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Saturday, October 5, 2019

Deal of the Day - Musicland (OSR Adventure / BRW Games)



Today's DriveThruRPG Deal of the Day is Joe Bloch's / BRW's Musicland.
You’re trapped in a land where musical instruments are alive, and music itself is created. 
But beware – there are dangers aplenty beyond the living instruments who serve the King of All Instruments.

Criminals, demons, monsters, and even weird creatures to whom music itself is anathema all stand in your way.

Can you find your way home from this bizarre and fascinating place? 
Musicland can be used as a stand-alone adventure or as an expansion to the Castle of the Mad Archmage™ megadungeon campaign. 
Musicland is written using the Adventures Dark and Deep™ rules, and is compatible with most Old School type rules with little or no conversion neede
Normally 4.95 in PDF, until tomorrow morning at 11 am Eastern, Musicland is on sale for 2.97

Yep, that's an affiliate link above. Affiliate links keep the beer cold and the lights on here at The Tavern.

Friday, October 4, 2019

Wendy's Releases RPG - Feast of Legends (5e Inspired)


Yes, Wendy's - the fast-food chain - has released a free RPG. It uses the D&D 5e "inspired" RPG (it doesn't appear to use the OGL).

Download link to Feast of Legends.

Have I read it? No. But if you do a Google search, it is being written about ALL over the net. As a marketing tool, Wendy's hit a home run.

I've heard some chatter that releases like this are going to hurt indie game producers. I don't think that will be an issue, as no one is going to play this more than once. That being said, the quality looks high.



Thursday, October 3, 2019

Death Threats from a Kickstarter Project Creator to a Backer - A Real WTF Kickstarter!?!

There are times I am simply left speechless. This is one of them. Thanks to Jamie Chambers for sharing these screenshots on Facebook. As an aside, the project looks like a simple cash grab IMHO.







Wednesday, October 2, 2019

New - Dragon Con Co-founder (Ed Kramer) Charged Again with Having Child Porn

From WFTV News (Ed Kramer - a former roommate of none other than Ken Whitman)


GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. -
A convicted child molester who found himself at the center of a computer hacking investigation is now facing a new child porn charge.

According to WSB-TV, Ed Kramer, one of the co-founders of Dragon Con, a massive sci-fi and fantasy convention in Atlanta, was helping private investigators TJ Ward and Frank Karic look into accusations that someone hacked Gwinnett County Judge Kathryn Schrader's computer.

Now, they're all charged in the case.

WSB-TV Gwinnett County Bureau Chief Tony Thomas was in court Monday when a judge denied bond for Kramer.

Thomas learned the Georgia Bureau of Investigation issued a warrant against Kramer shortly after 4 p.m. Monday on one felony count of child pornography.

Two hours before, Thomas sat in court as Kramer tried to get bond on one of his other cases, insisting he had just been sitting at home, obeying the law.

With an oxygen tank attached to his wheelchair, Kramer described to a judge his urgent need for getting out of jail for an upcoming spine surgery.

“We will be here; we will be at every court appearance. He is not going to reoffend,” defense attorney Stephen Reba said.

But just after Kramer’s lawyer offered that promise, prosecutors dropped a new charge – more child pornography.

Authorities said they found five more images on the computers they say they seized as they investigated Kramer’s role in the hacking of the Gwinnett County courthouse computer system.

“I was not surprised when I was notified that there was child pornography on his computer," Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter told Thomas.

Kramer's run-ins with Gwinnett County law enforcement go back years.

In 2013, he entered a plea to child molestation and was given five years of house arrest.

Just after clearing that, he was charged with illegally taking a picture of a boy in a Lawrenceville doctor’s office.

As police searched his computers after that arrest, they say they found evidence Kramer, Schrader and Ward hacked into the county's computer system. All three, plus a fourth man, now face criminal charges.

“One wouldn't have happened without each other, but they are essentially unrelated,” Porter said.

The judge delayed any decision on Kramer’s bond Monday. He'll now have even more to consider.

“It's certainly not the end of the investigation,” Porter said.

Kramer is due in court Thursday, when the judge will take another look at the bond issue.

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Swords & Wizardry Continual Light attains Electrum Status on DTRPG - 50% off in PDF for the Month of October


Sometime over the last few weeks, Swords & Wizardry Continual Light attained Electrum Status on DTRPG. Huzzah!


Additionally, last night was the 500th episode of the Tavern Chat Podcast. 500 daily episodes. More Huzzah!

To celebrate, we're putting the Swords & Wizardry Continual Light PDF on sale for the month of October - 50% off (just $1.25)

Thanks to all that made this possible. It is humbling.

Yep, that's an affiliate link above. Affiliate links keep the beer cold and the lights on at The Tavern.


Monday, September 30, 2019

GoFundMe for Corey Langeslay - Flooded after Tropical Storm Imelda


I simply can't imagine living in a flood-prone location. If I get an inch of water in my basement I'm out of sorts for days. Yet here I am looking at a water line 3 feet high in this room. Simply scares the shit outa me.
Our home was flooded during TS Imelda.  We will be forced to move after just finishing a rebuild from Hurricane Harvey.  FEMA has not declared this a disaster at this time and we are living at a friends home.  our car and RV were destroyed.  Since we lived in the RV last time now we don't have a place of our own to sleep.   You can clearly see the waterline above 3 feet in this room, other areas had 65 inches of water. 
 https://www.gofundme.com/f/flooded-after-ts-imelda

Corey is a gamer and he and his family could use some help from the gaming community. If you can't help financially, please share this among the social communities you are a part of.


Sunday, September 29, 2019

Hero Labs / Lone Wolf Downsizes - Ceases Development of Realm Works

This effects folks with who use various Lone Wolf products, but especially Realm Works.
Link to post on the Lone Wolf Site here.


Lone Wolf is undergoing several major changes and I wanted to personally take the time to update everyone on what those changes are and how they will impact our users.

While Lone Wolf is a business, the company itself is comprised of people. And when it’s a small company, it’s more akin to family. There’s also our user community (you), which in many ways is like our extended family. Over the more than 20 years we’ve been creating software tools for gamers, we’ve garnered a significant number of loyal fans – fans who have been crucial to our success and whose ongoing support is greatly appreciated.

This sense of family was core to how we operated in the past, but when I got deathly ill three years ago, I strayed away from that. Now that I’m mostly back to my old self and finally completing my rehabilitation, I’ve realized we need to get back to those roots. You should see that shift reflected here in the increased level of disclosure and in future communications from myself and staff.

For quite some time, we’ve spread ourselves too thin across different efforts, and that’s been especially true for me personally. We’ve been doing an insufficient job at multiple tasks instead of a great job on a much narrower set. This has clearly hurt us. By implementing the changes outlined below, I fully believe we can get back to producing our normal level of quality products in a timely manner.

To start with, effective immediately, we are officially suspending work on Realm Works while we focus on improving our other products. Realm Works is “my baby”, and there’s a great sadness in making this decision, but the reality is that, despite our efforts, Realm Works is failing as a commercial venture with what limited resources we can put into it. There are quite a few things we could do to improve it, but that would require a significant investment of time and resources, neither of which we currently have.

Various aspects of Realm Works may begin to emerge within the Hero Lab Online framework in the future, but the Realm Works desktop product will not see further development at this time. Realm Works will absolutely continue to be available, and the servers will continue running, so the product will remain incredibly useful in its current form. However, for the foreseeable future, no more coding changes will occur beyond the significant bug fixes that went out over the past couple weeks.

Another big change we’re making is with our staffing. For quite some time, we’ve been leveraging investment financing to allow us to carry extra staff and pursue some varied objectives while we transitioned from Pathfinder 1st edition to 2nd edition. – one of which is on the verge of readiness (more on that in a moment). Alas, we didn’t get those projects completed within the investment funding time window (due to spreading ourselves too thin), so corresponding adjustments are now a necessity. We’re therefore saying goodbye to some excellent people, and that just adds to today’s pain.

Everything thus far sounds somewhat dire. So the obvious question is whether there’s any good news to take the sting out of the bad. Thankfully, the answer to that is a resounding YES.

First off, Hero Lab Classic isn’t going anywhere and it just received a major upgrade in the form of native 64-bit support on both Windows and Mac. If you haven’t downloaded them yet, please do so, as you should see both performance and stability improvements. We also have several data packages ready and waiting for release. However, Apple has changed their rules and is now refusing to let us update our Hero Lab Classic iPad app, so the new packages have been held up while we determine how to appease Apple. We obviously want to release them on all platforms simultaneously, but we’ll need to come to an agreement with Apple before we can do so. We’ll provide an update as soon as we make some headway here.

For Hero Lab Online, Shadowrun 6th Edition hits store shelves in early October, and we’ve been working hard to launch support for it in the weeks ahead. We’re also preparing the big hardcover books for both Pathfinder 2nd Edition and Starfinder, not to mention some significant performance and reliability improvements. But the truly BIG thing we’ve been putting into place is something we’ve dubbed Campaign Theater™. We previewed it at GenCon in an early Alpha state and you may have seen the video promo on our social media. Since the preview, we’ve been fleshing things out and testing like crazy so we can debut it in time for the holidays.

So what exactly IS Campaign Theater? The goal is pretty simple. Bring all the power of Hero Lab, in a unified manner, to everyone in the campaign – GM and players alike. In HLClassic, we’ve long had the Encounter Builder to let GMs prepare scenes and the Tactical Console to let GMs run them. But everything within HLClassic is disconnected, and nobody can see what anyone else is doing during the game. While still quite helpful, there are major limitations with this approach. Now imagine a unified display of all participants in the current scene, with the GM seeing everything and players only seeing a suitable subset of information the GM allows. Any time a player makes a change to their PC, or the GM to a monster, everyone sees the update in real-time on their own device. And imagine having all your scenes prepped and ready to play out with a few clicks. That’s just the tip of Campaign Theater and what we’ll be starting with.

Some of you have mentioned this sounds a little bit like a virtual tabletop. Well, sort of, except that our focus is on all the detailed character/monster manipulation that VTTs don’t excel at and Hero Lab does. So there may be some similarities, but very little overlap. In fact, we’re developing these capabilities with the ultimate goal of integrating with VTTs, allowing those products to focus on all the tabletop visuals and Hero Lab to handle all the character mechanics in a coordinated manner. I like to think of it as the RPG equivalent of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

We’ll have more to share regarding Campaign Theater in the near future, so stay tuned for that. As you can see, there’s still plenty to look forward to in the next few months, and even well beyond that.

In closing, allow me to say a big THANK YOU for your continued support over the years. It’s been extremely gratifying to create products that I love and to know that thousands of gamers are using them every week. Thank you for giving me – and the rest of the team here – that opportunity. It means more than we can express.

Sincerely,

Rob Bowes, President
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