I find myself thinking a lot about Frontier these days. (It’s probably because I have some self-imposed deadlines for ‘Illusion’ and ‘6’.) Over the last couple of years I’ve harvested some twenty names from the freelancer forums of RPG.net as I try to get a feel for the art that I want for my games….
Author: matt
Gamer. Writer. Dad. Serial Ex-husband. Creator of The 23rd Letter, SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO, ZOMBI, Testament, Creed. Slightly megalomaniac
COPS – Japan Stylee
Eamon, a technologist in the area of Cybernetics I know[1], posted this: “If you peruse Japanese foreign-resident forums you’ll read a depressing amount of stories about foreigners being told to sign kanji-laden papers ‘so you can go’, only to find they’ve signed a confession – which the courts accept as totally truthful. That acceptance of…
M&M2e: hero or zero?
Mutants and Masterminds gets a lot of airplay on the internet forums: any time someone asks about superhero games, a raft of people come out of the woodwork to impose it upon you. I bought M&M 1st Edition a few years ago and was less than enthralled. It was D&D…with superpowers. Considering the general miasma…
Transhumanism
In 1966, Transhuman was defined by F. M. Esfandiary (later, FM-2030) as: included physical and mental augmentations including prostheses, reconstructive surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilisation), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values. (Source: Wikipedia The word…
War of the Worlds: Earth concept art
Which do people like more? (See the comments for more info)
Lucky Ringo
Greg Stolze writes on his web page: What I learned … is that the best creative partnerships are the ones where each of you thinks the other guy is doing 70% of the work, and you’re the lucky Ringo along for the ride. (crossposted to my other blog)
The 23rd Letter: in film?
Back in late 2006, I got a bit of a shock. Maybe you do as I do but I like to beachcomb through Google and see what people are saying about the things I have written. I pick up a few comments about The 23rd Letter and Zombi most often, usually through RPG.net which seems…
UFO files from The National Archives
Lots of PDFs, a video and an MP3. The files contain a wide range of UFO-related documents covering the years 1978–2002. So if you want to find out more about lights in the sky over Waterloo Bridge, near misses by pilots, crop circles – and what the UK government thought of it all – this…
Vader escapes custodial sentence
You couldn’t make thisup. “The judge was on the verge of sending the Dark Lord to prison for the maximum possible term but abruptly changed his mind when Vader lifted his hand and waved it from side to side, while at the same time telling the judge that he “found his lack of faith disturbing”….
Saur: introduction
Half a decade ago, when Crucible was still about, we tasked ourselves with a job to create games settings in one week and bring them back to the fold. The catch was, the group decided what sort of game you were to write. The one that was given to me was subtitled “Roman Empire, No…
The WhiteChapel Project – early history
The Project in Whitechapel was formed in September 1941 as a subsection of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The SOE was directed to encourage espionage behind enemy lines and build the core of a resistance cell in the event of a land invasion. As a result, they were entirely dependent upon the security of radio…
RPGnet whiners strike again
I loathe it when the RPGnet whiner crew crawl out of the woodwork and accuse people of being passive aggressive with the threat of bringing down the mods. You can’t even express an opinion without being asked to tone your language and the P-A finger is then pointed. That’s the absolute definition of the Ad…
Resolutions: Dealing with Canon and Context
Canon is the past in the play. It establishes facts which have gone before. It doesn’t mean it can’t be retconned afterwards but for the most part it is immutable (or at least it should have immutable facts and mutable descriptors, the latter of which may be changed due to Context. Context is the present…
systems, systems, systems
Is it right to design another system for a game? At the moment we’re still writing War of the Worlds, though we’ve started development on Status: Refugee and a Supers game. In all three, the working system is to be a derivative of ERIS from “The 23rd Letter”. Part of me wants to use ORE…
Portraits of the Dead.
MetalFloss has
Ransom
The idea of ransoming game material is definitely new and innovative. It’s being done rather successfully by Greg Stolze for his Reign supplements and there’s a Delta Green book ‘Targets of Opportunity’ which is being funded this way as well. Shane Ivey wrote: “If we collect enough “pledges” through Fundable.com to cover the various and…
23L Superhumans
Having some spare time yesterday evening I resurrected some of my notes for ‘superpowers’ in T23L. It wasn’t part of the plan to have 23L superhumans – though I was accused by Jeremy of writing my own ‘supers’ game when we published The 23rd Letter. We did have quasi-superhumans in the form of the Furies…
The Stars Are Right….over there….
The Internet STELLAR DATABASE is a lot of fun. Look at the entry for Barnard’s Star especially the submits at the bottom where you can search for stars within a certain radius. How I wish this had been about when I was working on 2300AD scenarios (My favourite being ‘Bayern’ which exceeded the 7.8 light…