs had. I'd also like to keep their war-like behavior and military skill. They can be a world power instead of being arbitrarily insignificant despite being more powerful than humans, just as smart, and just as technologically advanced.

Again, kobolds are just as smart as humans but are arbitrarily less advanced, despite their natural propensity for teamwork via their Lawful alignment, which would actually make them better at forming a complex society than humans are. Though they are indeed evil, kobolds don't betray each other. They torture, kill, and maim other races, not their own. I'll give them the ancient magic race slot, the sinister custodians of magical secrets best left unknown. I'll need to change their stats a bit, since as written they are one of the few races that would actually be worthy of a negative effective character level. In a world where non-player-character challenge ratings are calculated as Class Level -1, kobold NPCs have a unique formula all their own : Class Level -3. It's not a big stretch of the imagination that kobolds as player characters would be ridiculously underpowered as well. In fact, I may keep their horrible strength and constitution and balance it with mental ability adjustments. They're related to dragons, after all.

So I've got a generic race, a fighter race, and a magic race. I need a rogue race and some additional options.

In my friend's campaign, I'm playing a werebear. Since we're only second level, we've broken down the werebear template, which normally jacks up your effective character level by nine, into nine levels of a werebear class. I could make a race of people who can shift into animal form, but then make an associated class that improves their natural combat ability, much like taking levels of bear to enhance my character's hybrid and bear forms. One that shifts into a flying creature would be great for this aerial world.

The rogue race could be some kind of arboreal monkey... perhaps one that lives on the undersides of the islands, tangled in the vines? I'll have to think on that...

District 9

2009-09-13T22:43:30Z

Go see it.

NOW.

It's amaaaazing.

Campaign Creation : The World

2009-09-12T20:22:06Z

So, while my friend is DMing, I've had free time. I've run Dungeons and Dragons games for years now, and so it's natural to think like a Dungeon Master whenever I even think about the game, so not having any world-creation responsibilities is unsettling for me. So what did I do? I decided to spend my time building a new world, perhaps even to publish online. Who knows if it will get that far, but it's a neat project and I really want to have an actual, complete game world to call my own instead of creating half-assed ones every new campaign. It could be one I use again and again, and the lack of a time constraint on its creation means that it will likely be of high enough quality to actually be worth using again and again.

Usually I do all my world creation by myself without any external input, but I want to try something different. So, I'm putting my stream of consciousness into a blog post, mostly so that I can reference it at a later date from anywhere and so that I can get input from others instead of being solo. So what do I need to do?

World Setup : Decide on the basic structure of the world.
Race Selection : Decide which creatures populate the world.
Class Selection : Make necessary changes or additions to the classes available.
Geography : Decide more specific composition of the world and where to put countries.
Countries and Cultures : Decide on more detailed countries and the cultures that inhabit them.
History : Flesh out how the world got to its current state.

So I've got it in my head that I want to build a game world. One for publishing, and therefore one that needs to be sufficiently detailed that it can be applied to a variety of campaigns. That's fine. A detailed world. But what world? I want this world to be interesting enough to stand out and actually be interesting. "Medieval Europe with Magic" is so cliche it causes physical harm. It is also, unfortunately, the norm, and changing too many of the basic Dungeons and Dragons assumptions will simply end up alienating players and DM's, not to mention ruining compatibility with other supplements, simply for the sake of being different. So we'll stick with a primarily European style.

Another assumption is that the world is polytheistic and the deities are active in the world. This I have a bit more leeway on. Gods play a big part in many folktales and myths, and they do so enough in standard D&D to warrant two core classes directly tied to worshiping them. But must there be so many?

I considered a monotheistic world briefly, but a single deity seems rather boring. It was neat during one of my brief campaigns involving a battle between the monotheistic religion and a polytheistic cult, but a purely monotheistic world in which the existence of that god is a fact would lack something important: conflict. We need an opposing force for balance and energy, a dualism, and it's sufficiently different enough to give the world a unique kind of religious terrain. I sort of like the idea of a very small group of divine beings rather than there being twenty different gods for major themes like fire and death with an uncountable number of species-specific deities who only appear as brief, two-paragraph sidebars in the Monster Manual.

The first thought for a dualism is, of course, Good versus Evil, and that's exactly why I won't be using that one. I don't want one deity to be clearly evil and one to be clearly good. I want them to need each other for balance, and I want there to be reasonable people on either side of the field. How about Peace and Conflict? While one is typically connotated positively and the other negatively, neither one is inherently good or evil, especially when Conflict simply means struggle or problems, and Peace means a stillness or calm. Conflict allows an individual to improve oneself by overcoming problems, and Peace grants rest and safety. Too much Conflict leads to destruction, but too much Peace leads to laziness and a slow rotting within as one's mind, body and soul atrophy from disuse. This sounds good enough to go with, at least for the time being. Perhaps I'll throw in a few other "gods" as attendants and assistants for these "overgods" if I feel I need to change to a semi-polytheistic setting.

What's next? The actual physical composition of the world itself, I would think. How the world looks and feels determines what and how creatures evolve, so I need to get this established before anything starts to walk the world. The standard assumption is a sphere of primarily silicate materials with a surface covered primarily in dihydrogen monoxide. Lands and seas, in other words. I'm tempted to change this, but the problem is that I can easily fall into the trap of being different just for the sake of being different.

While pacing and reviewing how I previously handled world building, I briefly touched on my D20 Future campaign. I didn't think how I made star systems and galaxies would be at all useful to me, but the mental image of a planet orbiting a star stuck in my head. I could use my Future experience.

Floating islands.

Don't get me wrong, I know it's been done before. Hell, I've done it before, years ago. Floating islands of rock in a sea of air is not exactly original, but it's done infrequently enough to provide a unique experience, both for a player and a DM, and I would certainly enjoy building such a world. The planetary system idea is interesting. Perhaps the islands group up and circle around larger bodies of stone? This setup would provide an area-distinction similar to standard bodies of land, with the different island systems being like continents with expanses of empty air between them. Perhaps strong air currents block airships in much the same way that mountains deter overland travel? Gas giants often have elaborate wind systems, and it appears that my game will be set on one of these behemoths. Except, ya know, with an atmosphere that is more than one percent oxygen.

So these islands.... how do they float? I'm thinking there may be some kind of material that is lighter than the atmosphere. This mystery material forms in the core, and quickly rises, collecting on rocks along the way. When the upward pressure of the material is greater than the downward pull of gravity on the attached rocks, they float up. The floating rocks, still far into the planet, collide and attract each other, forming bigger and bigger rocks. Eventually, they form large rocks, which catch more of these materials shooting up from the core. Eventually, it collects enough of this lighter-than-air material to hover up to the Earth-like level. These rocks are now too far from the core to collect more of this lighter-than-air material, and so they simply hover at varying heights and bump into each other, slowly forming into larger masses in much the same way an actual planet forms.

This is real pseudoscience! I'm liking that idea, at least as a general concept of how these things form. I can come up with details later.

Hmmm. There's something about the world I forgot to consider. I never decided on a technology level that I want the game to default to. In Faerun, and particularly Eberron, the world has a slightly higher level of technological sophistication than the standard medieval timeline, and I like that. I kind of like the idea of crude guns. I want swords and even bows to still be viable options, though, so I need to make sure the gun isn't too overpowered. Obviously, airships will be important, and I may have to design some ship combat rules for them. In fact, I will have to decide some ship combat rules for them. That comes later, though. For now, I think I've gotten the basis of a decent world down.

Writer's Block: The truth is out there ...

2009-09-12T08:18:59Z

If someone discusses UFOs at a party, do you assume they're a visionary or bonkers? Do you consider yourself a believer or a skeptic?

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I am immediately reminded of a line from The Mentalist.

"She's entitled to her opinion."
"Not if it's wrong!"

While I would be surprised if there were no other forms of life in the universe, I do not seriously believe they have visited our planet. There are no known mechanisms by which a physical object can move through space at a sufficient velocity to reach its intended destination in a reasonable amount of time. Even going faster than light could take hundreds or even thousands of years to reach another star system. Why the hell would these creatures expend such ridiculous resources to visit us only to hover around in the sky for a few seconds, a minute at most, perhaps even poke the native wildlife with needles, and then leave?

Also, why the hell are they even poking creatures with needles? They can warp space and time to travel several hundred times the speed of light but they don't have anything more medically advanced than an anal thermometer?