Highmoon’s Ponderings

Voting for the ENnies has commenced so do me a favor and drop by to vote!

ENnies Voting Page

Here are my suggestions for some of the categories; I worked on these, or in the case of Witch Hunter, I love the game to death:

• Best Rules - Witch Hunter: The Invisible World (Paradigm Concepts, Inc)
• Best Supplement - Spirit of the Season (Evil Hat Games)
• Best d20/OGL Product - Codex Arcanis (Paradigm Concepts, Inc)
• Best Game - Witch Hunter: The Invisible World (Paradigm Concepts, Inc)
• Product of the Year - Witch Hunter: The Invisible World (Paradigm Concepts, Inc)

If you’d like some more suggestions, check out the Summer Revolution.

Go vote!

One of my favorite games, and one I am running now, Witch Hunter got 3 nominations for the ENnies. Yet, it seemed like a lot of people had not really heard about it. So I decided to start a thread at both EN World and RPG.net to get some talk about the game going and hopefully build some awareness. Even cooler, new threads have emerged on their own, with more people talking about the game, what they’re doing and/or what they plan to do. Check these out and either learn about Witch Hunter, or join in and share your experiences.

EN World

• Witch Hunter: Are you playing? Yes? No? Why?
• Witch Hunter: Invisible World - my impressions

RPG.net

• Witch Hunter: Are you playing? Yes? No? Why?
• Witch Hunter: Invisible World - my impressions
• Witch Hunter: What character are you playing
• Savage World of Salomon Kane vs. Witch Hunter … which one?

Paizo

• Witch Hunter: the Invisible World

And of course, check out the Witch Hunter forums at Paradigm Concepts’ website as well.

I finally cried uncle and called Dell to have my laptop shipped over for repairs. I’ve been 2 months without a monitor since the inverter burned out, and with the stupid virus I got on Sunday having wrought chaos in my system I’m at my wit’s end. Worst thing is, I lost access to my CD drive (like, the system does not even know there is a D:\ drive at all) so I can’t even do a system reinstall! Argh.

I’ll be able to be online and use Photoshop to finish the website I’m working on now until the box from Dell arrives and then I’ll endure being without my laptop for however long just so they can fix it for good.

I’m so not a happy camper right now…

To all my computer geek friends out there, I’m having problems with my Windows.

This morning I clicked erroneously on a spam link while going for the Delete button. The website opened but I closed it immediately. However, the computer froze, and I got the blue screen of doom. The computer started doing a physical memory dump, and in the middle of it, it auto-restarted. When it did, it took two tries for it to actually boot followed by an auto-diagnose. After that, many of my programs won’t work (iTunes, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, MS Money) and I keep getting errors telling me dome .dll’s are missing and them not being valid Windows image. An example:

The application or DLL C:\Program Files\Microsoft Money Plus\MNYCoreFiles\rcmpacct.dll is not a valid Windows image. Please check this against your installation diskette.

So, WTF is going on? Help me! I’ll be offline until Saturday night, but feel free to leave a comment and I’ll get to it once then.

Thanks.

Found about this from a thread at RPG.net:

As I’m writing this, first drafts have already started trickling in for the tentatively-titled New Wave Requiem, which is a historical book for playing Vampire in 1980s America — think of it as Requiem for Rome meets Miami Vice.

Read full post at LiveJournal.

Vampire in the 80’s? Sign me up right now!

The jokes have already been made that the game should only go up to 1989, when a breach in the Masquerade happened with the release of a book called Vampire: The Masquerade (this only makes sense if you read/played Victorian Age Vampire, where the setting went all the way to 1889, when a breach in the Masquerade happened with the release of a book called Dracula). Personally, I’m all for it. 

G4 has been playing all day the press conferences coming out of E3 in California. I got to see/hear the presentations from Sony and Microsoft (I missed the Nintendo one thanks to a storm that made my DirecTV go blank for a couple of hours), and they were both interesting and informative as to how a larger-yet-similar industry to my own Hobby Gaming one handles this type of event and process (answer: much better than what I have seen at GTS and Gen Con, and not only because of the much larger budgets).

What really called my attention was how in each of the presentations, the big companies, the big market leaders, lauded and constantly thanked and showed appreciation for the 3rd-party publishers working with them to make their own systems a better value in entertainment and for the betterment of the industry as a whole. Seriously, it was a constant thing, with mentions by name of studios like EA, Ubisoft, Bungee, and even references to smaller design studios as well.

I just could not help but draw a comparison between the positive attitude towards 3rd-party publishers I was seeing from the video game industry market leaders vis-a-vis the way the hobby game industry’s market leader has behaved towards its 3rd-party publishers, specifically with the release of the GSL, a license that is so restrictive and controling of not only their IP, but also of the signatory parties, that more and more companies are simply not putting up with it.

As of today, three companies have publicly announced their intentions to not sign the GSL, these being Kenzer & Co., Adamant Entertainment and Green Ronin Publishing. Of these, Kenzer and Adamant have both already released 4e-compatible material using standard copyright law. In addition, Necromancer Games, though they have stated they will indeed be signing on, have stated that the terms of the GSL prohibits them from publishing the book they most wanted to, the Tome of Horrors, as they don’t want to lose that IP to Wizards via the control ceded via the GSL terms. Goodman Games remains mysterious in what their plans are; though they are indeed releasing 4e material, we don’t know if it will be via the GSL or via copyright, as Kenzer and Adamant have done. To this you can add a great number of small PDF publishers, like myself, that have also declined to sign the GSL.

E3 showed me a glimpse of what it is to have market leaders that value the contributions and innovations of their 3rd-party publishers, and made me wistful that we in the hobby gaming industry do not have such a market leader of our own.

To be fair, I have nothing against the little machine itself; I think they’re kinda cool, though I don’t know that I really have any need to be that connected all the time. My pet peeve is with BlackBerries in terms of work, when they really turn more into ShackleBerries.

Unless you are a doctor or superhero who needs to be on-call 24/7, I see no need for these little electronic ball-n-chains. My problem with them is that they completely erase the boundary between work and private time, essentially making (potentially) people be at work all the time. I cannot count the many times my wife’s BlackBerry has gone off while we’re at home with some crap or other from work, because someone farted and they got inspired for some new project or other. Can’t it friggin’ wait until the next business day?

Complicating the issue are workaholics, people for whom the boundary between work and private time is non-existent as well. Since they don’t have a life that doesn’t revolve around work, they will gladly get to that work email that came in during their off time because otherwise what they hell are they gonna do with their weekend? And since these folks are answering their mail, then how dare the rest of employees not do the same? It all ends up creating an intimidating atmosphere, because you can then mark yourself for retaliation during business hours.

I hate the little machines in this context. I know for a fact that the only reason I have not slammed my wife’s BlackBerry against a wall on various occasions is because G-d granted me a huge amount of patience.

If you have a work BlackBerry, for all that is good and holy, learn to respect your private time, and more importantly, teach your bosses to respect your private time.

The 2008 ENnie Awards nominations were released today, and boy, and I one giddy dude! Two products on which I worked have been nominated for awards:

Best Supplement

• Codex Arcanis, Paradigm Concepts (2008 Origins Award Winner for Best Role Playing Game Supplement)
• Spirit of the Season, Evil Hat Productions

Best d20/d20 OGL Product

• Codex Arcanis, Paradigm Concepts (2008 Origins Award Winner for Best Role Playing Game Supplement)

For Codex Arcanis, I did only minor additional material design in the form of some feats and a prestige class for the original softcover version, of which only the feats remained in the new hardcover version. Still, Codex Arcanis was my first game design credit in a published book, so it holds a special place in my heart (not to mention that I have a special fondness for Paradigm Concepts and Arcanis, because I’ve known the members of Team Paradigm for years, because Paradigm Concepts is a local Miami company, and because in Arcanis, Paradigm Concepts gave me my first taste of working in the industry, both with the design I did for Codex Arcanis (and some other tidbits that showed up in other books down the line) and with an adventure in the very first year of the Living Arcanis campaign).

For Spirit of the Season, I did the initial writing for the Chanukah section, then handed it off to Fred Hicks and Chad Underkoffler to awesomify, which they promptly did. I am incredibly proud of this book, in part because of the way my involvement in it came to be (see THIS and THIS), but really because of the amazing experience I had working on it, both on a personal level and on a professional level (as I wrote in the second post linked above).

Let me stress that in both nominations, I feel the credit really goes to Team Paradigm and Fred Hicks & Chad Underkoffler respectively; my contributions to those books was minor, and the honor really is mine to have my name listed next to theirs in the Credits page of those products. That said, I will savor the moment and feel proud and excited as well. I’ll be sure to post once the voting period begins.

 The pictures from our trip to Seattle are now up on Flickr.com. Just follow the link below:

Flickr Set: Trip to Seattle

Ad just check out the new garment I acquired in Seattle:

The kilted podcaster strikes!

I came across this while reading through the forums at RPG.net. I’d never heard about it, and it is simply amazing.

Abir is an ancient Jewish martial art that is rooted in Torah so that there is no danger of avodah zara (idolatry) as there could be in the study of other Oriental martial arts which feature philosophy and practices of religions contrary to Torah (like Shinto, for example). It is based on the Aleph Bet (Hebrew alphabet) and features katas based on each of the tribes (like the Double Snake of Dan).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syHyD8aPpkA (in English)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2aGALQqmEc (in Hebrew, but features better visuals)

I am incredibly proud and excited about this finding. The image of the meek Jew has become way too prevalent in the world over the last century, and while it is certainly true we are a peaceful people at heart, we are also warriors with a strong tradition stretching back to King David and even to Abraham. It is great to see this core being ignited once again, especially when it is in a tradition that fully merges the strength of body with the strength of spirit through Torah learning.

I’m going to be research this more, because guess what my new gaming project is going to be…