Slow posting this week.

Due to a visit from the Mother-in-law, Halloween approaching, an all-day Battletech throwdown, and some upcoming medical appointments this week, including an overnight at the local hospital, I've been too busy to post.  Expect regular broadcasting to resume next week.

New Project: Learning how to do electronic cartography

Despite early exposure to computers and using computers for both personal and business ends, I am not very savvy outside of spreadsheets and accounting/tax software.  Back during the hey-days of DOS 5.x through 6.x, I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about software, so much so that I had memorized the slash commands for Lotus123 and WordPerfect and had a hard time adjusting to Excel and Word.  With the arrival of Windows 3.x in the early 90s, I decided to go the accounting route and leave the computer route to those who liked to run cable through drop ceilings and constantly take courses to keep up with new computer technology (funny thing is about that decision, accounts are constantly training themselves).

So, since I've got back into gaming and I love maps and I love to draw maps (poorly I confess) I've been wanting to do my own maps on the computer.  I don't care for what either, Battletech, Traveller, Warhammer, generic D&D.  I just want to be able to do maps.  Guess what.  Its a pain in the ass.

I picked up Fractal Mapper 8 a number of months ago (why didn't I choose CC3, you don't want to know) and have taken/read a number of tutorials and have prowled the cartographer forums and I still haven't produced crap.  I feel totally lost when I look at graphic programs, whether its CC3, FM8, Inkscape, GIMP, what-have-you.

Well, I think I've finally have started to make some headway and I'm going to start posting examples of what I'm doing for both comment and pointers. 

TFADAV, Part IV

or, The Further Adventures of Adelbert Vaksmann, Part IV.

Well, not matter how much he would like too, Adel can't fault Oren, the party's dragonborn meatshield, for ruining our chance for surprise.  When we last left that shining example of graceful balance, Adel, the party had decided to rest in the room with the scrying mirror.  The party's intellectuals, you know the wizards and cleric types, conferred about the wisdom of leaving such a potentially dangerous tool (the scrying mirror) there and the dangers of destroying said tool.  After much debate, they had Adel trap the room and we were on our way into the tunnel we had found.

The tunnel was not a very well built affair, with ill-spaced timbers propping up the tunnel almost as an afterthought.  But that didn't matter much, since a short distance into the tunnel, the party found itself in a natural tunnel.  Dim light and voices could be heard in the distance.

Shortly, the party came to a fork in the tunnel.  With Ky checking the tunnel to our right, Adel snuck down the tunnel to the left.  Now the last few encounters, the jingling dragonborn has been the downfall to our ability to surprise opponents.  This time it was all Adel's fault, tripping over his own feet (well, it was a natural cavern, don'tchaknow) and falling upon his backside with a loud thunk.

From inside the cavern, a nasty orc barbarian glanced up and saw Adel there.  Adel jumped up, grinned and backed back down the tunnel in a hurry, all the way back to the fork in the tunnel.  As the orc comes charging up the tunnel, party members step forward to engage.

Hearing commotion down the other tunnel, Adel decides to assist Ky, the female elf, as she is the only member down the tunnel.  However, as Adel comes to assist Ky against the hobgoblin, he finds that the nasty little guy isn't interested in fighting, just making googly eyes at Ky.  Being the evil little enchantress she is, she then proceeds to roll a crit and rip the hobgoblin's still beating heart from his chest and laughing stomp on it with her boot.  Well, not really, but a critical was rolled and the poor nasty was felled by the one he thought he loved.

The fighting progressed onward, with the Hand of Bane joining in the battle in the far tunnel.  Much cursing and banter took place between those party members facing the Hand and the Hand.  It seems that, prior to Adel joining the party, the party had faced the Hand of Bane before and the Hand had embarrassed the dragonborn and had taken the party's lunch-money, so to speak.  And unfortunately, the Hand was still giving poor Oren a hard time.

While one half of the party was dealing with the Hand, the other half was confronting an Orc chieftain of some sort.  Unfortunately, the space was confined and it was becoming very difficult to maneuver.  The chieftain was having difficulty landing a good blow due to Adel getting in his face and blinding him with his rapier, but every time we thought we had started to beat him down and he got bloodied, he'd heal back up.

However, the battle does continue on.  We had to pause about a 1/2 hour earlier due to the DM's recurring problem with his router resetting his IP address.  Or at least, that is what I think the issue is, I'm not really up to speed on connectivity issues.

Still not on the list - I declare a FLAME WAR!

Cyclopeatron has posted the latest list of hot Olde Skool blogs on the interwebs, ranked by number of followers.  There is also a list based on follower gain over the past three weeks.  I left him a message that I have two followers, if you count myself and that I am old.

Cyclopeatron did reply, stating that inclusion on the list required that this here blog needed to 'Old School' covering pre-1985 gaming.  I'm old school though, even if I don't focus on pre-'85 gaming.  Why?  I'm not sure, but I think its because I am older and the game changed during the period I had to take my hiatus from gaming and the mindset of the younger gamers is just different.

Earlier this year, while trying out a new to me game group and learning 4E, I had one of the regulars tell me I was doing it wrong.  And in my current 4E game on Fantasy Grounds, I get the feeling that goofy Adel is the only playing in character.  I just think that the current mindset is to not roleplay at all.  Now if I had to choose whether to play a game with no roleplaying versus a game where the bard had to be able to compose and sing ballads, I'd definitely choose the first choice.

So in the effort to increase traffic, please flame me in the comments section for being or not being sufficiently 'Old School'.  Thank you, come again.

The further adventures of Adelbert Vaksmann, Part III

We've had a few issues with our Sunday night game over the last few weeks, illness, visitors, hardware difficulties and software issues, but last night we had a full party and outside of one or two crashes, we had a full, fun session.

Tonight found the party in the room that housed the hell-hounds, where the party had ended the prior session taking a short rest.  Adelbert was about 75% of max hit points, but had all of his daily-ies, so he wasn't terribly concerned when he checked the door opposite of the entrance to the current room and found that it was both locked and trapped.  With Zeril, the Deva, poking him to go faster and being a general nuisance, Adel goofed somewhere (not sure how bad, the DM uses a tower and I wasn't privy to Adel's roll) and received a needle to his cheek and the poison was enough to bloody him.

Adel finished removing the trap and unlocking the door and let the others lead the way into the adjacent room.  Within a few feet of the door, black curtains hung from ceiling to floor and a terrible corpse-rotting stench emanated from the room.  Oren, our dragon-born warrior, strode into the room, followed by the pain-in-the-ass Deva, Zeril.  Zeril feeling brave stuck his head through the curtain and saw a room with four mirrors, an altar and a statue of a well muscled human.  Zeril immediately withdrew his head and exited the room, complaining of a weird feeling.  Those watching saw a misty essence in the shape of Zeril tear away from him as he exited the room and then the essence disappeared through the curtain.

The party then debated if we should enter the room.  We reminded ourselves that we had told the ghostly Duke that we would not disturb anymore crypts except in the removal of the orcs and cultists in exchange for the undead leaving us alone.  Despite the hell hounds presence, the party decided that the room probably didn't have anything to do with orcs and cultists, not wanting to chance distrubing the ghouls again.

We re-entered the main hallway again and proceed to continue in the direction we were originally travelling.  Adel was leading the way, trying to peer around the corner with Zeril poking and proding him to hurry up.  We made the turn and realized the hallway was sloping upwards and we started to worry that we missed the entrance to the lower lever when we saw a door up ahead on our right.

Seeing weak light and hearing some noise, Adel opened the door, sees a long hallway and crept inside.  Suddenly Oren comes storming through the door, pushing Adel aside.  Oren turns into one of the crypt alcoves where some light is coming from and runs into some Hobgoblin minions.  Next thing, bugbears and orcs come streaming out of the doors further down the hallway and battle is underway.

Due to the narrowness of the hallway, Adel spent most of the combat watching the action, but did find a chance towards the end to sneak in and get a whack at a bugbear.  When the last one finally fell, we searched the room at the end of the hallway and found a mirror-esque type device whose reflection showed the room with the black curtains.  While the party contemplated the meaing of the mirror, Adel and Kys were searching the crypts and a tunnel was found.  Therefore the party decided to take an extended rest before proceeding down the tunnel.

So, that is where we left it.  The DM said we'd pick it up at the decision so we could check for randon encounters during the extended rest.