Goin' down in a blaze of glory!

I spent the past hour or so perusing Simon Washbourne's Go Fer Yer Gun! OSR Western RPG.  Awesome stuff.  And best yet, it's free at RPGNow.com (link in the title there). 

The game has ten (eleven really) classes for Western themed RPGs including gunslingers, preachers, braves, scouts, mavericks and wandering monks (the optional 11th class and one I'm obviously partial to).  Hit points are generally low ("name level" is level 4), and gun damage is pretty high.  I've never played or even looked at the Boot Hill game, but having heard stories of its lethality, I can see how this game might be similar.

Anyway, I'm still working on grad school stuff (one out of three final papers completed today), so not much time to game.  And definitely not time to run a game.  But some day, I may use these rules to either run a straight up Young Guns/Fistful of Dollars/True Grit/Magnificent Seven style game,

or else mix it with Labyrinth Lord (and Stars Without Number?) for a game based on Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

What color was that wedding?

Thoroughly enjoyed The Red Wedding.  But then I've read the books.

We saw Star Trek: Into Darkness last weekend - in IMAX 3D even - and we enjoyed it.  The homages to TOS got a little too heavy there at the end.  I was both enjoying the hell out of them and groaning inside at the same time.  A few plot holes, but overall a fairly well done flick.

Oh, and we saw Iron Man 3 like over a month ago.  Damn grad school.  My son thought it was too intense.  Similarly to Star Trek, I was both impressed and disappointed in the way they handled the Mandarin.  It was a better movie than Star Trek, I think, but then I was having to answer about 100 questions a minute from a 5-year old boy for the first half, and then cradle his head when the scary flaming under the skin AIM guys were fighting Iron Man at the end.

I think Iron Man 3 has been out long enough that this isn't considered spoilerish.  At least I hope so.

Lots more movies on the horizon I hope to get to see.  And I hear Arrow is a pretty awesome show.  Want to check that out, too.  Maybe when I get these papers done...

Crowd Source My Rogue's Gallery!

In order for me to more effectively run more Star Frontiers games for the Busan Gamers this summer, I'm gonna need a list of interesting criminals to inhabit the planet of Outer Reach. 

Want to help?  You don't even really need to have the Star Frontiers rules (although if you want to actually stat up your criminal, feel free to save me some time).  What I'm looking for are just some interesting, colorful characters that I can use as targets for bounty hunting missions, foils, street contacts, and the like.

So if you've got an idea for an outer space bad guy, let me know in the comments here or on G+.  And I'm looking for a wide range of criminals, from pickpockets and hoverbus molesters all the way up to serial killers and criminal masterminds.

And here's a sample format:

Name:
Race*:
Wanted for:
Current Bounty:
Personality Quirk(s):
[Optional] Star Frontiers Alpha Dawn stats:


*The Star Frontiers races I'm using are just the Alpha Dawn set [Human, Dralasite, Vrusk, Yazirian, Sathar], but if you really want to use something from Zebulon's Guide or some wacky Star Wars alien or whatever, feel free.

A slight change

For a few months now, the old blog has been getting lots of anonymous spam comments linking to websites that are probably fronts for phishing, viruses, or something.  I'm sick of having to clear out these posts every other day or so.

So I've disabled anonymous posting of comments.

Josh, you're the only regular anonymous poster that I have.  Sorry.  If there's something you want to say, shoot me an email or PM me on Facebook and I'll repost it here for you if you want.

In other news, Chanbara waits patiently while I write a couple of papers for grad school.

Blogging about interesting game stuff waits as well.

Oh, and apparently Jack Vance wasn't dead already, but he is now.  Bummer of sorts.  Maybe when I work through my current stack of Carl Sagan, Poul Anderson, Joseph Campbell and Terry Brooks (hey, it was dirt cheap at the used English book store/cafe here in Busan - don't judge me!), and the next semester's worth of TESOL/SLA readings, I'll try out some more Vance.  I really enjoyed the Dying Earth books.  I'd like to read some of his other works.

A strange confluence

Last night, in one of my Ph.D classes, our professor showed us part of this TED Talk while discussing the limits of copyright/IP law with regards to creating English teaching materials or having our students get involved in creating similar content and then releasing it online as a teaching tool. 

And the whole time, I was thinking, "That's so OSR."  It's also very "Indie RPG."  As Gygax famously said, "Why should we do any more of your imagining for you?"

Content coming soon!

Well, we've recovered all (or almost all anyway) of our data.  Now I'm sorting it out, reinstalling various programs, and the like. 

Plus, it's the end of the semester and I've got a couple of papers to write.

Not much gaming going on, but don't fret, gaming content will be back up on the blog soon!

As long as Kim Jeong-Un doesn't nuke Busan, that is...

Crapola

Two nights ago, we had a catastrophic hard drive failure on our PC.  And for some reason, our external hard drive had stopped automatically saving a backup over a year ago and we didn't notice.  So we've possibly lost a year plus worth of data.

My wife will take the old hard drive to a shop tomorrow and they'll see what they can salvage.

Back up your data, folks!  If you're like me, you always think about it when you're away from the computer, and when you get to the computer you aren't thinking about it anymore.

Anyway, for those of you hoping to see Chanbara released sometime this decade, don't worry, all of those files are on my netbook.  I've probably lost a few recently downloaded pictures (pending recovery operations tomorrow) but since they were all downloaded from the internet, I'm sure I can find them, or suitable replacements, again.

Once again, hurray for the public domain!

Anyway, back to work.  I've got to clear off enough space from our external hard drive for them to put all the data on if they can recover everything.


Update - We got all of our data.  Now I've got to spend the rest of the weekend getting the new hard drive and the external hard drive sorted out, and finish downloading and installing the programs we lost.  Fun fun!