5K

Just 17 short days ago I was happy to reach 4000 page views. Today I am ecstatic to note 5000 page views. Once again, I really want to thank all of you from the bottom of my heart. A friend of mine once told me that we all crave external validation. We may not need it, but we most certainly want it. I've said it before, I started this for me, just to put my ideas out there, to give me a chance to step back from them and get a new perspective. I didn't need an audience, but I definitely wanted one. Thanks to all of you for giving me that.

Now that I have 4shared going I plan to provide more for download. It won't all be original. I plan on collecting things like the Alternity Fast Plays into one central, convenient location, for interested readers. I will share my original crap, too. If there is anything any of you would like to see in the share folder, be sure and let me know. Now that I do have an audience, I want to keep things fresh and interesting, and give you all a reason to keep coming back.

Now, let's get started on that next milestone . . .

A Look Back at Dicemaster

A post over at Tenkar's Tavern got me to thinking about this little nugget. Released in 1996 by Iron Crown Enterprises, the same folks that brought you Rolemaster, this was an attempt to cash in on the "collectible" gaming market created by Magic: the Gathering.

Sadly, I remember very little about it. It was released as a base set, and supported by three supplemental sets of dice. I can't recall now how much the base set cost, somewhere in a $25 range, with the supplements about $5-10. They each contained a random selection of 8 dice, from a set of 100. Like most collectible gaming material, they were divided by rarity.

This is another one of those games I remember playing, but I don't remember much about it. My best friend at the time was as much a gaming tart as I, and we bought and played most of the new stuff that came out in the mid 90's. I remember we bought some felt from the fabric store and made playmats. Some of the dice in this game are heavy, and in addition to making a thunderous racket they were fully capable of pocking a dining room table.

It's too bad these aren't available on Amazon on the cheap. I would love to play it again, just so I could remember it better. The older I get, the more I feel like Mr. Endo from Lethal Weapon, "He's forgotten more about pain than you and I will ever know." I've forgotten more games than a lot of the new generation will ever know.

Some Alternity Stuff Uploaded

I just uploaded a few things for Alternity to the 4shared folder. The Player's and GM's Fast Plays, and the Dark*Matter Fast Play. There are a couple of supplemental information files for the D*M FP.

I have a lot of Fast Plays, Fastplays, Quick Starts, ets. I'm sure I'll get around to uploading them. If there is something that someone would like to see in the folder, let me know. If I have it, I'll get it uploaded.

Items of (Potential) Interest

Over the course of the blog I have written and shared a few things. I've tried to, anyway. I was attempting to do this with Google docs, but apparently it is beyond me, and very few, if any, of you were actually able to access the files. Thanks to the recommendation of Fenway, I created a 4shared account today. If you will look to the left, you will notice that the old "House Rules and Such" page link has been replaced with "Items of (Potential) Interest".

So far, it is pretty sparse. There is a free supplement for Alternity, called Warships. There is also my personal layout of M74 Swords and Sorcery Edition. The share folder (rather unimaginatively titled Beyond the Pale Gate) will only contain freely available material, or crap that I create. Apart from putting some "pasted" art in things of my own devising (such as my M74 edit) there will be nothing in the folder that is restricted. Over time I'll be adding to the folder, but I doubt that I'll populate it with all the stuff from Goggle docs. Some of it I've lost interest in, and some of it never generated any interest anyway (well, the mention of it didn't).

So, there it is. Hopefully you'll find some useful things, or at least something interesting.

My First Sci-Fi Love

A few weeks ago I took a quick peek at Alternity. While I think Alternity is great, it isn't my first sci-fi love. Judging by my age and history with the hobby, you may be tempted to think my first love would be Traveller. I do love Traveller, and maybe I did indeed love it first, but it is not my First Love. Traveller's design was completely linked to the Imperium, no matter how much anyone may try to deny it. Sure, you can make up your own setting, but at the end of the day Traveller's design paradigm will leave you with your own version of the Imperium. Not that there is anything wrong with that, the Imperium is a fine sci-fi setting. Traveller, for me, never seemed to have a wide-open, anything-is-possible attitude. Then, along came a darling of a sci-fi game that was over-the-top, gonzo sci-fi at its free wheeling best.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you . . .

This little beauty had it all (except starships). That cover tells you everything you need to know. Of course, it wasn't a perfect design, but it was fun. It had that lightning-in-a-bottle of OD&D. Just enough of a framework to hang your own adventures and house rules on.

Then, along came . . .

Knight Hawks actually has a nice physics model under the hood. Not perfect, it is science fiction, but the rules for starship movement are pretty well thought-out. A real surprise given the general aura of "thrown together" that surrounds these two games. There has never been any doubt that everything in the TSR stable took a back seat to D&D, so to discover that these two titles actually comprised a good, consistent, fun gaming experience proved a very pleasant surprise.

They are still available, and free, at Starfrontiersman.com. Also available at that site is Starfrontiersman, a free fan e-zine. It looks pretty good, with 17 issues for free download, the most recent being from October 2011.