Jennerosity

One of the cool things about going to conventions of any sort, is that you tend to get some free swag.  Some of it is immediately awesome and useful and sometimes they aren’t.  After sorting through the bag of goodies last September after PAX, I relegated the free CCG cards into the pile of not useful.  Included in the pile were 2 packs of Magic The Gathering cards.  Despite the fact that I am a gamer, I’ve never been someone who’s been involved heavily in CCG games.  But I didn’t want to throw away the cards because I have that keeper instinct.  Even if the purpose for which it was designed isn’t useful to me, I can’t help but think that I could somehow make use of it anyway.  Which is why those CCG cards are in a drawer in my crafting dresser.

Today, as I was wandering the internet searching for a blog about t-shirt mods, I happened upon a crafty site that has given me a bunch of ideas for making use of those cards.  The site, I Could Make That, immediately appealed to both the crafty and geeky part of me.  And, there was a recent post outlining 7 craftsy things to do with Magic cards!  So, now I’ve got seven different ideas to choose from which I will list here, along with my general comments on each of the ideas (though you should click through to see the pretty pictures in the original post):

1. Bookmarks – the practical part of me likes this idea since bookmarks are useful.  However, I’m as likely to grab an old receipt or bus ticket as I am to use an actual bookmark.  Still, the idea has some merit.
2. Earrings – I’m very unlikely to make any since I don’t have the necessary earring parts and don’t wear earrings much.  These remind me of the earrings my mom used to paint for herself in the 80′s & early 90′s though.
3. Box – This uses up a lot of cards to make and does have some usefulness.  Though we don’t use counters and have many other containers for our dice already, so I’m not sure I could put it to use around the house.
4. 3-D Tokens – Kind of cool, but also looks a bit advanced to me.  Plus, since we have metal figs to use in our games, I didn’t think it would get much use aside from collecting dust.
5. Ornaments – Since I don’t celebrate Christmas, definitely not useful for me.  They do have potential as gifts though.
6. Accordion Flower – If I were trying to inculcate a little girl into geekiness and gaming, this might be an idea.  But, since I don’t know any likely candidates to even receive one as a gift, I don’t think I’ll be making any of these, cool as they may look.
7. Notebook – This one would be really cool.  I like the idea of handmade notebooks to begin with and it would make a pretty cool geeky notebook.

I’d also already thought of using them in art journal pages, though I haven’t been doing much of that at all lately.

Anyone else have any ideas for how to make use of them?  Any friends have requests of things they want me to make for them?  Let me know in the comments!

Tonight Benevolance and I are heading out to our 4th edition DnD campaign, which is going really well lately.  Our last session was absolutely epic and featured the best use of an immovable rod ever.¹  The last chapter, was full of all kinds of awesomeness, and the deployment of the immovable rod was just the icing on the cake.

Just to set the background a bit . . . our rag-tag group of adventurers has been on a quest to retrieve the scattered remains of some all-powerful weapon so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of the bad guys (who would obviously use it in their plot to take over the world).  We’ve just gotten to the point where we can afford a small ship and a rag-tag crew (some of them are even experienced sailors, all of them are kind of insane and/or desperate for taking the job).  We go to a small island where a bad-ass dragon lives, because one of the weapon pieces is supposed to be there.  When we arrive we find out that he’s holding an auction and giant ball of debauchery where every evening devolves into a giant murder fest.  Sounds fun, right?

We manage to survive the first night and even scope out the back door entrance into the dragon’s lair where the weapon fragment is.  Then, a diversion starts and we sneak in and start sneaking out, when some enemies catch up to us.  Instead of standing and fighting we try to flee/fall faster and then our crazy Dragonborn cleric paladin of love Cyrano de Ragenborne (played by Benevolance of course) takes this crazy potion he’s been carrying and turns himself into a dragon and he breathes fire on the bad guys so that we can escape.  We get back to our boat and our Dragon wreaks some general havoc in order to let us try to escape across the water.

Benevolance gets back in the boat before his potion wears off and we seem to have actually done it.  Except for the fact that there’s a big boat full of bad army guys with magicians in hot pursuit.  They are catching up despite the fact that our other Dragonborn character Arjan², a ranger, (played by a friend whose codename shall be Chuck Norris) somehow manages to have his god smile down on him and a magical wind appears to make us go faster.

So there we are . . . a group of adventurers who seem to be about to have a giant battle against well trained soldiers in boats.  And . . . most of us wear some sort of armour so the swimming thing would be a problem.  The drowning, that would probably be easy.  And as we’re all kind of looking around the table trying to think of something, Benevolance has his stroke of genius.  We’re going to set the immovable rod.  In the path of the rapidly advancing boat behind us.  We maneuver the boat a bit to get it lined up just right, and then we set it horizontally at mast-level.  The oncoming boat hits it and gets totally fucked up!  And we get away laughing our heads off.

Epic!  Win!

1. And since work is insanely slow today, I thought I’d share the story. [↩]
2. I have no clue if that’s how it’s spelled [↩]

December 7 – Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011? (Author: Cali Harris)

I am happy to report that during 2010 I have seen an influx of awesome into my communities.  By and large, I feel that some of the most supportive people in my life, are the ones that I only meet with online.  These are the people I tweet to when something big in my life needs some positive thoughts or even if I’m just feeling like I need a little pick-me-up.  This is also one of the very first places I turn to when I feel like jumping up and down and shrieking with joy when stuff goes well.  In general, I love the twitter community!  (Oh, and you can find me there @Jennerosity.)

More specifically though, my community of writers, both online and in real life, has definitely been enriched in 2010.  I was semi-regularly meeting with some of the local writers who participate in NaNoWriMo each year.  Plus, thanks to the forums and IRC chat room, I got to know some of the other Municipal Liaisons from other places a lot better this year¹.  In fact, I’m missing their camaraderie already.  They really helped keep me going during the stress of the last month.  And I’d be remiss without mentioning the community of local participants for NaNoWriMo too.  So many awesome people there, many of whom I hope to keep in contact with throughout the year.

My community of gamers has also widened a bit in 2010.  Some new gamers have been added to the groups I belong to.  And of course, my online list of gamer geeks has also increased, though I haven’t been very active in the online gaming community this past year.  A lot of that has to do with the difficulty in keeping up.  I don’t play through different systems as often as others do.  And since I’m only a player in the games, a lot of the blogs that relate to being the Game Master really don’t apply much to me.  Anyway, I think I’d like to engage more here, but since there are several avenues available to me, I’m not certain yet which to choose.

A quick note on how I’m falling behind schedule.  It seems I’ve overdone it.  Between the 50,000 words of my novel, emails, blog posts, forum posts, tweets, etc. my wrist pain is flaring up big time.  Since I have to use a computer at work² I’ve been trying to let my hands and wrists rest during the rest of the day so that’s part of the reason why I’m behind schedule here.

1. one of whom is also doing #reverb10 [↩]
2. though I’ve been wrapping my wrists in tensor bandages to help alleviate it a bit [↩]

Thought I’d share some of the games that we picked up¹ because of seeing them at PAX.

• Zombie Dice – got the free app at first to just check it out and then went out and bought the real life game so I can play with other people.  I like how easy it is to transport and the elegant simplicity of the game.
• Shibuya – this one is for the iDevice.  Love that it’s named for a place in Japan.  It’s pretty, elegant, and challenging in a similar tetris kind of way.
• Super Meat Boy – Must. Get. This. Game!  It constantly had groups of people mesmerized with the game clustered around it at PAX.  We groaned and cheered with each fall and narrow escape.  Plus, the comic they had in the goodie bag totally rocked.  They actually explained their thought Buy Chloramphenicol Online without prescription process behind the decisions they made in the game.
• Scott Pilgrim The Game – Super cute graphics!  And we love the fact that it’s a multi-player co-op fighting game.  It’s been downloaded, though we haven’t started the game yet.
• Rock Band 3 – Well d’uh!

Not an MMORPG in the entire group.  In fact, I like the cartoon style graphics that a lot of these had better than the super-realistic stuff out there.  If I want super-realistic, I’ll actually go outside and have fun with some real people.  If I want a video game, I think a cube of meat is right up my alley.

1. or will pick up just as soon as they are released [↩]

This weekend I’m going to be down at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle getting my geek on, so I thought I’d share with you some things I’m looking forward to experiencing down there this year.

• Friends!  For the first year ever, people we know in real life are also going to be attending PAX.  Plus, a bunch of the tweeple I know are also going to PAX.
• Being in the presence of so much awesome!  Wil Wheaton, Scott Kurtz, not to mention Gabe and Tycho.  This convention has always been driven by gaming enthusiasts instead of gaming industry, and it draws some of the most awesome people to it as a result.  I find many of the other attendees are just super cool, friendly people, you can slip into conversation or games with very easily.
• Shopping!  In years past I’ve been much more frugal when attending (the last year we attended was 2007).  I’ve loosened up a bit since then, and am in a much more spendy mood in general right now, so I’m sure I’ll come home with some geek stuff, and some Sephora stuff, and a racing seat¹
• Celebrations and drinking.  We’ve got a few things that we will be celebrating with this little weekend away.  BenevoLance is finished another CGA course² and our friends The Vizier of Nameology and his wife³ have just bought a house.⁴  It was in 2007 when we discovered the delicious 5 Spice Sidecar at a little Thai restaurant nearby and we’re hoping to continue our adventures in mixology during the weekend.
• Gaming!  It is a gaming convention after all.  And this year, I’m a much more confident gamer, so I might actually jump in and try out some games.  Like in public.  While people watch me!  Shocking, I know.  There should be some new stuff there to check out, and plenty of space to just hang out and play some games of whatever strikes our fancy.

1. I’ll do up a whole separate blog post about this sometime, but not today. [↩]
2. the exam was last night and we drove straight down afterwards [↩]
3. who really needs some sort of title – Vizier, get on it! [↩]
4. There are a few other teensy tiny minor things that we are also celebrating, such as the passing of another birthday for me and the completion of the first draft of my novel. [↩]

I mentioned before that we were starting a new campaign and working on creating characters.  Even though I’ve gamed with my husband in the past and have worked on other characters with him, this time it occurred to us that we could create characters that were also a couple.  We’ve worked on it over the past few days, chatting back and forth and giving a lot of ‘what-if’s’ about how they might have developed their back story to get them to where they are today¹.  Here’s his email that describes them more or less ready to go.²

The assassins work as a pair. The first infiltrates the location by blending into the crowd and delivers packages (weapons, poisons, costumes.) to drop points and acts as an spotter and keeps the escape routes open. The second of the pair infiltrates the room socially, perhaps on the arm of some dignitary or otherwise. The second either isolates the individual from the crowds to deliver the kill or otherwise gets close enough to the target to deliver a poison or knife if subtlety is called for. Once a hit is made, the pair escape. Frequently the escape plan involves some sort of preset sabotage for a diversion, enabling the pair to make a clean getaway.

The duo do not act rashly, prefering to quietly research and observe a target before committing to action. One specializes in direct observation, the second in social interrogation. Knowledge is power. They like to discover everything they can about a target before engaging. If a mission appears too dangerous once initiated, or unforseen circumstances complicate the kill, the pair do not hesitate to walk away and plan again.

The assassins do not shy away from direct confrontations, being quite adept at physical violence, but prefer methods that offer better risk/reward returns. Delivering death by the sword is the epitome of their craft, but pragmatism often dictates other methods be used.

The assassins left their work behind when a mission was left incomplete. Sent to kill an important person before he rose to prominence and became a threat, the socialite did not proceed with the kill as planned. The socialite realized that the individual possessed an uncanny ability to lead, and could perhaps unify the divided galaxy under one rule. The spotter does not understand this perspective, feeling only that they failed the mission. The two fled to the Inner Sphere to avoid retaliation. The spotter still yearns to persuade the socialite to return and complete their task, while the socialite patiently coaxes the spotter towards her enlightened point of view.

In the mean time, they fight crime….

And that’s how we ended up joining a little mercenary group.  My husband did the lion’s share of figuring out the back story and I had so much fun working out the character details with him!  At the time when he wrote the email, we hadn’t picked our names yet so we were just calling them ‘the assassins.’  We decided to go with a Japanese theme³ and dug through some Wikipedia pages until we settled on Kitsune & Kirin.  Anyone want to guess who’s who can feel free in the comments!

1. and still be married [↩]
2. I didn’t include any stats but if anyone wants those too, let me know and I’ll happily oblige. [↩]
3. big surprise there, right? [↩]

My first gaming group is about to start a brand new campaign.  We’re using a world we’ve played in before, just fast-forwarding a bit, and creating  new characters for it.  It’s got me to thinking about the methods I’ve been using to develop characters that I am more interested in and (hopefully) others are too.¹

1. I start with some ‘woo-woo.’ I find that I like to start with something very abstract.  Like a particular quality or quirk that someone might have, and then build out.  If I start out by thinking of the larger role the person has in the group, I tend to get stuck there, and the character lacks a personality.  So, unless I’ve already got a character idea in my head that I’ve been itching to use, I’ll pull a tarot card and see if that gives me any inspiration.  Another thing you could do is go find a horoscope/astrology site and check out today’s readings, and see what tickles your fancy.
2. Reference material. When coming up with a character, sometimes it’s hard not to use a well-known model.  So, at some point, I take my kernel and start to think of famous tv/movie/book characters that shared that trait.  This is good time to brainstorm all the possible ways that this can influence someone and pick which direction feels right for you, the world you’re playing in, and the group of characters you are playing with.  Usually you don’t want to copy a well-known character but it can be good to give you some guidance.
3. Torture. Now that I’ve got some general ideas about who and what your character is like, I then begin to think of ways to make a person’s life more difficult.  The current rule set/setting I am playing in makes this easy, since you have to pick assets and complications for your character.  The assets are easy, so I try not to look at those until I’ve figured out what the complications are.  I also like to frame these in terms of the past and future.  What’s happened in their past that has lead them to a particular place where they would meet their current companions?  What might come up in the future that would bring conflict to a situation?  The whole point of gaming groups is adventure and conflict and often the most memorable and fun times for players come up when that is character driven, instead of story driven.

After going through those basic steps, I’m usually ready at this point to start assigning some numbers, fleshing out details for a backstory, and filling out my character sheet.  Anyone else got any interesting tips for creating an interesting character?

1. I’ve also borrowed a lot of these methods for creating characters for my novels. [↩]

Had our monthly games night last night.  In addition to the usual crew of awesome, we had extra awesome, because our friends brought some of their friends.  And when the friends you have are awesome already, it stands a good chance that their other friends are awesome too!¹  Anyway, in addition to the usual Rock Band and arcade cabinet, we also played some more of my new favourite game: Dominion.

I first heard about the game on one of the GeeksOn podcasts².  I knew right from the start that it was right up our alley.  The game is a card game where you build the deck that you play with throughout the course of the game.  You use your treasure cards to buy land and actions.  You ultimately want to be the player with the most land in the game.  The different action cards are what really spice it up though.  It comes with a large selection³ but then you select 10 to actually play with.  Depending on the cards that are selected and the random draw that each player gets each hand, each game is really different and interesting.  You also have to be adaptable.  There is no single strategy that is going to win every time.

My only (very small) criticism is that it’s only a 4 player game and I hate people being excluded.  However, I also enjoy watching other people play this game much more than our other standard tabletop games, so it isn’t really terrible.  Plus, we will be picking up the Intrigue expansion sooner or later and that’ll essentially let us run 2 games simultaneously.

1. Everyone was so awesome that we gamed until 2am.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve stayed up that late on purpose! [↩]
2. I’m way too lazy to look up the exact show so you’ll just have to listen to all the episodes if you really must know [↩]
3. which you can expand upon by purchasing the expansions [↩]

This week, gaming stuff has totally been on my mind.

1. I got really excited about the fact that Scott Kurtz is now on the west coast (Seattle).¹

2. I finally got around to making a ‘gamer’ list on twitter. Makes it much easier to follow the gaming conversations that I’m finding increasingly interesting.²

3. I *think* I finally settled on a 4th edition character sheet. It might even save me from needing to spend so much time shuffling through all my power cards.  This theory will be tested on Monday night.

4. I found an etsy shop who will do custom sewn dice bags. She also has a bunch of pre-sewn ones you can choose from.  She’s now been favourited.³

5. I wrote a blog post all about using Evernote for gamers.⁴

1. I don’t actually follow his comic anymore though. My husband, who does, will probably be disappointed since midnight in his old time zone was a few hours before in ours, and now he’ll be reading the comics on the actual day they get posted. [↩]
2. I think soon I’ll be at the point where I no longer view my ‘all friends’ column, or push it way over to the right, and just focus on my specific groups and searches. [↩]
3. I keep saying I’ll sew one myself, but these are so nicely done and reasonably priced I can now snap out of it and just buy one when the time is right. [↩]
4. No, posting about one of my own posts is not cheating, it’s just boosting my SEO! [↩]

In the most recent edition of 5 Geek Things for Friday, I mentioned that Evernote was one of the tools I was considering for plotting my novels.  The gist of my comments on it was that it was more frustrating than helpful in that regard.  Shortly after the post went live, the Northern Voice blogging conference commenced at UBC campus, and I was watching the comments stream in via twitter.  One of the talks that generated quite a bit of buzz was on Solutions for Coping with Social Media by Alexandra Samuel.  One of those solutions was using Evernote.  After reading her article (and her 2 previous articles that she links to in the post), I decided to jump back into the program to try to see if I could recapture my initial enthusiasm for it.

It struck me as I was playing with the interface and weeding notes out of some neglected notebooks, just how handy this program could be for gamers if you can have a laptop or an iPhone/iPod Touch at the table.  And I promptly set about revitalizing my RPG (Role Playing Game) notebook.  I’m currently playing in 4 different campaigns that are being run in several different systems, but it’s mostly the classic Dungeongs & Dragons.  Here are a few of the things that I’ve set up that will hopefully help me out at the table:

1. Character Progression
   For a couple of the campaigns, I’ve got the future progression of my character planned out with regard to which feats, skills, powers, etc. they will be taking.  I had this all set up previously in Evernote, but since I originally planned it all out, Evernote went and added tables¹.  As I was re-organizing my haphazardly spaced text into a properly formatted table.
2. Character Notes
   Since I have a terribly short memory, I have a hard time remembering all the little details I come with about my character’s backstory and their goals and motivations.  After reading an article over at Gnome Stew on how to Cover Your Character Sheet I started creating one page character summaries about my characters.  Since I can’t draw character sketches and don’t have the time to find appropriate images online² or appropriate figures/miniatures, I try to make the text & layout match the personality of the character.  I find it’s a great way to connect.  But, sometimes, with all the paper already at the table, it can get a little unwieldy.  But, with Evernote, I can have a note with the same information in it, and my iPod Touch takes up a lot less room.  I can also refer to that while I’m in the process of creating my cover sheet³
3. Campaign Notes
   Depending on how evil forthcoming your Game Master is, you may, or may not need to keep notes about different clues that arise during your adventure.  Or, perhaps you run a character that likes to collect things and write it down somewhere.  Our group often likes to jot down hilariously appropriate in-character quotes that someone says at the table.  But, add to that my horribly messy writing, tendency to spill things, and (lately) my penchant for trying out different character sheet templates, and it’s easy to see how these little notes can become indecipherable or get lost entirely.  So, I can keep them digitally now.  The other benefit of this is that if you keep your character sheet at the host’s house, you still have access to the list of clues and information between sessions so you can still work on figuring out what to do between sessions.
4. Rules
   Since some of our campaigns have adopted a few house rules, this is a great place for characters to keep track of the changes to the game mechanic that the campaign is using.  I also tend to get incredibly confused about the way areas of effect work in DnD 4th edition.  So now I have a note with the rule wording.  This way, I’m not going to be) interrupting people on the turn before mine, asking for the book or asking them how it works, when I’m trying to figure out which power to use and where to place it.⁴
5. Images
   For one of the campaigns I’m in, the Game Master created some digital maps for us to look at and emailed them to us along with some other background information.  So, I clipped them in to Evernote.  We’ve got access to at least one of the maps at the game sessions, but the table is tiny and we have anywhere from four to six people around it, so space is at a premium.  This way, if I want to look at it between turns, it’s easy for me to flip open my iPod Touch and check it out, without causing two or three other people to have to twist, turn, move books, etc.  If you had an iPhone, you could also snap pictures of the battle map at the end of the night, hand drawn symbols, etc.

The nice thing is that since you can tag each note, I can put them all in one central notebook, and then just call up the relevant ones by searching for the tag of the campaign/character that they refer to.  I can see them whenever I have access to a computer with an internet connection.  The only potential downside is that I might get distracted by other iPod Touch apps while I check things during the game.  But, since that sometimes happens anyway, I don’t think it’ll be too big of a deal.

Got any other ideas on how to use Evernote for gamers?  As a player, what tools do you use to get organized for your campaigns?

1. Yes, I’ll have to eat some crow about that, since my previous post said they didn’t have tables [↩]
2. sort of the same way I don’t have time to find good pictures for my blog either [↩]
3. since sometimes it can take a while for me to be inspired and/or have enough time for it [↩]
4. Instead I can interrupt them about entirely different things :D [↩]