Recommendations January 2012

In this category of posts I will highlight three links I find worthwhile and tell you, the readers, why that is so. In every post like this I will link to one podcast, one other blog, and one free game, be it video-, table-top, RP-, or other. I'll try to keep this as regular category at the end of the month/beginning of the next month, hence the “of the month” attached to each category. Take that however you will. All things presented here are things I listen to/read/play on a regular basis and that is my only certificate of quality I'm offering here.

Podcast of the month: The SundaySkypers

The Sunday Skypers is a role-playing actual play podcast by some people who play pen and paper RPGs via Skype (duh). There are quite a few actual-play-podcasts out there but this one has quickly become my favorite as the participants really get into it and make the stories they play in come to life with different accents and a general attitude that makes this 'cast something special. If you're into listening to other people playing RPGs at all (typing it out like this makes it feel a bit pathetic, I must admit), you should definitely give this one a try, I recommend starting out with the Zo-episodes.

Blog of the month: Towards Dawns

A long running project by a video-games-journalist who decided to start a Minecraft-blog on a very simple concept: Keep moving towards dawn in the ever expanding world of Minecraft until you die. As people who play Minecraft know you'll eventually fall into a pit filled with either enough nothing to make the impact deadly or lava so it will eventually end. Updates aren't frequent but it's very well written and quite a nice journey to follow. It's been quite a long trip so far and I strongly recommend following it all the way to the eventual demise of the protagonist, though that hasn't happened yet.

Free game of the month: RogueSurvivor

I love me a good roguelike and this one is one of the best. Combining an interface that is not too complicated with mechanics that are actually quite alright and graphics that tell you all you need to know, this game creates a randomized city, populates it with people and zombies and lets you run loose until you die. Will you starve? Will you not find a safe place to sleep? Will roving bikers maul you to death? Every game you play in Rogue Survivor will tell a different story, most of the time a short one, I admit, but sometimes you can hold out even longer. I recommend turning perma-death on to give the thing a truly horrifying atmosphere...

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 12: Back to the Capital

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

I spawn right in the arena-district of the capital and turn in the bad news of I-killed-your-father and he-was-a-vampire to the half-orc gladiator. He is understandably bummed out by this and I leave him to his bloody business practicing crowd-pleasing murder. At least he has something to take his problems out on, I guess. Then I go to the tavern where I'm supposed to meet the Blade who was last seen protecting the body of the fallen Emperor. Getting in the tavern he tells me to sit down, not talk and do what he says. Since this is basically what I've been doing all game, unquestioningly obeying orders from the establishment I sit down until he tells me that he's been tailed and the guy in the corner is probably an assassin. He is going to get up and go and if the guy follows him, I'm to follow both of them as a backup. He gets up and as I want to get up too, I accidentally take an apple or something from the bar and the owner yells at me being a thief so I reload the scene and listen to the Blade again. In the basement of the tavern there is a short fight as the guy turns into an armored warrior as these evil cultists apparently are bound to do at some point and we kill him quickly.

Minecraft SMP 1: an Anecdote of Redemption

Ever since fall 2010 I've been playing Minecraft on and off. Since the "official release" brought a slew of new features, I started playing again after not doing much with it for a long time. Since then I had started another world since my original one had started out without biomes and was also lacking a lot of the newer resources in a considerable circle around my original base of operations. Now this winter, a friend of mine had the idea to start a private server for us and some select few friends to play on. Only people we knew personally and who favored our building-philosophy of using somewhat realistic medieval/renaissance architecture etc. were going to be allowed on our server. I called it our personal "SMORPG", or SOME multi player online role playing game.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 11: Delivering the Prince

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

We spawn outside the monastery at Chorol and a dark-elf seeing this comes running towards us. We have a fairly long conversation about how we must go into the monastery quickly as there are assassins about who killed the head of the place already. After confirming this for about two minutes we rush into the chapel, killing an assassin in armor who, much like the guys who killed the Emperor reverts into a red-hooded corpse after dying. The Blade head-honcho is alright but has, of course, left the royal amulet in his room. We rush there only to find that it is gone and the assassins now have it. Should've left it with me, really.

At this point it is decided to bring Martin to the secret fortress-temple of the Blades in the mountains and that I should take the dead priors horse. See, I told you buying one would've been a waste of time. But then, so is this. After all, with the fast-travel-system, why would I need a horse. Are there any special combat techniques that can be used while mounted? I don't know. We saddle up and I hit fast-travel again as I've been playing for hours by now.

Play Diary: Rogue Survivor - Unknown Man

In this play-diary I'll do something different to the ongoing Oblivion-series and play a little roguelike called Rogue Survivor, which can be found for free here. Roguelikes are games usually based on procedural generation of worlds, the programmers choice of mechanical depth over graphics, and usually a high degree of difficulty. A famous example would be NetHack. Anyways, Rogue Survivor takes place after zombies have started to overrun your city and you play a random survivor (or zombie, if you want to), just trying to survive for as long as possible.

As the game is under development and there is no 'win' state yet, it usually boils down to how long can you survive. Killing zombies is not the goal, you level up with each passing day regardless of how you spent it. You need to eat and you need to sleep and that is what usually gets you killed. These play-diaries are going to be stand-alone stories of survivors I played until they expired, written down from their perspective as I was playing. Almost none of the events are scripted, as this is a random world and I of course write a bit more into them than actually happened in-game but the general story is what happened, as it happened. Enjoy!

Day 0:

How did I get there? Don't know but I left that house quickly. Screams and panic everywhere, had to get out. A cop shot an undead monster that was attacking me. He said I'd better find a save place to be so I left for the shopping district. Found myself some guns and ammo as well as some food I ate and now I just spent the night in a general store. Gonna try and get underground to the subway station as I heard rumours that they're gonna nuke the whole city! Gotta grab what I can and get moving now.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 10: Getting side-tracked

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

I follow the path West and run into a woman clad in fur-armor, wielding a huge hammer attacking me. After a bit of a scuffle, she lays dead on the ground and a juvenile curiosity lets me strip her down, taking all her stuff. Leaving the underwear-clad corpse behind I go on my way, killing some wolves that are foolish enough to attack me. I have bought myself a steel claymore from that orcish woman to have a backup-weapon in case my sword degrades too much again. Having a backup-weapon is important, I figure, if your blade gets dull after two dozen cuts.

Along the road I pass an inn, an actual traveler (not a bandit) and I run into an imperial legionnaire riding on a horse spawning directly in front of me and yelling at me to watch where I'm going. Whatever, asshole, I was materialized this whole time. I get to the ruins as it starts to rain – I really like the weather-effects in this game, they almost make up for the lack of a proper sun – and am attacked by two skeletons, one with an axe and one with a bow. I destroy them and then clear out their comrades from the upper parts of the ruins. I enter the wooden door, searching for the door that the key the gladiator gave would open in the dungeon beneath this fortress. And maybe some of that elusive wine.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 9: To Hell and back already?

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

I reach a hastily thrown up blockade of some sharpened logs manned by three guards in plate-armor. Beyond it are the city walls and the city gate, in front of which there is what can only be described as a hell-gate (or a portal to Oblivion, as the game calls hell). Before I can talk to the guards and tell them that the Player Character is here so all will be fine, three little critters reminding me of the imps in American McGees Alice (the game calls them something else but to me they are imps from here on out) come out of the portal and the guards immediately leave their fortified position to attack them. I join them and we make short work of the fireball-throwing and clawing critters. The guards return to their position and I go back with them and talk to their leader.

Schmidtennistan-Files part 1: Discovery of a Nation

A discovery by my father gets my attention to a long-term game my grandfather and a friend of his played as kids. In this series I'll explain what it was and how it went, as far as I can tell by the files I have here.

My father gave me a folder, coming from a box from my grandfather, who passed away in 2001. The box had contained some serious things, such as my grandfathers WWII-dog-tags, his P.O.W. dog-tag from an English POW-camp (which, according to the red-cross observations I found on line, was one of the nicer camps to have been to), and something that only looks serious at first glance: The state file of a country called Schmidtennistan. My father said something along the lines of "this is like the stuff you do", referring to my role-playing groups and design-attempts. Little did he know that this folder contained what I now regard as my heritage as a 3^rd generation gamer. Let me go backwards:

My father was a fanatical board-gamer up until his late 20s. He and a buddy of his, when not buying old cars to destroy in illegal crash-course activities in a local quarry, once made their own room-sized version of Monopoly in a basement, complete with intersections and lots of additional streets. As I have heard, they never finished a game with it, usually giving up after a week or two of playing but the point is, they made their own larger version of a game already taking way too long but adding the element of choice of movement, something which Monopoly probably direly needs. Be that however it may be, I'd generally thought this to be what gaming-heritage I had. I was wrong by a generation.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 8: A Horrible Trip

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

I leave the city early in the morning and walk up to the stables right outside the walls. I have planned a route cross-country, not taking the road back to the capital but to go west to the coast, follow it a while and then cut across the wilderness southwards until I get to Kvatch. As I am no slower in the countryside than on the road, I figure this may save some traveling-time and also raise the potential for random adventure. But it would be a lot faster if I had a horse, though I haven't seen anyone ride in this world yet. I talk to the dark-elf raking manure in one of the stables and she tells me to talk to the guy inside if I want to buy a horse. She's kinda pretty so I try social combat on her, a mechanic I haven't understood at all whatsoever and of course fail horribly. I have no idea what winning would've gotten me anyways. She tells me she isn't impressed and anything else would have surprised me. Then I talk to the guy inside and he basically laughs me out of the building for not having 2500 gold for a horse. Later I'll find out that spending money on a horse would have been pointless anyways but we'll get there eventually.

Developer-Diary: Star Exodus, Part 2

So you want to design a game, board-game, card-game, RPG, anything with physical components like a rulebook or something like that, really. And you can't draw for crap. What do you do? In this little essay from my developer-diary of Star Exodus I'll get to working around this particular problem.

Graphics give a game flavor, fleshen out the theme. Now, there are people out there who can draw well and I'm even friends with some of them but there are several problems with getting them on board with something like my board-game. First of all, most amateur-artists who are good are also very self-critical. Sure they will put all sorts of crap on their DeviantArt page but tell them it's for being published and they will work and work and correct and brush up on a tiny bit of artwork forever. If you want sixty different equipment-cards for your game illustrated, this is not an option, even if they do have the time to work that much on something that isn't even their project for free.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 7: Beginning the main quest

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

So I'm finally getting to it and set out to Chorol, where I am to meet the leader of the Blades, an organization that is a weird mixture of knights, samurai, secret-police and swiss-guard answering only to the Emperor himself. He is supposed to know who the surviving heir to the throne is and where to find him. Did I mention that the religious-sanctioning of the monarchy goes as far as to claim that the world will end when there is no one of the imperial blood-line lighting some fire while wearing the amulet I have on me? The Empires propaganda apparatus is just that good but Martor believes in this sort of thing (like I said: he is a bit dim) and I leave the ruined fortress where it is and follow the road to Chorol, which is quite near. Now when I first came out of the sewers the game told me that I could use the map, which I have found out how to use by now* to fast-travel to places but I find that horribly out of place in a fantasy game. In a world where you don't get into a plane only to leave it six hours later on a different continent, traveling is supposed to be slow, dangerous and full of suspense and adventure. What lies by the wayside is the interesting part! So I walk, or rather, jog, I like it slow but not THAT slow.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 6: Outside the city walls

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

I leave the city on the wrong side, of course. Having to circle around I run into the first hostile wildlife in the form of two wolves which, while quickly dispatched, worry me. There are no guards visible upon the wall or around them and these predators coming so close to the city... Not as worrying as the fact that this medieval city apparently has no farm-belt around it. How does this population get fed? I'll never know as most of Oblivions world appears to be either city or wilderness, with the occasional farm that farms like five stalks of corn sprinkled throughout the landscape. I guess they have some DnD-like economy-destabilizing food-creation-spells at the ready. After circling around the city and the oh-so-terrible port next to it I get to the bridge connecting the city-island to the actual mainland. Why aren't the walls along the shore? Why isn't the island pacified? I'll never know. Beyond the bridge there is a small inn. I go inside and take note of the fact that rooming here costs half as much as within the city walls. Also, the innkeeper is a collector of wine and asks me to get six bottles of an extremely rare wine sometimes found in fortress-ruins scattered across the landscape. Is this a fetch-quest or one of these achievements the kids these days need to feel good about themselves? I don't know but I tell her I'll keep my eyes open and leave.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 5: At least it's no fetch-quest...

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

The man walks the typical slow walk of all denizens of Oblivion. This makes this a long, tedious walk. Whenever I hit run out of boredom I risk catching up with him. He cheerily greets me every time I do. Very inconspicuous of me. Like I said, I am not good at stealth. Luckily, this mission doesn't really require it as he doesn't seem to find it suspicious, even when, near the palace, I switch to full stalker mode, running from pillar to pillar behind him. I've read somewhere that the people in Oblivion all have a schedule and some randomized behavior set into it that rules their day. This means that they have places to be at certain times, such as store-owners leaving their posts, people running from a to be, not just pacing back and forth. As the randomized pattern means they have conversations with people they meet along the way, this makes the populations look rather real and alive. People go from A to B, meet acquaintances along the way, chat and then keep moving in the same direction they were heading before, sometimes even running when they've gotten late. This makes for a great backdrop when you walk through a city, with people being busy around you and the murmur of actual conversations taking place all around.* When you are on surveillance on someone, this can become quire a nuisance.

Game Release: Office Fleets

Another weekend, another free game from me to everyone else! MadZab Gaming presents: Office Fleets!


What is Office Fleets? It's a tabletop-strategy game played entirely with office-supplies. Typical games take only a couple of minutes so you can do them at work, in your coffee-break. Paper-clips become star destroyers and a coin can be used as a die. A pen is a good ruler for this game.


Set up epic space-battles on your working-desk. Defeat your co-workers' fleets in events that will shatter civilizations! Download the three pages of instructions:

Here.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 4: A day in town

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

It's still dark outside and as I haven't found the button for resting and its time-telling function yet. Sometimes during playing I catch myself looking up a'lá MineCraft, trying to find the sun or the moon to tell the time but no such luck. As far as I can tell, this sky has a kind-of-moon and and blurry brighter-spot that could be a cloud or the sun. I can't tell. Anyways, a guard I meet on the street informs me that it is five in the morning and why am I still out? I want to tell him that I'm not still out but already but he doesn't care and walks right past me. I decide to check out the store that I was told sold suspicious wares and run into something that I haven't seen in a game since Fallout 2 (and there only rarely): Opening hours. I click on the door and the game immediately jumps into lock-picking-mode. I panic and break a pick right away. Then I push the auto-try-button until the door is open. The store inside is like the others and it's hard to tell what is being sold here. I steal an apple and look through a scroll lying on the counter, telling how to get rid of a hangover or something like that, when a guard materializes behind me and arrests me.

Play Diary: Rogue Survivor - Carlton Lee

In this play-diary I'll do something different to the ongoing Oblivion-series and play a little roguelike called Rogue Survivor, which can be found for free here. Roguelikes are games usually based on procedural generation of worlds, the programmers choice of mechanical depth over graphics, and usually a high degree of difficulty. A famous example would be NetHack. Anyways, Rogue Survivor takes place after zombies have started to overrun your city and you play a random survivor (or zombie, if you want to), just trying to survive for as long as possible.

As the game is under development and there is no 'win' state yet, it usually boils down to how long can you survive. Killing zombies is not the goal, you level up with each passing day regardless of how you spent it. You need to eat and you need to sleep and that is what usually gets you killed. These play-diaries are going to be stand-alone stories of survivors I played until they expired, written down from their perspective as I was playing. Almost none of the events are scripted, as this is a random world and I of course write a bit more into them than actually happened in-game but the general story is what happened, as it happened. Enjoy!

Day 0:

Woke up to find the house assaulted by zombies, strangers also here, ransacking the place! I grabbed some food from the fridge and my flashlight. One of the strangers beat a Z to death in my kitchen. I went into the basement and killed two rabid rats with my bare hands, blocking the stairs with some crap I found in the corner. I stashed the food in a corner of the basement and went back outside. Went to the general store down the street to get supplies and found a horde of zombies there. Evading them I got back some ammo (but no weapon!) and a medkit, which I used to patch myself up after returning to my basement. Then I ate some food. The next trip went to the grocery store. I met a group of cops on the way there and a guy with a hunting rifle was sleeping at the store. I grabbed as much canned food as I could carry and brought it back here. A third trip outside brought in more cans, some fresh groceries I will have to eat sooner rather than later and also the information that the gun store next door is still barricaded. Good. I'll sleep for now as I am really tired. Hope the Z don't find me down here... It's 19h and I've been up since midnight, by the way. Rough day. Tomorrow I'll see what I can get weapons-wise.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 3: The outside world – kinda.

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

What comes next is the Look-How-Awesome-Our-Game-Is-Moment. The LHAOGIM is an old staple of gaming. Examples that immediately come into my mind are: Fallout 2 – you are forced through that stupid, stupid Temple of Trials like a primitive dungeon-crawl-RPG and then all of a sudden you are set into the world. Where do you go? Your choice. What do you do? Yours too. Then there is the graphical aspect of it all, which has been typical for first-person games. Unreal – you fight your way out of the tight corridors a crashed space-ship and then suddenly you blink at the sky in an open environment, which was something awesome and new back then. Before this moment, the game was like other games of the time, corridors and monsters. Then you were outside. Other games that have done this were Halo and, most impressive to myself: Far Cry – you leave the bunker and suddenly find yourself overlooking a jungle and a beach and there is a helicopter flying in the distance and you realize that this isn't a backdrop – it's this games world and it's yours to explore.

Developer-Diary: Star Exodus, Part 1

So, I'm developing my own board-game and in this series of posts I'll talk about how it's all going and how I'm actually doing things. This might help other people with similar aspirations or just be an interesting read for anyone interested in board-games.

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 2: The game begins

This is part of an ongoing series. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.

It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.

So even before the game begun, Martor has gotten himself in trouble and is in a cell. A let's-player on YouTube playing Skyrim remarked that this was typical for these games so I guess it's true for at least two of them now. The guy from the cell across the hallway remarks that yes, I'm a Nord. While this makes sense from the stand-point of the developer, showing the player that a decision they made a couple of moments ago during character creation (well, for some people it may be hours ago if they are indecisive/compulsive with the sliders) already has an impact on the game world, I find this somewhat racist. Is the first thing you talk about with a fellow prisoner their freaking skin-color in the real world, remarking on the attributes their nation has inherent? If I went to jail for unknown reasons in real life and the first thing my fellow inmate is remarking upon is how I, as a German, am probably industrious, disciplined and potentially dangerous to the rest of the world, I think I'd be somewhat offended. But then casual racism is an accepted staple of fantasy-settings (Kill them! They're goblins!) and at least I am a human. I'll have more to say about the issue of race in the world of Oblivion (and fantasy-settings in general) later. For now, back to the show, someone's coming!

Game Release: Sudongeon

Here it goes: First release of a free game on this blog. So, here we go: MadZab Gaming proudly presents Sudongeon!

What is Sudongeon? Well it's a little pen&paper-RPG experiment. A solo-dungeon-crawl that uses a Sudoku for generating a randomized little dungeon. Hence the name. You know. Sudongeon. Soduku. Dungeon. Yeah, not all that clever.

I wrote this game sometime last year after reading an article on some other blog (linked in the game file) about using a Sudoku for generating a dungeon for a game of DnD and I thought I should make this a full game. So, download it, try it out if you like, modify it to make it your own little thing, whatever! It's a small PDF-file and it probably needs some more work and refining. Let me know if you have any feedback about it.

Download link:

Sudongeon 0.4

Playing Oblivion - Day 1 part 1: Starting out!

MadZab plays Oblivion – years after everyone else did.

So this week, after nine years of having the same computer, we bought a new gaming machine. The old one lost its GPU two months ago and when my first-gen Eee-4Gs power adapter died right after Christmas it was time to get a new PC. The old one was quite a beast when I got it in 2002, a frustrated replacement for a lost love, which held out quite well for a couple of years. But just a couple. The last graphics-whore I was able to play (on the lowest settings) was Half Life 2. Everything released after that was either low-spec indie-fare or not being played. Anyways, long story short, I have a new machine now and it's quite impressive for what I'm used to (though it is on the low end of contemporary gaming-PCs). So I downloaded some free games but nothing that would tax the graphics at all. MineCraft runs smooth (and I have owned MineCraft for a while now) with far sight-range and all settings on fancy – something that my old PC could only dream of (I had to change the sight-range to look at the sun/moon to check the time and then re-set it to short).

As luck had it, this week a local supermarket offered The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (henceforth shortened to 'Oblivion') in the game of the year-edition on sale for ten Euros. So I figured I'd get in on all that buzz about Skyrim going on in the local and global nerd-scene right now by playing the predecessor. Which is incredibly advanced for my terms. Here is my record of the first day playing it, with thoughts on the game, world, and the story I'm creating by playing it. Also some bitching by me. I'm a critic by heart. Day 1 refers to the day of me playing it, by the way, not in-game-time.

Things to come 1

So, here is what's going to come to this blog in the not-too-distant future in no particular order:

-Introduction and download link to Sudongeon, a solo-dungeon-crawl pen & paper RPG I made using Sudoku for procedural generation.

-An in-game diary for Rogue Survivor, a roguelike game about surviving as long as possible in a city overrun by zombies. Spoiler: The character dies at the end. There may be more than one of these as they are reasonably short.

-Introduction and download link to Office Fleets, a small and simple tabletop-strategy game I made that uses only office-supplies and some simple but clever movement-mechanics.

-My gaming-diary of playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Yeah, years after everyone else did, I am doing it too!

-Thoughts about working on my own board-game. From creating graphics as someone who can't draw for crap to how to get components this series will have it all. In the end we'll hopefully have a board-game out...

And this is it for the next couple of weeks, I guess. See you there!

Introducing this blog

Hello everyone, you all here? Good. This is my blog and it's about the games I make and the games I play.

I spend a lot of my free time creating games, old-school pen-and-paper RPGs, board-games and even the occasional table-top strategy thing. I've also made forum-optimized RPG-concepts in the past and sometimes I delve into procedurally generated solo-player-affairs of the RPG-irk too. Some of the stuff I create is for free release and these will be available to download here later. Others are not for free, as I intend to sell them at some point of readiness but you will hear a lot about those here so you can form your own opinion in time. As I currently have quite a lot of content I'll probably do about four to five posts per week for starters.

My self-made games are only one aspect of this blog. The second one is going to be my own opinion on games, both physical pen-and-paper affairs of the roleplaying-kind and videogames of any sorts, really. This may include reviews but are probably going to be more in-depth musings about themes and mechanice in gaming. I'm mostly an indie-player as I like free stuff and I don't care too much for good graphics so that will show but I do play the occasional AAA-title. Usually years after first release though, as I find stuff in bargain-bins at the local supermarket and I don't have the money to keep up with current-level hardware all the time.

Another big part of this blog will be gaming-diaries. These may take the form of fictional diaries by characters in games I play, like the Rogue Survivor-Diary I have at the ready, or in-depth descriptions of me playing a game and what happens and what I think about it, which is going to start soon with my very own playthrough of Oblivion. Think of these as a written form of the ever popular Let's-Play format found on Youtube.

Anyways, those who find their way here are welcome to leave feedback in the comments, we'll see where this all is going to go from here. So let's get to it then...