Sycarion Diversions

I’ve updated the site with an upgrade to Wordpress 2.5.1.

I’ve also changed a few other things:

For example, I host Action! System files, but I have begun work on a revised version called Mnemosyne. This has also created a 10 page quick play system called MUSE – Magic Using Simple Expressions.

I’ve also planned on publishing Knock, a Craits variant, featuring an expandable deck. Thanks to the Guild of Blades, I hope to create beta cards in May 2008. When they are finished, the PDFs will be posted on the site.

I’m playing to two Statis-Pro Football league and host one of the sites. I hope to enjoy playing an old favorite once again. Game time: Fridays or Sundays, just call.

The fine folks at the Guild of Blades have opened up shop to print playing cards on demand. This isn’t your traditional poker deck (although they can print those if you design your own face cards) printer, they focus on Collectible Card Games.

Guild of Blades Card Printing on Demand

Andre Corvus, a story writer and game designer published this unsolicited testimonial of their services on YouTube. He used GOB to print beta versions of his card game, Renown. He talks about the quality and the differences from traditional cards. Overall, the quality and price are great – the cards even shuffle well.

I was happy to provide a blank template in the Yahoo! Group for their services, I’ll let you know how good it is when I publish my own beta decks of Knock in May 2008.

I came across verminary.com/rebellion as a conversion site from D20 to D6.

It uses Star Wars information from D20 published material to translate into D6 material. For those that may not know, D6 is an RPG system published by West End Games. They originally published Star Wars! D6 material under license from LucasFilms, but lost that license when sold to Yeti, a French publisher.

It looks really good, as far as I can tell. This site is very well-thought out. However, since I do not own a D6 rulebook and Free D6 is vaporware, I cannot offer more than that.

I’m sorry for the recent spam. I got overwhelmed by the spam when I didn’t update my hashcash filter.

I have been working on a few things. I’ll update the current development page soon. Really.

I stopped the football project long enough to actually play Statis-Pro Football again. I have a pretty good team with a few holes to fill in the draft. I made the questionable call of not keeping a good RB. I am afraid that will haunt me.

Anyway, I have used yould to generate most of the Lenga language. This is the last piece in creating all the crunchy bits for the backstory of this world.

I have also stumbled upon an old usenet posting of a spell description language. I have modified it, adding an element and a few actions. Using it, I am translating the OGL spells from the SRD into the magic system I have created. It’s not as straight-forward as I would like. There is a bit of fuzziness in some of the descriptions. It also takes a while. There are even a few spells that do not translate, like Air Walk.

The goal is to have something that is more or less systematic in determining difficulty and power of a spell without making the player use a lot of math to create their own. I think this has been done. In the player’s book, it will basically show a spell, a description of the effects, a mana cost and a TN. To make a spell, a player must use simple sentences to describe the effect of the spell. Conjunctions cannot be used, only one verb per sentence.

For example, the Aid spell is described in the SRD this way:

Aid grants the target a +1 morale bonus on attack rolls and saves against fear effects, plus temporary hit points equal to 1d8 + caster level (to a maximum of 1d8+10 temporary hit points at caster level 10th).

This translate to:
Give target bonus against fear.
Give target temporary LIF.

Using the rules, the GM then figures out the Mana Cost (11) and TN (24).

One rule about Magic is that it is easier and cheaper for spells to do one simple thing. If a person casts two spells instead of a combined one, the breakdown would be:

Bonus against fear spell: Cost 5, TN 20
Give temp LIF points: Cost 5, TN 18.

If someone has time to cast two spells instead of a combined one, it is 1 point cheaper and about 10% more likely to work as intended.

Other spells demonstrate this more dramatically, like Animal Messenger, which I’ll detail later.

I finally found a place, thanks to a commenter on Flywheel, that helps you make board games. It looks like that they can even custom fabricate certain pieces. This would be interesting if anyone ever considered creating Bertzel Chess.

Game Inventor Kits and other assorted goodies.

You can buy just the boxes, just the board, or an entire kit. My favorite item is a 2 lb bucket of bits. You know, if I ever win the lottery, I’m calling these guys. Even if I don’t, I’m ordering the Bucket of Bits on my next payday.

It all starts at the wiki.

I wrote about the upcoming game a bit ago. Now, we are in full swing. Since the players are located all over the country, we are using a forum+wiki to track everything. My character is Henry Carter. He is tracked in chapter one with the heading “Daisy Bell”.

I haven’t played a serious game in a long time and I am enjoying this one.

I’ve also learned that much of the rules-medium (d20) or rules-heavy (GURPS) systems can hinder a good story-based game if a GM is not careful. Scott, is a good GM. I know this from playing D&D with him eons ago. His style is a good story building style, as opposed to my style which is more world-building. Whereas I may start to get bogged down in the precise definition of Line-of-Sight, or want to map out exactly how fast Henry’s bike can travel, or work out the exact geography of the UFO I saw land, Scott moves things along, weaving all the characters together.

Check out the game, it should be a fun read. Also, keep an eye on Scott – he may write books about this setting. If he does, I’ll create game aids for them for Action!

I like Chess variants a great deal. In fact, my wife bought me an Omega Chess set for Christmas. While there a couple months ago, I happened upon an invention by Graeme C Neatham. It is basically a variation of chess on a hexagonal board. No surprise, considering the link. The difference comes in splitting hexes into triads. Each triad has a different color.

Some time ago, I mentioned a hexagonal variation of Tactique. Seeing this board gave me all sorts of ideas. This also gave me ideas for using this type of hex paper for RPGs instead of traditional hex paper. For both, I hope to explore different ideas.

Here are the PDFs of a black and white version and the colorized version. What is different from Greame’s design is that my hexes are not rotated 90 degress and the colors are different. I will also provide a hex shaped pdf soon. I realize that a hex shape is more conducive to board games.

Black and White Tri-Hexes | Color Tri-Hexes

A friend sent me a link talking about a one page RPG. I’m not surprised by them as 1km1kt has a bunch of them.

However, the prospect of the rest of the players determining your stats is intriguing. Scott and I are going to try it out with two of his friends soon. (Yes, we paid the $2.) Check out the original post about Minimus here.

Here’s the PDF. Free to download, requested $2 if you use it.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Our campaign is similar to Golden Age Comics circa 1937. We plan on being mostly gadgeteers at this point, but who knows what five things I’ll come up with. The first one is:

Henry (my character) was born in 1837 and fought in the Battle of Antietam for the Union.

Turns out that I won’t be making that post after all.

Yannick, the creator of yould liked my process enough to add another option to basic yould command.

To test the quality of any yould engine, type the following:
yould -t foo.yould -q

You will get a percentage of real words generated by the engine listed in the command. Anything under 10% will say that more training is needed. Between 10 and 20 % will say sufficient training. Over 20 will say well trained.

This option is in the 3.9 beta. It should be released soon.

How good are the engines that are created with Yould? Here a good way to find out:

First, create a complete word list used in an engine
yould -t cicero.yould -s > wordlist.txt

Second, generate 100 words with the engine using –real-words flag
yould -t cicero.yould -r -n100 > co100.txt

Third, sort the 100 words in alphabetical order
sort co100.txt > sco100.txt

Fourth, run a comparison that prints out only the words in sco100.txt that are not in wordlist.txt
comm -23 sco100.txt wordlist.txt > compare.txt

Fifth, count the number of lines in compare.txt
wc -l compare.txt

You can script this as well, just needed to make some notes before doing some explanation later. This works on Windows if you use unixutils from sourceforge. Very handy toolset to have.