Urh? OOTS!

Somehow, someway, I have failed thus far to post about my uber-favorite online comic - Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew.  Major damn oversight on my point.  It single handedly brought me back to gaming.

Go.  Read.   Start at 1. There are 719 strips to go, not counting the extras in the printed collections.

I'm open for suggestions of other comics to follow.  High standard to be met ;)

Midweek Meltdown - Or at Least Rescheduling

Looks like this weekends proposed first session of the Fantasy Grounds 2 / Labyrinth Lord Campaign will need to be rescheduled... Mother's Day is more like Mother's weekend these days, especially when you have two (or more) sides to the family.  Ah well.  Soon.

As a complete aside (and bizarre tangent)  my "get paid to play with your firearm training" has been postponed and instead tomorrow I will be sitting in a classroom learning "Basic Powerpoint".  If you can think of more diverse training I'd love to hear about it.

I've been putting the iPad through a nice workout with the plethora (always wanted to use that word) of PDFs I've been loading up on it.  I'm even going to bed early just so I can read in bed ;)

Next up (or at least soon) should be a small write-up on Battlegrounds.  I just need to find one of the two external hard drives I have it installed on.  Too many gadgets, not enough organization.

Twofer Tuesday

Yep, its a Twofer Tuesday here at the Tavern.

What's the Twofer you might ask?  Two short reviews ;)

First up is  Dark Fate, a Swords & Wizardry Campaign Setting.  Quite simply put, it is a product full of great ideas to lift for your own campaign (assuming you don't want to stick with the included campaign).  Actually, the included campaign information is so thorough, a prospective DM would be well adviced to just read up on a small corner of the detailed world.

It includes some variant rules (personal favorite... undead are harder to turn then in standard rules, but every 2 points of damage inflicted adds +1 to the turn roll - priceless).  It does suffer from one minor (or major problem depending on your sensitivities) issue -  the author is not a native English speaker, and it shows with the tense of verbs and some other awkwardness in writing.  The ideas and presentation rise above this in my opinion, but others may feel differently.  I'd like to thank my iPad for making this a very pleasant read from bed ;)

Next is OpenQuest, a free, total open ruleset of Mongoose's RuneQuest.  As Runequest is published using the OGL.  From the site:

Open Quest is based on the Mongoose RuneQuest SRD (MRQ SRD), with ideas from previous editions of Chaosium’s RuneQuest and Stormbringer 5th, mixed in with some common sense house rulings from the author’s twenty years of experience with the D100 system.

I don't own the Mongoose version of  RuneQuest.  My last experience with RuneQuest was from Avalon Hill, although I did pick up the Chaosium 2nd Edition years ago.  The price is right for me to start checking out the system again.  You can also pick it up in paper format on Lulu, but that kinda defeats the point of free ;)

Fantasy Grounds / LL - Soft Start Set

It looks like this coming Saturday will be the first session of the Fantasy Grounds 2 / Labyrinth Lord campaign I'm starting up.  I call it a "soft date" as it works for me, barring any unforeseen circumstances.  It may not work for my whole group, as the next day is Mother's Day.  The following week won't work for me, as I'll be playing as a player in a C&C campaign.

I've also been trying to get feedback from my players for an alternate campaign or two of one offs - kinda used for pick-up games when we don't have a full group.  I was figuring on using Basic Roleplay for that, as the rules can cover most genres, and a level-less game works better when your party is less likely to be balanced.

Of course that means they overwhelmingly voted to make the alternate campaign Star Frontiers.  Now I need to translate that into Basic Roleplay.  Eh, could be worse... I could be trying to translate Paranoia (great game, decent rules - don't think I could EVER translate it).

Weekend Wrap-Up

So, what did I accomplish towards getting my Labyrinth Lord Campaign up and running?  Nothing

How about getting ready for my next blog piece on Virtual Table Tops?  Nada

Maybe I found a nice RPG product to write a review of?  Maybe.  Dark Fate has my attention at the moment.  It's written for use with Swords & Wizardry, but that hasn't stopped me in the past.

No, Ive been a slave to the iPad.  Dumbass name but an amazing little product.  Dropbox is my friend for moving my PDFs over to the iPad and I've been ignoring family and fiends as best I can to keep my new toy in hand as much as possible.

Now, if someone could write a basic VTT that would run on the iPad... that would be damn sweet.

Back to work tomorrow.  Back to my regular blog posting tomorrow.  Tonight, I'll be reading some gaming material on my newest toy ;)

iPad-arama - 24 hrs with the iPad 3G

Yes, I've gotten about 24 hrs... less sleep, driving, travel, socializing, visiting family... sigh, alright, maybe more like a solid 6 hrs, much of that time spend searching the Apple App Store for, what else?  iPad Apps.

First things first.  The iPad doesn't do flash, in doesn't do external memory, and it doesn't do USB ports, so put your flash drives away.

What it does do (among a whole lot of other stuff) is read PDFs.  That's muy importante to me and just about every other gamer out there that has a collection of RPG PDFs and enough disposable income to pick up what is, for all intents and purposes, an expensive proprietary touch screen computer device.  Thank god my family understands the importance of my "family recycling program"; they know at some point my latest gadget will be theirs when iPad 2 comes out next spring ;)

Back to the PDFs.  Regretfully, most of the apps on my iPhone do not work natively on my iPad.  They either work by using just a small portion of the screen, or they can be blown up, like digital zoom on your camera.  Digital zoom can ruin the sharpness of a picture, and this is no different.  Not a big deal on most games, but for text (like a PDF) this is a game killer.  Now my nice (and expensive) document editor and viewer on my iPhone (DocsToGo) is pretty useless reading PDFs on my iPad.  Definitely annoying and discouraging.

Then I remembered an app I had read about in preparation of receiving my iPad - GoodReader.  If my short term memory is correct it cost 2 bucks in the app store.  There are different ways to get your documents transferred from your computer to your iPad, but the least stressful method (and I tried the stressful ones first) was to use a Cloud computing storage solution that the app could connect to and download the documents I wanted it to transfer.  I used Dropbox, but it supports about 6 cloud storage services.

Basic Roleplaying looks amazing, but the art didn't seem to work in the PDF.  No biggie.  Very readable, especially when one pinches out to get rid of the white margin.

Dark Fate, a S&W campaign setting, looks as good as the printed version would, assuming I had a printed version.  It really looks that good.

Take 5 minutes.  My son is happily playing the piano on my iPad at the moment ;)

The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game - Beautiful in full color.  The Kindle DX has been put to shame.  I pinched out to get rid of the margins.  It was readable at the default size, but the little extra made it so much nicer.

Labyrinth Lord, Advanced Edition Companion - Just a pinch and it was perfect.  I no longer need a hard copy of my gaming material if I wont be GMing (still quicker to flip thru a book then slide the page scroll to fast advance, but not by much).

Knockspell 4 - I was putting off the full in depth read for the arrival of my iPad.  This will be my reading tonight.  Again, just a pinch to enlarge slightly and it is perfect.

Basically, every PDF I've opened on the iPad has looked amazing.  Better then reading on the computer screen.  My preference for all that I've listed above (with the exception of Dark Fate, which didn't need any adjustments) was to pinch out the margins just a tad.  Probably has a lot to do with my eyes going just a tad bad at close work these days (43 is just around the corner).

The iPad is a winner, and for reading PDFs it is damn close to perfect.  The Kindle DX is going to have to drop in price to remain competitive, because as a PDF reader it is a very distant second (and will drop further as more devices get released).

Time to play.  I  want to load up The Dungeon Alphabet and see how it compare to the hardcover I have ;)