I’ve largely, though not entirely, dropped out of touch with the world of RPG design in the past several years. As the hobby continues to shrink, we’ve seen a lot of consolidation into familiar titles—D&D and White Wolf’s formula—even on specialized game shops, which grow fewer every year, and less shelf space for even the […]
Continuing my search for RPG inspiration, I checked out the Douglas Fairbanks version of The Thief of Bagdad. Boy, is it ever campy! The sets and costumes, though lavish, bear no resemblance to either Arabian folktales or the historical garb of Arabs, Mongols, et al. “Florid†is an understatement for the body language, and the […]
Once again, America’s news services do her a disservice. In the wake of the record-breaking earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the thousands of deaths entailed—two thousand corpses washed ashore, to date, and who knows how many uncounted—a large majority of the news out of Japan is about the frailty of nuclear power, an the […]
Eileene tried her mother’s hand at hair dying yesterday, hoping to save the cost of a professional without significant loss of results. (It came out fine.) The dye job is decidedly not natural; it’s a vivid blue. And it looks great. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t find it appealing. Admittedly, people who don’t […]
Teachers are a hell of a lot more than baby sitters. Sadly, babysitting is unavoidably some small part of what we do. I had this visibly proven to me when flooding cut off too many roads: too many teachers were unexpectedly late, and, thanks to budget cuts, we didn’t have enough staff to monitor all […]
I picked up a book tonight about the Silk Road, as a resource for RPG design. I’m considering something in the vein of the Arabian Nights folktales, a breathless whirl from Baghdad to Macao, with the PCs taking the role of retainers to an Arab prince smitten with love for a Chinese princess. With no […]
Eileene’s trying her hand at the new Dragon’s Age II game tonight, and I’m helping by sitting near to hand and making snarky comments. What little we’ve seen so far looks pretty good, a decided refinement on the original Dragon’s Age: Origins. Gear, especially, requires less fuss: you only have to worry about equipping yourself, […]
This past Sunday, NPR continued coverage of the Libyan uprising. The report included a snatch of an interview with a Libyan rebel, whose position was what might charitably be described as “conflicted.†“We don’t want the Americans here!” he insisted. “This is our country, our war! But when the struggle is over, there will be […]
We saw Rango yesterday, an animated comedy featuring the voice of Johnny Depp as a thespian lizard who, plunged into an isolated western town, decides to pretend he’s a much tougher hombre than he is, and the hijinks that follow. I walked out of the theater feeling like I hadn’t witnessed a proper movie, but […]
There’s something that I just can’t wrap my head around concerning the nation-wide assault on public workers’ unions, no matter how hard I try to see things from somebody else’s perspective. I can understand why politicians, especially right-wing politicians, would be eager to cut paychecks in order to balance the budget (or, sadly, to buy […]