Scantabulous!

GenCon 2010

2010-08-12T05:48:00.000-07:00

Holy crap, you're still checking this blog?! Well, I put up a long photo-dump of a post about this year's GenCon on the vorpal chainsword. Check it out if you want.

New Gaming Blog!

2010-06-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

Yes its been forever. Well, social networks kill personal-life blogs, that's for certain, but I have started a new gaming-related blog with my fellow GM buddies, Brando and Kevin. We're hoping with three authors posting on our ongoing games using different systems and spouting our various gaming-related opinions we can keep it going without suffering single-author "blogpost-fatigue." Anyway, if you were a fan of the gaming-related stuff here at Scantabulous come on over and take a gander at...

The Vorpal Chainsword!

Fun in the Sun

2010-03-06T17:09:00.000-08:00

Cory and I took a trip to Sunny CA to visit some friends. It was great to see them. It was also great to see the sun.

There was a low low tide, so we hit the beach to see the tide pools.

We saw lots of sea anemone and starfish.

We also hit the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park. A baby elephant was just born there. Unfortunately I can't get blogger to upload the baby elephant video, so you get pictures of the lion.

Dragon Strike!

2010-01-13T05:17:00.000-08:00

I was perusing the latest in horrid D&D fan films this morning and got sentimental for an old board game instructional/story video I used to have on VHS tape.

You're welcome for that Cullen.

Also, there's seems to be yet another D&D documentary coming out that, while as cringe-worthy as most, seems to have some sort of overall point about societies stupification...or something, I'm not sure, but it does poke fun at politics being ridiculous. Anyways, check out the trailer.

Now my power is complete!

2009-11-29T12:50:00.000-08:00

Yes, Facebook posting pretty much kills blogs, but I thought I'd let the blogosphere know that my nerdiness and subscriptions to all Green Lantern-related comics at my local shop have allowed me to finally obtain all powers of the color-spectrum!

That's right, every ring is now mine! Kneel before Zod!

And now that I have all the Lantern power rings, I will, uh, I guess...um... collect something else?

Halloween 2009!

2009-11-01T16:18:00.000-08:00

So the ravenous Dr. Lecter and I headed down to the Windy City this year for Halloween, to hang with the Goreckis and Chicago peeps for the celebration of Sam Hain.

Dr. Girlfriend and I both went as serial killers for Halloween this year.

Paul, Cathy, Tom, and Megan went as Spartans!

Chris and Laura went with an excellent Wizard of Oz theme.

I kept busy all night abducting various Dexter fans.

Like any good party, much drunken Wii was played.

Another great Halloween with the Goreckis!

Horror movie sequel challenge

2009-10-03T12:24:00.001-07:00

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w00t! Its October again!

October is the time of horror movies, and as many of you will remember from previous issues of scantabulous, the top ten Halloween movies of all time were established back in 2007, and I don't think anything has come out in the meantime to that could knock movies off that well-researched list, except maybe one...

With the recent release of Children of the Corn remake on the syphillis channel (filmed in the illustrious Lost Nation, IA, home town of your beloved blogmaster) we should talk about some horror movie genres that have multiple sequels.

So with that, I present the "What crappy bad guy is this?" horror movie challenge!

Rules of the challenge:

1) All screenshots of bad guys are from movies with multiple sequels.
2) You get points for naming the movie series, and extra bonus super points for naming the bad guy specifically (if they have a name).

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1) So, lets begin fairly easy:

Yeah, you know the movie series, even if you never actually watched any of them. Where is this little guy from?

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2) Let's get a little more difficult...

You may be confused at this one, but I guarantee you've seen this movie. This movie started an iconic meme that is now applied to all of my favorite horror monsters' feeding habits.

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3) Okay, next we have kind of a trick one:

What the hell? Yep, that's Billy Zane. This was actually a pretty good movie. A major plot point was a dude running around with a vial of Jesus's blood that could create force fields. I ain't kidding.

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4) This one's a difficult one, but I'm guessing Cullen or Brando will get it:

These little creepos like to put your baby sister in a glass coffin in the middle of the woods... or something, I don't fully remember what the deal was with these guys.

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5) Here's one of my favs:

I watched all 5 of these crappy movies. Clue: That gemstone he has is the focus of his ridiculous angst and stupid powers that he would use to kill people in ironic ways.

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6) Here's a semi-difficult one, where's this guy from:

Yeah, he's not the most famousest of bad guys, but he's certainly creepifyin'. What's he from my fellow horror movie buffs?

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7) Finally, how could I not include this guy:

Where's this little wicket from? Bonus points: Name all of this little charmer's terrible movies by title.

The Big Gorecki Wedding!!

2009-09-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

So, this weekend was the BIG Greek Wedding of our friends Paul and Cathy. First on the agenda was to pick up the tux.

I think the black tux with the harvest orange vest looked very nice, but required the D20 socks and Green Lantern cuff links to really pull the ensemble together.

Thanks to Paul and Cathy for the awesome cuff links. They are very cool.

Next up was the rehearsal. Since this wedding was in Cathy's Greek Orthodox church, there were a lot of parts of the ceremony that we had never seen before, so the rehearsal was necessary. Afterward, Paul's parents hosted the rehearsal dinner.

The groom and me

Cory, Chad, Noah, Hillary, and Devin

The groom's sister, Jill and her husband Nick

Nice robot sweatervest!

After dinner, we all got a quick lesson in the Greek 12-step so we were prepared for the reception.

I put together a little video of highlights from the wedding and reception. The quality isn't great, but it will give you an idea of the Greek 12-step (my name for it since I don't know the actual name).

My dates, Brandon and Devin (since Cory was at the head table)

Cory and Sophia

The best man and maid of honor

The Koumbaro and Paul's godmother

Paul and Cathy are both so wonderful, warm, and fun. Wishes for a lifetime of happiness!

To the Earth's Core!

2009-09-23T17:33:00.001-07:00

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SPECIAL UPDATE: The soon-to-be straight-to-DVD blockbuster remake of CHILDREN OF THE CORN (that was filmed in my tiny home town of Lost Nation, IA) premiers this Saturday on the "Syfy" channel at 8pm Central!
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I decided to actually give Hollow Earth Expedition a try with my gaming group, and I must say it was a blast. I had a short adventure already planned out for Gencon but never got the opportunity to play it there, so decided to invite my buds over for a convention-style one-shot game of 1930s pulp action!

Now, as my players had never played Hollow Earth Expedition before nor even heard of the dice system, I had to give a quick overview of what was going on. I read the following:

Several months ago, Prof. Challenger received a faint distress signal from a group that identified itself as "Expedition 3." The cryptic messages from Expedition 3 stated they were a scientific crew who had become stranded deep within the Earth's Crust.

Prof. Challenger immediately began work on the Maneuverable Oxygenated Linear Excavator, or MOLE, a drilling machine capable of traversing through the Earth at remarkable speeds.

Most of the world thinks this is either an insane endeavor or a scam, but Prof. Challenger was able to secure funding and pull together a group of distinguished explorers to join him on this expedition. Together, you will travel in the MOLE on a rescue mission to the heart of the planet!

Then I just let the players see all the demo characters I had printed off and let them choose who goes on the mission without knowing what all the stats meant on the sheets. I would explain the rules after they chose characters because I figured it'd be easier to understand while looking at the sheets.

The characters available were as follows (and yes if you're a Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle fan you'll recognize most of the character names I used):

Prof. Edward Challenger -- Mad Scientist (Expedition Leader)
Lord John Roxton -- Big Game Hunter
Ms. Gladys Huntington -- Intrepid Reporter
Preston Weatherby III -- Dying Moneyman (Expedition Sponsor)
Doug McClure -- Ex-Military Rugged Explorer
Prof. Julius Summerlee -- Snooty Professor (Challenger's Academic Nemesis)
Jacqueline Payne -- Archaeologist and Fortune Hunter
Glenda Blondell -- Imperiled Actress

This being their first adventure they opted for a combat-heavy group and chose Prof. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Doug McClure, and Jacqueline Payne.

The rules to the game are pretty simple, and I won't go into them here. Suffice to say that one of the major differences between HEX and other rpgs are Style points. Each character had a predefined Motivation (Power, Greed, Truth-Seeker, etc.) and a pre-defined Flaw (Overconfident, Absent-minded, Thrill-seeker, etc.). Each time a player plays their character to their motivation or flaw I give them a Style point, which is a poker chip. They can then use these style points to get fairly big bonuses on their die rolls. So for example, Prof. Summerlee's flaw is "Condescending," which means he gets Style points whenever he proves his mental superiority, or just from being a dick in a smarmy and entertaining sort of way. Now, his combat stats are rubbish, but presumably by the time he has to dodge bullets he's saved up so many Style points from antagonizing the group that he can wade through combat by sheer "luck." Style points really made for a fun game, and flew back and forth between me and the players like water.

When starting new games, I prefer to channel my inner Robert E. Howard and start the campaign in media res, that is, toss the characters into an immediate and dangerous situation and gloss over how they got there in the first place. This is much more fun than starting out with the characters sitting around with a long briefing and a Q&A session with the local king, royal sponsor, or general "quest-giver." Don't give the characters the opportunity to waste time haggling with the blacksmith for deals before they've even dented their sword.

With that in mind, the description of the setting was simple and straightforward:

To reach the coordinates broadcast by Expedition 3, the MOLE must travel through over 500 miles of solid rock. You are just getting used to the sound of the grinding drill when suddenly the MOLE is rocked by external explosions. Boiling hot, sulfurous gases penetrate the hull, the electrical systems spark, and the engine pistons scream and struggle to put out enough power! A tectonic tremor has caused the MOLE to fall into a matrix of brittle rock within an enormous magma field!

Then I set down a map I drew of the inside of the MOLE and showed them the five stations, there is the HELM, SYSTEMS MAINTENANCE, ENGINES, AIR PUMP, and SENSORS.

The players had to get ten successes at the HELM within three turns to escape the oncoming rush of hot lava filling the tunnel behind them. Every station gave benefits to other stations or the HELM if successfully maintained, and also gave other stations penalties if not successfully maintained (or in the case of the Air Pump, made everyone start to suffocate and take damage). Of course there were five stations and only four PCs, which is by design. But Doug McClure flexed his mighty thews and manned the bellows of the Air Pump, Prof. Challenger put on his steampunk goggles and drove at the HELM, Ms. Payne interpreted the SENSOR array to help steer the MOLE, and Lord John Roxton took up the monkey wrench and banged on the ENGINES to keep them going. Everybody ignored the smoldering and sparking SYSTEMS MAINTENANCE station and just hoped it would hold until they were safe, and sure enough they were able to just make 10 successes by the third turn and thrust upward through the Earth's crust into an expansive jungle valley! They had little time to ponder this unusual circumstance as they were closely followed by the rushing lava!

They only had a few minutes to spare before the MOLE was swallowed completely in lava, so I let them grab their gear and head out the upper porthole, where they had to jump to a nearby tree for safety. Ms. Payne made it easily, and Lord John Roxton had no trouble grabbing a tree. Doug McClure took a stumble and his boot brushed some lava, but he made it in one piece. Prof. Challenger tried to use the MOLE's ejector seat to get to safety, but only succeeded in setting off a small explosion wrecking the control panel and throwing him harshly into the jungle trees.

Once safe, the PCs were able to look around and while the Professor's coordinates said they were deep within the Earth's crust, they could see a shining sun above them and were deep in a tropical jungle! Then, Doug found some tire tracks in the mud, suggesting they were near the site of where Expedition 3 must be operating!

The PCs followed the tire tracks for a few hours and noticed a lot of previously unknown and thought-extinct ferns and insects. Fortunately, Roxton was keeping an eye up while they traveled because he shushed the group as they came upon a horrendous sight... lizardmen!

A small tribe of lizardmen were dancing around a large bonfire and playing drums. Near the makeshift bonfire they saw an overturned truck and a wooden pole stuck in the ground, with a very distraught woman tied to it! The lizardmen danced around the young sacrifice as the drummers thrummed hypnotic music into the jungle.

Lord John Roxton could not stomach the sight of a woman in distress, and immediately took a knee, aimed his .405 Winchester rifle at the serpentine head of the nearest abomination, and pulled the trigger. The lizardman's head exploded in red mist. The crack of the shot scattered most of the tribal serpentmen, leaving the shaman, his bodyguards and the drummers left to defend the sacrifice.

After a few rounds of intense hand-to-hand combat between the group and the lizardmen, a thunderous roar was heard throughout the jungle, and the PCs realized what the drumming was actually summoning. That's right, since this was a one-shot I wasn't holding back, the lizardmen had summoned a T-rex!

McClure raced to cut the bonds holding the captive with his machete as Ms. Payne distracted the T-Rex with her shotgun and fancy moves. She narrowly escaped being bitten in half only by the grace of spending a lot of Style points and using up her special "Lucky" Talent she gets once a game session. The T-Rex finally reached down to snap up the sacrifice as McClure pushed her out of the way and threw a lizardman drummer forward at the same time, feeding it to the T-Rex Gammorean-guard style. With the death of the drummer the other musician lizardmen stopped playing and started to flee in panic. With the T-rex no longer hypnotized by the music it rampaged around the area attacking things at random. McClure grabbed the damsel and ran past Challenger, the T-rex hot on his heals. Fortunately, Prof. Challenger had in the meantime been attaching a fuse to the overturned truck's gas tank. As the thunderous Superpredator passed the jeep the Professor lit the fuse, and the truck and T-Rex exploded in a tremendous fireball! Prof. Challenger barely leapt out of the path of the explosion into a nearby sinkhole.

Once they were clear of the area, the damsel explained she was Dr. Emily Masterson, a British geologist who was with Expedition 3. She explained that they were ambushed by Nazis who had come into the Hollow Earth on an icebreaker Ship via an opening in the North Pole. The Nazis had found a treasure-trove of strange and precious artifacts and hoped to utilize the riches of the Hollow Earth to help their Fuhrer to conquer the world! She was forced to work with a group of Nazis looking for more precious minerals when they were ambushed by the lizardmen. The Nazis fled leaving her to be sacrificed to the Lizardman gods.

Upon hearing this, patriotic Doug McClure expressed his disdain for Nazis and asked how they could stop the nefarious germans from fulfilling their plans. Dr. Masterson said she could lead the party to where the Nazis had found a strange obelisk in the jungle that they believed to be some sort of weapon. The party needed little prodding with the promise of glory, riches, and a possible escape to the surface and so proceeded to follow Dr. Masterson to the Nazi encampment.

Sure enough, upon arrival at the obelisk they saw a bunch of Nazi guards and Nazi engineers lowering a dug-up obelisk toward the back of a large truck. The obelisk swayed unsteadily on some jury-rigged ropes and it was clear the Nazis were concerned it would fall before they got it on the truck. Deciding they needed to stop whatever it was the Nazis planned, the crew threw together a hasty plan. They would play the lizardmen drums to make the Nazis think more lizardmen were coming, and at the same time Ms. Payne would sneak behind enemy lines and pull the stake holding the obelisk upright at a 45 degree angle above the truck. It seemed like a good plan, until the drumming on the mystical lizardman drums accidentally summoned a group of hungry Ultraraptors from the nearby tall grass!

Nazi, Explorer, and Raptor fought in a desperate three-way battle. In the confusion Ms. Payne pulled up the stake and the obelisk came crashing down onto the truck, just as a guard jumped into the truck to avoid an oncoming raptor. He was flattened instantly. The obelisk broke in half and revealed what the rune-inscribed atlantean artifact had been hiding, a miniature black hole!

Suddenly, everything started to be pulled toward the tiny black hole between the two broken halves of the obelisk. As objects and creatures fell into the dark matter, it grew in intensity and was able to pull toward it larger and larger objects. The players had to hold on for dear life not to get sucked in. As the Professor secured himself between some trees with a hastily-erected harness, he noticed that when the smaller broken-off pieces of the obelisk fell into the hole it decreased in size slightly! On the other side of the battlefield Lord John Roxton noticed it too. Held by his belt and secured to a nearby tree by the stout Doug McClure, he was able to take aim and shatter one half of the obelisk with a well-placed round from ol' Matilda, letting all the smaller pieces fall into the hole, decreasing its size significantly. Unfortunately, the other half of the obelisk was on the other side of the black hole from Roxton, which would suck his bullets into it if he tried to shoot past it!

Seeing his only chance, the professor overloaded the dilithium oscillator on his experimental Stun rifle and tossed it to Ms. Payne, who was able to throw it under the other half of the Obelisk just as a huge explosion rocked the valley. The obelisk section was thrown into the air and came down into the black hole, nullifying the black pulsar, or what was known to the inhabitants of the area 100,000 years ago as an Atlantean Gravity Bomb! The Nazi's plans to take the bomb back to the surface had been foiled!

The trucks and encampment destroyed by the implosion, the players gathered themselves together and headed toward their only hope of escape, the Nazi's icebreaker ship docked just a day's hike away. But as they got to the shore their hopes were dashed, as some time in the night the ship had been attacked by what must be giant sea beasts, or had suffered an artillery explosion, as now only pieces of the deck and various debris bobbed out in the water.

Where would they go now? How would they survive in this hostile world? Where did the rest of the Nazi sailors and soldiers go? Would they ever find their way back to the surface? Find out next time on...

Trapped in the Hollow Earth!

Correspondence from the Reagan Era

2009-09-13T19:17:00.000-07:00

We recently helped Cory's grandparents move to an apartment from the home they lived in for 59 years. In the course of cleaning out the house, a box of memories was assembled for each family member. Below is one of the items from Cory's box.

Universal truths reinforced by this letter:
1) Seven year-olds need lined paper.
2) Cory loves Halloween.
3) Conan is a nerd.

Rainbow Brite Lanterns

2009-09-07T11:24:00.001-07:00

In Brightest Day, in Blackest Night, No Evil Shall Escape My Sight, For Those Who Worship Evil's Might, Beware My Power, Green Lantern's Light!
- The Green Lantern Oath

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So as some of you down with the DC Universe may have heard, the Green Lantern Corps are having some major internal affairs issues with their power rings. For those of you with only a passing knowledge of the current happenings in the Green Lantern universe, I'll break it down.

It all starts with these little blue aliens named "The Guardians of the Universe." These little guys and gals dislike emotion, and believe that excess emotion causes chaos in the universe, and they want order and peace. To that end, thousands of years ago they cut off access to the destuctive power of emotion and created the "Manhunters" to police the galaxy, which are androids devoid of emotion and free of its corrupting influence. However, as all android-police stories go, the androids coldly massacred an entire galactic sector and rebelled against the Guardians. After shutting them down, the guardians decided they needed living police-people to defend the galaxy, and allowed them to wield the power of one emotion: Willpower. Thus forming the Green Lanterns. I'm not really sure how being emotional gives you superpowers either, but lets just move on, okay?

The color Green in the Green Lantern mythos denotes the emotional strength of Willpower. The people who become Green Lanterns have always been chosen by the power rings for two traits: 1) Their ability to overcome fear and 2) Their mastery of their own Willpower. Basically, how ballsy they are. This is why Hal Jordan, who used to be an experimental-jet pilot, is such a badass Green Lantern.

Now, in accordance with an evil prophecy of the "Blackest Night," the remaining colors of the "emotional spectrum" (which is kind of a lame term) powers have broken free of the Guardians imprisonment (or whatever was keeping them under wraps), and now all the colors of R-O-Y-G-B-I-V have their own power rings.

Red - Rage

Red Lanterns express the power of Rage, and are mostly really angry aliens who are pissed at Sinestro, leader of the Yellow Lanterns (I'll get to that). Their leader is named "Atrocitus," which is hilarious. What's cool about the red lanterns is that once they put on the red ring, all their blood is expunged from their system (through their mouths!), and is replaced by pure red plasma energy. Besides the power to disrupt the light-contructs of the other power rings, the red lanterns can puke up the plasma blood in a corrosive form, melting their enemies faces off. They're pretty badass but completely insane. The red lanterns recently destroyed the Green Lantern's Sciencells where they were keeping all the Yellow Power rings they had captured, inadvertantly allowing those rings to make a bunch more Yellow Lanterns, who the red lanterns hate. Whoops! The Blue Lantern rings (see below) can disrupt the red power rings for a short time, and combined Blue+Green power rings can destroy Red power rings.

Orange - Avarice (Greed)

Orange Lanterns wield the power of Greed. In the comics they call it "Avarice," because somebody decided to get cocky with a thesaurus, but basically its just greed. Currently, there's only one real Orange Lantern. He's some kinda alien guy that stumbled on the Orange Lantern Power Battery a long time ago with his twin brother and killed him so he wouldn't have to share it. The Orange lantern allows the user to create thousands of light constructs (all of "orange lanterns") at once which can eat other power rings and envelop their owner's souls, thus allowing the Orange lantern to make more constructs when it kills another color's lantern superhero. The Orange Lantern is still kind of a mystery, except he really, really wants to eat all the Blue Power rings, and is currently launching an attack on the Blue Lantern's home planet of Odym.

Yellow - Fear

Sinestro is the primary enemy of the Green Lanterns, and was a major force in the build up to the release of all seven colors of the emotional power spectrum. Ya see, Sinestro used to be a Green Lantern, but decided that Fear makes a better motivator for peace than asking people to have Willpower, so changed his tune. Somehow he made his Green Lantern ring into a Yellow Lantern ring. It can do all the stuff the Green Lantern ring can do, but is yellow. Also, he was able to reproduce his ring and form his own Yellow Lantern Corps (called the 'Sinestro Corps') to try to take over Oa (home planet of the Green Lanterns). This started the 'Sinestro Wars' that preceeded the Blackest Night prophecy. During this war, the Guardians realized that the Green Lanterns couldn't defeat all the Yellow Lanterns unless they lifted the ban on killing for the Green Lanterns (up to this point, the GLs couldn't kill anybody, so were kind of hamstringed in battles and had to make big cages and fists to grab dudes -- but that doesn't work when you're fighting guys with the same power to un-do the cages and whatnot you made). So the Green Lanterns started killing the Yellow Lanterns, and (temporarily) won the war. This turned out to be Sinestro's plan all along, because he felt once the populace of various worlds found out that Green Lanterns were now willing to kill, they'd be afraid of them, and the galaxy would have peace at last. The Green Lanterns imprisoned all the Yellow Power Rings they found in their super-huge galactic prison, but very recently the red lanterns who were imprisoned there destroyed the prison and the power rings escaped to find new owners.

Green - Willpower

These are the light-construct-making green ring-slingers we've all come to know and love. Normally there was a single green lantern for each one of the 3600 'Sectors' of the universe, but recently have been doubled in number and split into pairs due to the increasing threat of the yellow lanterns. These guys take their orders from the Guardians of the Universe and are generally do-gooders on par with Superman and Friends. Hal Jordan is the most famousest of Lanterns, and has up to this point been exposed to and fought off the effects of the Red, Orange, Yellow (at least, when he was Parallax), and Blue Lantern effects. I'm betting we'll see him almost get taken over by Violet and Indigo at some point, but he's Green through and through.

Blue - Hope

These peace-loving beatniks are very few in number and are founded by two exiled Guardians who felt it was necessary to feel emotion to defeat the oncoming 'Blackest Night.' The Blue power rings don't really have any powers of their own other than flight and a protective shield, but instead they greatly increase the power of any Green Lantern rings nearby. When a Blue Lantern (Hope) and Green Lantern (Willpower) team up, they can destroy some power rings (Red) and drain the energy of others (Yellow). Unfortunately there's only like four of these guys running around and the Guardians forbid the Green Lanterns to commiserate with them, as they are illegally using power rings (or something), and so we haven't seen a lot of teaming-up yet, other than with Hal. The Guardians tipped off the Orange Lantern to the existence of the Blue Lantern's homeworld, and the Orange Lantern has sent his huge legion of nearly-indestructible ring-eating constructs to consume their world. And as the Blue Lanterns are alone, without a Green Lantern to help, it looks bleak.

Indigo - Compassion

These are the only ring folks who haven't really been seen yet by the universe at large. There was like a four-panel section of one issue which showed a group of tibal folks come across a completely exhausted Green and Yellow lantern in the desert, presumably on their home world. The Green Lantern told them to run as he was fighting that Yellow Lantern who may still be dangerous, because his power ring was drained and his body broken. The Indigo Lanterns (?) moved over to him, speaking a language his ring couldn't decode, and quietly smothered him to death. Next they went over to the Yellow lantern (who's ring was also drained) and did the same, but not as nicely. Then they continued on their walk through the desert. Kind of wierd, but at least we know they aren't automatically nice guys just 'cause they are the rings of compassion.

Violet - Love
(Brando's Favorite)

Readers of Green Lantern have seen these ladies before, at least in the form of Star Sapphire. Hal Jordan's old girlfriend Carol Ferris has occasionally been taken over by a somewhat-malignant force from space known as the 'Star Sapphire'. This force gave her Green Lantern-like powers and made her the embodiment of an extinct Queen of a race of evil superwomen called the Zamorazons...or something. Her evil plot was to marry/enslave Hal Jordan and have his superbabies, and to that end she robbed banks and destroyed cities. Look, it was written in like the 1940s, they had no idea about continuity or making female supervillians remotely interesting back then. Anyhoo, now that the emotional spectrum stuff is going on, the Star Sapphire has had a gentler change of heart and hosts the entity of Love rather than the Queen of the Zamorazon's soul, and has started its own Corps. The Star Sapphire crystal (or whatever) realized that the 'power of love' is too strong for just one host, so displaced itself into a Power Battery and Power rings, like the Green Lantern Corps. Of course, all the Violet Lanterns are still hot chicks with evidentally a 'no boys allowed' policy, but that's fine because I really wouldn't want to see a dude in one of their outfits. So far their rings have been shown to make light constructs a la Green Lanterns and show people who their true love is, which is kinda lame.
Mostly they've just used that ability to make yellow lanterns hesitate to strike as they see their true love and then the Violet lanterns sucker-punch them from behind. Go Love!

Black - Death

Now this is the king-daddy of them all, and the epicenter of the Blackest Night prophecy. One of the Guardians who was scarred from a fight with the Anti-Monitor (its a long story, don't ask), went crazy and opened the portal for the Black Lantern Power Rings to come forth. The Black Lantern power rings seek out dead superheros and turn them into Zombie Superheros, who have all their original powers and none of their vulnerabilities. Not only that, but in order to power their rings (which undead superheros really don't need to use their abilities), they have to eat the hearts of other superheros! Currently their power level is at 2.67%, and that's after eating like nine major superhero hearts. Also when they kill a superhero he or she joins their ranks! To find out some of the major superheros/supervillans who've been killed and/or resurrected as Black Lanterns, highlight below:

Martian Manhunter, Jade, AquaMan, AquaLad, Superman Prime, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Elongated Man, Solomon Grundy, and the Spectre!

And that's only up to Blackest Night Issue #2! So now the whole universe is battling these zombie superheros who are seemingly indestructible and want to eat people's beating hearts, and they are laying waste to the superhero population of the DC Universe. Furthermore, the evil Guardian (who I think is now undead), has sent waves of the rings to the home planets of the various Lantern colors, in order to ressurect them and destroy all power colors except for Black.

How will they be stopped? Nobody knows, but I really hope its not something as Deus Ex Machina as Hal Jordan combining the powers of all seven colors and forming the 'White Lantern' or something. That's my guess though.

What are you?

2009-09-01T16:56:00.001-07:00

...I'm Batman.
So I picked up the new game Batman: Arkham Asylum this weekend on the recommendation of my good buddy Paul, and its incredible quality has consumed all of my free time since. This new Batman game is the everlovin' bees knees.

Take the best forensic science investigation parts of Condemned: Criminal Origins, the dark atmosphere and open Central Park-sandbox of the latest (otherwise 'meh'-quality) Alone in the Dark, add a sweet brawler combat system, and you've got Rocksteady's latest release, Batman: Arkham Asylum.
I assumed they would put in a quality combat system, and even a stealth-kill mechanic that's fun to use, but what I didn't expect was the cool 'detective mode' system where you can look around a room as Batman would, to pick out fingerprints and chemical vapors and other forensic evidence. It really adds the detective element to the game.

Without giving anything away, the premise of the game is that Joker has set up a super-trap for good ol' Bats, by luring him to Arkham island which he has secretly taken over, and letting all the crazies loose. The plot is an oldie but a goodie, and silently gliding around the island quietly choking-out assault rifle-armed joker thugs from behind just doesn't ever get old.

The voices are all done by the folks from the animated series, so yes we have Mark Hammil as the Joker, which is the most important voice of all because he's constantly mocking you over the loudspeakers. If any of you Jokers are on the fence about picking this game up, or haven't even heard its out, then I heartily recommend grabbing it. Its a Bat-smashing good time.

Trees!

2009-08-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

Built some deciduous trees terrain this week for my lord of the rings miniature game I never play. Now the Rohirrim can ride through Fangorn on their hunt for orc.

The tree groups are built upon some carved foam, and covered with some grass matting. Then I hot glued some stumps down, and glued some sand and rocks down. Once dry I painted them with scorched brown, and then drybrushed them with snakebite leather and skull white. Then glued down some grass flock to cover any unsightly seems, and then clumps of foliage as bushes. They turned out pretty good. Here's some pics of the trees themselves before I figured out to turn off the flash under macro mode.

A goblin hides in the trees for scale.

Of course, no goblin is going to be able to skulk around the Riddermark without the Riders of Rohan (led by Gandalf, of course) venturing forth to purge their lands of such evil!

*gulp!*

GenCon 2009!

2009-08-18T15:44:00.000-07:00

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Yes, I'm back. I'm not going to go into the whole tired monologue of why I haven't posted in five months. Just be glad that Gencon 2009 supplied the activation energy needed to kick one geek butt into nerd gear again.

Wednesday:

Wednesday morning, Mary packed me up and sent me off to GenCon at the crack of 9am.

My travel companions from Madison were my IT buddy from work, Steve, and two of his faithful companions, Jason and Nick.

Upon arriving in Indianapolis, I met up with Delp and Paul in our room at the Marriott to form the "GenCon Triad." (those of us who have been to Gencon three years in a row)

Later that evening, Brando arrived in Indy to complete the adventuring party and there was much rejoicing. GenCon could officially commence!

First, a beer was had at the local microbrewery that caters to nerds during Gencon, the RAM. The RAM produces a new beer specifically for Gencon every year. This year it was a Honey Brown Ale, which we drank plenty of.

Then we talked the talk of nerdyness well into the wee hours of the night, ready to face dangers and adventure galore for the next four days of gaming.

Thursday:

First thing Thursday was True Dungeon! After getting a filling breakfast in the concierge lounge, we headed downstairs to face the horrors of True Dungeon.

Sadly, Devin was abruptly unable to attend GenCon this year, and so we had an extra ticket to True Dungeon. Requiring a Cleric, we found this guy in the hallway to fill in.

He did his part acting as the cleric, but its difficult to compete with the awesome that is Devin. Devin, you were missed, especially your puzzle-solving skillz.

We stumbled through the puzzle rooms with all the skill of first-level morons, but gritted our teeth and took the auto-damage as we kept on going to the next extremely dangerous hit-point sapping room. Of course, with an adventuring party so resplendent and powerful, we were still victorious in the end and overcame "Scumfang," the Troll Mage King of the Cursed Bog of Deadliness and Neverending Peril.

This is when Delp left the party to assume his duties as a volunteer for True Dungeon, and I only saw him once or twice afterward due to his busy volunteering schedule.

As Paul went to run through True Dungeon a second time, Brando and I tried to get to one of the Hollow Earth Expedition games I had singed up for with the excellent title of "Burt Fedora and the Warmaidens of Mars." Unfortunately due to a last-minute renovation in the Crowne Plaza hotel, the game was moved to another room which the info booth was not updated on. Alas, we searched and searched, but by the time we did find the game it was already 20-minutes in and we'd be interrupting, so we didn't bother them. Instead, Brando and I wandered the exhibition hall for a few hours, and Brando got his picture taken with some of his favorite characters.

Plenty of good ol' fashioned representatives from the Empire were there too.

Of course there were Ren-faire bands and whatnot selling their lute-music CDs.

There were a ton of very cool minis to be seen and we both took pics of sweet 28mm pewter mini setups. Brando took like 600 pictures of them.

There's also an art show at GenCon for fantasy art, and one guy brought along his wizard-ified motorcycle. Now with 30% more skulls!

Later that night, I ditched the crew and went on a solo adventure to go play a 6-hour marathon of 1st edition AD&D's original RAVENLOFT Adventure (I6)! The GM was excellent and clearly loved the source material. Unfortunately it started out a little slow because the guy couldn't bring himself to turn away all the people who showed up with generic tickets to play, resulting in 11 PCs to deal with. Fortunately, it got a lot better when a Banshee on the second floor of Castle Ravenloft screamed and 6 PCs died after failing their saves vs. death magic, leaving the remaining 5 of us to mop up Strahd.

My character, Connor Macgregor: Cleric of Lathander held his own against the minions of evil with his holy spellcasting and richeous silver flailery. Each time he defeated an enemy or did something even remotely noteworthy it was recorded in his Great Book of Good Deeds.

He even managed to find the Holy Symbol of Barovia and with it actually stunned the Vampire Lord for one round!

That's right, that's Connor within 5 feet of Strahd Von Zarovich. How's that for some iron balls? Strahd was aghast at Connor's clerical abilities and fled for one round, leaving us to be level-drained by his nearly-endless Wraith minions (of which Connor single-handedly destroyed two). The party was level-drained and their souls were eventually imprisoned forever but the legend of Connor Macgregor, stunner of Strahd, will haunt Strahd forever!

Arriving back at the room well after midnight, I collapsed in hopes of actually making Friday's Hollow Earth game I had signed up for.

Friday:

Friday morning I got up chipper as can be for the Hollow Earth game "Lost City of Crystal Graveyards," and tried to awaken Brando to attend with me. Unfortunately, he and Paul had gone out and gotten uber-hammered the night before, so he had an epic hangover and did not attend the morning game with me. Furthermore in my haste to get to the game I neglected to take my camera, so got no live-action pics, but this illustration does a good job representing the great adventure that I had.

After Hollow Earth, I did some more exhibition hall shopping and picked up all the sweet new release books I wanted, including Mysteries of the Hollow Earth, Strange Aeons, Star Wars Guide to the Rebellion, and the Desolation rpg.

Then after dinner we finally got to hang out with Delp for more than five minutes and for the rest of the night Brando ran a game of Dark Heresy (note: link may have music) for the three of us. We killed a number of cultists AND innocent bystanders, and succeeded in sending the cult leader to his well-deserved judgement. Unfortunately we each died horrible deaths at the hands of a Daemonhost and his fervent followers, but that's a small price to pay for furthering the God-Emperor's glory.

Saturday:

On Saturday morning, Delp once again disappeared to True Dungeon land and Brando, Paul and I went to the Hyatt to play in Brando's 8-10 am spider-infested game of Return to the Tower of Gygax. RttToG is a fairly new addition to GenCon, and is a continuous highly-deadly game of 1st edition AD&D in a magical tower of traps and wizardry, where DMs run two-hour shifts for any players that showup. Immediately upon entering the game I was passed a note from good old Brando letting me know I was possessed by a malevolent daemon and forced to kill my fellow PCs. I personally kicked an unsuspecting Paul the Elf into a pit of acid and held the door shut on him. I still kind of feel bad about that Paul.

Later my shift started and I ran the Tower of Gygax from 11am-1pm, wherein I could exact my revenge upon Brando, who's gnome illusionist I suffocated in a sea of shifting quicksand. Later I forced everybody to jump from pillar-to-pillar over a bottomless chasm, and each pillar was trapped such that it would randomly kill or imperil the person on the pillar behind it. Everybody had a grand ol' time, and one player actually escaped the Tower!

Having geeked out to the max at Tower of Gygax on Saturday, Brando, Paul and I then went back to the room to change into our Green Lantern shirts, and proudly walked around the convention center as the three coolest dudes in the hall.

Oh yeah, and the three of us ate dinner at the RAM.

That night, I taught Paul and Brando how to play Lord of the Rings strategy battle game with my Rohan guys and Goblins on some of the new terrain I picked up, and there was much battle to be had.

Sunday:

We all said our farewells and started the long trip home. Thus ends another epic tale of The Lords of the GenCon, Nerds of the West!

Now its time to deal with the inevitable post-GenCon sickness from swimming around in that petri dish of nerd funk. I can already feel my throat getting sore and my nose getting stuffed as we speak...

Oh well, good thing its totally worth it! Now where's that Dayquil?

And they call it a Mine!

2009-03-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge's fire is ashen-cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls,
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls;
In Moria, in Khazad-dum.

As noted in last post about Talisman, my terrain-building bug is back. However, with very little time on the weekends to work on terrain, and no driving force to get any done (as I don't actually play any wargames anymore), progress is slow. However, my first project to get me back into the swing of things is now complete. I had an extra piece of 2x2 plywood lying around, so I figured a general terrain board was in order. A Moria terrain board for my Lord of the Rings Mines of Moria guys, that is.

First, the boring shots:

I followed the tutorial on the games workshop site to get the little broken tiles and whatnot on there. It looks a lot better with terrain and minis though. Here's some Balin's Tomb attack action:

Aragorn defends the doorway...

Boromir and Gimli attack the Cave troll...

Nothing makes bad paint jobs on Gandalf stand out like a close-up shot...

Strangely, the flash causes the bases to look really light in the pictures, but they are virtually the same color as the table itself in real life as far as I can tell. Oh well, the trials of an amateur photographer.

Now my challenge is to convince Mary that she really wants to learn how to play the excessively-complex Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game!

Talisman Game Board!

2009-02-16T06:03:00.000-08:00

I sauntered across this little gem this weekend and was amazed. This guy made a totally sweet 3-D gameboard for Talisman! (You can watch it with the sound off, its just background Enya music).

You can tell its 2nd edition (the best one) and not 3rd edition (shortened, crappy one) because of the presence of all the center stuff: werewolf, pit fiends, the "dice with death." The 3rd edition one I have now just has you draw cards once you get into the plains of peril, which is totally lame. Fortunately my buddy SuperChad still has my old copy of 2nd edition Talisman. I'm going to get that back from him in a month or so and consider making my own unnecessarily huge gameboard for Talisman. How can I resist after watching that video?

I stopped painting minis and crafting terrain once I moved to Wisconsin, but that video made me desperately miss my pinning vice and foam cutter, even if I'm no longer marching Necrons across fields' of battle.

I keep thinking of other game boards one could build. Arkham Horror maybe, with little light-up 1920s street lights and such. Fireball Island is an obvious one, but that one would have to be functional for the little marbles to roll correctly. What are other games that would benefit from a huge, 3-D terrain board?

Star Wars: Battles of the Outer Rim

2009-02-11T19:15:00.001-08:00

STAR WARS: BATTLES OF THE OUTER RIM

EPISODE I

SIEGE OF RYLOTH

It is a dark time for the Galactic Republic. Civil war rages as the newly-formed CONFEDERACY OF INDEPENDENT SYSTEMS declares independence and quickly absorbs a number of important and influential systems into its number. The Republic has responded to this threat by unleashing the GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC, in what throughout the galaxy has come to be called THE CLONE WARS.

After a number of defeats on Duro, Commenor and Balmorra in the Core, the bulk of the Separatist forces have withdrawn to the Mid and Outer Rim territories, reinforcing their holdings and controlling access to the Corellian Trade Route hyperspace lanes. Emboldened by the Separatists’ seemingly hasty retreat from the Core worlds, SUPREME CHANCELLOR PALPATINE and the JEDI COUNCIL have deployed a significant force of clones and fleet elements to the Outer Rim to liberate the loyalist systems in the region and break the siege on the hyperspace lanes.

Above the tidally-locked planet Ryloth, a vast battle rages between the armies of the Republic and Separatist Forces. Enmeshed in this battle is the Venator-Class Star Destroyer JUSTICAR, recently sent to the Arkanis Sector from Coruscant to bring much-needed reinforcements to the Republic forces in the Outer Rim …

Two sessions in and the Force is strong!
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Fire up the hyperspace navicomputer and strap on your ridiculously elongated rebel helmet, its time for some Star Wars!

As most of you know, Star Wars is the greatest Space Opera of all time (definition of Space Opera notwithstanding). So my Tuesday night D&D group agreed to drop the Longswords and Magic Missiles and dive into some X-wings and Blaster Rifles after much prodding by me. We even got a sixth player to join us who altered his work schedule just to be able to shoot droids on Tuesday nights. Now that’s dedication to the Force. I downloaded a boatload of Star Wars sound effects I play during the game, and I’m always looking for more, because you just can’t have enough sounds of blaster bolts ricocheting off of lightsabers.

We’ve got a human scout pilot named ‘Rolan Antillies,’ of the upper New Corellia Antilles’es, who is a fairly crappy pilot who’s never actually successfully landed a starship/starfighter/landspeeder/speederbike, but he’s got a famous piloting name so he stays employed. There’s a Bothan scoundrel “technician” for the Grand Army who speaks binary and has an underground hacker following on the holonet that call him ‘The Warlock.’ The Jedi are represented by an acrobatic flippity-doo-dah Jedi named ‘Romulus’ who focuses on the force insomuch as it allows him to aggressively use his lightsaber on stuff; as well as his estranged twin Jedi brother ‘Remus’ who went the Force Wizard path, knocking dudes around with his mind-bullets. There’s also a half-baked jetpack-wearing Clone Sergeant/failed ARC trooper (bad early batch) named ‘A-144’ that was determined not suitable for ARC duty but too skilled (expensive) for genetic recycling, so was shoehorned into the regular Clone Army. Finally there’s the hulking Wookie ne’er-do-well named ‘Garrrgull’ who specializes in tearing the arms off of ‘bots and things.

The group consists of a bunch of semi-random Republic soldiers and contractors all thrown together in the Clone Wars after the Republic Star Destroyer they were traveling on gets hit by a couple Proton Torpedoes upon exiting hyperspace. They were all in the same Turbolift when this happened, and of course the primary power went out. Once they figured out how to get out of the Turbolift shaft the clone is contacted by ‘T-1138’, the clone commander for the ship, who lets him know that droids have breached deck D-327 (which our heroes happened to be on) and are heading for the shield generator in engineering! Early in this adventure they learned that while battle droids have terrible aim, blaster bolts really hurt when 20s are rolled by the DM. We had to break out the ‘Treat Injury’ rules pretty early in the session.

After their first harrowing battle, the PCs decided that rather than take the direct approach and get shot to pieces by battle droids, they’d go through the maintenance tunnels. During their crawl through the dark tunnels they rescued an R5 astromech droid that had become trapped in some live wiring. The Bothan nearly destroyed it trying to retrieve it, but the Corellian pilot – familiar with Republic droid tech – managed to pull off a motivator inversion and re-polarize its core matrix, all using a simple hydrospanner!* As such, the R5 astromech is surprisingly loyal to the failed pilot, and follows him everywhere beeping all the way.

After a few near-misses with avoiding those ubiquitous chasms found in all starships, a number of battles with squads of battle droids trying to destroy the shield generator, and seeing the death of a Jedi Knight at the hand of some Separatist melee-bots, the heroes witnessed a Sorolsuubian Techno-Union chief fly out of the hanger deck and into the sprawling space battle with a kidnapped Twilek ambassador in tow!

As they saw the Techno-Union Separatist leaving in his Sorolsuub Lamba-class assault shuttle, they quickly jumped into any ship they could find in hot pursuit. The pilot, humorously confident in his piloting skills, opted for one of the ARC-170 fighters taking the astromech and the force wizard along as a gunner. The rest of the crew jumped into the “Golden Mynock,” an ambassadorial YT-2400 star transport prototype. Both ships rocketed out of the docking bay in hot pursuit of the Separatist kidnapper.

The space battle was huge, and difficult to keep straight. For some reason I decided that I needed a full four Republic star destroyers, three Separatist Banking Frigates, and one Droid Controller Ship all on the map along with 23 droid tri-fighters, 16 vulture droid fighters, 11 Clone-piloted ARC-170s, 6 Jedi Starfighters, 12 space mines and 5 patches of ‘space debris’ randomly floating about the board while the chase occurred. Oh yeah, and 1/4th of the board was a gravity well due to the pull of the planet Ryloth. This was probably a little too much to keep track of for our first foray into the spaceship combat rules, but I follow the creed that if you think of some awesome thing for a game but don’t know if you can follow all the rules properly, then make rules up on the fly and still do the awesome thing.

The PCs had to do sensor sweeps to see the mines, which would move every round and disappear from the map. They also had to avoid engaging in dog fights with the droid ships as the Techno-Union kidnapper flew past them, and the droid ships would move based on a highly technical algorithm called “my 40k scatter die.” If the PCs got too close to an enemy capital ship I’d roll a chance based on the size of the ship that they get stopped by a tractor beam, but the capital ships were pretty busy defending themselves so the chance was very low.

I anticipated that the PCs would most likely try to cripple the ship they were chasing and catch up to it, using their magnetic clamps to board the ship, or they’d chase the ship into the planet’s gravity well and force it to land. Less likely, but still possible, was that the ship would make it to the Droid Control ship on the other side of the board and that the PCs would have to call in some Laat/i gunships filled with Clone Commandos to board the ship with them and take it down from inside. Instead, they decided to follow the Corellion Pilot’s lead and crash their ships into the docking bay at full speed on the same round that the Techno-Union ship landed to take advantage of the momentary opening in the capital ship’s shields, and busted up every ship in the hanger (including their own).

They crawled out of their ships and into a huge droid firefight and barely survived. A vulture droid ship crashed in behind them and began blowing the hell out of the upside-down ARC-170 the pilot was trapped in, but the Force Wizard made a heck-of-a-roll and Force Gripped it until the Lightsaber Jocky could cut it to shreds. The Wookie nearly died and almost everyone took at least a blaster bolt to the kidneys before the battle was over. You see, I had prepared an encounter in the hanger for the PCs and two groups of Clone Trooper Squads (from the Clone Wars book) just in case of the third possibility, and after a second of consideration I decided to use it as-is, minus a few battle droids that were in the path of the crashing ships. Hey, if you want to land aboard a Droid Control Ship you’re goona see a lot of droids, what can I do? To add insult to injury, the Techno-Union guy ran into the bowels of the ship with the Twilek Ambassador and got away...for now.

Once the hanger was secure and the Bothan slicer hacked into the computer they saw all droid squads in the area converging on their location, so the slicer locked a few doors, the clone and pilot set up a couple explosive traps, and they all went back to their favorite strategy – hide in the maintenance tunnels. Now I’ve got a group of hapless and very wounded Republic soldiers hiding in the astromech maintenance corridors trying to figure out how they are going to contact their buddy T-1138 and get some assistance. Do they try to get to the heavy-defended comm. station and radio for help? Should they go to the heavily-defended detention area where the Separatist bad guy is probably taking the Twilekkian Ambassador? Or should they head to the extremely heavily-defended core reactor and shut down the ship droid controller system?

I love Star Wars.

*Hydrospanner note from the Personal Log of Remus. Entry 03, 19 BBY

The Stars are Right!

2009-01-01T07:15:00.000-08:00

Three planets were visible last night (New Years eve 2008) just at sunset, after the sun went down but before the stars came out. Venus was visible all night long and was super-duper bright, and I assume anyone who was out last night saw Venus just below the moon.

But Mercury and Jupiter were skulking around out there too, but were only visible around 5:30pm central time, to the southwest of Venus just above the horizon.

Now granted, the linear alignment may not have an R^2 of 1, but its pretty darn close. Its got at least a 0.985 if I've ever seen it.
I went inside worried that the end of all things had come, but then was relieved to see that Dick Clark was still alive and hosting his New Years Eve special, so things must be fine. This is just a general omen of otherworldly dread, not necessarily an immediate portend to unprecedented disaster.

I look forward to greeting the Great Old Ones when they arise from their subterranean crypts due to this celestial alignment. Wait, maybe they already have...

Happy New Year Everybody!

Ftaghn!

Happy Holidays!

2008-12-20T15:48:00.000-08:00

Yes, we have done a woeful job of updating the blog as of late (Cory's last posts notwithstanding). Here is a pictoral essay of what has been going on.

The cactus that we got from Cory's grandma bloomed. The blossom started off as a large pod, opened up for a while, then closed and fell off. It was strange and beautiful. Interestingly, in WI in the winter, a cactus requires more water than you would think.

Cory and I made our first (and second) trips across Lake Wisconsin via the ferry. We didn't know what to do, but the GPS did.

Cory and I went to the RA reunion at UNI earlier this month. Guess who else was there?

We got complimentary passes to eat at the Redeker dining center (now called Piazza). Before we got there, I told Cory we should count all the pajama pants we see (mesh shorts and sweat pants count, too), but the first twelve people we saw were all wearing pajamas, mesh, or sweats, so we decided that we should count people wearing regular clothes, like jeans. But as soon as we got inside the dining center, we were so confused about how to actually get food, we forgot about the counting. After wandering around to all the different stations, where Cory took one of everything, we finally secured enough food to comprise the weirdest meal of all time (black bean burger + butterscotch yogurt + chinese stir fry + cotton candy ice cream).

The actual RA reunion was held in the new McCloud basketball arena, which is a much better building for basketball than the UNIDOME.

The reunion was held in the Alumni Association box behind the basket. Great seats.

Cory's been rollin' some 20-sided dice with his buddies.

We got a kickin' pre-lit Christmas tree.

And we also got over thirty inches of snow. I went to the nearby golf course today for a little cross country skiing. I didn't stay long because it started snowing again. As of the 11 inches of snow we got Thursday-Friday, we have more snow this year than we did last year at this time (remember over 100 inches of snow last year?). We are under a winter weather advisory for tonight with 4-6 more inches of snow. We fly out to visit Cory's parents on Monday, so hopefully the snow will be finished by then.

On that note, Merry Christmas to all and to all, a good night!

Ravenloft, Redux

2008-12-14T09:02:00.000-08:00

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So avid readers will remember that I DM'd an online Ravenloft 3.5 ed game on Fantasy Grounds with some buddies of mine a while back. Specifically the "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft" game, though we never got into the Castle itself. This was my fauilt, as I didn't have the patience anymore to convert maps and dialogue into type form anymore, and the Castle itself is such a huge project I just gave up. It didn't help that I had made an agreement with a guy on the FG forums that I would convert the realm and encounters around the Castle and village, etc. into FG format and he'd do the Castle itself, except after I sent him my stuff he never reciprocated. That was pretty much the end of it.

Anyway, avid readers will also remember that I have a new local 4e D&D group I have weekly games with (in-person!). Well, they just got transported into Ravenloft (Barovia, specifically) and fought their way into the center of a besieged town, which is under seige by '30 Days of Night'-style zomb-ires (I've altered the EtCR a lot for 4e). Anyway, one of the players plays a halfling ranger/rogue who's a living turret (*pew pew pew*), and he writes a bi-weekly journal of our games in-character. As his last game was their first foray into Ravenloft, I figured my old players and fellow Ravenloftians might appreciate reading it. I've also come up with a new Fear/Horror/Madness percentile-based system into our Ravenloft games that is very Call of Cthulhu-oriented. So far its worked out pretty good and the players seem to like it, so I may post the details of the system in another post.

Just for reference, the characters are Rong the Dragonborn Cleric of the Raven Queen, Arjan the Half-elf Paladin of the Raven Queen, Wil Blackburn the Human Man-at-Arms, Colibri the Tiefling Fire Mage, and KinKal the Halfling Ranger/Rogue.

Journal of KinKal Issue R1

There was a chill in the air as we got our bearings in this new place. It was dusk and a thick fog hung about the forest the bordered the road. The land we had left was snow-covered but here there was none.

We started off in the direction of the town – perhaps someone there could explain where we were. As we moved down the road the fog seemed to get even thicker and a misty rain began to fall. Though I believe the actual temperature was warmer than where we left, the wet air chilled me. And I had a feeling in my gut…something here was just not right.

We eventually reached a gate in the road flanked by two large statues whose heads had been removed. There was no wall beyond the gate or any other reason for it to be there. The thick forest was as it had been on either side of the road.

The gate creaked open – probably a bit of breeze…though it seemed pretty calm. It just seemed creepy but I wasn’t about to let a creaking gate scare me and strode forward. As the rest of the group followed through the gate slammed shut behind us. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and the feeling of dread increased – that was clearly not natural.

I shook off my doubts and we continued forward but there was still that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that something wasn’t right.

We broke from the woods as the rain increased from heavy mist to a constant drizzle – not enough to soak you, but enough to be cold and annoying. A town lay in a low spot thick with the ever-present mist. However, we did not see any signs of life – no fires, no light, no smoke from chimneys. As we got closer we could see that the doors and windows of all of the buildings were boarded up.

The muddy road showed signs of recent foot travel from many sets of boots, and with the puddles on the ground and rainy weather they couldn’t have been very old. So someone had to be here, somewhere.

A noise up ahead grabbed our attention – there seemed to be an overturned cart of some sort with humanoid figures around it. It was hard to tell what exactly they were doing though the thick fog…but as we got closer it became clear – they were some sort of sick undead creatures feasting on dead humans!
I felt the bile rise in my throat; these were no simple mindless zombies but were instead actively feasting on the dead bodies! Our new addition – I had learned his name was Wil Blackburn – charged forward but the sickly creatures were faster than they appeared and after deftly dodging his blows started swarming around him.

As the paladin marched forward and launched into his attack, he was assaulted from the flank down another street. Fortunately he avoided the attack as the rune-covered creature caused the ground beneath him to open and attempt to swallow him.

The fast zombies gave out a high-pitched scream which was answered from distant rooftops. As we cut down the zombie hoard more of them poured in from the rooftops, surrounding Wil and Ahrjan, while the rune-covered enemy pressed forward. Wil managed to get tangled up with a zombie during an attack and dropped to the ground, managing to get a face full of muddy water which momentarily blinded him.

We were looking a bit pressed and I still felt the horror in my gut. Still I pressed forward a bit as the rune-covered evil sent a wave arcane fear over our front rank. Meanwhile Wil had gotten up and cleared his eyes, but in his drive to strike his foes got his flail tangled and tossed it across the road.

The cart we had seen was now an inferno as Colibri’s bursts had caught that as well as the enemies. I saw a cold determination rise in Rong as he stepped forward and called on the power of the Raven Queen. A shadowy burst of divine energy radiated out from him and several of the creatures screamed as they turned to dust! Ahrjan pressed forward but was trapped by the earth attack and could not reach the runed enemy.

My arrows finally started flying true and I felled a pair of the disgusting creatures that were coming over the rooftops. We had now turned the tide, but the leader was still standing. Rong stepped forward, again invoking his god, and smote the thing. There was a terrible scream as the runes glowed and the creature seemed to collapse in on itself.

Ahrjan yelled some nonsense about that being “his” enemy to defeat but most of us figured it was just more of his “life is pain” morose crap and just nodded until he stopped. Rong seemed a bit surprised at the reaction but little seems to shake the huge Dragonborn. But then again he could have had a look of complete fear for all I knew – his face never seems to change no matter what the situation.

All was quiet…for a moment. Then we heard the scream of another of these wild zombies. The fire – it was clearly visible from most of the town and we pressed on to get away from it before we had more visitors.

Clear of the fire we came upon an open crossroads. In the middle there was a man lying face down. We all suspected…well something. Colibri poked the body with some magical force to see if it would arise as a zombie but it was truly dead…for now. Still, I’d seen enough ambush situations to go marching into this. No, always change the rules when you suspect an ambush. So I quietly climbed to the roof of one of the buildings to our right. Moving stealthily I noted a figure on a roof opposite, seemingly watching the corpse. It was hard to see through the fog but it seemed to be crouched in a pose suggesting a zombie, not a human. I took careful aim and fired – the arrow neatly pierced the creature’s neck and it pitched forward onto the street with little more than a thump.

The group approached the man and he seemed to have some sort of amulet on him – an old symbol of a sun god of some sort. I stayed on the roof, watching for more enemies while the group searched the body. Suddenly they looked up at the building he appeared to be fleeing when he died. I could see in their eyes that something inside was not right. Colibri gave out some sort of scream and started looking around as if he were surrounded by enemies. Before we could act he had launched a spell at Ahrjan. A moment later the madness seemed to clear from his eyes and he looked confused. Ahrjan slapped Colibri to try to clear his senses but it was obvious he now knew he had been affected by some sort of delusion.

Meanwhile Rong and Wil had gone in and taken care of the floating apparition practically before I could get into the building.

We sat to rest a moment but heard the sound of combat farther along the street. It appeared we were not the only ones fighting zombies in this dread place! So off we raced toward the sound. I checked my supply of arrows on the way; a little more than a single quiver. Hopefully there was someone in this forsaken place that could make a straight shaft and put steel to its tip [after all, in 4e I can’t craft anything…].

We came upon what appeared to be the city center. There were barriers constructed across the roads entering the square but one was broken and zombies flooded through the breach. In the middle a single armored female struck down zombies with gusto, but was hard pressed and wounded.

The barriers were high – clearly made to slow the advance of the quick zombies. It took some of my teammates a bit of effort to clear the obstacle, but it hardly slowed me down. Two arrows took care of two zombies currently attacking the armored lady. She looked up a bit surprised at the sudden aid and I simply smiled; “Yes ma’am, the heroes have arrived.”

With our help the zombies were quickly dispatched – even those foul things that hurled globs of putrescence at us. Without hesitation the lady – who we later learned was Ashlan and a Paladin – started directing people to rebuild the barrier. But before we could get very far with that the ground shook with giant footfalls. I could help but wonder what this place was? Where had we ended up? Was this some sort of slow death set upon us by some evil god? Perhaps there was no end to the flow of living dead and it was simply an inevitability for us to join this army? The thought shook me – slaving was my most hated issue but eternal servitude with the torture of the cold pain of death lingering forever?

A barrier burst open, shaking me out of my thoughts. A zombie the size of a house stood in the newly made breach. I hesitated, wondering how something this foul could even exist. Well, that didn’t matter now, let them come and keep coming. I will fill them with arrows until I have no more, then I will cut them with my swords until I create a pile of bodies so high they can no longer reach me! And somewhere, somehow a bard will sing songs of the crazy Halfling that slew an army of zombies!

I let fly with arrows but the shaking of the ground threw off my aim. Wil strode bravely forward but the creature swung its massive hand at him. Though it struck Wil with the force of a battering ram its back swing had hit a building, knocking lose a tall tower. The tower collapsed on the giant zombie causing massive damage!

The group pressed hard, seeing even more, smaller zombies following the giant beast. Apparently the falling tower had done a lot of damage as the big zombie fell under our assault. Still I had a feeling – something was not right. And correct I was, as moments later the thing got back up! I launched arrows burring several deep it its rotting flesh. Rong, Arjan, Colibri, and Wil smashed, burned, and cut not only the giant zombie but all that followed and soon all of the dead had been returned to their rightful state.

Ashlan thanked us and introduced herself. She indicated that the attack seemed to be over for now and we should retire to the tavern to rest and recover.

Even in the warm tavern I could feel the chill inside me. This was not the normal chill of wet, cold weather but a chill that touched something deeper. Should I fall from this evil and rise as one of these foul creatures I truly hope that my companions will destroy me and ensure that I do not rise again. I most certainly will not hesitate to do the same to them.

Maybe this is some test from the Raven Queen for Rong and Ahrjan? Perhaps I was just unlucky enough to be caught up in the “test”? Whatever the case, perhaps I should at least learn a bit about this Queen and what it is I can do to keep her satisfied.

Duck and Cover

2008-11-14T05:36:00.000-08:00

Fallout 3 is going well, and I think I'm rolling on into the endgame (and my level XP is maxed) so I thought I'd waste everybody's time with an album of Dr. Atomic's Post-Apocalyptic Development. I took screenshots occasionally throughout the saga and so, without further ado, here they are.

Here's one of the good Doctor fresh out of the Vault.

After a time, he joined up as a hired gun on some trading carvans. When those same caravans were ripped to shreds by Deathclaws, he wandered the wasteland...alone.
After facing raiders, ghouls, mutants, and giant Mole rats, Dr. Atomic came across an old military installation, where he was able to procure some combat armor, which he wore (and constantly kept repaired) for most of the game.

Soon he earned enough money to have his own house in the town of Megaton, and outfitted it with a full Science lab package, where he could do his research in peace. Note: The only real research you can do in the world of Fallout is build bigger and better weapons, which is fine with me. Though aspirin or toilet paper won't be reinvented anytime soon for these poor folks.

Much later I encountered the Brotherhood, and they taught me the finer points of Power Armor. On a mission for them to retrieve a G.E.C.K.* I was captured by some bad guys that like to do nasty experiments on folks, but quickly took care of them after freeing a fellow Vault Dweller (from a different Vault) that was held captive.

He was there a little longer than me, you understand.

Now we are ready to go face the big bad, if I can just figure out where he is. Do I have a chance to save the world of Fallout? Maybe I better check my Pipboy...

*Garden of Eden Creation Kit.

Hallowscream Scare-a-bration

2008-11-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

Thought I'd take a breath from being totally captivated by Fallout 3 and post some pics of our Halloween party this last weekend. Yes, we had a Halloween party, because Sam Hain requires sacrifice...of gummy bears and beer.

Auto-image upload oscillator.....activate!

Halloween '08! W00t!

Dentural Wisdom

2008-10-26T19:44:00.000-07:00

So I got my wisdom teeth yanked out of my face last Thursday. Why are they called "wisdom teeth" in the first place? I mean, you only notice them when they are hurting you, or the dentist takes an x-ray and says you'll have an orc-mouth if you don't get them pulled immediately (yeah, right doc), so I don't really see the wisdom in their presence. Maybe in the long long-ago we used to get our back teeth knocked out real easy by chewing on bark and rocks and such and they were like shark-replacement teeth for our hairy ancestors. Either way the result today is that I gotta miss two days of work while my jaw swells up to the size of a cantaloupe and I get hepped up on grams of ibuprofen and prescription narcotics.

I decided not to let the extreme pain-killers go to waste on just getting my teeth pulled though. I figured as long as I'm taking multiple 600 mg Ibuprofen tablets and get a nice shot of who-knows-what to dull the pain of my jaw being partially broken for a day or so, I might as well take this opportunity to deal with my major bad habit (note that I only have one because I am otherwise flawless -- pride doesn't count).

Caffeine.

I know what you're thinking, "But Cory, with all the problems facing the world, what with the oncoming economic collapse, peak oil, and zombie plague, how is caffeine a major bad habit? Its cheap, easy to make, and keeps your brain power cylinders operating at the expected 4000 rpm to optimize your superhuman productivity!"

True enough, you, but how about this: have you ever had to make a fire in the cold? Know how much that sucks? Now try to make a fire in the cold...with a killer headache. Yes, you can stockpile coffee (as I have), but when the mutant zombie bikers are roaming and the fallout is coming down you don't want to have to venture out to super-duper mart, putting your life needlessly at risk, simply because you need coffee!

Anyways, I got the two-birds/stone idea from Mary's dad, and I gotta say so far its working splendidly. Its been a solid four days without caffeine. Doesn't sound like very long to you, huh? Let me give you a synopsis of my intake at work each day last week, and you'll understand what kind of withdrawal that is:

Cory's average work day:

- 6:45 am -- Make one pot of coffee. Drink one tall travel-mug full (+4 cups) with breakfast (I put a couple ice cubes in it to cool it down).
- 7:45 am -- Refill travel mug with coffee, drink on the walk to work (+4 cups).
- 8:30 am -- Crack open one of the Monsoon energy drinks (lo-carb) I brought from home, drink it up (+1 energy drink).
- 10:00 am -- Refill travel mug with crappy coffee from breakroom. Drink until lunch (+4 cups).
- 11:30 am -- Eat lunch with Mary. Drink a small styrofoam cup of coffee with lunch (+1 cup).
- 1:30 pm -- Crack open second Monsoon energy drink I brought from home. Milk it until 2:30pm (+1 energy drink)
- 3:00 pm -- refill travel coffee mug with crappy coffee from breakroom before maids clean it out. Drink for rest of day at work (+4 cups).
- 5:30 pm -- Get home, rewarm remaining coffee in pot. Drink the rest of the pot over the course of the evening (+4 cups).

Total average intake of coffee per work day: 21 cups and 2 energy drinks (lo-carb, of course, gotta watch my figure). And by "cups" I mean the English measurement of the cup (8 fluid ounces).

Now, most of you probably think that's an inhuman amount of caffeine to take in, and you'd be right. Some of you may not even believe me, but that's only because you didn't know me back when I polished off an entire 12-pack of pepsi in one sitting while playing Fallout (the first one) in my parent's basement. Cullen remembers. I lost a Constitution point that day and gained about six pounds on the spot. Either way, that's not good for humans.

Considering that chocolate is not good for dogs because the caffeine could kill them (well, theobromine kills them, but its a caffeine derivative so stop being so technical), I figured I'd stick this guy in the bud.

I've felt the headaches, but it hasn't been too bad thanks to prescription pain killers. I'm such a cheater. I have gotten a little nauseous from not having coffee on Saturday and today, but I think its passed now. I have noticed a major increase in my desire to nap. Tomorrow is my first day of work with no coffee, we'll see how it goes. I'm sure my coworkers will be put off by my non-buzzed personality and general laidbackedness.

I know other people break their coffee habit the old fashioned way with perseverance and cussedness, and I think that's great. Having the fortitude to go ahead and shake off the effects of addiction with pure willpower is to be commended.

But I'm a chemist, and I fight alkaloids with alkaloids.

The moral is: When you choose the battlefield, you can overcome any obstacle!

...with narcotics!

TEOTWAWKI Time!

2008-10-17T05:18:00.000-07:00

SO I finally read through the 106-page bailout plan, and I can officially say that we are all boned. All the stuff about the gov't owning the banks and whatnot is in there, word-for-word, along with a bunch of other crap (the formation of a group called "TARP" - "Troubled Asset Relief Program") which won't help. Also, its quickly becoming obvious that "increasing the liquidity" of banks so they will go back to lending to folks, which was the justification by Paulson for the big push-through, isn't working worth a damn. What are the banks doing with all that free money? Probably buying gold and freeze-dried food, like we should all be doing.

So, without further ado, I present to you the five-part Demo for Fallout 3 (to be released Oct. 28th, and yes I actually preordered it from Gamestop -- I've never preordered any game before, but this one is going to be incredibly awesome). Once you get home or whatever from work, its well worth watching. Watch the first part of the demo, and if you can resist watching all five, you're a stronger man than I.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Now go get it while the dollar still has value!

#1 Movie in America!!

2008-10-09T19:26:00.000-07:00

Readers, weigh in: Did our friend and immunologist Dr. Surfbum Cooper help make Beverly Hills Chihuahua that #1 movie in America last weekend?

Sisters Abroad!

2008-10-07T17:04:00.000-07:00

Since Cory spent his vacation days attending GenCon, I had to come up with something even better to spend my vacation days doing. To Europe!!

The smallest Smalley and I flew into Frankfurt, Germany and were whisked away to Heidelberg by her most hospitable friend from the Smalley hometown. We ventured out to the country side via train to Bad Dirkheim to enjoy the fall wine festival.

These folks are serious about their wine as they sell it in pint glasses.

To France!!

The Palace of Versailles is amazing and was my favorite part of the trip. As you can see, I was not able to capture all of its vastness in one photo. As its height, 22,000 people lived at Versailles.

There is lots to see of Versailles in addition to the castle including the Hameau de la reine (hamlet complete with mill and livestock).

To Paris!!

The Cathedral of Notre Dame...

San Chapelle...

And everyone altogether: The Eiffel Tower

Louvre:

Arc de Triomphe:

That was a long day.

Back in Heidelberg, we finished up at the Castle.

Assorted notes: I ate chocolate croissants every day. There is no where to go to the bathroom. The portions at restaurants were just the right size. Beth's friends that we stayed with amazing hosts and I am very grateful! (And thanks to Beth for a lot of great pictures!)

2008-10-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

Jobs and Maps

2008-09-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

It's important to understand why the $700,000,000,000-bailout is necessary to keep the financial system going. It's also important to be able to articulate this to the masses.

Um, what? Sorry, that is not only incorrect, but entirely incoherent. Thanks for playing.

Bail-out?

2008-09-21T11:21:00.001-07:00

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As most of you have realized, I have generally given up on "preemptive postapocalyptist" posts here at the Technodojo, mostly because I was only sounding crazy to my family and friends and not really giving any answers to anything (as well as just depressing myself). Those of you unlucky enough to read Scantabulous back when it was an actual website (before it got 90% if its content lost inexplicably by the hosting provider -- causing me to turn to blogspot) and not a blog will know what I'm talking about most of all. But since then I've been focusing on posting only things I like about light-hearted, nerdy stuff, like Star Wars and D&D, mostly to distract myself from the coming economic crash (and because my personal preparations were mostly ready).

But then I was watching Meet the Press with Dr. Girlfriend today, and Tom Brokaw mentioned that the "Bail-out" proposal was only three pages long when talking to Bernake. Surprisingly, he didn't read a word of it or ask Bernake about it other than saying "700 billion" a couple of times, but instead they focused on why America needs it so much and went about selling it to the viewers at home. No one really gets concerned when ridiculously large numbers are thrown around by the government, I think because we just kind of consider everything on the government scale is big. So if "700 billion" is the worst thing about the "bail-out," then who cares (note I keep saying bail-out only because that's whats used on TV all the time, and so folks reading will know what I'm talking about, thus the "quotes". Plus its shorter than constantly referring to the "Legislative Proposal for Treasury Authority to Purchase Mortgage-Related Assets," which is its real name.)

Since it was evidentally written in the four days after AIG took a dump and sent to Congress Friday (Sept. 19), and Congress is expected to approve it by this upcoming Friday (Sept. 26), I figured it was worth a look (and its only three pages, which is about all my video-game/television-burned out brain can handle reading in one sitting).

Anyways, sitting in my undies and drinking some coffee, I went to the ol' PC and looked 'er up. I figured that while I'm no lawyer, I've been reading complicated scientific documents and FDA-legalese regularly for almost a year now, I should be able to spot some of the more obvious loopholes or double-talk that accompany such a hastily-written document, and it should be good for a laugh.

What I found was clearly-stated, blatant, and completely unbelievable.

First, here's a link to what Congress is expected to pass in five days (note that I'm linking to CNN Money and not linking to the .gov site because I'm still that paranoid little blogger). If you want, print that sucker out (its only 3 pages, in big font!) , grab a highlighter or pen, and mark sentences that seem a little ominous. You'll be really amazed by how much ink you use by the end. But for the rest of you, I'll point out the really, really juicy stuff:

Sec. 2. Purchases of Mortgage-Related Assets.
...
(b) Necessary Actions.--The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this Act, including, without limitation:
...
(2) entering into contracts, including contracts for services authorized by section 3109 of title 5, United States Code, without regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts;
(3) designating financial institutions as financial agents of the Government, and they shall perform all such reasonable duties related to this Act as financial agents of the Government as may be required of them;
...

Wait....what?! Read #3 again. Any banks, credit unions, or "finanacial institutions" can become property of the government. Err...uh, that means that the money in your savings account can be spent by the government as it sees fit. You think you complain about taxes now? How about if after you pay your taxes your savings account can be withdrawn from to pay for "bridges to nowhere" and child welfare benefits for someone's eleventh kid.

Hey, and how about #2. Super no-bid contracts baby! Those have really worked for us in the past, right? So they can pay those overpaid contractor entities with money from your personal bank account now! Genius!

Oh, but don't worry. They recognize the severe powers of Section 2, so they added Section 3 to prevent the appearance of overstepping their bounds:

Sec. 3. Considerations.
In exercising the authorities granted in this Act, the Secretary shall take into consideration means for--
(1) providing stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system; and
(2) protecting the taxpayer.

That's it. That's the entirety of Section 3. The Secretary shall "take into consideration means for protecting the taxpayer"... and its not even #1! (1) is protecting the banking system! So if banks are in trouble, they'll protect the banks (by not allowing you to withdraw your money, or more likely, putting a cap on the amount you can withdraw/spend out of it each month). And this isn't "A Wonderful Life" bank style protection, where your money is in your neighbor's farm (reference pointed out by Brando), its the bad kind of protection, where your money doesn't really exist anymore because it was lent out to someone who could never, ever pay it back so the bank manager could increase his stock price and create intangible "money."

Oh, here's the part about the 700 billion clams:

Sec. 6. Maximum Amount of Authorized Purchases.
The Secretary's authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time.

At any one time. What does that mean? It means this thing is open-ended in its financial spending capability. The Treasury Secretary (who's looking more and more like some sort of financial Emperor) can only spend in chunks of $700,000,000, before he has to...what, exactly? Who makes sure he can't spend anymore than that a second time? Oh, wait, here we go, Section 8: Review. Now we'll see who has oversight on this joker:

Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Ah, good. So that clears that up. Any decisions the Treasury Secretary makes are completely unfettered by oversight. Well, you know, if you're going to spend taxpayer money, well, and non-taxpayer money, and money that isn't taxed -- basically all money (see Section 2.b.3) -- you don't need to be constrained by "approval" and "laws." Just spend away and NEVER EVER be questioned about it, or ever make your decisions known (publically or non-publically -- not even to Congressional "task forces" or the Justice Department).

But wait, there is one limit to the spending, the maximum public debt cap! Ah, thank goodness, Congress decided to cap total public debt in the 80s and, while they've increased that amount occasionally, its limited to about 9 trillion bucks. Wait, what's this...

Sec. 10. Increase in Statutory Limit on the Public Debt.
Subsection (b) of section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking out the dollar limitation contained in such subsection and inserting in lieu thereof $11,315,000,000,000.

Oh. An extra two-and-a-half trillion (then they'll be able to start spending whats in your savings account)? So it should be called the "2.5+ trillion-dollar bail-out" I guess. But that goes back to huge numbers that don't mean anything to people anyway. Seven-hundred billion probably sounds like more money anyways.

That's all I can take for now. In one weeks' time Congress is going to fast-track this sucker to approval and all your savings accounts, checking accounts, mutual funds, and whatever else will be fully open to government spending. I can't wait for the inflation rate to soar out of control after so much government-spendable dollars are "created."

Enjoy your new completely broken financial system, America! Wheeeee!

Anybody got a different take on this?

Monday Night Football

2008-09-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

So Lando got ahold of another pair of tickets to the Forbidden City, and I snatched them up faster than a Jawa at a hydrospanner bargain-bin giveaway.

We participated in the tailgating. Even the official tailgating, where you pay $5 to get in and there are no tailgates, but there is a band playing Neil Young and George Thorogood.

As you might know, the game was supposed to be the one where they retired the good ol' #4 jersey. Well, there was no mention of Favre on Tundra Vision, but the fans had plenty to say about the whole thing.
Rodgers did a great job, though he was presented with an unprecedented number of penalties throughout the game to deal with. The fans around me were quite unhappy with the refs during the game, but the Pack took the ball into the endzone regardless.

Emmet Smith was there and sitting right in front of us. I heard from a reliable source that he's a huge jerk though.

First game of the season! Atari Bigby once again showed us why he's awesome. Go Pack Go!

What are my spell capabilities?

2008-08-28T17:18:00.001-07:00

The guy throws out a half-assed hypothetical scenario, and Diesel asks what the weather is like and what his racial bonuses are.

I ask you, how can Vin Diesel be so awesome?

GenCon 2008 -- Engage!

2008-08-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

Jump to Comments.

UPDATE: Now with elevator Cougar!

*shiver*

Warning: The sheer NerdCore joy experienced at this year's GenCon will be difficult to ever be surpassed by mere mortals.

Four of my fellow adventurers from last year joined me at GenCon this year, and we totally rocked the damn house in 2008. Our party of brazen PCs were under constant attack from all angles throughout the duration. We defeated a plethora of dastardly beasties during our travels, let's see: brigands, kobolds, werewolves, goblins, Egyptian spider queens, living scarecrows, Imperial Stormtroopers, vampires, carnivorous pixies, and one elephant-sized fire-breathing death goose, to name a few.

Paul and I had a great time playing a game of Hollow Earth Expedition called Burt Fedora and the Temple of the Spider Queen. I had bought tickets for it hoping it would be an alright RPG to check out. Turned out that that four hours had to be some of the funnest rpging I've ever experienced. Paul was hilarious as the ex-prizefighter snobby English Butler.

The costumes were in full effect this year, and while the expected Stormtrooper teams and Jedi were present, the convention has a serious case of Anime infection. I don't know what the hell is wrong with people, but the same people who like to make costumes also have a penchant for giant swords, eyeliner and spikey hair. I didn't take any pictures of Anime dudes, but while I didn't recognize a single costume I could appreciate the wierdness of the female costumes. For example here's a girl who, when asked what her costume was, simply replied "I'm a nurse." Upon hearing this I forced Travis to pose with her for a picture, with him being a doctor and all it only seemed natural.

There was also some sort of Steampunk "dance" going on at GenCon which we missed entirely (on purpose), though some of the Steampunkers came through the convention center and I got Devin to snap a shot with the Verne'nites.

Clearly I was more discriminating with who I got pictures with.

Drow and Twileks....

An evil ice queen....
...the queen asked me (in character) whether I was a follower of the Kingdom of Narnia. I informed her that I felt that using talking Beavers to present setting history to the reader is a stupid plot device. She was not pleased.

You may have noticed that I'm wearing a seriously Geek Level 11 T-shirt in some (all) of the pictures. This is not because I make a habit of wearing dragon T-shirts, but is because I was one of the DMs for the never-ending and highly-dangerous Tower of Gygax 1st edition AD&D adventure going on in honor of the Late Great Gary Gygax at GenCon this year. I had to wear the representative Dungeon Master T-Shirt during my session (and thus for the rest of the day). I got to DM the level of the tower I wrote, The Grimm Forest of Unending Sorrow, and I am pleased to say I was able to kill eleven out of twelve PCs in a single hour. I keeps it real for Gary.

There was also a zombie walk that Travis and I checked out. It started at the convention center and spread out into the major metropolitan area, terrorizing the poor NPCs of Indianapolis.

I picked up a number of goodies at GenCon this year. Every morning I was up and lined up at the convention center an hour before opening, even on Saturday and Sunday when the rest of my adventuring party were fast asleep after enduring the 4:30am sessions of Star Wars Miniatures. Why was I so hardcore about this? Because I wanted to pick up the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide and the Knights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide from WotC, of which they were only releasing 150 copies a day during the convention.

Both were excellent purchases, and are highly recommended if you're into that kind of thing. Especially the Forgotten Realms one. WotC totally Ravenloft'ed Faerun, and killed off a ton of the iconic characters and gods, making the world much darker and dangerous, which I wholly endorse. Elminster and his Deus Ex Machina Mystara magic can suck it.

I also picked up the sister boardgame to the fantastic Last Night on Earth from Flying Frog Games, A Touch of Evil. This game is super-fantastic, and in it you play 18th-century monster hunters who are trying to save a small town from some (randomly-determined) gothic monster. Its very Sleepy Hollow, and the best part is that it is totally cooperative! No more will I have to play the zombie master/evil wizard lord/alien invader just because I own the game. Once I cracked the box and we checked out the rules; Devin, Wes, Jen and I played the hell out of it. I also got my picture taken with one of the characters.

That other dude is from Last Night on Earth (also a fantastic game -- but not totally cooperative). Ignore him (Delp sure did when he snapped the picture).

That's it for this year. Remember to always turn off the targeting computer and Use the Force.

GenCon preemptive strike!

2008-08-11T16:29:00.001-07:00

That's right folks, its GenCon season again! The original seven of us had a blast last year, and this year the remaining five of us diehards are going to kick ass like Throthgar the Barbarian with one of the Githyanki's Vorpal Silver Astral Blades. What? That's right mofos. I'll make references like that all freaking week and the people around me will actually get it.

Now normally you may look at the Cyberninja and say "What? My host with the most DJ Ninja-tron is the hippest cat I know! No way does he roll the D20s and makes the Saves Vs. Paralysis!." But you'd be wrong. I'm like some sort of hyper-evolved chameleon nerd, come back in time from the enlightened year 2525. I may look all Fonzi and cool during most of the year, but when I go to GenCon I fit in like a Modron in Mechanicus. Like an Ewok on Endor. Like a Space Hamster in Spelljammer.

Give it up for GenCon Two-Thousand and Freaking Eight!

I think I need a little MC Front to survive the wait...

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

2008-08-05T18:43:00.001-07:00

Uh....wow.

I just watched the newest addition to the Starship Troopers trilogy, and I gotta say...uh...well, I'll be honest...it was terrible.

Terrible in a good way. This is one of those times that you wished you waited to watch this movie with all your friends, because making snide comments to no one in particular just makes you look crazy.

Rico is back, which is nice. But really the main character is the botox-addicted Vulcan chick from Enterprise, who plays the latest stranded supermodel pilot.

They took the ridiculous omnipresent Federation/Big Brother direction from the second movie and cranked it up to 11. The bug effects are alright, but not as good as the first movie, and a lot of the sets are clearly computer generated. You can almost see the hazy blue line that you used to see in the 80's around actors while they're standing around in front of the green screen.

I gotta say though, they did set aside the budget for some good death scenes, exploding blood-filled puppet heads and all. I knew it was going to get the gore award when within the first five minutes a bug-grenade goes off and an entrenching tool flies into a trooper's back, pinning him to the wall. Unfortunately, they decided to "upgrade" the awesome Morita rifle, and now its something no human could reasonably lift for long periods of time, much less fight with.

This movie is worth watching just to see the actors fire these things (they are built on an AK-47 frame that fires blanks-- yes I watched the 'behind-the-scenes' special features). Every time they are about to pull the trigger the actors look like they're taking a really constipated dump.

When the heavily-foreshadowed Marauders are revealed its CGI-central, and not good CGI. Like really, really bad CGI. Like Hanna-Barbara Herculoids animation. But good news is that the Brain Bug is back. Its nice to see that both Casper Van Dien and the Brain Bug aren't too busy to make some direct-to-DVD sequels for the fans. Thanks Brainy!

Nitpick fan note: Throughout the movie they keep refering to Rico as "The Hero who captured the Brain Bug." But you and I know that it was Drill Sergeant Zim who captured the Brain Bug in the first movie.

But really, who cares.

Now get out there and kill some bugs!

Tower of Gygax -- Art Show!

2008-08-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

So GenCon is coming up, and the late Gary Gygax is getting a special tribute at this year's convention. One of them is a straight 72-hour original super-deadly AD&D adventure session (broken up into 1-hour increments), written by old-school D&D DMs (your humble host included), and put together by Keith Baker, author of the Eberron campaign setting. It is called the Tower of Gygax!

I have submitted a level for the Tower (graciously edited by Dr. Girlfriend), and will be taking my turn to DM it on Friday, August 15th from 6-7 PM. I don't want to repost the whole level and ruin it for anyone who encounters it, but I will post the crappy art I drew for the level to enhance the old-school style.

Behold, some of the art of THE GRIMM FOREST OF EVERLASTING SORROW!

Come to GenCon and see:

Cannibalistic Fairies!

Magic Mushrooms!

Princes of Stirgedom!

And sweet old grandmothers!

Monday night D&D - Podcasting!

2008-07-25T18:10:00.000-07:00

So I made the mistake of recording last week's D&D session, and now I'm honor-bound to post it on my blog. So check it out, suckers.

Part 1 - Goblins!

Part 2 - Bugbears! (on permanent hiatus)
Note that I'm using a temporary free hosting service, and the link will probably go down within a month or so. So if you want to listen to them I'd suggest downloading them now, as I'm not sure if I'll spring for actual real webspace to store stuff in the interwebernets.

Podcasting Vets: Whenever I use Audacity to record/edit audio, the audio is quiet through the computer speakers (PC or laptop), but is plenty loud if you use headphones. I can amplify the sound with Audacity but then its super loud in headphones. Anybody with podcasting XP know why this is and how to rectify that?

Outlander

2008-07-18T06:23:00.000-07:00

I don't know how movies like this are funded, but I am so glad they are:

Hat tip to The Evil DM.

More Movie Reviews -- Hellboy and Chris C'tan!

2008-07-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

Got some more horror movie reviews for ya folks. One in the theaters (Hellboy 2: Attack of the Puppets), and one fresh outta production and straight into Netflix Watch-it-Now (Undead or Alive).

Hellboy 2

Let's start with Hellboy, which I just came back from this fine Sunday morning (I like my horror in early morning matinee form). Don't worry, I won't post (m)any spoilertz.

So how is it? Well, its better than the first one, by far. I'm not really a Hellboy fan, I certainly don't collect the comics, and I'm not really into the cartoony/Men-in-Black way in which they present the Cthulhu mythos. I do like Ron Perlman punching giant muppets though, so that's what gets me to the theater for these movies (who am I kidding, I'd watch just about anything if it even remotely suggested the presence of Yog-Sothoth).

However, two things bothered me with the first Hellboy movie that made me almost not go see this one (which would've been unfortunate):

1) The regenerating Hellhound creature(s). So you're going to make me watch Hellboy fight a mutant dog. Fine, that's pretty cool, I can't wait to see what he fights next!
...again with the mutant dog. Oh wait, yet ANOTHER identical mutant dog. Then an hour into the movie: The exact same mutant dog! Wheeee! We don't even get a tentacled horror until the last five minutes, and it was only after seeing sixty more mutant dogs.

2) Secondly, the "Love story." For some reason Hollywood thinks a seven-foot 240 lb demon man stalking a 115 lb goth chick is "cute." Guess what, its not cute. Its creepy. Also: Boring. The love story BS in the first movie was so painful to watch (not "Attack of the Clones" painful, but painful) that I started to hate demon-spawned heroes, which really shows how bad it was.

Now, in Hellboy 2 there's some love story, but for Hellboy its the troubles of a couple arguing over living together and not the in-your-face "stalking chicks is cool and will totally work to win her over" as the last movie. However, they decide to go in a different direction with the love story-shoehorning in this one, and have fish-guy get a crush on a fairyland elf chick (oh stop whining, its hardly a spoiler, they'll choke you with it before the end of the movie anyway). I'm not sure how they'd explain that coupling though, I mean, how would they "do it?" Does he think he'll just release his gametes into the swimming pool and then she'll do the butterfly stroke or something? What's the attraction there for her? Its a stupid and forced love story. Moving on.

The good news is, the monster fights are excellent in this one. Lots of puppets. Instead of Nazi demon-summoning of the last movie, they went with dark Germanic fairytale-style monsters. Its like the Bureau of Paranormal Research decided to invade the Muppet show, Labyrinth and Fraggle rock all at the same time. Plenty of Gorgs everywhere for Hellboy to punch. Big monsters, little monsters, you name it. They really upped the ante with the monsters here and I appreciate their efforts. I especially enjoyed the "tooth fairies."

The movie was a little funnier than expected. While I don't like the government-coverup/Men-in-Black humor of the Hellboy genre (and there was a lot of it in this one), there is some stuff to chuckle at in this movie. Also the guy who plays the villain looks just like Tom Cruise. IMDB says his name is Luke Goss, but I'm pretty sure its really Tom Cruise. So if you want to see Tom Cruise do ninja backflips and get punched in the face, this is your movie.

Final analysis: Twelve-thousand regenerating mutant Hellhounds out of fifteen-thousand regenerating mutant Hellhounds. Easily worth a matinée ticket.

Undead or Alive

This movie just came out on Netflix's watch-it-now, and I actually highly recommend you watch it now!

Its a western zombie comedy (A "Zombedy") starring Chris Kattan and the guy from Desperate Housewives. Basic premise is this: Desperate Housewives guy is a hardened ex-army desperado, and Chris Kattan is his bumbling sidekick. Geronimo (the Indian warrior/druid) summons up a mystical zombie disease to kill all the white invaders. Geronimo's indian princess niece gets caught up with the duo as they battle the zombies.

This movie was stupid, as in stupid-funny. Chris Kattan plays the exact same character he plays in every SNL skit he's ever been in, and says a lot of funny stuff. There's plenty of old-west cliche's and silliness, especially with Kattan's character. You can tell that each actor knows how ridiculous the movie is and puts forth at least a little effort to make it even more ridiculous. But most importantly there's plenty of gore. Far more gore than you'd expect of a movie with SNL people in it (there's cameos by some of the other lower-ranking SNL people from the '90s as well -- mostly as zombies). I'm not sure how they ever convinced these actors to make this movie, but I'm glad they did. Its even got the kind of twist ending that are the reason I watch low-budget horror.

Final analysis: Seven Corpses out of Ten. For a free flick to watch on Netflix, its worth every penny. Highly recommended!

No Gungans Allowed

2008-07-06T19:36:00.000-07:00

So our DnD group is having so much fun playing DnD on Monday nights, that we've decided to add another night of gamin' to our weekly games. And we've decided to make it ... Friday nights! Because, and lets be honest, we aren't kids anymore, and saving our Friday nights in case we decide to 'go out to the bar' is about the most pathetic lie we can pretend we believe about ourselves.
Also: Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica is on hiatus until next year, so there's really nothing holding us back now.

Our group's collective second-most favorite setting for games besides the Gygaxian Middle Ages is the Galactic Space Opera setting of Star Wars! So Star Wars Saga is next on the agenda, and as I have the most Wookiepedian understanding of the setting of all of us (and the only person who owns the rulebook), I get to GM!

None of the group has played it before, but I'm not too worried. They learned 3.5, then they learned 4e. Since Saga is sort of a mixture of those two systems Saga should be no problem. The problem is deciding which setting to play in. We've narrowed it down to two choices:

Clone Wars -- The setting with the most promise that got the shortest straw with representation on the big screen. A galactic war involving Jedi + Cloned Stormtroopers vs. Battle Droids and Sith Lords? Who could possibly make that kind of premise boring? I'll tell you who: Hayden Christenson as Mannequin Skywalker and George Lucas over the age of 40. But I feel that I could present some really Jeditacular adventures set within the Separatist Wars.

Rise of the Empire -- The original Wars. Jedi hiding from a tyrannical empire! Scoundrels smuggling goods to rebel cells! AT-ATs and X-wing fighters! This setting has great promise for adventures involving padawan Jedi and escaped Wookie slaves battling the oppressive Empire. And remember, I don't believe in restricting player creation options for the sake of "story" (regardless of the title of this post), so you wanna be a Padawan Jedi Ewok? You're on! Just please try to explain it without referencing Wilfred Brimley or the Caravan of Courage.

So how do we decide what setting to play in? I'll tell you how, we do this old school: A die roll. At the Monday's weekly DnD game we'll not only make characters, but I'll also make an epic percentile die roll to determine the setting:

01-50% Clone Wars

51-00% Rise of the Empire

So what setting will it be? Stay tuned!

Update: And the winner is...

Rise of the Empire by a nose!

Since the roll was so close, I've decided to cheat and make the campaign take place immediately after the events of Revenge of the Sith. This way we can still have a bunch of Jedi padawans in the party and I can still use my clone trooper miniatures.

May the Schwartz be with you.

Scantabuviews: Shaky-cam Edition

2008-06-29T16:20:00.001-07:00

I watch a shit-ton of bad horror movies. In order to make the world a better place I review them to better help you, the horror movie fanatic, to make good bad horror decisions.

So what did I watch this week? Let's begin!

Cloverfield

Yep, right out the bad horror gates is a really expensive horror movie with a high level of CGI directed as if it were a low-budget Indy film.

Basic premise: Extremely attractive group of successful twenty-somethings hang out together in New York at a big party. One guy is in charge of recording the party on a hand-held camcorder. Then a 40-story Godzilla monster appears and smashes everything in sight. Camcorder guy tapes it all Blair Witch-style.

Does it work? Sure. The actors ain't too bad, compared to what I'm used to with these kinds of movies, but then again they're getting paid an order of magnitude more money than those in the 'spring class project' horror movie realm, so they should be fair-to-good actors. Plus there is more than the one monster/creature in the movie so there's a lot of room for tension even when they're hiding from the big bad, though the protagonists do always seem to be within three square blocks of the Godzilla beast throughout the movie.

Its got the monster tension of the original Jurassic Park, which was a really fun movie to watch, though this one doesn't promise family-friendly deaths (Hey kids look! The T-rex ate the stuffy lawyer, Ha ha ha!). Most of the protagonists do stupid stuff that you'd never think you'd do in real life, but that's what bad horror is all about and why we watch it. Also, this movie also has nearly Transformers-level military battles, meaning that you've got army dudes wildly shooting bazookas every which way throughout the movie, which I wholeheartedly endorse.

Final analysis: Six Mothras and a Godzilla Junior out of Seven King Ghidorahs! Go watch it!

Diary of the Dead

George Romero is back from Land of the Dead with one-sixteenth the money! Hooray!

Basic Premise: This movie is about a group of college kids (*groan*) shooting a horror film for class (*yawn*) in a spooky forest. After spending far too much time in the forest arguing about their particular problems with eachother (I guess this is character exposition?), they hear about the zombie outbreak over the radio and decide to head back to campus to see whats going on.

The whole movie is again shot in Blair-Witch style, only in this one they really only have the budget for the one camcorder. All the iconic college character classes are present: the athlete, the film geek, the computer nerd, the southern gal, the tough Jesse Spanno gal, and the drunk english professor. And they all give a Sci-Fi channel original movie level performance, which is to say, very craptacular.

This movie movies really, really slow. When the zombies do show up they are in fact legit Night of the Living Dead zombies, but by that time you don't even really care, you just want the college kids to die. Especially the jackhole with the camera. And in order to deal with the problem of making the plot move forward in a medium that requires the camera to be involved with the action, they take the route of a lot of loud noises just off-screen and then exposition by the actors (usually covered in a new spray of blood) about "what just happened" and "what the camera guy just missed." There are some sweet old-school Savini-style zombie deaths, but they don't make up for the 70-year old college professor shooting zombies (off camera) with a compound bow and acting cool about it.

This movie makes me sad Romero was involved, though I'm glad he's still working at least. And its better than The Dead Hate the Living, if that means anything to you.

Final analysis: Rotten and falling apart. Avoid if you aren't a hard-core zombie movie fan! If are a hard-core zombie movie fan, then there's probably something in there for you about the fall of society and how the National Guard always end up being dicks in zombie movies.

Ash is 50!

2008-06-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

Hey! Its Bruce Campbell's 50th birthday today! Hooray!

You know, Bruce played Autolycus in Xena the Warrior Princess.

Speaking of Xena, I recently encountered a very interesting game formula while digging around in the local Gamestop bargain bin:
[(Xena * Diablo 2) + anti-aliasing graphics update] = Titan Quest!

Yep, that's good ol' Rex Thunderguns, deadly dual-sword wielding ranger with his trusty feral dire guinea pig companions Presto and Chango, scouring the lands of Greece of its infinitely huge population of monstrous satyrs, ravenous boars, and blue cat-people.

Interesting note about the blue cat people. They're all female, and they all wear leopard skins. Funny thing is, I haven't encountered a single leopard, but I have slaughtered enough bikini-clad cat sorceresses to open my own leopard-skin bikini shop.

Anyways, the reason I'm bringing up Titan Quest is that it is a beautiful Diablo clone, which occasionally is just what the doctor ordered. I love me some Diablo, and throwing in some Minotaur mazes and Greeky names like "Autolycus, the prince of thieves" can only make it better.

Killing things and taking their stuff is one of the most precious and noble doctrines of sword and sorcery fantasy, and teaming up with buds and killing things and taking their stuff is what D&D is all about. This is why people so love games like World of Warcraft. So the question I get asked is, why would I play Titan Quest instead of WoW? Well, MMORPGs like WoW or Guild Wars come with some baggage that utterly ruins the level-grinding, gem-enchanting, sword-swinging fun, and that is the dreaded people on the internets.

I still remember the first time I waltzed into town in Guild Wars. I had just carefully crafted my avatar: Bonk Rockfist, savage barbarian of the Tyrannozaun people, whos very struggle for survival in the bitter cold shadow of Mount Frostdeath makes them some of the the strongest mortals in the realm. So Bonk adjusts his loincloth, readies his oak club, and waltzes into the city of adventure. What does he find? About a thousand scantily-clad sorceresses and gothy emo necromancers standing in a big circle playing air guitar and screaming in all-caps text over their heads "FRSOT OIL FROST OIL!!1!!! MOB BUFFS"

I don't even know what that means, but right then I knew that MMORPGs were not for me. I'll stick with the direct-connect cooperative games, thanks. I'm sure Bruce would agree.

PS: If anybody wants to team up and play some Titan Quest, I'm all about it.

Fourth Edition is here!

2008-06-08T20:09:00.001-07:00

Yay! I have an entire bookshelf full of out-of-date material!

But fortunately, I picked up the fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook this weekend, and worked up a character for our game on Monday.

Yes, I know I'm normally our Monday DM, however one of the players (who is also a DM) got all the books through checking the bits along the torrents and has crafted an adventure for us already. So I get to step back and actually play a few games until we 'port over their 3.5 characters (which will be interesting, considering we have two gnomes, a monk and a sorcerer in the crew), and then he and I will switch off as previously planned throughout the "campaign".

Anyway, pouring through the flashy new 4th edition PHB I was struck by a couple things. First, the artwork is really well done. I was worried it was going to look like DnD Modern looked, all cartoony and big-handed and stupid, but fortunately it doesn't. Second is that it is so different from 3.5 I am actually quite confused about some rules. Less confused than when we playtested the Shadowfell adventure, but still a little confused. Oh well, we'll see how it'll play out.

Now, I understand that nothing is more boring than hearing a person talk about some great thing their character did in a game you weren't present at. This is one of the social pitfalls of nerdery, one of the many pitfalls that gives all science fiction fans a bad name. I refer to this as the "Half-Orc Paladin" syndrome. As in having to yell at a stinky squatter at Pegasus Games: "I don't freaking care about your half-orc paladin!" Of course now that Half-orcs no longer exist in 4e I'll have to come up with a more esoteric and stupid race/class combo for that reference.

But I digress, the point being that hearing someone talk about a DnD game you weren't involved in rates up there with hearing about how someone beat the second-to-highest score on Elevator Action. On the other hand, recapping the awesome feats of derring-do of your mighty adventurers with other players who were involved in the game is about the funnest thing possible. Hell, Brando and I still reminisce about the exploits of The mighty Vampire Slayer Quinn of the Dancing Blades and his trusty sidekick, Garsome Cinderheart: Dwarven Orc-Smasher!

All that said, I'm still going to summarize my character creation process for our adventure, in full awareness of my nerdery. I eventually narrowed it down to two options:

1) Rex Thunderguns: Ancestor to Mighty Chief Theogrim Grudgebearer, Slayer of the Twelve Bear-Men of Wereblight Valley, Retriever of the Bone Axe of Ghorz Bloodharvest, and Bedder of the Nine Beautiful Daughters of King Amorinous!

2) Vincent Von Grimm: Decendent of the Half-Dragon Necromancer Xanthugar Nyarlthotep, Banisher of the Black Beast of Butcher Bog, Keeper of the Six Orbs of Ioun Fellhammer, and Bedder of the Nine Beautiful Daughters of ArchDeamon Nicodemous!

Then I found out that one of the guys in our group was making a Dwarven Fighter named "Cuttem Ta'Pieces," so Rex will have to wait. Von Grimm it is! Half-elven Warlock of the Eldritch Arts! Keeper of the Sinister Secrets Man was not meant to know! Singer of the Six-Hundred and Sixty-Six Songs of Sensuous Suffering! Conjurer of Fell Magics Beyond Comprehension!

Behold his power and quake in fear!

I present to you...Vincent Von Grimm!

To hear the lamentations...

2008-06-04T16:26:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows the Arnold quote from the Conan the Barbarian movie about what is best in life. Its a good enough quote, sure. But I was surfing over at The Cimmerian today and was reminded of why the real Conan quotes are a thousand times cooler than anything Arnold could ever chew on in a movie. Here's a quote from "Queen of the Black Coast," where Conan and his Pirate Queen lover are enjoying the spoils of a recent raid and discussing life in general:

“Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

Awesome.

Bluebells in Bloom

2008-05-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

My CyberNinja and I took a road trip to the Smallville ranch last weekend. We delivered a gently used PC with flat screen monitor to the folks as an upgrade to their computer running Windows 98 with 28 Kb of RAM (yikes). We installed Skype and dazzled them with a test call (complete with video) to Beth in Montana. The future is here. Thanks, Cory!

After the Ninja set up the computer, we headed out for a hike at the New Haven Potholes.

The Potholes is an outdoor classroom covering 170 acres and containing examples of three basic habitat types: marsh, forest, and prairie. This is the south marsh.

These are plum blossoms.

But the highlight was the bluebells. There were literally millions in bloom in the forest.

Ghalstaff, Sorcerer of Light!

2008-05-20T18:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, take a good look at this in-action picture of yesterday's D&D session and tell me what's different about it...

That's right, those little plastic tactical action figures are being moved around the laminated map of a haunted graveyard using 4th edition D&D rules!

My friendly local game store got a store copy of the first adventure for 4th edition D&D: Keep on the Shadowfell (no, not the Borderlands), which isn't available until June 7th for us regular folk. As I run my weekly game there on Monday nights, the owner offered to let me borrow it and playtest it for my D&D group. We of course took her up on the offer and decided to take the fight to some Kobold Wyrmpriests.

How does it play? Well...its freaking different than 3.5, that's for sure. Let's highlight some glaring differences we encountered:

- Magic missiles are cast at-will, don't automatically hit, and do 2d4+4 points of damage.

- Everybody can basically cast cure light wounds on themselves at least once per combat.

- Halflings are as fast as humans, and a foot taller than they used to be.

- A Kobold 'minion' has 1 hit point, but a lvl 1 Kobold has 36 hit points and can breath fire.

- Miniatures are absolutely essential to play the game, as everything is measured in "squares." (no more "5 foot steps" or "15-ft flaming cone" or distances on anything, but "5-square burst").

- Bards no longer exist and Gnomes are now monsters, but Half-daemons and Dragonpeople are 1st-level playable races alongside Elves and Humans.

- Fighters can cast "Cleave" at-will, but can only "Brute-Strike" once per day, and neither do what you think they do.

All-in-all we were not as impressed as we wanted to be, probably because the combat was so confusing. It was like the first time you play a Fantasy Flight boardgame, where you think you know what's going on, but realize four hours in that you don't know how combat really works (I'm looking at you, WoW and Arkham Horror!).

4th edition D&D might eventually be fun, but we've all decided to continue delving the depths of The Wizard Thraxdar's Hidden Library of Death using the 3.5 rules for now.

Good news, though, Wizard's of the Coast has officially announced they're going to GenCon this year (what a surprise)!

Petrifying!

2008-05-10T17:56:00.001-07:00

You know what's great about having a weekly DnD game at the friendly local game store with guys and gals who aren't you're best buds?

You can be a ruthless DM and not even care. You can keep it 4-realsies DM-style pullin' no punches, and actually feel good about it.

Anyway, check this: In last week's adventure the players were toolin' around the second level of the dreaded dungeon of Thraxdar, and they came across an out-of-the-way door barred from the outside. Like good adventurers they opened the door to peek inside, and saw a huge treasure chest in there alongside a hobbit-sized lizard-skin chicken thing with a long tail eating a crunchy-looking dire badger carcass. The paladin immediately recognized the description as a cockatrice, and informed the party that a cockatrice could turn you to stone with its gaze attack. With that esoteric monster knowledge in mind, they decided that they had enough information to protect themselves and go after the treasure, and the paladin said he would go in and fight the cockatrice.

The problem is that in 3.x DnD it is a basilisk that can turn you to stone (or kill you) with its gaze attack, but the cockatrice turns you to stone with its bite attack. So imagine the poker face I had to endure while the 2nd-level paladin waltzed in to fight the dreaded lizard-bird blindfolded.

This is why everybody makes three characters in my campaign.

Twas a good day

2008-05-04T10:47:00.001-07:00

Saturday was one of the jammin'est ever for me this week. Allow me to brag for a moment...

First, woke up at the crack of nine-thirty to play a few games of tactical combat Dawn of War over the interwebernets with ol' Brando. My Necrons weren't at their best against the tenacious Dark Angels, but they harvested some souls of the damned at least before being phased out back to their home dimension, and thats all you can really ask for when you're a metallic death robot from the future.

Then, yesterday was FREE COMIC BOOK DAY (1st Saturday of May), and Dr. Girlfriend and I strolled on down to Westfield Comics and picked up a load of free Hellboy, Avengers, and other comics as well as the 3rd volume of the Conan Graphic Novels and a Warhammer Graphic Novel, Forge of War.

As I returned home waiting on the doorstep for me was my purchases from Noble Night Games, who are having a huge sale on rpg and miniature stuff (they extended it through Monday, for you gamers out there)! Included in my purchase are the critical hit and critical fumble decks (that I'll be giving them a go for Monday's game) from Gamemastery, as well as some cthulhoid novels, and some planetary flash-gordonesque adventure novels I had heard good things about from the Evil DM.
Finally, we loaded up our exoskeletons and went to see Ironman! I never was a huge Ironman comic fan, I tolerated his presence in the Avenger team, but I didn't really see the excitement one could get for a technologically advanced super suit vs. the powers of the Xmen or Spiderman. And Tony Stark was never as interesting a billionaire industrialist as Bruce Wayne, so Ironman always got a 'meh' from me. However, Robert Downey Jr. played an awesome Tony Stark, and even though every robot battle scene in the movie had already been shown in the trailers (all 1.5 minutes of it), RD Jr. carried the non-robot bashing 99% of the movie really well and I highly recommend it. Furthermore it had one of the better cameos of Stan Lee in it. Also, big fans of S.H.I.E.L.D. might want to stick around through the credits for a special guest appearance.

Geekery abounds.

House RULES!

2008-04-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

First game with the new crew was really fun last night. Thought I'd share some of the house rules I used in the game that went over really well with everybody.

Divine Blastering
Since its inception, turning undead has been too damn complicated, both for the player and DM. Roll on this table to determine your turning power, then roll on this other table to determine how many HD you can turn, and then, worst of all, roll to see how long the creature runs away from the party.

DnD isn’t about a bunch of jerks trying to chase down a freaked-out skeleton, its about kicking ass against evil and, on rare occasion, taking down a few names. That said I use the alternative turning rules, such that when the cleric turns an undead he does 1d6/level energy damage to any undead in line of sight within 30 feet (they get a will save for half). Turn resistance for undead becomes damage reduction, easy peasy. Devin used this to great effect in our high-level Ravenloft campaign.

Purchasing Magic Junk
As I like to use the Jamis Buck’s Dungeon/NPC/Treasure/Monster generators when planning my games, the treasure and monsters are mostly random that I’ll be doling out (I figure out why there's a wyvern guarding a Hat of Intellect in room 6b after the fact, if I have time). So if the party monk specifically wants those +4 flaming burst nunchucks from the DMG he’s probably going to need to save up for them. So I don’t hinder the player on needing to find a big city to purchase highly magic items or whatever anymore. If the player has the gold for a magic item they really want, and they’re in-between adventures, they can remove the gold from their character sheet and put the magic item on there, and then give us all a sweet-ass story about how they came upon the flaming nunchucks (and how they lost all that gold – the two stories don’t have to be related).

Dungeon Levels
I'm old-school when it comes to dungeon levels. Level 2 is twice as dangerous as level 1. Level 3 is twice as dangerous as level 2. So when the players find a staircase going down it means they better be ready to up their game (and get more XP). Last night's game ended at the top of the first staircase down.

Critical Blitz
Here’s one of my newest and favorite changes to the rules. Instead of the critical-threat/critical-hit deal, all weapons only crit on a 20, and when a weapon crits I have the players roll a D20, and look up the result on my homemade crit chart, which gives me the mechanical effect that occurs. Then I think up a reason for these mechanics to occur and give them a description of what happens and what it means. This way even if they roll the same two crits in a row, they won’t necessarily be gaining a bonus for the same reason. This also applies to critical misses, which are much more fun for me to describe. Note that if a certain weapon’s main benefit is a much better crit chance (like 18-20 for rapiers and bladed gauntlets) then I’d probably just let them use a higher multiplier when they crit (double becomes triple, etc).

Here’s the charts I used last night (chart changes on my whim and when I get bored):

Critical Hit!
1-3 Double Damage
4 Double Damage + enemy is dazed next round
5 Double Damage + -4 to random attribute of opponent
6 Double Damage + +2 to random attribute of player for 1 day or until critical miss is rolled
7 To the Hilt! – Triple Damage and weapon is stuck in enemy, causing 1d4 dmg/round (but you have to let go of it)
8-9 Double Damage + Extra immediate attack (not necessarily on same opponent)
10 Double Damage + Player gains +2 to all saves for 10 rounds
11 Double Damage + gruesome display causes Fear DC 10+dmg to enemies within line of sight
12 Double Damage + player gains 1d6 hit points/level of opponent (as the spell “aid”)
13 Maximum Normal damage + opponent falls prone
14 Double Damage + player gains +4 to AC
15 Double Damage + player gains regeneration 3 hp/round for 10 rounds
16-17 Maximum Normal Damage + Next attack auto-hits on anything but a 1
18 Double Damage + Gain monsters XP value times 2
19 Maximum Double Damage + Opponent is sickened (-4 to everything)
20 Decapitating Strike! – 10d10 damage + Str/Dex bonus x 2

Critical Miss!
1 Complete Meltdown! - Character is tripped, falls on his weapon (takes normal damage), and bursts into flames (1d6 dmg/round, anything combustible explodes).
2-3 Cold streak – Character takes -2 to all attacks for 1 day or until a natural 20 is rolled
4 Freak Hit – Character hits ally instead of opponent
5-6 Banana Peel – Character trips and falls prone
7 Stop hitting yourself! – Character hits himself instead of opponent
8 Groin pull – Character pulls a muscle, -2 to any Str-related activites for 1 day or until a natural 20 is rolled
9 Concussion – Character gets hit in the head, forcing a DC 15 Fort save or be dazed for 1d4 rounds
10-11 Stinger – Character gets a stinger in their primary hand and has to change weapon hands. -4 to attacks unless Ambidextrous.
12 Sickened – Character is sickened for 1 day or until natural 20 is rolled
13-14 Disarmed – Weapon falls 1d4 squares (1d6) 1: behind player, 2-3 left, 4-5 right, 6 forward.
15 Stunned – Character is stunned for 1 round
16 Cursed! – Character takes -4 to all actions for next 1d10 rounds or until natural 20 is rolled
17-18 Weapon breaks (if nonmagical) or if magical is damaged (-1 to hit/dmg) until repaired
19 Hole in pocket – Character suddenly realizes he lost 1d00 gold pieces somewhere along the way. He also misses his attack.
20 Armor damaged – Nonmagical shield breaks (Magical at -1). If no shield then armor is damaged at -2 until repaired.

I of course embellish any critical effects appropriately. Last night we only had one sling bullet accidentally shot into the back of a paladin's head and one case of the everpresent dungeon peril: the dreaded banana peel. I was sad some of the crazier ones didn't come up, but there's plenty of time for that. Anybody got any good ideas for critical effects I can switch out? Game on!

It's a Bright Shiny Day

2008-04-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

Maura Kay was born to our friends Cullen and Jodi today! I don't think she was officially due for a week or so, but she weighed in at 8 lbs. Happy Birthday Maura and Congrats to Cullen and Jodi!
And by the way, great job on the beautiful name. As soon as I get a picture, I'll post it;)

New Group!

2008-04-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

Last week I was bemoaning the fact to my lady that all my buds who enjoy searching for treasure and vanquishing eldritch evil lived so far away from Madison, when the other day at work I saw a dude I didn't know (outside of IT) sneak-reading the Order of the Stick on his computer.

This, of course, led me to drop some hints that I knew about his "hobbies" and that he was a "dice roller." I was promptly invited to check out the game he runs down at the FLGS on Monday nights. I hemmed and hawwed to Dr. Girlfriend about going, because every time I've ever seen a game run at a game store it contains some of the most portulent and immature 30-somethings that ever lived. But this guy seemed alright so I went and sat in on a combat.

Everybody there was pretty cool (all 6 of them), and all of them were very new to the game (like, 3.0 or later --> late adopters), so I shared with them some of the traits of games I like to run. The DM happened to be really wanting to play and was wrapping up his campaign in the next couple weeks, so after hearing my ideas they asked me to DM! After more hemming and hawing with the good doctor back home I agreed to run a new campaign, starting April 28th, for six folks I barely know.
I gave a pitch for the campaign based on a an old-school playing style I wanted to try out after reading some stuff at the Gameblog, with particular attention paid to this paragraph:

"One good place to put this principle in play is at character generation. Even a guy like me, who like robots and lasers in his D&D, occasionally gets on this funk where I consider trimming down the character build options to achieve some sort of artsy-fartsy effect. You know the drill. "I want to do something Arthurian, so no Asian-flavored classes in this campaign." or "This is going to be all Conan-y with the swords & the sorcery, so no demi-humans in this campaign." Although I truly, deeply understand the profound artistic reasons for such an approach, let me simply say: fuck that shit. We're talking about D&D here. If you can't fold themes and motifs into a game starring an elf ninja, a halfling bard, and two ill-tempered gnome wizards then you should be writing bad fan fiction, not running actual games for real players. Just please don't post your stories anywhere on the net where I might see them." -Jeff's Gameblog.

So here's I decided to do (and now realize is going to be a bit of work):

Everybody makes three 1st-level characters who all happen to be staying in the same town (in this case it will be the town of Longsaddle, in case any Faerun-ians are out there who care). We will have a big map with encounter locations that we'll flesh out while the game progresses, and the players choose which character they want to play with that night. I plan on having a number of dungeons and short adventures planned for the world and be ready to pull one out at a moment's notice. Also no character in your character "pool" should be more than two levels above any other, as best as you can manage it. So that'll lead to lots of switching characters, and some interesting party mixing (including opportunities for things like all-rogue or all-wizard parties occasionally). This way I can make stuff without even worrying (or caring) what adventurers will be going in there, and drop hints to the particular dungeon's deadliness or particulars in the tavern when they Gather Information ("Don't enter the Temple of the Skull without a powerful priest of Lathander at your side!" or "The Tower of the Serpent contains many traps that kill those foolhardy enough to enter!" etc.), so they can choose who to take before they leave. Also with three characters each if one dies I don't have to care or feel bad (just bring in that player's halfling monk that had been secretly following the party since they left town).

The idea is that the other DM would take over once and a while and I'd play some characters too, and if any of the other players felt like DMing they'd get a shot and both DMs would play while the newbie cut their teeth on the DMG. Each adventure will be self-contained, and there's no overall campaign plot that has to be hammered out before the first adventure (when I tie one in later, it will only be thanks to my DMing genius). But I agreed to DM the first four games at least until the other DM got the gist of what I am trying to do. I went from zero-gaming to maximum overdrive in a matter of days.

Time to put on the pointy hat once again, and tell a group of grown men (and women, actually) that they feel a cold wind blowing from the north...

Baby Booty

2008-04-12T19:39:00.000-07:00

Our friends JiveTurkey9000 and Tom Joad are expecting a baby at the end of April, so the Cyberninja and I ventured norte to the home of Leinenkugel's beer for the baby shower and some non-baby-shower-related guy time. Brando and KimboSlice also made the trip up for the festivities.

Jodi's mom's lady friends from the church choir threw her a great shower complete with delicious blueberry egg bake, croissants, and games. I actually won a prize in the game where you have to avoid uttering the word "baby". No problem, people. Jodi's not really the attention-seeking type so sitting there while everyone watched her open the gifts was pretty grueling. I have to say that the kid got some great swag, so it was probably worth it (though she might not agree with me).

From left to right: Jodi's mom Pam, Jodi, baby swag.Jodi's please-get-me-out-of-here face.

Jodi opening gifts......and Jodi with her friend Jody from volleyball and Jody's daughter Lola. Lola served as a mini focus group for the toys for Baby Bright. All toys tested off the charts.

While we were baby showering, the boys went shooting and, of course, the 'ninja came home with a hankering for a new weapon.

That evening we went out to an Italian place.

Our waitress, Mint, was very confused, but the food and company were excellent.

Thanks for a great weekend!

Wizard's Quest II: This Time its Personal

2008-04-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

Paul and his lady came up for my birthday weekend, and we went up to the Dells to once again enter the land of mystery and mayhem: Wizard's Quest!

You may recall that the last time Dr. Girlfriend and I went to the Quadrosphere we did not locate the Earth Wizard, the only wizard to escape our searchings.

Did we find Paradisio, the Magestic Earth Wizard, this time you ask?

Do magic space swords glow with unfathomable power?

Hell yes they do, and hell yes we did. I should also mention that Paul and Cathy found and freed all four Wizards on their own, with no help from Team Cyberninja (we wouldn't have helped even if they'd asked -- you gotta earn it on your own, that hows' we roll in the Technodojo).

Damn crafty wizard seekers. They were known as, of course, Team Paladin.

After getting some grub, we went to an ultra-crappy haunted mansion that I really wanted to check out while we were in the Dells. It was terrible, which is fine by me.

All in all, great Birthday weekend!

I also returned Turok (after beating it) for full retail value (Gamestop's got 30 days no-questions-asked full refund return policy for VIP members, of which I am very P) and picked up Spiderman 3 for 360 to do some web-slingin' and The Witcher for PC. For those of you who have played The Witcher, I highly recommend this video review.

Keep it realsies, ya'll.

Champaign Supernova

2008-03-23T19:54:00.000-07:00

Took a trip this Easter weekend, down to the land of U of I @ U-C, and toured the ol' graduate school home-town.

First, we met up with Muncher, Randa-Kay, and Nebraska, and the proper ceremonies and exchange of wizardly gifts was performed.

We watched many a movie, including the Tom Hanks documentary classic: Mazes and Monsters.

Every session of Mazes and Monsters requires over $75 in scented candles and incense.
Also: Stupidity.

This is a movie from 1982 where the primary moral was "Don't play DnD, or you'll stab people in the streets of NY and try to jump off a building."

Look out, its a Gorevil!

Then we engaged in traditional Easter festivities, including egg decorating...

...and playing zombocalypsian boardgames.

It was a good time. I also ended up picking up the Dungeons and Dragon's animated series and learning that all Dwarves and Gnomes in "The Realm" are slaves working for Vengir's military-industrial complex.
Every other episode requires that the kids free another village of 100 dwarves from Vengir's diamond/iron/weaponsmithing mines. It's pretty sad, really. I can't believe these dwarves don't have enough pride to fight back, or at least not work to further Vengir's bloodthirsty goals. Glimi son of Gloin would be pissed, for sure.

Center: Brando's favorite Halloween costume.

We also got a chance to eat some lunch on Saturday with Nathan and Amy, and check out Amy's new laser eyeballs.
All in all, a good weekend. Throughout this week Mary has given me a gift-a-day for my birthday week. Here's the swag I've gotten so far:

- Star Wars IV: A New Hope
- Beyond Civilization
- The Art of the Cthulhu Mythos
- Coleman Two-Burner folding stove
- Turok, Dinosaur Hunter for 360

I beat Turok today. Mutated Velociraptors don't stand a chance when the cyberninjaz come a'callin.

Anne Marie Scanlan

2008-03-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

Grandma Scanlan passed away on Sunday afternoon, March 9, 2008. We went down on Saturday morning and we were able to spend most of Saturday and Sunday with her.

For any of you who might want the info, the visitation will be at Sacred Heart Church, the Nation, from 3-8 PM on Tuesday (Mar. 11). The funeral service will be at the same location on Wednesday at 11 AM.

Nibbles takes on the Tomb of Horrors, Part 1

2008-03-07T16:07:00.000-08:00

In honor of my recently deceased familiar Nibbles and the greatest of Dungeonmasters both in one week, I decided to start my adventure last night into the most dangerous of Gygaxian deathtrap dungeons, the Tomb of Horrors, and bring along my ranger/rogue from the main NWN2 campaign who's animal companion is Nibbles' virtual alter ego.

That's us, in the camp above the dungeon. The little dwarves in the background are the stupid NPC hirelings I had to hire into my party after my first horrible death in the dungeon.

Mostly they just stood around and let me constantly walk around really slow and search for traps. You think that chest in the wall is trapped? Well, my trap sense isn't tingling, so it must not be, right? Hey, there's a lever inside! Cool! So I pulled it. And got pit-trapped into a zombie-warrior infested crypt I had to fight my way out of.

Initially I just bashed on some zombie warriors no problem (Ranger Favored Enemy: Undead x 2!), and searched around for a way out, but the tomb's guardians got much more dangerous...

Hmmm, I wonder what happens if I check out this crypt...hey, there's a lever here!

...and how does gettin' teleported (sans all my equipment) into a 10' x 10' room filled with confusion gas...and two Ta'anari? (that's "big mean deamons" in English) Great!

A reload and a completely separate path of corridors later...

Hmmm, that doorway looks inviting, maybe I'll go through it (after dismantling three DC 30 traps and fighting off five mummy lords)...

Nibbles smelled something in the Hallway of Many Colors so I was on my guard. Carefully checking for traps I quietly opened one of the colored doors in the long hallway...

...and was promptly level-drained, confusion-blasted, constitution-drained, strength-drained, dexterity-drained, feebleminded, baned, slowed, and good old hold person'd. Then 12 succubi and a Tan'ari teleported in and proceeded to destroy my entire party. Nibbles, god bless 'em, lasted the longest.

Good times!

Now that's the D&D of old. Devin's going to join me for Part 2, where I don't try to open the orange door.

Anyone who already owns NWN2 is welcome to join us take on the Tomb of Horrors (even Jared, who otherwise wouldn't be invited to play D&D with us because of our severe prejudice against Panther tatoos).

DelpCON 2008 - Good and bad news

2008-03-03T17:15:00.001-08:00

UPDATE: Immediately following our convention of everything Dungeons and Dragons this weekend, the all-father of D&D went to the great Renaissance Faire in the sky.

Gary Gygax, July 27, 1938 - March 4, 2008

We were fortunate to see him last year at GenCon 2007. In his honor we should all get together again as soon as possible and play a true Gygaxian D&D adventure. Here are three things I figure are minimally needed to make it truly Gygaxian:

1) Strange number-based riddles/puzzles
2) Occasional save-or-die traps
3) A Rust Monster

-------------------------------------------------------------

Now back to this weekend's DelpCon ...

Incoming Nerd Bomb! Take cover!

This weekend was DelpCon 2008. The annual festival of geekery that takes place in the basement of wherever Delp is living at the time. Fortunately Delp now lives in Cedar Falls, the home city of our old alma mater, the illustrious University of Northern Iowa. At this annual convention we at the very least play a game of D&D and drink 6-7 gallons of Mountain Dew. The geek fairy was out in rare form this year, as we also got in a full-fledged Star Wars miniatures tournament and watched two nerdy movies. It was glorious.

Attendees were myself, Delp (of course), Superchad, Devin, Travis, RW, and Paul.

Friday night we started the Star Wars tournament. Delp and I bought a bunch of random booster packs for Star Wars minis and everybody got a single sealed booster pack. Then we played the double-elimination tournament with whatever we got in our box. In the boxes people got badass Jedi like Mace Windu, Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, and Qui-Gon Jinn. The MVM (most valuable miniature) award, however, goes to the humble Sith Assault Droid.

The magic of this little guy is that he is the Necron of Star Wars minis. He is an otherwise mediocre mini that has two important powers: shields which made him the most survivable little guy in existence if you can roll high enough each time he gets hit, and a flamethrower which doesn't need to roll to hit anyone within 6 squares. Devin and I got identical pulls in our "random" booster packs, and while we didn't get any bad-ass jedi, we both got a Sith Assault Droid, doubling the chances that people could face, and learn to hate, this little bastard.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), Devin and shared the trophy for Star Wars tournament master. The games went on so long that by the time we got to the final game we were all sick of Star Wars minis, and Devin and I felt that facing off two Sith Assault Droids against each other may end up ripping a hole in space-time, so we called it a draw. In the future Devin and I may have to face off again to determine who is the truest of Star Wars minis champions.

We shared the cake with everybody.

Saturday we ate a huge breakfast at the infamous Waffle Stop in downtown Cedar Falls, followed by a trip to the FLGS (friendly local gaming store), The Core. I picked up the Dunwich Horror expansion to my copy of Arkham Horror (best wedding present ever -- thanks Paul!).

Then returned to our HQ in Delp's basement, and that's when the true dorkery was unleashed!

That's right, Dungeons and Dragons! RW was the DM for our foray into the realm of fantastic adventure. He came up with a sweet reversal adventure idea in which we were all turned into different undead, and took over a dungeon for our own. Wanna hear about my skeleton rogue? How about Chad's mummy barbarian? Or Paul's Vampire Spawn? No? Okay, okay, geez...

And in case you still don't believe me that SuperChad was there...

In any case, RW's adventure was totally awesome. We picked locks, dodged traps, fought zombies, and fed paladins to the unholy Ravenloftian Well of Souls. Like I said, good times. We played for a long, long time until the DM just couldn't take any more and we had to call it a night...

...a night to go out on the town, that is! Most of us drove in a big caravan to Delp's dad's house to meet some of his friends there to play cards. I'm pretty sure every one of us ended up losing money at that game, but it was a good time anyway, and we got to meet Delp's friends. Somewhere along the way we got split up and some of us went back to game further while others went to ye old tavern to seek adventure (Huzzah!).

When the gamer group returned we played some more Star Wars miniatures while we waited for the party crew to get back, and then we all watched the MST3k version of Angel's Revenge, which was horribly great.

Finally, on Sunday we watched the new cinema classic: Dungeons and Dragons II: Wrath of the Dragon God, which is infinitely superior to its predecessor that had quintuple the budget to work with.

And as RW would say, LuX 4 L1fe!

Dark Energy -- the Hidden Conspiracy

2008-02-25T21:05:00.000-08:00

So recently there have been some measurements taken of the universe's expansion, and its possible between the various goings-on in the world a lot of folks don't have time to delve into the finer points of the astronomical vogue news.

Well, lucky you, because I feel its time that everybody learns about Dark Energy. Don't worry, I won't go into math or whatever, because I don't understand it either. I'll just give you guys the gist of it, and then let you go off and throw up in a state of nauseated euphoria as you consider the implications, and slowly go insane.

So...the Big Bang, right? Yeah, so, Maiar and Magic aside, its a pretty accepted theory of universal start time. Basically, every piece of matter was a tiny hot little speck, and for whatever reason it exploded and everything went everywhere in all directions. Eventually things cooled and became galaxies and whatnot, which is where your slurpies come from. In any case, you've probably heard about "Dark Matter," which is essentially a name the astrophysicists give the "fudge factor" constants they have to use in their fancy equations to solve for x. Dark Matter is an uncreative name for invisible matter ("ether," anyone?) that possesses a gravitational pull, that can't be directly measured, but can be studied by its effects on (regular matter) neighboring bodies. Fair enough.

Now putting Einstein's theories of whatever in the formulas, the big scientists determined that the universe will eventually slow down and stop expanding, and then collapse back in on itself as the gravity of the universe overcomes the force of the initial Big Bang, and then we'll have the "Big Crunch." You may have learnt about this in middle school, back when all they told us was lies.

Turns out, these scientists don't know shit about shit. Initially they had some quirky readings of the universe's expansion, but finally in August of 2006, they got some readings using NASA's orbital X-ray laboratory where they could measure the redshift of the galaxies moving away from our planet without the earth's atmosphere interfering. They figured they'd determine how fast the universe was expanding and at what rate it was slowing, in the hopes of being able to give a guesstimate on the amount of Dark Matter in the universe. Only instead of finding out the universe was slowing down, they found out it was speeding up.

That's right, speeding up. Think about that for a second. It doesn't make any goddamn sense. The fastest the galaxy should have been spreading is immediately after the Big Bang, and should slow down from then on out. "Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, objects in motion tend to stay in motion." Remember that little wit of wisdom from good ol' Newton? Well, not a universal truth, evidentially. Something is expanding in between the stars and galaxies, forcing the total area of the universe to get bigger without having any mass in itself at all.

What's the term for this ridiculously magical substance? "Dark Energy." Well, at least they didn't call it "The Xena Effect" or "Seven-of-Nine Swelling." In any case, Dark Energy is the new Dark Matter (there's still Dark Matter though...I guess).

So for the last 1-2 years we know we have had no freaking clue what was going on in space (we never really knew, but now we know we don't know, see?). We thought we did. I thought we did. But we don't. At all. Space is made of a magical substance that ebbs and flows however it wants, and swells up without having any measurable forces at all.

Light speed the fastest speed anything can travel? We probably got that wrong too. Alternate dimensions? Sure, why not? Hyperspace travel? Probably possible. Elder Beings watching us hungrily from across the endless voids of space? Most definitely.

Basically, every kind of cheesy alien/ghost/space travel origin presented late at night on the sci-fi channel, which everyone made fun of you for watching over and over, is now understood to be totally possible. Man, scientists are so freaking dumb, duh!

Krull: A Synopsis

2008-02-19T18:45:00.000-08:00

Since Dr. Girlfriend and I have split our netflix lists into two separate queues, I have taken it upon myself to educate the good doctor in all of the epic 80s movies she missed as a little girl. We already went through the entire Indiana Jones Trilogy, in preparation for the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...

So now we've moved on to 80s fantasy, and I am happy to report that while she didn't appreciate the Dungeons and Dragons-esque 1983 movie Krull, I found it better than I remembered (though, for the record, I remembered it being pretty bad). Here's the synopsis (super spoilertz!!!1!!).

Krull is the story of a happy medieval kingdom of magic and wonder on a far away world, and what happens when that world is invaded by a deep-space faring Satan who flies around in a spaceship castle.

At the beginning, a young prince with sweet chin-stubble and 80's-hair princess are getting married in order to unite the two warring kingdoms under one banner. This is so the relevant kingdom's armies can unite and fight off the "Beast's" alien armies. They make it pretty clear that the alien armies are right on the two kingdom's doorstep, but they still won't fight together until the kids are married. This is some really sticky politics the world of Krull has, and it costs them bigtime, because during the ceremony the aliens attack the castle (with freaking blasters that shoot blue laser beams!) and, with the exception of the prince stubblefield and princess Joan Jet (who they kidnap), kill every single person. Thats every person in the whole castle. Both kings, every knight, every squire, every peasant, every chambermaid.

The prince, fortunately, is just knocked out. On the bright side...hey, new king!

"Old Wise Guy" saunters down from the mountain and nurses the prince back to health. The prince is keen on getting his sweet lady back, but Obi-Wan tells him he can only defeat the big bad guy with the legendary "Glaive." Here's where my first recollection was off. I thought the Glaive was called the "Krull," but Krull is the planet, not the bladed thing. The name Glaive is a little misleading, because from my years of reading D&D manuals I know for absolute certain that a glaive is a huge blade on the end of a pole that orcs and cosplay dorks swing around.

You're welcome Paul.

In any case, the Glaive in Krull is a throwy knife-thing.

The origin of the Krull, shit, "Glaive" is completely glossed over. Its just an ancient weapon from ancient times with ancient power over evil. It doesn't seem very hard to get, as Prince Beardy waltzes up to a cave, sticks his hand in some hot lava, and pulls it out. I don't know what the deal is with the fire-resistant hand, but he gets it again later for no reason.

In any case, he gets the Glaive and you won't see it again for another hour and fifteen minutes. In the meantime Luke Beardwalker and Obi-Wan Bore-nobi start their journey toward Castle SpaceJump. Oh yeah, did I mention the evil guy's castle/spaceship teleports to a random destination on the planet Krull every morning at dawn? Well, it does. So they gotta find out where it'll be before they can go attack it and be completely overmatched by aliens with BLASTERS, so they obviously decide to head to the "Old Seer," so they can go off and get killed storming the castle.

This is where it gets wacky. Like every 80s movie and most early 90s fantasy movies everywhere, a plucky stupid JarJar-style sidekick is required by law. So of course they cross paths with a Monty-Python style clutsy magician who I hated throughout the movie.

Other 'joiners' to the Kingdom of the Sideburns included a group of Bandits (featuring Liam Neeson!), a little kid, and a spear-wielding cyclops named Rell. Rell threw his spear no fewer than four times, hitting dudes who were about to backstab someone every time with perfect accuracy. This kind of throwing accuracy is amazing because Rell shouldn't have any depth perception at all.

In any case, the old Seer gets killed off by Beastie McGee, so they gotta go see an evil spider-lady who can see the future. This is probably the part of the movie everyone with even a remote fear of spiders remembers, because of the awesome-looking white spider that hunts Old Guy as he tries to cross the webbing.

Old guy dies and they find out from the evil spider lady that the castle will appear in the "Iron Desert" in the morning, where it will remain for a day. The party of adventurers shows concern as they inform us that the "Iron Desert" is over 1000 leagues away! I felt it was interesting that nobody pointed out that the "Iron Desert" isn't a very specific location. That's like saying "Know ye prince, that the Castle of the Beast will appear in Kentucky, and stay there for only 24 hours! You must hurry!" If I'm going to kill off my Obiwan Kenobi character for some directions they'd better be given in latitude and longitude.

Fortunately they rope some some super-fast horses and are able to zip to the castle just before it re-teleports. They get inside where just about everyone dies. One thing that is great about the movie is the alien soldier deaths. When stabbed, the alien soldiers die in a very cool way, as they give out the exact same scream noise that R2D2 gives when he's shot by a blaster, and then a worm jumps out of their neck-armor and tunnels into the ground. Totally wierd. The movie is worth a rental just to see that.

Anyway, Sir Beardsalot fights the "Beast" with the Krull, which with he uses the force to make it telekinetically cut the creature a bunch of times. But then it gets stuck in the Beast's body and he can't retrieve it. Oh noes! Now he's powerless! How will he ever fight the Beast now?!

True fucking Love is how. I shit you not. On this crazy planet, somehow when people get married they can form flames in their hands and they trade them in some sort of ceremony. Well, Princess-in-Distress hands her flame to Hiro B. Protagonist and he shoots like a flamethrower out of his hands, melting the beast. Then he proceeds to shoot through the walls of the collapsing castle with his flamethrower-hands, destroying shit everywhere. It really is as surreal and out-of-nowhere as it sounds. True Love = 3rd degree burns. So, basically, newlyweds are the most dangerous people on the planet.

I give it seven Glaives out of nine!

The Way is Shut

2008-02-09T19:50:00.000-08:00

You know how when you're traveling through an ancient dungeon of unspeakable evil, and you and your stalwart companions wish to purloin the great treasures in the Chamber of Yog-Sothoth, but you can't open the way because you first must gather the three scattered gems of Avonleigh to unlock the great seals that bind the Dragons of the Old World behind the Gates of Khalim-yah?

Yeah, that's great stuff. That's when you show your icy stare that was hoary when the earth was young, and head off into a world-spanning pirate adventure. That's how a good DM gets you to do the boat trip adventure he has planned.

So how does the game Neverwinter Nights 2, 2007 game of the year, handle forcing fetch quests on its mid-level PCs? What if all you want to do is just get to another part of town where a dude you need to talk to lived?

Oh Noes! The City Watch have sealed the gates behind yellow caution tape! Would you, as a group of roguish and stalwart adventurers, be willing to run all sorts of errands for the City Watch in order to get into their good graces so they'd let you in? Of course not, and neither would 7th-level Ranger Quinn Apblanc, or his fiercesome sidekick 'Nibbles' the Dire Hampster!

So Quinn, along with his trusty high-level NPC companions, decided to find another way into the northwest quadrant of the city. I mean...the people in there have to eat, right? There's gotta be a wall we can climb or tunnel we can take or food supply wagon we can jump on or, if nothing else, we can overpower the guards and waltz on in (our dwarf has a flaming morningstar, after all).

Look at the height of that wall. I could climb a goddamn tree and get in there. Or I could, if the game recognized the "/climb" function (and there are a surprising lack of the 3rd-level fly spells in this game). But nope, you get railroaded into working for the City Watch for who knows how long. And the quests aren't even that good! Instead of 'Recover the golden scepter of the carnivorous ape tribe in the Lost Valley of the Velocigorgons,' you get 'clean up the docks and check in at all the guardhouses during your patrols.' Oh well written Atari, true masters of dungeons and dragons!

And as another kick in the pants, wherever I go now I'm attacked by assholes because I'm part of the City Watch. Here's a quick screenshot I grabbed of yet another ambush right after I left the tavern to start my patrol.

Thanks for the cheapshot required reload assholes! I'm now up to being a 9th-level Ranger after all these fetch quests and they still aren't letting me into the goddamn northwest region of the city. If you're going to force me to wade through a thousand sidequests before I continue the main quest (which I'm only barely interested in anyway), spice it up a little! I mean, where's my motivation?

Oh yeah, and Nibbles is getting pissed.

Update from Hoth

2008-02-06T12:52:00.000-08:00

Got out of work early today! Evidentally they had to let us go home early because even Imperial Probe Droids couldn't find a Rebel Base in this blizzard. These are pictures from our trip home at 1pm today (blizzard started ~7:30am).

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!

That reminds me that we got some sweet cross-country skis last week, and last weekend we went cross-country skiing around Middleton. There's so much perpetual snow here that you can pretty much ski anywhere. Here's pictures of us near our apartment, crossing a big open industrial park between blizzards.

Currently there's a huge blizzard outside and if they don't shutdown COMPANY tomorrow (unlikely) we may have to ski there rather than try to drive in this stuff (we live close enough its doable). Maybe I shouldn't have laughed at the snowshoe display in the sporting goods store we went to last week. Getting home today was an exercise in e-brake turns and rolling through top-of-the-hill stop signs (first paycheck went to new snow tires fortunately). But now that a couple more hours of blizzard have accumulated I don't think that the Fantastisuper Americar USA could even get out of the Apartment complex parking lot!

Don't worry Tim, I got her back home and she's in our underground parking space now.

Portals open every five minutes!

2008-01-27T19:57:00.000-08:00

There is a realm of mystery and wonder just outside the winter-dreary city of Madison, a place they call..."The Dells." The Dells hide a number of attractions such as Ripley's Believe it or Not and The Haunted Mansion (non-Disney version), but the most important of these encounter locations?

Wizard Quest!

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I went up to the Dells this weekend, and I was able to finagle her to go to Wizard Quest, a prop-filled building where you play a fruity game to "Free the Four Elemental Wizards from the four realms of the Quadrasphere!"

Its actually a pretty darn cool game. They have this huge building filled with crazy props and little notes and stuff hidden away that say things about the various trolls and whatnot that live in the wizard realms. The goal of the game is to find and free the four wizards in each elemental plane within 90 minutes, but there's a lot more to it than just walking around a fancy maze. You have to collect magic points called "glimmers" to free the wizards (each wizard costs "200-250 glimmers" to free). I was unable to call them "glimmers" without laughing, so I used the more comfortable term "mana" when referring to the magic points. Dr. Girlfriend kept referring to them as "twinkles" the whole game, which was hilarious. All the "glimmers" are recorded on a strip of paper with a barcode on it that you scan to activate the various computer terminals around the place.

Anyway, to get more magic points you can do a number of things, mostly answer questions on these computer scattered around the place that refer to specific clues hidden around (20 points per correct answer). There's also cool puzzles and stuff that cost points to try, and then award more points if you successfully do the stuff right. Plus a lot of it is really physical challenges too, so you can't be afraid to jump in the ball pit or crawl through tunnels on your hands and knees to find the clues.

For those of you "in the know," it was like a big True Dungeon without any battling but much better props and very openly explorable (with plenty of one-way secret passages). Also the puzzles aren't dependent on a "DM" in the corner, they're all computer controlled so if you do the puzzle right the door opens/chest unlocks/etc. There's also a bunch of side quests that the computer terminals tell you whether you've beaten them or not when you go to answer more questions.

Saving the wizards gets you a bunch of cheesy dialogue from said wizard (the whole game has a cheesyness about it, which they acknowledge), and cumulative 5% off anything in the store for each wizard you save. We saved three of the wizards. For the life of me I couldn't locate the goddamn Earth wizard, even though we collected enough "glimmers" to save him. We spent about ten minutes at this door puzzle in the Earth realm before we gave up, and on the drive home I'm pretty sure I figured it out (damn!).

But in any case, did we take advantage of our epic success (and 15% discount)?

Hell yes we did (and yeah, that hat lights up).

If anyone wants to take a trip up to the Dells to face the Wizard's Quest we would be happy to go again. Don't worry about us ruining anything, the next time I go my only goal will be to find that damn Earth Wizard, glimmers be damned!

Intergalactic Planetary

2008-01-21T18:27:00.000-08:00

Working full-time doesn't give you nearly as much time to goof around and write blogposts. With the writer's strike TV hasn't been worth a crap and the perpetual Wisconsin snow prevents any outdoor activities from taking place during the week. So here's my synopsis of shows I've been watching while painting Lord of the Rings miniatures:

The Sarah Connor Chronicles - so far its a 'meh.' Its got River from Firefly, which is why I'm still giving it a chance, but its a little loose with the temporal paradox thing. I'm willing to overlook temporal paradoxes for big, important stuff, but when they start jumping in little 10-year leaps (just so the show can be based in 2007 instead of 1997), with full-on resistance cells jumping back in time to help the Connor team, it starts to get a little ridiculous. I'm still entertained for now though, and the John Connor kid does an alright job of acting like a perpetually unhappy Edward Furlong.

Prison Break - Season 1 of this show was phenomenal. Season 2 was pretty darn good. Season 3 has been...ad nauseum. I don't know how many prisons they need to escape from or how many attempts at each escape need to be performed but this Panama prison break has gone on long enough. The 'prison break' tbeme has gotten so ridiculous they'll probably put him in a maximum security prison on the moon in Season 4...and I'll probably watch it.

Daily Show and Colbert Report - Wow. Not worth a crap since the strike. Get your writers back or go on hiatus guys. Its like watching bad high school improv up there.

Snoop Dogg's Fatherhood - Yeah, with the strike its inevitable a reality show would have to make the list. While reality TV is generally piss-poor, when its Snoop complaining about all the dishes he has to do something about that is really funny. Not that great, but here on Scantabulous we can't get enough Snoop so we watch it.

I've also constructed a kick-ass computer rig (with some advice on parts from my buddy Kevin) that, once I get a legit copy of XP Pro, will soon go fully online and replace my 2003 computer. For now its just an extremely expensive video game console that I can play Dark Messiah of Might and Magic on.

Neverwinter Nights 2, here I come!

30% Chance of Flurries

2008-01-13T09:45:00.000-08:00

Tim and Munch won't like this one...

Delp took me to the Green Bay Packer's playoff game this weekend. Delp got his mits on some tickets through some sort of unscrupulous deal involving three roosters, two bushels of cantalope, and a drunken bet during a Canadian curling competition. In any case, since he knew that I had recently been converted to football, he decided to try and convert me further from a Bears fan to a Packers fan by taking me to a playoff game at Lambeau Field.

We got there nice and early in the morning, so I could get the whole tailgating/warm-up experience.

As a new Wisconsonian, I ate the curds and drank the Leinies (out of a can, no less) in Green Bay.

Packers' fans are a rowdy bunch, but are a fine group of green-and-yellow folks. After every play in which the Packers got a touchdown, made a first down, or Bigby got a sweet tackle, everyone would congratulate each other in a perpetual 360 degree high-fiving celebration that lasted the whole game (except for the first minute-and-a-half). Even in the bathroom at halftime there was high-fiving, which I thought was verboten in areas containing urinals, but I didn't yet fully understand the passion Green Bay fans have for their team.

Seahawks fans weren't treated badly either, to my surprise, though plenty of taunts were thrown their way during the game (again, except for the first minute-and-a-half). Also, much like the Catholic church, Packer fans follow the tradition of Early Indoctrination.

Watching the game at Lambeau field was awesome, and makes you realize how small the field really is and how big the players really are. The crowd was well represented on the Jumbotron. In fact, at one point in the game I actually saw Cullen's mom up on the Jumbotron holding a sign that said "Iowa luvs (hearts) the Packers!" That was cool. I couldn't snap a pic of that fast enough, but here's another one of Delp.

It snowed like a madman at the game and by half-time the field was covered in snow, such that they had to put away the brooms and pull out the shovels to clear the 10-yard increment lines. But the snow seemed to be the Packers superpower, as after the first three minutes of the game (where the Hawks scored two touchdowns) it started snowing, and the more it snowed the more amazing Green Bay played.

I'm especially glad the Packs got the snow-boost, because at about 40 seconds into the first quarter I could see the look in Delp's face wondering whether the Packer fumble-for-14 to the Seahawks was all my fault. I knew he was considering sacrificing the Bears fan to the Packer fans to change Grant's luck. Fortunately it didn't come to that.

Seeing the Packers at a playoff game in Lambeau field in the snow was the greatest sporting event I'll probably ever witness. And I have to say that I'm sorry Muncher, Tim, Brian, Devon, Rex (well, not Rex), Brian#2, and Orton, but I have officially been converted to the Great Wisconsin Green Machine.

I'll miss your mustache, Kyle.

Go Pack Go!

PS: Favorite player of the game: Bigby (#20). That guy's like an American Gladiator out there.

Christmas Circle 2007!!

2007-12-31T21:12:00.000-08:00

Since some things have changed for the usual Christmas Circle invitees over the past year (Travis and Nicole had Olivia and moved across the state) and other invitees had other plans, an ad hoc Christmas Circle was called this past weekend. Cullen and Jodi hosted it up in the home of Leinenkugel's beer.

Others in attendance were Chad and Phil.

Of course, Cory and I were there, too.

Cory brought his "Last Night on Earth Boardgame" and we all played. Chad and Cory were the Zombies, and Cullen, Phil, Jodi, and I were the Heroes. Stevie the cat didn't play.

It came down to the last hour before dawn, but the heroes found four townsfolk and kept them safe until sunrise, so we won!

The climax of the night was Cullen keeping a promise to an old friend.

Legend, I am

2007-12-31T19:59:00.000-08:00

No, not that one, this one.

Okay, Mary and I finally went to see I am Legend on New Years Eve, and now I'm going to give my thoughts on this movie. This is not a review, but a discussion, so there's going to be spoilers galore. If you have any inclination to see this movie stop reading now and click the Penny Arcade link to the right or something. Read some webcomics or whatever, but don't continue reading.

You sure you've seen it? Spoilertz ahead, I'm serious.

The dog dies. There, now are you happy? You kept reading and now I've spoiled the epic tear-inducing part of the movie for you. It would've been like Return of the King Hobbit-sad, but now you know about it so it won't be as good when you see it. Keep reading and I'll wreck the whole thing for you, shit-for-brains.

Alright, so we've got action star Will Smith (awesome), in a survivalist situation (double awesome), in a city filled with vampires that only come out at night a la Castlevania II:Simon's Quest (triple super awesome). Now that's a recipe for the Live Free or Die Hard Award if I've ever heard it. Unfortunately, the producers cut one too many corners and stupefied an otherwise cool flick. The following rant is specifically for the producers of this movie.

The CGI zombires (zombie vampires). Son of a bitch. The movie's enemies are virus-infected vampires that are all Nosferatu-like and crawly, not dinosaurs or cosmic tentacled horrors. There is absolutely no need to use CGI for the zombires. None. CGI for the abandoned city? Sure, absolutely, can't even tell. But can I tell that the Master Zombire, that they show 47 close-ups of screaming, is CGI? Hell yes I can. My semi-blind guinea pig can tell. Its gotta be more of a pain in the ass to attempt to make a CGI human than it is to just hire a dude and put some makeup on him to scream into the camera. It must somehow be cheaper though, and it sure as hell looks like it.

To get Will Smith for your action movie with city-wide zombie-vampire attacks and then use CGI zombires is like serving Fillet Minion on a paper plate with plastic silverware. The first time the screeners watched the initial movie draft and they saw the cartoon zombie scream at Will Smith did they think "Holy shit that Disney-animated bad guy looks great! I'm glad we didn't go with the obvious and much better idea of hiring Iggy Pop and putting a bald cap and Spock ears on him!" There has got to be plenty of shirtless heroin addicts out in LA who are willing to wear bald caps and Spock ears for a few bucks, what the hell were these guys thinking? Way to wreck a possible Oscar contender with taking the cheap route. Those boss fight scenes were worse than the mass Agent Smith attack in Matrix:Reloaded.

Maybe the Shreck guys did the zombires or something, because there was also a lot of Shreck references in the movie that I thought only served to show how shitty the zombires looked. The camera stays on a TV playing Shreck for like 5 minutes of the movie as if to say "See? CGI is great! The zombires are the same high-end technology that produced Shreck! You like Shreck! The monsters aren't even real actors, even though hiring real actors would make perfect sense! If it ain't broke...break it with CGI! Buy a green slurpie!" All the Shreck business only drove home the point that the infected people weren't even people. I'll accept the CGI lions, real lions are difficult to get to act, but CGI technology just isn't good enough to do realistic zombie/vampire people yet. Fortunately, there are over 6.5 billion people on the planet that can stand in as realistic zombie/vampire people in a movie in the meantime (see: 30 Days of Night).

So they dumbed-down the "Legend" storyline. That's fine, artists interpretation and all that. I'm fine with the storyline changed (for those that are unfamiliar, in the book Neville is a "Legend" to the not-completely crazy infected zombires, as he doesn't know there are "good zombires" and hunts them as well as the bad ones and they consider him a sort of daytime boogeyman). The movie also seemed about a half hour too short, but that's okay. Had it been another half hour, they probably would've just filled it in with extreme close-up shots of the CGI Master Zombire face growling at the camera or puzzling out a way to use a doorknob.

So there you have it. I know you all loved the movie, but for me it was a shining example of stupid executive decisions ruining an otherwise perfect setup. Will Smith is still awesome in this movie though, even if we didn't get to hear the trademark "Aww hell naw!"

PS: For a more in-depth analysis, see Paul's review. For nit-picky complaints about the military equipment in the movie instead of the CGI zombies, see Brando's review.