Magical Swords

The group, well one of them at least, came across a magical sword. It could speak to them, both verbally and telepathically, and decided it liked the dwarf just well enough that it might let him wield her.

The dwarf thought she was annoying when she constantly wanted to rush into battle, calling him cowardly when not jumping headfirst into stuff, and generally being a pain in the ass, and so decided to leave it.

Did not see that coming.

Godzilla

Just got back from the new Godzilla movie. A few thoughts are listed here, hopefully spoiler-free.

The new Godzilla movie is:

• About white men
• Pretty fly creatures

it's not:

• good at representation
• good at equality
• good

Alright. Granted, I fell asleep a few times during it, but I don't think I missed anything important. But here goes: the main character is a white guy. Everyone else, with two exceptions, are white men. There's one white woman, and one asian (Japanese?) guy. That's it. The main guy's girlfriend is a white, blonde girl who is also a nurse. I, for one, am surprised by this. I think the dialogue must've gone sommat like this:

-- Okay, we need a girlfriend or wife or something for him. Something important.

-- What if she's a nurse, we can show how caring and loving she is?

I mean what the fuck? I don't know, but it's just such a fucking cheap move that I get tired thinking about it. Isn't Will Smith's wife (or whatever) a nurse in Independence Day? At least that movie had an ex-wife working for the president (who was white, obviously). I can't remember.

Anyway. Yeah, so look: the entire cast, and most of the background people, are white. Would it have been so fucking hard to make the girlfriend latina or Japanese or something? Like, white guy's father worked in Japan, he could very well have married a Japanese woman, but no -- gotta have a white main guy. Aight, so make the girlfriend Japanese or African-American, or Latina or whatever. Make the general something other than white. Make some of the marines or whatever they are non-white. Representation isn't hard. Just take a character, then make them not-white. You don't even have to change anything. The general could have been a woman, that would have raised the number of important women in the movie by 100%.

Oh yeah, also: the white guy's girlfriend is absolutely pointless. She doesn't do shit (ok, I might have slept through the parts where she's amazing, but I seriously doubt it).

So no. The new Godzilla movie isn't very good. The entire idea behind the kaiju (I think they're called?) is cool and can be lifted completely out of the movie and applied to Your RPG Setting of Choice. In fact, I will do so for Roanoke. Apart from the city destruction scenes (which are okay), it's a bad movie.

Online RPG Thing: Shadowbrook Manor - Completed

Last year I ran Shadowbrook Manor as an online one-shot thing. I never wrote down what happened, but basically this:

The party oooh spoilers, more under the cut:

Checklist: Online Sandbox Thing

• Write description about the city Roanoke and its rumors
• Also describe main families of Roanoke, and the different districts
• Write up some important NPCs. Stats? Who cares?
• Create starter packages.
• Write email to players.

It doesn't look like too much work, to be honest. This thing is happening, hopefully start next weekend.

Online Auctions

I can't visit eBay or similar sites (Yahoo Japan's auction site, for instance) without losing money. Or I guess it's more "spending" than "losing", since I actually get stuff. Japanese auctions are interesting; most people aren't really willing to send stuff internationally (kinda like American auctions, but with an added language barrier), so it usually ends up with me hiring a proxy service, which makes everything cost that much more.

My brief visit to eBay ended with me winning a Japanese dice set -- I was looking for d6 mainly, but I'm not one to say no to one of each. Besides, they were purdy. I ended up paying ~$3 for each, which is kinda expensive for dice, but what can you do about it, am I right? I also ran across, and just now won, The Book of Lairs 1 & 2, which ended up costing me ~30 bucks. I think that's a fair price? They'd be about $23 on Amazon, before adding on shipping (which definitely won't be $7). I don't really know what they're for, but inspiration is always nice, I guess.

I have one bookshelf left to assemble, for now, and after that I'll start comparing AD&D GM Companion to the AD&D GM Companion Manuscript. The manuscript was like, 300-400 pages I think? So they cut a lot of stuff, but the text in the published book is also really small, so it could be that they just squeezed everything in. If I find myself with absolutely nothing to do and a scanner at hand I might scan the thing too (not the book, of course), but don't count on it. Dunno what I'll do with it once I've listed differences. Maybe some collector will want it? Then again, not sure I want to sell it. Meh.

You've got mail!

My latest Lulu order finally arrived, 21 days after it was dispatched. Now granted, there has been a good amount of holidays between then and now, but 21 days? I guess it takes that long for a package to go from France to Sweden. UK to Sweden takes about 7 days with their regular mail, and Denmark to Sweden takes what, 3 days? Maybe there was a strike? It wouldn't surprise me, last time I was there they had three strikes in two weeks. No, wait, four.

This post is not about unionizing your dungeon inhabitants, however (although a friend did manage to do just that with a tribe of goblins working for a dragon, but that's another story). The books that arrived were Dyson's Delves, 1 & 2. My current review list:

1. Forgive Us
2. Qelong
3. Scenic Dunnsmouth
4. Isle of the Unknown
5. Carcosa
6. Fuck for Satan (maybe)
7. Dyson's Delves I
8. Dyson's Delves II

With maybe some other stuff in between. It depends. Stay tuned, updates come whenever I remember I have a blog.

Sandbox and RL play update

I'm almost finished unpacking and all that jazz after having moved. Yes, I do procrastinate a lot, which is why I'm still doing this stuff three months after having moved.

Picked up a good number of books on GothCon, all of them LotFP-issued. This was planned. I'll be writing reviews of them later, although they've already been reviewed pretty much everywhere else. Still, my opinion is important.

My sandbox world is taking shape, as you can see. Sure, it looks pretty boring right now, but it's just an overview. I've already hexed it up and started adding stuff to the hexes, but for fear of spoilers I can't write about it here. Keep in mind that distances aren't to scale here (because why would I do something like that). Eh. It works, I guess.

The reason why I'm doing something like this is that when I play online I can't expect the same group all the time, because we're all adults with lives outside RPGs (silly as it sounds), so I can't do any massive campaigns or story arcs. Instead I have a sandbox where people can go wherever they want, and group composition/membership doesn't matter. I think it can work, I just gotta map it out somewhat. Still, 7 hexes down, only ~44 to go.