It's been oppressively hot, but I found out about a mod for Oblivion I wanted to try. It's called Ruin-Tail's Tale and by gum the man was inspired to write it. Basically, its about a companion for your Oblivion character named Ruin-Tail. He's an Argonian (lizard-man/fok) who is tortured by morality and his conscience. He left his sect of Dark Brotherhood and sought freedom. You run into him, and you start your adventures with him. The tale can turn into one of "infamy", "Friendship," or "Romance." When I was playing it, when it came to go "romance" or "friendship", my character was blind-sided by Ruin-Tail's declaration of love (or as near as he could get to it). Relunctantly, my character confessed he shared the same feelings. However, there was no way of explaining to Ruin-Tail that my character preferred to have a Platonic Romance over an erotic one.
The mod is based on Wiedu's mod Soulefein for Balder's Gate II. The writer felt that a companion with an engaging storyline is better than most companion mods. You get a companion, he or she fights for you, and you don't really build characterization. Ruin-Tail's mod is really high quality, and the best mod I've seen for Oblivion. And it is an old mod.
The story presented in Ruin-Tail's Tale is a love story. Whether you follow "Romance", "Friendship", or "Infamy," it's classified as a love story because of the deep friendship both of you build together. it is also tragic since Ruin-Tail and you split up at the end of his tale. I love the mod, myself. Morrowind mods don't reach this kind of quality. At the end, I was thinking up a novelization of the mod about my character's and Ruin-Tail's exploits told in a series of books for Oblivion, meant to be added after the Ruin-Tail's Tale has run its course.
There is nothing gross about the mod. I checked the dialogue and there is nothing there that is too deeply suggestive. However, this is probably something that can only happen in a game like Oblivion. Love story plots in D&D is often hard to run let alone write. The reason why Fear is so popular to inspire is because most DMs and Players fear love stories. It's either not manly or they feel it intrudes on them somehow. Quite frankly, I don't blame them for feeling this way.
But it is the best mod for Oblivion I played with Companions. And it's done so well it's a wonderful mod. It's both great and sad that it's unique.
Next: Romance, the tale of Ruin-Tail and the Crusader.
I've watched the Life of Brian today. Basically, if anyone thinks that this movie is offensive to Christianity or Judaism, you have to get a life and look closer. The movie essentially is based on what might happen if someone were completely mistaken for the Messiah. The Christ, as he was portrayed in the movie, wasn't put down or made fun of. In fact, I think Christianity was reverently handled. What the movie did make fun of was the sheep mentality.
The Pythoners are actually geniuses when they put together their entertainment. When they do a movie, they make a lot of social commentary on their day. The movie does ridicule Authority. From the Pharisee at the beginning to Pontius Pilate. May I stress that the movie doesn't make fun of the Christ.
Basically, Brian is born about the same time as the Christ, around 4 BC. About 33 years later, Brian begins his adventures. He has an abusive mom (Terry Jones, I think), no father, and a hatred of the Romans. He falls in with the wrong group, gets into a raid on the Fortress of Antony in order to kidnap the wife of Pilate. However, he's truly innocent when his group (the People's Front) meets up with the Judean People's Front and the both of them get into a tussle over who planned what first.
Well, they die, and he is the only one left. The Romans capture him and bring him before Pontius Pilate who initially wants to crucify him for trespassing and being an accessory to breaking and entering. However, Brian claims that he's the son of a Roman Citizen and they get him confused with Biggus Dickus -- Pilate's friend from Rome. He escapes, after a prisoner says that he is envious that he's getting crucified.
Having reached his so called friends, he leads the Romans right to them. And the Romans visit not once, but three times. On the third time, Brian falls to the street and takes on the guise of being a street preacher. He preaches the Sermon on the Mount as best as he could from the Savior. However, the people mistake him for the Savior and starts to follow him around enmasse (there's the Sheep Mentality). All at once the new cult -- the Cult of Brian -- starts up. At one point he tries to tell them to leave him alone, and he's not the Messiah, but the people are drunk with Sheeple thinking.
The next morning, they catch him naked and try to get more insight out of him. Brian denies having any authority and tries to get them to think for themselves. However, they are so drunk with Sheep think that they all answer in unison. Finally he escapes, but his girlfriend tries to tell him that they want him to be a leader. He eventually gets captured by the Romans, and was crucified. The Romans try to have him released, but they mistake his identity for another. So the people's front comes along and like untrue friends they abandon him to be crucified. However, the JPF comes along, announces that they are a suicide squad and then stab themselves to death with gladii. It ends when Eric Idle breaks out in a song.
The brilliant thing about the movie is that the central message is that we have the right to work out life for ourselves and to think for ourselves. Which I think is really one of the themes of Christianity. We work out our own salvation. And there are several times in the scriptures where Yahweh and the Savior promote independent thought (in the Bible as well as modern Revelation).
The other brilliant thing about the movie is that it really portrays Terrorists as being ineffectual. Just as ineffectual as governments (not that the suicide bombers are ineffectual, they cause terror more efficiently than the JPF). Finally, the Sheep think. What is strange is that the movie subtly hints that people are easily brainwashed when they want to be brainwashed. Sheep think is an easy way to brainwash a massive amount of people and this method can be taken advantage of through propaganda.
The strangest thing about this movie is that:
--- It offends Christians.
--- Atheists seem to love it.
Christians should not be offended by this movie. I don't find anything in this movie that offends Christ. But it does touch on how a cult or a church can be formed. As for Atheists, I really don't know how they get their kick off this movie. They either perceive it makes fun of Christianity in some way or they make fun at the people who are taken by Sheep think. What I think is that there are many Atheists who say that they are Atheists but are really not. I find most of them to be confident people even if they are outspoken against Yahweh or any other god. If it does speak out against Religion, I think its the Sheep think of a lot of people that Religion so often takes advantage of.
The Pythoners should be exonerated of the charge of blasphemy. Really, there was no blasphemy in the film. It's an innocent film about the stupidity of people, especially while in the grips of Sheep think. The movie does have nudity in it, but we are all naked underneith, so what is the big deal? And yes, there is a suggestion that they did have sex, but really the movie's message isn't about getting us to have sex out of wedlock. The real message of the movie is what could have happened if someone was mistaken for the Savior. Enjoy the movie, and remember to form your own opinion.
An unprofessional Review of the 4e Player's Handbook on this very blog. And on RPG.net, a professional, unbiased review. Want a biased review from me? Read this blog. Want to see me at my professional best? Read RPG.net.
Either way, you will know how I feel about the game once I've read it.
The GSL forms the most important reason NOT to purchase the player's handbook of 4th Edition D&D. Well, until now. Looking at the reviews of the players handbook, everyone seems to have forgotten the most important part of the game.
The. G. S. L.
In a day when we live on a planet with an Internet, the GSL should be the most important factor in your decision to buy 4th Ed. D&D. And I was so mad, so HOPPING mad that this most important factor of the game was ignored, I want to buy a copy of the players handbook myself and give it a review. On. RPG. NET.
I really feel like they missed the boat. The GSL should have been the most important factor when buying a Dungeons and Dragons product when we live on a planet with an Internet. It's my most important factor, and it should be a lot of people's important factor when it came to buying this game. On my count, Wizards of the Coast is guilty of Behavior Befitting a Monopoly:
1. Sending Cease and Desist Letters to loyal fans.
2. Stealing 30 years worth of Gamer History.
3. Allowing their legal counsel to fleece them of important funds defending their copyright.
This behavior will continue as long as it is legal for the government to grant monopolies over so called "Intellectual Property." Do us all a favor you rabid Dungeons and Dragons fan boys, and don't purchase 5th edition unless it is Artist/Author friendly like 3rd Edition was.
There is something to say about this campaign setting. Originally designed for OD&D, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy is . . .well . . . inspired by the Fantasy fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Although there's nothing to stop you from adding High Medieval Romance, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy is specifically designed for wandering barbarians, dark wizards, neolithic cultures, orcs that would slay you before talking, and high adventure in the land.
Everything about Wilderlands just screams Frank Frazetta and his Fantastic art. From the adventures of John Carter of Mars, to Pellucidar, to John Norman's Gor, to Robert E. Howard's Conan and Kull, to Ancient and Prehistoric cultures the Wilderlands of High Fantasy is a place you get to by "turning left instead of turning right." It's not typical fantasy, but some of the best of every Campaign Setting can fit there.
The premise behind the Wilderlands is the Points of Light idea found in 4th Edition. However, unlike the PoL idea where you have city states of Medieval Romance, the setting has impacted the City States of the Wilderlands a great deal. The untamed wilderness is untamed, and there are hardly any roads leading to other lands of civilization. In the untamed wilderness there are dangers everywhere, ruins waiting to be explored, neolithic and paleolithic cultures, dinosaurs and wild beasts. Amazons who feel that they are superior to men, dangerous undersea cultures. Slavers, and the enslaved.
The Wilderlands is a campaign unlike any other. It's not something they'd dream up at Wizards of the Coast. Although, Dark Sun does come very close to the Wilderlands in feel. Bob Bledsaw and others have taken a lot of liberties to put this together, and what they've put together is a campaign that would make certain people blush. It's a no holds barred setting that doesn't pull any punches. Fantasy is fantasy to Bob, and to play in his setting is actually being edgy and tells people you want to play something different than a typical fantasy setting. So, putting together a Wilderlands campaign, you do need the Wilderlands of High Fantasy Player's Guide to get started -- but to add awesome sauce, you need to read a lot of fiction from the Early and Mid Twentieth Century. Typically:
* anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, including Tarzan, A Princess from Mars, and At the Earth's Core.
* Anything by Robert E. Howard, especially Conan the Barbarian stories.
* Anything by John Norman: such as the Gor series.
* The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
* Anything by Jules Verne.
* Anything by H. Rider Haggard including King Solomon's Mines and She. * The Clan of the Cave Bear * The Scarlet Pimpernel
Movies that will help:
* Anything where Ray Harryhausen was the Special Effects coordinator. Including: The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, The First Men in the Moon, Jason and the Argonauts, and the original Clash of the Titans.
* King Kong (1930's and 2004).
* the Indiana Jones series
* Alan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold (a cheesy movie)
* King Solomon's Mines (1932 British Film)
* The Tarzan B-Movie serials
* Hatari! with John Wayne
* Sheena * 10,000 B.C. (both: the one /w Raquel Welch, and the Roland Emmerich film)
* Conan the Barbarian
* Red Sonja * Stargate * Stargate SG-1
References of History:
The World's Last Mysteries (Time/Life books)
America B.C.
GURPS Low Tech.
GURPS High Tech.
GURPS Greece
GURPS Rome The Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly
The Bible
GURPS Egypt The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt
Putting together a campaign in the Wilderlands is easy no matter what edition you have. Just remember, you're playing in a World that Tarzan, Conan, and John Carter of Mars would be happy to be in. There seems to be no room for powerful knights and damosels in distress; although you can put them in there. Roleplaying and adventuring in the Wilderlands is an interesting experience. You're leaving behind the Forgotten Realms and its spell-scars and so forth and venturing in territory that your fertile childhood mind could only imagine. Welcome to the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. Enjoy your stay.
Second thing: it's useful and can be deadly serious. I will fully recommend this book for adults who can successfully treat sex as natural and can enjoy it in their games. There are some classes I'd definitely use (the Tantrist and Kundala for instance). Why? because they gain the best benefit from sex: using sex to reach enlightenment or to boost creativity. Sadly, there isn't a Tantric healer class (imagist?). And the spells are sometimes useful to kinky to perversion based spells.
The book talks about sex in a matter of fact way, and treats sex as a serious, good subject. All of the pictures in it can be construed as pornography, or just erotic art in a good way (a couple is photographed having sex, and its beautiful, as all sex is beautiful before the Universe!).
but frankly, you need to judge your players before you use the adventure ideas in it. Some are light hearted (The Town Mayor has openly declared that he's gay!) to humorous (an ogre has fallen in love with our lord's daughter!) to Strike-me-through-the-heart serious (a gay paladin asks the adventurers to help reinstate him to his church).
But the book is useful. How you use it depends on your players and yourself.
Today, I was watching a program on Quantum Mechanics. I watched a lecture, which was very very good. And now I watched a program called "What the BLEEP do we know?"
The program is VERY VERY good. Full of good science for the first hour or so. Then it started to get philosophical and started to bad mouth religion. Then the program turned into a vehicle for a "channeler." It left the realm of truth and ventured into the realm of philosophy and conjecture.
Good Points of the Program:
1. It's true that this universe is affected by our consciousness. We can change the universe in expected ways, by changing our beliefs.
2. That our universe is full of possibilities.
3. The double slit experiment is infamous; and the program explains the experiment and its results.
Bad points of the program:
1. It comes down on religion pretty hard without explaining the original purpose of all religions --> to show the way to Spirituality. The program says that religion preys on the fears of the people, telling people that they better live their lives one way and if they don't they will be cut off and sent down to hell.
What people don't understand is that Religion, at first, teaches the way to attain spirituality. In fact, all religions do show the way: every religion in the world teaches the symbols to attain Spirituality and the way to get back to Father (ie. the Symphony analogy --> all religions play different parts of the same score, each one a different instrument in a religious symphony orchestra).
Where religion fails is that a man must eventually turn to God himself, and religion eventually fails in this purpose. All of the religions of the World are designed to fail for a man seeking truth and oneness with the Father. And strangely, for all their failure, they succeed for the man seeking Truth.
The program fails to address this.
2. The deep philosophy that the program gets into at the end should not be taken as fact. In fact, the deeper it went into Philosophy, the more it loses its credibility. In fact, for all of the truth it presents, its skews the program into a propaganda piece (just like the show I watched on Atlantis, which was deceptively pro-Gadianton Robbers).
I recommend the first hour, up to the 8th part of the program. That is the best parts of the program since they focus on the science. After the 8th part of the program, they go into philosophy, and it takes great judgment to sift the wheat from the chaff.
Since I missed Nude Blogging Day, I thought I'd play catch up and blog today in the nude. Today, I'm going to rate two Atlantis campaign settings that I own (GURPS Atlantis and Avalanche's Twilight of Atlantis). The third, Atlantis the Second Age is not a game that I own.
But first, a discussion of Nude Blogging Day. As you can see from the picture on the left, my friend on the left is taking some time out of her busy schedule to blog nude on Nude Blogging Day (picture is from Canstock Photo). Basically, the movement is to show that nudity in and of itself is not sinful. To quote Cafe Philos:
Sadly, not everyone agrees that nude blogging is moral. There are people -- even influential people -- who think the good lady to the left of us is spinning society into dark moral decline simply by blogging naked amongst the foxtails.Those folks are morally confused. For reasons perhaps known only to themselves and their psychiatrists, they firmly believe great evil comes of simple nudity. Most of them were shocked to the bone when Janet Jackson's naked nipple appeared for two seconds on international television during the superbowl.At the time, the FCC was deluged with angry letters and emails from folks outraged that even a single nipple was seen by themselves and their children -- as if their children would inevitably grow up to be perverts and sex criminals now. Politicians demanded an investigation. The FCC responded by fining the broadcaster, then toughening its standards. Jackson's "nipple of doom" launched a national crisis.Is that what so many people think morality is all about? Naked nipples? Apparently so. At some point, all morally sane people should be asking themselves, "Do we really want a society that's crazy enough to take a nosedive into sheer hysteria over nudity?"
So, yeah, I do blog in the nude. When I feel like it, that is usually in the mornings or at night when I'm not disturbed. I really don't feel that it is sinful to be nude, in fact, it's quite a feeling of freedom. So, on with those reviews.
GURPS ATLANTIS The first thing about creating a Campaign Setting about a piece of mythology that you are really passionate about is to do research and to learn what others have done. In the case of Atlantis, three products have been produced on the subject so far. They are GURPS Atlantis, Twilight of Atlantis, and Morrigan's Press' Atlantis: The Second Age. The first two are out of print, the last is still in print and supported by it's publisher.
GURPS Atlantis is the tour-de-force of the three Atlantis campaign settings. This is quite simply because GURPS Atlantis goes into more than a simple Campaign Setting, the book explains how the myth of Atlantis actually got started. Written by Phil Masters for Steve Jackson Games, GURPS Atlantis deals with the mythology of Atlantis by quoting directly from the source material: i.e. Plato's Critias and Timaeus. And then discusses whether or not the myth is true and it actually happened. It also goes into the literary and arcane legacies of the myth of Atlantis and how it has grown over time from a simple science fiction tale to a mystery of epic proportions.
The Atlantis myth has been used by science fiction, fantasy, and horror; three traditions of fantastic fiction. And the book delves deeply in the origins of the Atlantis myth and how it changed over the years in the first chapter.
The second chapter deals with the lands that we have lost. Tales such as Noah's Flood and Sodom and Gommorah are discussed along with Davey Jones' Locker and phantom islands and lands. And consequently, Ys, Mu, and Lemuria are also discussed.
Chapter three presents rules for underwater adventuring. This part was well researched, as the rules work in the GURPS game and can be adapted for other games. This chapter presents rules for venturing underwater and how the problems of great depths in the Sea presents for Engineering and Exploration. The chapter also goes into the history of Submarining and how technology has improved for deep sea diving.
Chapter four, five, and six presents three different campaign settings: The Orichalcum Age, which presents a campaign setting directly based on Plato's Timaeus and Critias; an Illuminati type campaign called The Secrets of Minos; and a Superheroic or Victorian Steampunk campaign. All three campaign settings are very good and provide a great way to game in Atlantis. GURPS Atlantis is available from eWarehouse-23, as it is out of print and only available in PDF form.
TWILIGHT OF ATLANTIS Twilight of Atlantis is the second Atlantis Campaign Setting I own. Instead of created for the GURPS game, Twilight of Atlantis is created for the estimable d20 System. Twilight of Atlantis is also based on the Critias and the Timaeus. It's another high fantasy work that takes the work of Plato and adapts it in a different direction than GURPS Atlantis does.
The book opens with a cover by Lorenzo Sperlonga, the fourth to sit on an Avalanche cover. The cover is a cheesecake cover to be sure, but can be interpreted as pornography by certain readers.
Part 1 of Twilight of Atlantis deals with the Ancient World that Atlantis exists in. This part is extrapolated from the Critias and builds upon the tale in a direction different than that taken by GURPS Atlantis. Basically, the meeting between Clieto and Poseidon is discussed, and how the five sets of male twins learned and explored their world. Then the five sets of twins would use their skills to build a mighty empire of epic proportions. This part also deals with Atlantean culture.
Part 2 deals with the rules section of Atlantis and is Open Game Content. Three new races are provided along with new monsters, equipment, and magic spells. The last part deals with Atlantean campaigns. Unfortunately, Twilight of Atlantis is so scant in its information that you need the resources of other gaming books to make up for what is lost. GURPS Atlantis, GURPS Greece, GURPS Mars and GURPS Egypt would be invaluable resources for the d20 System GM when using Twilight of Atlantis.
Next: I'll go into other areas of Research and how that may affect a campaign setting. I will also review Morrigan Press' Atlantis: The Second Age if I can get a review copy.
