SI 1995/3297, also known as “The Duration of Copyright and Rights in Performances Regulations 1995”, this UK law came into effect on January 1st 1996. At its most basic, it extended the copyright for any written work from 50 years after the author’s death, to 70 years. Any work which had already become public domain…
Category: Commentary
Bigotry?
This post surprised me But I think I’d have a real ethical problem role-playing in a world that was Christian-realist. – some dude on RPGnet There are reasons why I find this odd. Most gamers will play in a setting where some sort of religion is real. Think about it, this covers any fantasy setting…
Superheroes can be dicks
Forget Iron Man. PJ pointed me at the new Hancock trailer. It’s true, Hancock has gone from being a “Wild Wild West” kind of camp nonsense movie to a movie I’d really like to see and a game I’d like to run. That said, Iron Man, much more than the Fantastic Four or Spider Man…
Creed/Testament/Rapture – queries and comments
It’s always nice to get some kudos from people you respect and Balbinus on RPG.net has come through again with Creed/Testament/Rapture – queries and comments. He has a few comments, mostly clarifications and does make me realise that the character sheet I provided for Creed was entirely inadequate. Or, if I meant something else I…
It is about the boobs or the invasion of personal space?
What the fuck is this all about? Damned if I know.
Collaboration, writing and vision
This weekend I was busy with family duties but still managed to do a bit of work on WoTW:Earth. Most notably taking the draft ideas Aidan sent through and turning them into mechanics and flavour. Collaboration is hard. I’m very conscious that I’m an ignorant so-and-so with strong opinions and a jeadstrong way of doing…
Archaeology
I spent a couple of hours in the attic of my parent’s house excavating some old books. I have a notion to sell some of them considering that I’ve not looked at them in a decade but as I continued to browse I don’t think I could find one that I would seriously get rid…
Quality of Play theory
Levi Kornelson came up with this theory and posted it on TheRPGSite: The text inspires “solo play”. Personal play creates group play. Group play feeds back into personal play and pushes more group play. The punch-line is: The quality of solo play often matters more to actually getting a game than the quality of group…
One for the millennialists…
Mike Cane 2008 reports that NASA got it wrong and an asteroid that they reported to have a 1 in 45000 chance of hitting Earth actually has a 1 in 450 chance of hitting Earth. It took a 13 year old German schoolboy to validate the figures after NASA experts forgot to take into account…
Mario Kart for the Wii
Last weekend we picked up Mario Kart for the Wii for a fiver after trading in two games that we neither liked nor played (Wabbit Wampage? Cars?) and I must say it was the best fun I’ve had since I bought the device (over a year ago) and discovered Wii Sports. The game isn’t as…
Sexuality (part 1)
A recent thread on TheRPGSite talks about sexuality and sexual and/or gender bias. Art Cheesecake art in fantasy is a real issue. I thought it was mostly gone but there’s heaps of the damn stuff out there. You know – the male characters are ripped with muscles, the female characters are showing cleavage. It’s because…
Raising the bar
I’m arrogant to believe that I can write and, to be honest, most of the time the feedback has been pretty good. I like writing, it’d be nice to do it for a living (and not the stressful but boring job at $BIG_COMPANY) but them’s the breaks. In my spare time I write a lot…
There is a hole in my memory
I don’t remember a game I allegedly ran over a decade ago. Nothing at all memorable. I think it was a superhero game/ That worries me.
Gates of Hell
A couple of pics of a really accessible volcano. Easily re-used for something gaming…
New Downloads
Some people were looking for them so I’ve put some downloads on the books page: Wildtalents fanzine 1 60K PDF Wildtalents 3 fanzine 1.5MB PDF Wildtalents 5 fanzine 373K PDF 23rd letter character sheet 22K PDF zombi character sheet 86K PDF If there’s anything else in particular that people are looking for, please mention it…
Man vs…
The topic of conversation this morning in the car was the substance of plots. Traditionally, we have plots which are Man versus Man (and yes, I intend to keep the male pronoun because anyone who would be sensitive to it likely has stopped reading a long time ago). Man versus Man This describes the quintessential…
The State of the RPG Industry
An article on MSNBC writes about the woes in the RPG market: “Wizards does not reveal sales figures, but Pramas estimates the overall market for traditional role-playing games at $30 million annually.” When I first read this, my immediate thought was ‘piffle!’ and that it was a vast underestimate of the market. Okay. Let’s take…
222 years ago
“Blood running in the streets. Mobs of rioters and demonstrators threatening banks and legislatures. Looting of shop and home. Strikes and unemployment. Trade and distribution paralyzed. Shortages of food. Bankruptcies everywhere. Court dockets overloaded. Kidnappings for heavy ransom. Sexual perversion, drunkenness, lawlessness rampant. The wheels of government are clogged, and we are descending into the…
WP upgraded to 2.5
And things seem okay. Still somewhat frustrated that the theme keeps dropping and I’m not aware of any log files/errors. Annoying.