• On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    Down to six hundred sixteen unread Google Reader items! Here are some of the coolest of the nearly 200 I’ve read in the last couple of weeks (as well as random surfing, of course): How to Lower Your Heating Bills This Winter – I definitely need to try out lowering our thermostat. We keep it on 72 F in the winter, which we could probably stand to lower by 5-7 degrees if I bundled up more. 9 New High-Quality Free Fonts | Freebies – I really like the Spatha and My Fair Cody fonts on this list. I'm (back-burner) working on a design for charsheet.net, and the styles of those…

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    D & D: Erathis Save Us

    The setting: our town fell through a portal into a dark and inhospitable world. Luckily, Erathis shines upon us and keeps the darkness at bay… for now. Except that the portal’s not closed. Little pockets of other worlds and planes are landing outside the town, chock full of baddies. Who’s going to squash these bugs? Four adventurous types with big weapons and the gods’ backing step up to the plate. So they’re a little breakable right now. They’ll grow into it, we’re sure. Or we’ll replace them. Flimsy plot? Yes. It’s essentially a miniatures game, combat-only. Greg and I (playing two characters each) are going to work our way through…

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    Assisting in Story Telling: Fun But Complicated

    Last weekend at the city-wide Geist live-action roleplaying game I play in, I let Greg twist my arm into running a plot. In a game the size of ours (10-20 people, depending on sleep schedules), there almost has to be more than one person running stories–there just isn’t enough of one game master’s attention to go around. The trouble with me getting involved in running plots is that Greg is the main game master (or “story teller”, in the Geist system). Nepotism, anyone? Eep. I was very, very worried about accusations of such, especially since I’ve been accused by others of using my “feminine wiles” to get judgments in my…

  • On Life and Love

    “Observation” posted!

    Chapter 8 of The Witches of Ming Ung, “Observation” is up, and picks up right where “Interception” left off: “Hardi, why in all the worlds wouldn’t we tell Wilder about this?” Robert asked, waving a hand at her comm. He’d just listened to the ransom note for the second time, and was sitting at the desk with his feet propped up. “Yet. Not tell him yet.” Hardi stood still in the middle of the room, staring at the floor with her hands tucked in her pockets. “And I… don’t know,” she said slowly. After that deep voice had threatened to go on “vacation” for a week, Hardi had listened to…

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    Tidying up LARP character sheets: an app in progress

    So. I LARP. Twice a month, I go out of my house dressed like a nurse and stand around acting like I see ghosts and have an extra-special creepy ghost of my own on my shoulder. Yeah, so if I’m late to your Saturday afternoon picnic this summer, this is likely why. I LARP in White Wolf‘s Geist system, which is very new in the LARP world — the worldwide game just started in March. There’s one person that has taken it upon herself to create and maintain (sorta) Excel character sheets, and the sheets for the Vampire game seem up-to-date and fully functioning. The Geist one isn’t so much,…