The Most Useful RPG Blog on Teh Interwebs

Go right now to Roles, Rules and Rolls and start downloading from the Rules and Tools section. Do it at once. Do not pass 'Go' and do not collect £200. Its contents are hands down the most useful of any RPG blog, anywhere.

A particular highlight for me is the PowerPoint Dungeon Mapper, which does in 2 PowerPoint slides what no piece of mapping software I have ever seen can do: create a good looking dungeon map with ease. (Don't be put off if your browser can't preview PowerPoint documents - just download it and enjoy.) And the innovation involved is seriously impressive: never in a million years would it have occurred to me to use PowerPoint for dungeon mapping, but it's perfect.

I can't recommend Roger's stuff highly enough.

Random Generation Baby

From the ether (well, from the Core Mechanic) a new way to waste time and procrastinate emerges.

Yes, it's a Fantasy Name Generator, with an impressive degree of fucking-around-with-ability, for generic names, beasts, spells and locations. The names it generates are cheesy, but none the worse for it. Check out these examples:

Generic

Broad Fall
White Tribe
Tear Fountain
Plague Orb

Beasts

River Drown Virus
Gnaw Grass
Drip Panther
Basker Beetle

Spells

Whishan's Winged Instinct
Narissa's Dream Arsenal
Llethra's Ghost Book
Q's Locking Hope

Locations

Basement of Iron
Ooze Void
Ruin of Crystal
Basker Lair

My favourites are the Plague Orb, River Drown Virus, Narissa's Dream Arsenal and Ooze Void.

The Tolkien Professor Podcasts

If you're at all a fan of Tolkien, or even if you're not a fan but feel you could be persuaded, I highly recommend The Tolkien Professor. It's a series of podcasts/lectures by a professor of medieval literature and self-professed lover of Tolkien, and it so far covers some informal "chats" as well as a more formal series of lectures on The Hobbit. Well worth a listen.

Atomic Rockets

I'm going all hard science fiction crazy at the moment with this blog, I know. Bear with me. I just wanted to link to the excellent site Atomic Rockets, an attempt to create a lay person's guide to rocketry and the science behind hard science fiction. (Aside from its contents, one thing you have to love about the site is its eccentric layout. As with all internet sites created by amateurs and which have been around for a long time, it truly feels as if it harks from a bygone era. I wonder if one day there will be an Antiques Roadshow of old websites?)

Anyway, browse through it and enjoy. Some particular favourite passages of mine, from the "common misconceptions" section:

Rockets Got Wings

If your rocket has a multi-megawatt power plant, an absurdly high thrust thermal rocket propulsion system, or directed energy weapons it will need huge heat radiators to purge all the waste heat. Otherwise the rocket will melt or even vaporize. Radiators look like large wings or arrays of panels. The necessity of radiators a real problem for warships since radiators are pathetically vulnerable to hostile weapons fire.

...

Rockets Don't Got Windows

Spacecraft have no need of windows or portholes, for much the same reason as a submarine. (No, the Seaview doesn't count. Strictly science fiction. There are no panoramic picture windows on a Trident submarine). Windows represent structural weakness, and there really isn't much to see in any event. Unless the spacecraft is orbiting a planet or docking with another ship, the only thing visible is the depths of space and the eye-searing sun. And unlike submarines, windows on a spacecraft also let in deadly radiation.

Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica to the contrary, space battles will NOT be fought at a range of a few feet. Directed energy weapons will force ranges such that the enemy ships will only be visible through a telescope. Watching a space battle through a port hole, you will either see nothing because the enemy ships are too far away, or you will see nothing because a reflected laser beam or nuclear explosion has permanently robbed you of your eyesight.

The navigation room might have an astrodome for emergency navigation. But for the most part windows will be omitted in favor of radar, telescopic TV cameras, and similar sensors.

...

Fuel Is Not Propellant

In a rocket, there is a difference between "fuel" and "reaction mass." Rockets use Newton's third law of Action and Reaction in order to move. Mass is violently thrown away in the form of the rocket's exhaust and the reaction accelerates the rocket forward. This mass is of course the "reaction mass." It is sometimes also called "remass" or "propellant."

The "fuel" is what is burned or whatever to generated the energy to expel the reaction mass. For example, in a classic atomic rocket, the fuel is the uranium-235 rods in the nuclear reactor, the reaction mass is the hydrogen gas heated in the reactor and expelled from the exhaust nozzle.

There are only a few confusing cases where the fuel and the reaction mass are the same thing. This is the case with chemical rockets such as the Space Shuttle and the Saturn 5, which is how the misconception started in the first place.

Automobiles, airplanes, and boats are sizable vehicles with relatively small fuel tanks. Not so rockets. An incredibly powerful rocket might approach having half its mass composed of reaction mass and the other half structure, hull plates, crew members, and everything else. But it is more likely that 75% of the mass will be reaction mass. Or worse. Most rockets are huge propellant tanks with a rocket engine stuck on the tail and a tiny crew habitat stuck on the top.

In which I provide a series of links to items of interest on the world wide web

• Shameless plug: I've started a new blog for my more academically related articles. If you're interested in international law, or just want to read the pseudo-intellectual ramblings of a legalistic twit, take a look. It's called Anti-ideoligism and there's a grand total of one entry so far.
• Amityville Mike has created huge, FREE blank hex maps for you to download and use. What a star.
• Eye Candy for Bibliophiles is one of the best picture-based blogs on the web. Dozens of classic fantasy book covers, many of them first editions, all of them beautiful, every single day. Subscribe to it at once.
  
• There is proof of a kind that WotC missed a trick in getting rid of gnomes, and should have chucked half-elves instead.
  

Link-and-random-blah

One of those lazy link-and-random-blah posts.

• Max, who seems to have similar tastes to mine, has put up a Rules Cyclopedia Changeling half-elf variant off the back of my own elf series a few posts ago, and it's a good one. I love to mix a bit of folklore with my D&D, and this does exactly that, being full of fairy-tale weirdness. On the very same subject he's also statted up both 3rd edition and Labyrinth Lord versions of a kind of fey called a Rhyme Stealer. I think it gets the malignant tone of a nasty fey creature just right.
• I've been listening to quite a bit of Have Games, Will Travel recently. It's a one-man podcast by somebody called Paul Trevis, and is a catch all for all kinds of role playing, card and board games. As you probably know I'm very much a D&D guy, and Trevis isn't, but we have a few areas of overlapping interest (Burning Wheel, Unknown Armies) and it's always nice to hear new perspectives and to find out about new games. Of special interest to me recently has been a show he made a few years ago featuring an interview with the famous (or infamous) Ron Edwards ("Forge Midwest Gathering 2006: Special #2); I'm not a great fan of Forge theory or a lot of the games that come out of the site, but the man has some very wise and interesting things to say about independent publishing of rpgs. He's certainly inspired me to get off my backside and just go ahead and give it a shot.
• Brian has made a reply to an old post of mine in which I waxed nostalgic about animal fantasy stories; according to him there's a role playing game, now a GURPS supplement, called Bunnies & Burrows - loosely based on Watership Down. Whatever next? I wondered. Well... how about a Risus version? Definitely time to start a thread about it on rpg.net.
  
• I'm going to be running a first-ever Superheroes game via facebook messages soon. It'll be a solo affair for an rpg virgin, done with Mutants & Masterminds, and promises to be interesting: I'll be setting it in our shared hometown (Liverpool), which is something I've never done with a game before. The player is a reader of this blog (hey Nate - I'll try not to squish your character...too much), so I can't give anything more away, except to say that I think setting a game in one's home town could bring a whole other level to one's gaming. Let's see if it does; I may make a post about it once we're underway.

Now back to work...

My New Favourite Thing

My New Favourite Thing: Abulafia's Random Generators. A site devoted to, well, Random Generators. Particular highlights include the spookily believable Anime Series Generator:

Masterful Falcon Utopia ~Magic the Butler~
Fate BeBop: Blood Crisis
War Detective Tank
Oh! Mobile Quest
Panda Tokyo Nya!: Triangle Shadow
Oh! Alchemist-chama Gakuen Dream: First Digamma

The Chuck Norris Fact Generator:

Chuck Norris once ate three 72 oz. steaks in one hour. He spent the first 45 minutes having sex with his waitress.

There are no weapons of mass destruction. Just Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris knows how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, but if he told you, he'd have to kill you.

Chuck Norris originally appeared in the "Street Fighter II" video game, but was removed by Beta Testers because every button caused him to do a roundhouse kick. When asked bout this "glitch," Norris replied, "That's no glitch."

Chuck Norris invented black. In fact, he invented the entire spectrum of visible light. Except pink. Tom Cruise invented pink.

And my own particular favourite, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, Bad Year in Bear Lake, which generates eerie, semi-incoherent old-guy-in-the-bar reminiscences:

It was 1948...

I remember Paul Weatherby had this hand-me-down doll, and frankly, it made everybody sick.

We shot him in the face at the Capital and he tried to make it right. As if he could. That's all I have to say about that.

That thing that happened down at the old tumble-down farmstead - that was bad. Sherrif Johnston and the damned manuscript. He just let it all go to hell.

That thing with Dr. Hines and the piece of jewelry - who the hell knew? He just picked at it like a scab until he went crazy.

He pushed and pushed and pushed. Makes me ashamed. That's all I have to say about that. I saw it all.

We strung his ass up down at Szucha street. I still get uncomfortable when I think about it.

You can bet that if I ever ran Delta Green or Unknown Armies games I would be using that generator every single session.