Delightful Deluxe T&T Photo

I was just updating some links and checking back in on the Trollhalla forum when I came a cross this blog offering updates on the new forthcoming Deluxe edition of Tunnels and Trolls. Of especial interest was this post featuring this photo:

I don't know about you, but I DEFINITELY want to get my hands on whatever game THAT gang is producing!

(Of course, I have already assured that I will get my hands on said game by contributing to the Deluxe T&T Kickstarter campaign.)

OSRCon 2013 Update

If you've been tracking the latest updates over at the OSRCon blog, you already know that due to various administrative and facilities problems, it seemed for awhile like OSRCon 2013 would not happen. Wrote OSRCon Director Chris Cunnington:

I’ll have a $1000 bill to use the [Lillian H. Smith Library] basement. I’ll have no way to collect money. And I’ll have four times the publicity/marketing burden than I did last year.

I’m stopping this before I take anybody’s money, before I’m committed. This started two years ago as a fun experiment. It’s time to get outta Dodge.

On the one hand, of course I was sad about this. I had a great time at both OSRCon 2011 and OSRCon 2012 and will miss playing RPGs in the basement of that beautiful library. However, a very good friend of mine is getting married in early August so there may be scheduling conflicts for me this year in any case. And in a way, I am happy for Chris because I know that putting on the full-blown Con each year is a LOT of work and stress and strain for him. It is my hope that scaling the Con back this year will give Chris and others an opportunity to regroup and think of a new way to go about this that is lower-key and less stressful.

In a more recent post, Chris announces that the Con is still on, but in a different location:

This year OSRCon will be over the August 3/4th weekend on the Saturday and Sunday. It’ll be at the Manulife Centre in the Party Room, thirty-one floors above Bay Bloor Radio. I live here so its easy to set up.

The Party Room is capacity sixty, well appointed, used for corporate meetings, has couches, a kitchen, and floor to ceiling glass windows. The view is fantastic. When people think of the Toronto skyline, they think of this.

So I urge you to attend OSRCon 2013; it sounds like the venue will be top-notch, and hopefully we can keep the momentum going from the first two years. Even if I cannot make it this year due to that wedding, I have my wonderful memories of the first two years, and want to publicly thank Chris for all he has done to make these engaging events happen in the first place. Hopefully this year's scaled-down event will help make OSRCon 2014 a possibility!

YesTrolls!

Says Spawn:

It occurs to me that there must be blogs and forums (fora, whatever) for fans and critics of the band Yes, of prog-rock fame.

Judging from my limited exposure to D&D blogs and forums, they must also have trolls, and probably someone long ago picked the handle

Owner of a Lonely Fart

and posts the most dastardly recriminations of post-Bruford or post-Wakeman Yes. Or something. Post-Dean cover art, probably.

Some compatriot of his has picked up another low-hanging-fruit-type handle: Fart of the Sunrise.

Another dead-ender has probably taken Long Distance Reacharound.

I have chosen not to Google these phrases lest I find my basest comedic instincts ratified by a blind machine.

Skype Session Photos

Things are intensely busy in my work life and so I haven't been blogging much. But I am gaming a fair amount, both at my twice-monthly game at the local book shop and with my "home" campaign that games over Skype. And just to prove to you that I STILL EXIST, here are some photos from my latest Skype-based Labyrinth Lord session (played 3/10):

Spawn of Endra, who plays Innominus the Cleric.

Carl and Danny, who play Dak the Dwarf and Vivuli the Magic-User/Assassin.

J.R.R. Tokens

I've been watching a fair amount of King of the Hill lately and caught this amusing reference in a season four episode:

Historical Note on Graph Paper

Dit Le Spawn:

Stumbling through an old issue of The American Statistician today I saw a nice (if dry) little article, "Quantitative Graphics in Statistics: A Brief History", by James R. Beniger and Dorothy L. Robyn (1978; Vol 32, pp. 1-11). In it they mention the first known commercial production of graph paper (p. 3):

The rise of coordinate plotting is also documented in the commercial development of graph paper. Rectangular grid paper was first offered for sale by a Dr. Buxton in London in 1794. Buxton's product first appeared in published research six years later, in an article on barometric variations which included a footnote advertising the product [Howard*, p. 357]. Herschel made ingenious use of plotted data to calculate the elements of the elliptical orbits of double stars, and his 1832 paper on the subject included a ringing endorsement of graph paper: "Such charts may be obtained, neatly engraved; and are so very useful for a great variety of purposes, that every person engaged in astronomical computations, or indeed, in physico-mathematical inquiries of any description, will find his account in keeping a stock of them always at hand" [Herschel**, pp. 171-2].

D&D would seem to fall under the rubric of a "physico-mathematical inquiry of any description".


*Howard, L. (1800), "On a Periodical Variation of the Barometer, Apparently due to the Influence of the Sun and Moon on the Atmosphere," Philosophical Magazine, 7, 355-363.

**Herschel, J. F. W. (1833), "On the Investigation of the Orbits of Revolving Double Stars," Memoirs of' the Royal Astronomical Society, 5, 171-172; read January 13, 1832.

The Tower of Frikkin' Death

Now that 2013 has arrived, Spawn of Endra and I have been talking about our next publishing project, the adventure module The Tower of Death. 

As I mentioned late last summer, the module is completely drafted, clocking in at just under 20 pages at present. It is my hope to keep it about that page count, or maybe even to trim some fat out of the prose on the next (hopefully final) revision pass. The Tower of Death has also been playtested, both by some of my "home" (Skype) group players as well as two different groups at OSRCon 2011 (see report here). Now the project merely awaits a final revision pass (my job), artwork (ideally, a cover by Johnathan and Daisey Bingham and interior art by Kelvin Green), cartography (by Spawn of Endra), and layout (also by Spawn).

In other words, not much has changed since my last lengthy update about the project, we're just now finally entering the final phases. The aim is to release the module at a reasonable price point in both pdf and POD formats by the end of 2013.