In a world plagued by mundane realities such as climate change, political upheaval, and economic inequality, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the single greatest threat that the modern world has faced since the rise of Hitler: Namely, the invasion of our our creative commons by algorithms armed with digital paint brushes, code-based…
[Quick Site Note: A recent PHP update seems to have broken some of the random generator scripts (most tragically, the Qerth Name Generator). I am aware of this and will fix them as soon as time allows.–Steve] Back in olden times (the late 1990s), we didn’t have all the fancy PDFs and ebooks and Print…
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Over the last year or so, I’ve seen several references to and discussions about “hard” and “soft” magic systems. Author Brandon Sanderson coined these terms to describe world builders approach magic. Basically, soft magic is vague and open to a lot of hand-waving and interpretation by the author. Soft magic works best when magic is…
I’m trying to work out how to make the rules for powers to work in Guardians of Shymeria. I’ve had several false starts so far. Every time I actually start writing the rules, I find myself lost once again in the Land of Crunch. I don’t want the rules to come from the Land of…
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For a while now I’ve been working on a game called Guardians of Shymeria, which was going to be the setting for the Sample of Play Theater game in the Cinemechanix rulebook. The basic idea was “He-Man meets Heavy Metal,” with 80s cartoon characters (because I really wanted to steal a rule Josh Burnett had…
We kicked off con season a couple of weeks ago and got to try out the latest version of Cinemechanix with real live con people for the first time. At DieCon, Leighton ran a sword and planet style game and Hobomancer using Cinemechanix, while I ran a game set in the City of 10,000 Daggers…
