Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 15 Posted

Have you not been following our science fiction campaign?  Well, it’s a good time to start.  Here’s a fun summary of the StarDrive campaign setting to help.

Fifteenth Session – The Concord command staff has to deal with a lot of shenanigans on Yellowsky.  Every group of religious wackos the setting offers has converged on the Lighthouse and is trying to cause trouble.  And some goon shows up promoting a new “space vampires are our friends” platform.

The space war is really heating up in this session.  We need some kind of anti-psionic tech because we’re being beset by guys with super-psi regularly now.

First, a bunch of bald psychic Jedi-esque weirdos show up and hassle Captain Takashi in the middle of the night.  I was really proud of my acrobatic escape from one balcony to the other till they all came hovering after me.  Then I got away from the first four only to run into another two!   They ego whipped me insensible.  But I got vengeance when the Lighthouse’s escort ships blasted their shuttle to scrap.

I dubbed them “donut worshippers” because of the concentric circle tattoos on their palms they were using to zap me with.  The other players are amused by my colorful names I tag our various unknown opponents with – “space vampires” for the alien bad guys (they’re tall, thin, intelligent, grey-skinned, evil looking, black clothes with frickin’ skulls on their shoulders like they’re out of Warhammer 40k) and now these guys.  Maybe the Captain’s memoirs will be entitled Space Vampires and Donut Priests – Or, How Everything In The Verge Tried To Kill Me.

Up next was the ever-popular on-stage assassination attempt.  I flung myself over the principal to protect her, but they got her anyway.  Alas.

Then the bad guys show up with their “turn Rokk Tressor against us” program.  Their story is “the aliens are friendly!  No, really!”  Apparently when the space vampires teleported aboard a klick ship and led an attack on the Concord Marines there, they were “trying to negotiate.”  Chris did a good job as Rokk, pretending to get on board with the loony tune program while still poking at the most incoherent bits of their story.

Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide In Final Playtest

Paizo, in their traditionally open and fan-friendly way, have been offering the six new PC classes from the upcoming Advanced Player’s Guide for public playtest!  They have taken the feedback into account and have released a final playtest version, freely downloadable from paizo.com.  Comments are still open till Feb 15, when they’ll bake ‘em and print ‘em!

Boy, there’s a lot of great Pathfinder news this week.

Freeport for Pathfinder!

I have a soft spot for Green Ronin’s Freeport, a crime-ridden city of dirty pirates and Cthulhoid cultists.   My very first D&D 3e campaign was the original Freeport trilogy and those are some fond memories.   I’m actually using the Freeport stuff, hybridized with Golarions’ Riddleport, in my current Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate.

Well, word on the street (or at least on the Green Ronin forums) is that they’re working on a Pathfinder version of the Freeport setting!  I’m looking forward to that.  If you’ve never played in Freeport before, pick it up when it’s out and discover the joys of rapine and plunder!

RPG Superstar 2010 Moves Into Round Three

Every year, Paizo Publishing holds a RPG design competition, open to all who care to enter, called RPG Superstar.  They have a set of prominent RPG designers judge the entries and winnow the crowd down to a smaller and smaller set of contestants.  It’s like fantasy Survivor!

Anyway, one of the best parts is that the stuff the contestants create is there for the using on the Web site.  Round One got us a mess of wondrous items, and rounds Two and Three will get us some cool monsters.  In the end, the winner gets a gig writing an adventure for Paizo!

It’s a great way to generate interest, promote innovation in your customer base, and in general demonstrate that they are the anti-…  Well, I was going to say WotC, but really about half the RPG companies out there seem to actively disdain their fans.

Anyway, it’s too late to enter this year, but those of you that harbor dreams of fame can plan ahead.  And raid the excellent content – not just from this year but from RPG Superstar 2009 and RPG Superstar 2008 as well!  Innovative!  Fan-friendly!  Consistent!  Have we entered a second golden age of gaming, or what?

Wayfinder Issue 2 Released!

Wayfinder is a free, fan created, high-quality pdf e-zine for players of the Pathfinder RPG.  Issue 1 was really good, and they’re not stopping there.  Issue 2 is now out!   Download it from paizo.com for free!

It’s a real miscellany; fiction, humor, monsters, NPCs, adventures, races, recipes, fluff, crunch – it’s all here!

Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 14 Posted

Fourteenth Session – We struggle through the usual subplots until we get to a pretty cool new planet named Yellowsky.  There are Stoneburner ruins on it and the more scurrilous characters decide they need a good looting!

But first, the command staff deals with trying to figure out what is up with the ten different dangerous, questionably related, mostly mysterious alien races we’re dealing with.  There’s klicks and kroath and i’krl and teln and some dwarfy ones and some big ones…  Kind of a lot of different ones for them to *all* be mysterious and unknown.  As in real life, we find most of what there is to know from the Internet.

The ruins crawl was good interstellar explorer fun.  We must have rolled 100 Perception checks to search the place.

Sadly, next time we’ll be down four characters (two players).  Bruce (Lambert Fulson/Taveer) got a job in Dallas and had to move away, and Peco (Adun Zelnaga/Ivan Stukoff) is on the spin cycle towards his impending marriage and won’t have spare time for a couple months.  It means we have basically zero in the techie department – Taveer and Adun were our key people there.  We need a Velma!

Further Jim Shipman Warnings, Sigh

Well, Jim Shipman, sole proprietor of Outlaw Press and the psychotic perpetrator of art and IP theft on a large line of Tunnels & Trolls products has recently moved on to good old fashioned eBay fraud.

As discussed on Tome of Treasures and The Acaeum, Shipman (under the name selling4u2) is selling “first editions” and other rare and valuable Tunnels & Trolls stuff on eBay.  But sadly, what one hapless buyer, who paid $1338 for a first edition, got in the mail was not what he paid for.  (Compare the eBay pic to the recieved pic.)

I can’t imagine the Tunnels and Trolls community is that large – have some of you really not gotten the news yet!?!   WAKE UP SHEELPLE!  This guy is using every existing way and some new ones of ripping people off he conceivably can.

Jim Shipman posts on eBay under the names jimship1, Hobbit_King, actionseller99 and selling4u2, using the hobbit_king@yahoo.com PayPal account.  Try not to get screwed!

Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Ninth Session Summary

Ninth Session (15 page pdf), “Holiday In The Sun/Flat On Rat Street” – The characters help Saul celebrate Swagfest in the streets of Riddleport, and there’s a startling amount of violence.  Then, they go to a local moneylender to find out what happened to the bar’s floor manager… and there’s a startling amount of violence.

First, I ran “Holiday in the Sun”, an interstitial Freeport adventure from the Freeport Trilogy.  There’s a big street festival, like Riddleport’s answer to Mardi Gras.  They got to have some random fun, choosing costumes, drinking, that kind of thing.  An assassin tried to take out Saul, and though the PCs stopped her, she totally took out Tommy in one shot.  He didn’t take that well; he took her back to the animal cages and tortured the crap out of her.  Explicitly enough that it took the other players aback.  And when they came back and she was missing, he really got scared.  Mmmwah hah haaaa!

Then they participated in various festival games.  Sindawe had a bad turn when he ran off solo and stumbled into the lair of an ettercap and some dream spiders!  In the original adventure it was a rogue aranea; in this one I decided it made sense for one of the crime lords to have an ettercap working for him as tender for the dream spiders, whose valuable venom is used to make a drug named shiver.  He got bitten repeatedly by the spiders till he was tripping his balls off, and then he got webbed up.  Bruce (Ox) spent an Infamy Point to have him rescued by the Splithog Pauper.  Funnily enough, when the rest of the PCs found him in an alley with a note from the Pauper, their reaction was “We told that guy to leave town!  We hate him!”

Then, the Yellow Shields organize a hit on the PCs, which they get out of without a lot of trouble.  After, when Tommy’s back at the Gold Goblin, he complains to Saul that they’re all pretty beaten up and don’t want to go back to the festival.  He tells him, not unkindly, to “Sack up and get back out there.”

Next, it’s “The Flat On Rat Street,” from Shadow In The Sky (the first chapter of the Second Darkness adventure path, which I am somewhat using for inspiration).  Saul tells the PCs that the floor manager, Larur Feldin, went to make a payment to a moneylender named Lymas Smeed and hasn’t come back.  The PCs go, bust in, kill his baboon, and beat him with a phone book for some time.

This scene really frustrated Sindawe’s player particularly (he was already a little ill-humored about the spider thing).  He was convinced that he just wasn’t beating the guy hard enough or searching good enough to find the answer, and it just wasn’t appearing – that they must just be doing something wrong.  He got pretty upset about it (not till debrief afterwards did I fully understand what was going on).  Of course, in this particular scene, there is absolutely no way to figure out what really happened from within the scene; you have to move on and find out from other sources.

I blame training from bad D&D modules for twisting players’ expectations.  Too many D&D scenarios wrap everything up nice and cozy.  Whenever you kill a bad guy, he always has a long note on him detailing his God-damned life story.  It’s from the same playbook that states “monsters” fight to the death, et cetera.  There’s always a convenient self-contained answer to the problem in the dungeon – the “silver weapon when there’s lycanthropes coming” syndrome.  Real mystery, intrigue, or complication is rare.  I try to run things very “realistically” – meaning if something in the game world doesn’t make sense to a reasonable person, it’s not because Gary Gygax decided that “weather is magical” or other such bullshit, but instead because yeah, there is something wrong here.  Afterwards, I told the frustrated player that really he was more on the right track than everyone else – that yes, it doesn’t make any sense that a common moneylender would let himself be tortured to death rather than give up the info they wanted, and that it shouldn’t be a source of frustration, but instead an opportunity to use that correct first step to re-engage with the game world and find out the next step.  We got things back on track, but I think it’s so unfortunate that there’s so much crappy D&D that trains people to not trust their own senses because the answer’s always “GM fiat” or “that’s just what the module said” or whatnot.  In my mind, the acme of achievement (in a simulation-focused game) is to get it to where everyone feels like they can engage completely in the game world, without having to second-guess about what metagame stuff is going on.  Metagaming is for pussies.  Yes, you can quote me on that.

The Past Of Modern d20 Gaming – And The Future?

Conversation among our gaming group recently turned to “Hey, was there ever another edition of d20 Modern?”  It got me thinking about  modern gaming and d20 modern-type gaming, especially as there may be some new breakthroughs coming on that front soon.  (Teaser!  I’ll spill the beans later in the article!)

Generic Modern d20 Games

I thought d20 Modern was just okay.  It was serviceable.  I didn’t like the stat-based classes, I think that’s lame.  And I didn’t like the way they halfheartedly supported it – it’s like it wasn’t a real product, just a spoiler product to steal sales from Shadowrun, etc.  In my mind it didn’t compare well; they proposed d20 Modern Dark Matter and Star*Drive, for example, which pretty much were better using the Alternity system. d20 Past and Future were just insulting in how light they were.  “You could use this to replace a number of other existing games!  We won’t provide enough content for you to do it out of the box, but look, you clearly could do it!”   Not sure what they were thinking.

Two other major d20-based games tried to fill the gap – True20 and Modern20.  True20 is Green Ronin’s generic, somewhat simplified d20 system; they use variants of it in Mutants & Masterminds and Blue Rose.  I like it better than d20 Modern, but am not wildly enthusiastic about it.  I don’t like the wound system, particularly.  And there’s not a lot of direct support for modern gaming; it’s meant to not be purely fantasy-tied so you *can* do it but it seems spread thin.  Every support book feels like it has to cover fantasy/modern/future/etc. which means you only get a little of each in the Companion, class books, etc.  That’s a poor marketing strategy because it means if I want material for a modern warrior, I have to buy a book with fantasy stuff in it.  I’m sure there are 10 or so people out there so in love with True20 they want to buy everything, but normal people would like books focused around information useful in a specific game they’re gonna run.

Modern20, from RPGObjects, is more specifically modern focused, which is nice.  It still goes with a largely stat-tied set of core classes, though it tries to add a little more “zazz” to them.  They have supplements for horror, martial arts, etc.  Seems serviceable.

Specific Genre Modern d20 Games

Mutants & Masterminds, from Green Ronin, is a great superheroes game.  I love it – well, the first edition.  I felt like the second edition overcomplicated things and decided the book should read more like a dictionary than a gamebook.  I understand some people like that kind of “definition centric” format but I say bah.   Anyway, I really like M&M 1e.  Beautiful books, you can build beautiful Marvelesque characters, and fun gameplay.  Criticisms – the way damage works can be a little problematic sometimes and I’ve learned over time that games that give the DM action points to use for villains suck.  Anyway, it’s the best d20 supers game hands down and IMO one of the best supers games in any system.  But it’s pretty much just for supers, which is great for that genre and not relevant for others.

Spycraft was another excellent game – in its first edition.  It’s weird that I also don’t like its second edition; it’s super overcomplicated and also goes for that descriptor stuff, must have been a fad at the time.  It was an espionage game, but because of that could work perfectly well for modern action, crime, investigation, military, etc.  If you’re looking to play a “subtle” genre, d20 probably isn’t the right thing to use anyway.  But if you want to be a faceman, soldier, wheelman, or fixer, it’s the game to use!  For most traditional modern genres, though, in my opinion Spycraft 1.0 is the shizznit.  (I didn’t like their uber gonzo “G.I. Joe on meth” setting,  Shadowforce Archer, but all the class guides are nice.)  They went the ‘real class’ direction instead of the ’stat class’ – heck, Spycraft 2.0 minimized stats to the degree where they did away with ability checks!   You can find all the Spycraft 1.0 stuff easily at Half Price Books etc.  I don’t know what the heck Crafty is doing with the game line now that they have 2.0 – their supplements are bizarre (convert to d20 Modern!  Add fantasy!  Book after book of new guns!).

Haven: City of Violence, from LPJ Designs, also seems like a good bet.  I haven’t played it, but it seems to stay squarely in the modern action/crime/etc and not try to add in psychic mutant magic-using bugbears or other crap like that.  Seems to be Grand Theft Auto in Sin City directed by John Woo.  I’d like to give it a shot sometime.

What’s New?

Well, there may be a Pathfinder version of Modern in the works!  People asked Paizo to do it from time to time but they said “we’re busy with the core stuff.”  Recently, however, on the Paizo boards, some names you may recognize – Stan!, Owen K.C. Stephens, and Hyrum Savage, who have formed Super Genius Games – are seriously talking about doing a Pathfinder Modern, possibly as a patronage project.  Although I’m leery of patronage projects, as the RPGverse is full of long promised and never delivered products (Nick Logue and Razor Coast, I’m looking at you), it’d be interesting to get a new version of d20 Modern with the learnin’ of the last 10 years baked in.

Here’s what such a game should look like IMO.

• Real classes, not “stat based” classes.
• Vitality and wound points, not pure hit points or a True20 weird DC thing.
• A general modern corebook, but supplements organized along specific genre lines.

Some Bonus RPG.net Reviews

• Modern20
• Haven: City of Violence
• Spycraft 2.0
• Spycraft

Help Haiti, Get Games

In case you don’t read any other gaming blog or forum, I thought I’d mention the Haiti earthquake relief effort RPGNow/DriveThruRPG is running.  You can donate $20 and you get free PDF products from a staggering number of companies in return – more than $1400 worth!  It’s like 180 different products.  And the cash goes to Doctors Without Borders, a “known good” charity (as opposed to, sadly, some of the dodgy ones that have sprung up to profit off the disaster).  You should consider donating more, just to help and not for graft, but there’s no harm in getting some graft for $20 of it!  (You can donate $5 or $10 instead, and they match it, but no freebies.)  As of this writing they’ve raised $72,125!!!  I bet you didn’t know there were even that many gamers that knew how to get to the Internet. 

They’ve had such demand that they’re totally overwhelmed, you can’t download yet – but no rush.  If you haven’t yet, go check this out!

Outlaw Press/Jim Shipman Sinks To Demented, Pathetic New Lows In Art Theft Scandal

The Newest Scam

This weekend, there was an interesting new comment on the Outlaw Press Thieving Update article detailing the ongoing blatant art theft perpetrated by Outlaw Press (aka James L. Shipman II) in his Tunnels & Trolls products.  It initially appeared to be Ken St. Andre (original designer of Tunnels & Trolls, who still runs a large T&T online community), calling into question the role of some of the artists in the debacle.  The message was attributed to “atroll”, kenstandre@yahoo.com, the identity he usually posts under.

One thing still bothers me about this whole sorted Outlaw Press mess is that M.E. Volmar and Simon Tranter were Art Directors, with Mrs. Volmar in charge of purchasing all artwork for Outlaw Press for several years (4 total I believe). Now she seems to be its harshest critic. I have to wonder if she purchased all that artwork over the years how she would not know if was stolen? Maybe this is her way of shifting the blame away from herself? Did she take the money from Outlaw Press and then help steal the artwork at the same time? I believe further investigation is needed. I’m inclined not to believe M.E. Volmar’s word at being the innocent Art Director, as she has shone herself to be less than truthful. She may need to be expelled from Trollhalla as well.
–Ken St. Andre

However, a couple things were suspicious about this post.  Besides the somewhat startling claims, there are a good number of spelling and grammar errors.  I haven’t known St. Andre longer than this stuff has been going on, but I’ve noticed that his communications tend to be extremely grammatically correct.  So I look at the IP address the comment came in from, and it’s different from the address St. Andre posted from in his previous comments on Geek Related about this issue.

Hmmm.  Maybe Ken was on a business trip to another state and was drinking wacky juice (accounting for the sudden 5 grade level drop in writing style) and decided to post odd accusations on my blog?  Or maybe, I should email him and make sure this was from him.  Sure enough, upon being contacted via email he confirmed that he didn’t post anything to this effect and that he considers the accusations in the comment to be fabrications.

Sadly, on blogs like this you’re pretty much free to put in whatever name, URL, and email address you want when posting comments – but the IP address tracks you down to where you really are.

I have reported the situation to the abuse department at Level 3 Communications, which is the ISP where the post came from.  In fact, I’d be interested if anyone else has records of who might be posting from IP address 4.159.56.108. If owners of other sites – Trollhalla, Trollbridge, RPG.net, etc. – could check their logs and see if anyone has posted there from that IP it would be interesting.  Naturally Shipman is the leading candidate, but I’d like to have proof.  What do you say, fair readers, would you like to know who posted the above comment? Ask your favorite blog and forum owners to check for people coming from that IP, especially Saturday 1/19 AM.

My own detective work: an IP geolocation indicates this IP address is currently assigned to Marion, IL.   (Such traces are usually pretty good but not necessarily accurate down the the exact town – like running a trace on my IP gets close, Austin, but not my exact nearby city.)  Interestingly, guess where outlaw-press.com is registered?  Lawrenceville, IL (the address on the WHOIS record indicates it’s Shipman’s parents’ house, Leroy and Julie.)  And Outlaw Press has been listed in several places (mostly taken down now due to complains) as a Lawrenceville, IL bookseller.  It’s where Shipman lives.  So same neck of the woods, seems like.  Isn’t technology fun?

Anyway, I talked to Volmar and St. Andre via email about the claims and turns out Volmar did occasional work for Shipman as a direct favor to St. Andre, doing some art and layout, but she and Simon Tranter didn’t do art direction or buying, despite being miscredited on products by Shipman.  Who to believe?  Well, even if the history of lying on Shipman’s part doesn’t make it obvious, there are also numerous other documented complaints by people he has miscredited on his products, so it’s consistent with everything else.

Lulu Shenanigans

Guess what else Shipman’s been up to?   He’s resorting to e-mailing Lulu posing as the trademark owner for Tunnels & Trolls, and telling them that copyright and ownership of the trademark is under litigation. He’s apparently doing this to stop anyone, including Ken St. Andre, from publishing any T&T related materials through Lulu’s print-on-demand service, as this only happened after he tried re-opening his Lulu store, now as James Shipman (http://stores.lulu.com/hobbit_king) and not Outlaw Press, Inc., with a handful of products that were immediately reported as infringing the copyright of several artists and writers by the copyright owners. This claim about there being current litigation on the T&T trademark is a complete fabrication, as the owner of the T&T trademark,  Flying Buffalo, Inc. and Rick Loomis, has said himself that he has not started any litigation regarding T&T.  Ironically, the only product currently listed at the James Shipman store on Lulu right now is a Ken’ St. Andre/Flying Buffalo publication.  Stay classy Shipy!

Ignoble Knight?

Also, jeers to Noble Knight Games, who seems to be happily selling loads of Outlaw Press products, even after everyone from Amazon to RPGNow has removed them.  I know people have contacted them about the situation.  Come on guys, you have a pretty good rep, do you want to sully it by continuing to sell stolen IP?  I’m sure you paid for that stock and it’s sad to take a bath on it, but sack up.

What You Can Do

First, if you are a T&T player, don’t buy any of the Outlaw Press stuff with stolen art or IP, wherever places he finds to list it briefly before people find him and get it taken down (it’s a continuous battle on eBay, Lulu, etc.).

Second, if you admin a blog or forum or Web site, find more proof about who posts from IP address 4.159.56.108.  Post here or email me at geek.related@gmail.com with your findings.

Third, if you’re one of the defrauded artists, continue working on legal redress of the situation.  No one else can do anything about this, and clearly he’s looking to make a long term stand and continue to blatantly defraud people until something’s done about it.

Fourth, if you admin a blog/forum/Web site – be careful, there is “someone” now willing to post lies under false pretenses regarding this issue.  You may need to turn off anonymous posting, observe posts and comments for signs of identity theft, etc.  Clearly someone’s trying to post falsehoods to add FUD to the situation – be observant and prevent that.  All major software – WordPress, phpBB, etc. logs IP address and other identifying information for all contributions, if you don’t know how, take a couple minutes to learn how to find and use that information.

Gamer TV

As we all know, gaming is just part of an overall geek package of entertainment that all, for some reason, resonates with us nerds.  Our gaming group talks a lot about what TV, movies, webcomics, webseries, etc. we are into, and I took a quick survey and figured I’d share with y’all, so you can find out about any geek friendly entertainment you don’t know about!  Out of 5 gamer geek responses to “what shows do you watch regularly,” it’s:

• Dollhouse x5
• Big Bang Theory x4
• Fringe x3
• Sanctuary x3
• Castle x2
• Chuck x2
• Heroes x2
• 30 Rock x2
• Family Guy x2
• Venture Brothers x2
• Modern Family x2
• How I Met Your Mother x2
• Sons of Anarchy (on hiatus) x2
• Simpsons
• American Dad
• Daily Show/Colbert Report
• Clone Wars (on hiatus)
• Warehouse 13 (on hiatus?)
• Legend of the Seeker
• Supernatural
• House
• Better Off Ted
• Bored to Death
• Ugly Betty
• Defying Gravity (on hiatus)
• Damages (starting again soon)
• NFL
• The Middle

If it got 2+ votes, it means “if you’re a gamer you should take a look and see if you like it, there’s a quite good chance you will.”

And a special shout out to (semi-)new channels Chill and Sleuth.  As SyFyLys has decided to show wrestling and ghost chaser shows rather than anything meaningfully SF, those two channels will often have something good on.

And some pans… About everyone in the group used to watch them some Stargate of one or more flavors, but now NO ONE mentioned it.  I know for a fact some people watch SG: Atlantis still (when it’s on) but I thought it was interesting no one remembered to mention it.  I’m pretty sure people are under-reporting above based on group conversations, but I think ones that came to peoples’ mind to write down on their list reflect the ones they enjoy more.  Also, no one said “all the weird Battlestar: Galactica spinoff crap they drizzle out.”  Despite everyone watching BSG faithfully of course.  And some people have stuck with Heroes, but no one has stuck with Lost.