Twit

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and signed up for Twitter.  Hey you, read my Twits!

Bordering on Madness

Finished up the page borders for Escape from Tentacle City.  This was made difficult by the fact that Ubuntu doesn’t have a good Paint type program.  Sure, it’s got Gimp, but that has way too many bells and whistles and distractions. I downloaded about five or six programs, and they all sucked.  Either no mouse over text, or no ability to resize the page, or no undo function.  I programmed a paint application when I was in high school.  How hard can it be for the Ubuntu community to make a paint program that doesn’t suck?

Anyway, Tim brought up one of his Windows computers from the basement to calibrate his iPhone.  So I booted it up, used the paint program, and tinkered around with the border images.  They’re pretty sweet, Jason Morningstar designed them, but they’re 6×9, and I really need something that’s 12×9 to wrap around the whole page spread.  So I spent some time tinkering with them to make them suitable for what I’m going for.

Day of Massive Gaming

Today Brendan hosted a day of massive gaming at his house.  I think this might be the first day of just gaming for the sake of gaming (not con related) in a long long time.  I used to do that sort of thing all the time in High School, but not so much anymore.  Good times.  We got together around 1 PM, played many many games of Race for the Galaxy, a playtest of Rocket Rummy Race, Brendan ran Awesome Adventures, more games of Race for the Galaxy were played, and then a playtest of the setup and character creation for War for the Throne, and broke around 9 PM.

I posted AP reports about the Awesome Adventures game on Grumbling Dwarf and Rpg.net, in addition to a couple of other places.

The War for the Throne playtest was quite a bit of fun.  The guys came up with a Norse/Beowulf type setting, with druids, raiding fleets, and three sons- a mad druid reformer, a driven angst-filled warrior raider, and a learned scholar.  We had a pretty good conversation about the themes and essential assumptions of the game- I have some very concrete ideas about what play is supposed to be like, and the GM advice really needs to support that.  I think everyone left with a better idea of what the game is supposed to be, and very eager  to playtesting this.  I’m looking forward to starting it up- probably sometime after Gencon.

Layout Sucks

You may know that I do my own layout for my games.  You may also know that I suck at layout.  You might also know I do it in Open Office.  This is apparently some kind of heresy, but it’s the only way I know how to do it.

Anyway, today I figured out how to use an image for the border (I have this cool tentacle picture that snakes around the page, it’s pretty sweet.)   It’s going to be a pain in the ass to implement, but it’s pretty cool, and I’m proud of myself right now.