Solar System in PDF

It’s amazing how long it can take to fiddle and tiddle a simple pdf file together and put it up for sale. I must have spent something like 2-3 whole workdays doing it, but now Solar System is available in PDF. It’ll be interesting seeing whether it was worth my while to do this – not that it wasn’t interesting to try to create a screen-optimized layout again after quite a while, but I do have other things I should be doing, too.

Pick-up Party Play

My snazzy topic here comes directly from a reader comment here. Captain Poco wants to know how I’m doing with a constantly shifting player base in my Alder Gate campaign, especially as I haz girz in the group, too. So let’s look into those issues, then – there’s a lot of other things I could write about here (including a Story Games discussion I need to write backgrounds for, related to my experiences here).

Chromatic Diplomacy

We played Chromatic Diplomacy with the teenagers a while back. As I’m always interested in Diplomacy variant design, it was pretty good to get to play this comedy masterpiece my Millington & al. from the early ’90s. The reason for playing the variant now was really that I happened to have a snazzy laminated map on loan from a friend in the south, and that we happened to need a 5-player variant. In hindsight it probably wasn’t smart to play something that has more comedy value than anything else, especially when half of the players hadn’t played Diplomacy before and couldn’t really appreciate the comedy.

Maracon Press

I’m going to a local convention this weekend. It’s Maracon in Oulu, and I have a car full of students and other youngsters who are going with me! The plan is to play the Best Session of the Year with all my friends who are coming as well. I’m also probably going to sell enough new games to pay the expenses of travel, which makes this convention a win-win event for me. People are coming all the way from Helsinki, this convention is just that good.

What GNS theory claims

GNS theory is a part of this model of roleplaying developed by Ron Edwards that we call the Big Model. GNS is perhaps the most famous part of the overall theoretical framework, the most contested and the most used for different purposes. It’s also rarely understood very well, which makes it a worthwhile topic here. A discussion at Story Games convinced me that there is still a need for yet another introductory article – I’ll make a point of writing mine in a very exact and simple manner, perhaps it’ll be useful to somebody.

A Blog Recommendation

I don’t read many blogs – I have enough in my hands reading my correspondense and a couple of forums. I’m also pretty bad at reading recommended linkages, but I do make the effort. Some time back Joshua Bishop-Roby linked me to an excellent blog. Then I just read the article he linked, but during my first annual State of the Blog address yesterday I went there again, and man that’s one amazing blog!

State of the Blog Address 2008

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for a while now, but being that I barely have the time to write anything else, it’s been postponed. What is? Why, the State of the Blog Address, to commemorate me having blogged for a whole year now. I’m celebrating the occasion by retagging and recategorizing the blog contents to make the structure reflect the contents better – hindsight is so much better than foresight at this sort of thing.