Phlegmatic

Some players in my group enjoy combat and dice rolls and stuff. Others (bunn especially) think that it gets in the way of the role-playing. Pleasing both types of roleplayer is difficult. What might help is if I could find a way to make combat more exciting. I mostly run D&D and Traveller, but I'm mostly concerned with D&D here since my Traveller tends to be quite light on combat anyway.

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Much amused by this:

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/dorktowerfeed/250579.html

Remember the Traveller cupcakes we made on my birthday?

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4163864&id=606268148&ref=notif¬if_t=photo_tagged_by_non_owner#!/photo.php?pid=4163864&id=606268148&ref=notif¬if_t=photo_tagged_by_non_owner&fbid=389450753148

Check out the most recent comment.

That's this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_W._Miller


I'm very proud...





UPDATE: And now he's linked to them on his own facebook page. Very chuffed.

You know I said I like my science fiction to be nice and Traveller-esque? And that I'd never quite found the series I was looking for in this respect. Well now I have.

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...only you don't know it yet.

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There is a part of the phlegmish brain devoted to thinking up ideas for role-playing game settings. Sometimes that part is squeezed by the part devoted to considering which college players should be drafted by the Oakland Raiders. However, the Draft was a week ago, so that part will stay more or less dormant for now, allowing the RPG part (a polyhedron-shaped area known as the 'Gygax cortex') to become temporarily dominant.

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Assuming you are prepared to stay within certain tight constraints, it is now possible to legitimately publish your own commercial Traveller products.

On the one hand, that’s fantastic. I must admit, I am sorely tempted to do just that. Self-publishing in downloadable pdf format is easy, and self-publishing using services such as lulu ( http://www.lulu.com/ ) isn’t much harder. I’m not naive enough to think that this would be profitable. But it would allow me to contribute an official Traveller product.

On the other hand, other people (not many, but some) are already doing it. And that means that the completist Traveller collector in me feels the need to buy them.

Here:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/days-of-high-adventure/7023-A-Perpetual-Traveller-Marc-Miller

Though it might be of some interest to a few of you.

One for the Lovecraft fans out there:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8420837.stm

"It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain skyline - regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings."

I've just been outbid on eBay on this Australian RPG magazine:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=360034557252&ssPageName=ADME:B:ONA:US:1123

I came across it in a routine search for Traveller material. Look carefully though, and you might recognise the author of the Traveller scenario.