From a Fellow Allit

Fellow Alliterate (and really nice guy) Wolfgang Baur has taken his Open Design / patronage experiment to the next level with Kobold Quarterly, a journal devoted to Open Design and D&D. I haven't ponied up for my subscription yet, but interested parties should definitely check it out. Wolf's Open Design project is a fascinating - and by all accounts, successful - experiment, so it's great to see the next chapter in that particular story.

Which reminds me: Open Design was nominated for an ENnie Award, a really big deal in the gaming world. Voting is done by the public and starts July 16. Maybe you should give non-Corporate, people-driven game writing a nod this year.

Getting My Game On

Off and on for the last three and a half years, I've run a pirates role-playing game on Wednesday nights. The characters have progressed from level 1 to level 17 (this is D&D), and in the process have become world-famous pirates and are about to save the entire human race from extinction.

But the last fight will very likely bump them up to level 20, and I have no experience running epic level games. So I'm going to try my hand at something else: running a more traditional fantasy RPG. I've been making sketches on what the world is like ("word-building") and having a hell of a lot of fun doing it. Even if I don't end up running this game, I'm still pretty happy with the 20 pages or so of notes I've got about the game world and can probably find something interesting to do with it.

On a sidenote, I'm also using it to test Google Docs. The more I use Google's tools, the more I like them. A lot.

Maybe I can even set the calendar so I don't forget important days? Say, friends' birthdays? We'll see.

The Old Ones Were, The Old Ones Are

A couple of weeks ago, Roger and I were having a conversation about the nature of the Cthulhu mythos based on this post on his Livejournal, and why exactly Lovecraft's writing was considered "horror." At the time, I did a pretty crummy job summing up the ideas of extreme existential horror in the mythos, but I found a passage this morning (in the d20 Call of Cthulhu sourecbook of all places) that does a great job articulating it:

The cosmos is everything: the universe, the stars, the planets, all forms of life, the physical laws that govern them, and the agendas at work that affect us all. Unfortunately for us, humans didn't create the cosmos, and neither did anything we commonly know. There is no God, no Allah, no Buddha. Humans do not possess immortal souls, and when we die, we are but dust.

Worse, the cosmos does not exist to give us an interesting place within it. It exists to exist. Oiur role within the cosmos is only what we make of it, for in the grand scheme of things, we are irrelevant. Even when we live, we are but dust.

Our vague conceptions of things such as gravity and subatomic particles are but the barest verge of a vast, unknowable whole. Like blind sailors marooned atop an iceberg, we fumble to understand our terrain without guessing the truth: the bulk of our reality lies occluded beneath the surface. More terrible still, it is but a solidary mass drifting without direction in an infinite ocean of mystery. And the ocean is full of monsters.