19th Level

Sure Samsung claims the batteries are overheating and causing their phones to melt... But isn't it just as likely that some cultist burned a copy of the Necronomicon into all Galaxy Note 7 phones? I've been getting my brain back into a Cthulhu state of mind (I guess one can do that by failing a SAN check). One of our possible games is a 21st century Delta Green game, dealing with a top secret organization dedicated to fighting the Cthulhu Mythos. One interesting exercise when dealing with a modern take on the Mythos is finding a conspiracy explanation for news stories. As I received a Galaxy Note 7 upgrade as a birthday gift, the fact that the batteries can potentially go boom got my attention... Putting on my Delta Green conspiracy hat (lined with foil) I thought of an alternate take. What if some cultist infiltrated the phone assembly factories and burned a copy of some secret tome into it - or, borrowing a page from Charles Stross' Atrocity Archives , a computer p...

Wesley: I'm a Rogue Demon Hunter now. Cordelia: Wow. What's a rogue demon? - Angel , "Parting Gifts" So here's the short version of the story. At a Congressional hearing on October 8th, the head of Volkswagen's US business operations, Michael Horn, was being asked about the defeat devices on Volkswagen's diesel automobiles. Essentially, when the car was plugged in for an emissions test the software in the car would change the engine profile to drastically reduce CO 2 emissions (and reduce fuel efficiency). When not plugged in fuel efficiency and performance would be high but so would CO 2  emissions. He further elaborated, as detailed by Forbes magazine : Management knew nothing about it, of course. “No supervisory meeting authorised this,” said Mr. Horn. “This was something individuals did.” So a handful of software engineers in Wolfsburg were solely responsible for a problem affecting an estimated 11m vehicles worldwide. Seriously. ...

There's been a lot of talk about the NSA watching everyone's every move. While there's absolutely a legitimate concern there it's amazing the amount of information we share freely (or for access to Candy Crush). I'm not exempting myself - googling myself reveals a ton of information, some going as far back as the mid-1990's. There's not anything particularly embarrassing out there, but that's not fully the point. I've begun pursuing my Master's Degree at Brandeis University in Strategic Analytics, dealing with a ton of data science related topics. One of the topics we are going over this week is ethics in data science. Our source material included an Alessandro Acquisti Ted Talk on the loss of privacy. It's a really engaging video - I'd absolutely encourage checking it out. While this video is in some ways filling me with an urge to buy a small cabin somewhere in the Northwest Territories of Canada, it does serve as a useful ...

I've seen a lot of RPG accessories posted today that are not related to gaming products and it got me wondering what sort of item along those lines I'd go for. I'm a techie. I don't have the absolute latest and greatest toys all the time but I do like my toys. And one thing that makes my life easier is to easily get data on these toys. I tend to prefer digital products nowadays. I have two excellent devices for reading digital gaming products - a Google Nexus 9 and a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. To store all these pdfs and related files I make use of Google Drive. And I also keep my own personal gaming notes - random notes, adventures, maps, writeups, etc. on Google Drive. I run my games using Roll20 embedded in Google Hangouts. I have a Google+ community for my current and past game groups. And I like the collaborative nature of Google+ in general, which has put me in touch with lots of interesting people. So oddly, my favorite RPG accessory of this nature is the tools...

I'm a software engineer who tends to be on the early adopter side of things. I'm writing this on a Chromebook, I store most of my digital gaming products on Google Drive. I now purchase the bulk of my RPG products digitally. Most of my fiction is read on Kindle or Kindle App. My music library is in the cloud at Amazon Cloudplayer. (And also at Google Music). Earlier this week Google announced the Chromebook Pixel. Unlike most Chromebooks which are very low cost, the Pixel is a premium machine with a clear inspiration from Apple's unibody products. I began wondering how practical it would be to use a Chromebook exclusively. While I do a lot of work on my Chromebook I also have a MacBook Air (which also runs Windows 7 as a Virtual Desktop). The family also has a large screen iMac, used mainly by the kids. For day to day stuff I do pretty well on my Chromebook. I use Google Drive for a lot of my word processing. I'm able to watch movies via Amazon and Netflix. I ca...

White Mountains of New Hampshire Having lived most of my life in Connecticut and Massachusetts, there's certain things that come to my mind when I think of "wilderness". First and foremost, there's trees. In most fantasy settings there are certain sections of the map labelled as "forest". Here in southern New England one gets the feeling were it not for urbanization, pretty much every "hex" would be forest terrain. Moving further north to northern New England we find ourselves in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Green Mountains of Vermont. Before having kids, my wife and I would go hiking in the White Mountains several times each spring and summer. There the terrain was very forested and very mountainous - no surprises there. You'd have tree-covered mountains and more rocky mountains, such as what you'd find in Franconia Notch. The notches themselves are the valleys between ridges of mountains. For me it is one of the most bea...

As I mentioned last week I view maps as something to be both functional and artistic. Last week I reviewed the Hexographer program which leans more towards the functional side, emphasizing production of hex maps as seen in the old D&D Gazetteer series. This week I'll be discussing ProFantasy's  Campaign Cartographer 3, (CC3) an application that can produce some absolutely amazing maps. While it get easier to use with practice, at its core it is a specialized CAD program. You get a ton of functionality but at a cost in ease of use. Let's start with showcasing what CC3 is capable of producing. Below is a map I designed using CC3 in the style of the old Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle Earth Roleplaying Game  maps, as drawn by Pete Fenlon. (Click on this and other images here to see the maps at full size. Also note that none of them have labels or text on them yet.) My skills with CC3 are probably middle of the road - I've been using it and its predecessor,...

Fantasy and maps tend to go hand and hand. One need only look at one of the most famous works of the genre, The Hobbit to see that. That work included two maps. The first was that of "The Wilderland", the location where the majority of the adventures in The Hobbit took place. The second was Thorin's "treasure map", his map of the Lonely Mountain. It is no surprise that fantasy role playing games have made extensive use of maps. Beyond being true to the genre this is also quite practical, as many games involve adventuring in an unfriendly wilderness, much like the Wilderland that Bilbo and his companions adventured in in The Hobbit. I've noted two common goals in RPG maps, those of utility and those of artistic merit. Commercial products tend to need both. Individual game masters have a bit more flexibility as they have just their own groups to satisfy. Personally I absolutely love maps and I suspect I'm not the only one in the hobby like that....

When my wife and I first moved into our house over ten years ago the house seemed enormous. It was just the two of us, with dreams of starting a family. Our considerable collection of books and my RPG collection barely made a dent in our available space. Move forward from that point and our family did indeed expand. Pets and then children joined our happy house. And with these additions our once seemingly infinite space began to seem, well, rather finite. During this time many RPG companies began offering their products in PDF format. Wizards of the Coast for a while made old versions of Dungeons & Dragons available as PDFs but one day they convinced themselves the solution to digital piracy was to pull all their gaming products from online stores (making it impossible to download a legal copy but still possible to download illegal copies - not quite certain how that helped them, but hey...) When Amazon released their first Kindle I eagerly pre-ordered. And I was quite pl...