Spring Cleaning
If you've poked around here this over the last week, you may have noticed a few changes going on. If you haven't, you missed two rather important updates, so you might want to pop into the archives. Anyway though, the first little difference around here you'll likely see is the result of someone casually explaining copyright law to me the other day. Turns out it's a whole lot less of a hassle than I thought it was. Of course, my name is now on every single page on this site instead of just half, but I doubt that will put an end to the fun of all the people constantly trying to guess at my "secret identity."
Next up, I redesigned my links page and nasty site index into hideous garish image maps. What possessed me to do this? Well, image maps are pretty high on the list of nifty things you can do with HTML that people forget about, my old links page was starting to bug me both because the idea's been done by so many people and because I had links there to pages I never actually visit, and of course the suggestion that I should add some graphics to my page since people don't like just staring at large chunks of text. Incidentally, the same person suggested I give him a horned viking helm in yon image, despite the historical inaccuracy.
Anyway, the most important thing about making those image maps is that I realized I didn't have a link to my page of simple games anywhere. While I fixed that oversight, I also updated the page in question with both my Dark City roleplaying rules, and dice emulation chart. The former is potentially quite fun, the latter is near useless and come to think of it I wasted the last couple hours on that. Smurf.
Speaking of RPGs, 8 months ago I started up a campaign of D&D. Since then, with rare exception, I've run a session of this campaign every single week. While I've heard legends of campaigns that have lasted years, I have never personally seen one go on for even half this long before, nor has anyone else I know. It really is rather disturbing to think that I actually went and created a big huge world, and the PCs have actually explored it all. Heck, the campaign is on the verge of actually resolving. I didn't think that could happen.
So anyway, anecdote: The PCs are searching the world for these magic stones pertaining to the gods. The earth god's stone is at the bottom of the obligatory sprawling 10 level labrynthian dwarven ruins. After several sessions of dungeon crawling, the PCs are pretty darn paranoid, and after having to carry around the death god's stone which kills everything in a spherical 20 mile radius, they are particularly wary about any round rocks.
Therefore, upon reaching the mausoleum level of the labrynth (clearly labelled in dwarven which none of them can read of course), and seeing the 600 shelves which seem to contain "head sized round rocks," our heros opt not to even go for a closer look at these "rocks" and instead just pry open the monolithic stone doors at the other end of the hallway. One battle against 600 skeletons later, they decide to cut their losses and crack open all the tombs of ancient kings. Luckily for them, they noticed when they were about to rob a lich at the last second and got the heck out fast.
In any case, it was a great session from where I sat, particularly since I expected them to spend all of 5 seconds on that floor. Notice it's wall to wall corpses, leave, that is all. If you don't find this amusing, well, I suppose you might have had to be there.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I'm not sure how local it is, but every Friday night from 1 AM Eastern until like dawn, the home shopping channel features drunken rednecks selling fantasy style broadswords for dirt cheap. Doesn't get much more amusing than that.
