Apparently Microsoft is not above admitting it made a bad choice and recanting. Don Mattrick came out with an official statement that the Xbox One will no longer require an internet connection every 24 hours, will only require internet access at startup, will not restrict the trading and resale of games, and will let you play all games the same way either online or offline.
Interesting. I guess the backlash was even more noticeable than just a lot of internet flack (maybe preorders were way below what they anticipated?)
Unfortunately, they still have that mandatory Kinect requirement and a $500 price tag so PS4 still looks like the better deal to me.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Rift and the F2P Experience....A Veteran's Opening Perspective
Rift officially went free to play on June 12th. I've been playing less and less of Rift in recent months, due largely to limited time, which is always going to favor "games that are fun" over "games that are making me grind." I have a low tolerance for slow progression, and Storm Legion, unfortunately, was laboriously slow. Despite buying into a year long sub at a good discount, I barely made it to level 51 on my warrior before my "I care" quotient was overhwhelmed by my "what the hell is this dragging on so long for?!?!" sense.
Still, I like Rift, and have dropped in periodically to keep up, albeit slowly. Hoping, of course, that sooner or later they would make the XP gain at high levels somewhat quicker, to accomodate more than just those mad, mad players who live and breathe MMOs and disdain the casuals like me.
Well, the new F2P model seems to have done just that: it has provided XP bonuses and potions to "patron accounts," which is a fancy new name for what a monthly subscriber is. It rewarded players by how long they had subscribed, with ongoing "loyalty" rewards for keeping with the game. I netted around 12,000 credits in the game, the currency used to buy stuff in the shop, something around $70-80's worth of currency. Additionally, the loyalty rewards dumped 23 gifts on me, in addition to a couple dozen dimension house items. Some of the gifts were useful (XP gain potions) and others were just plain cool (mounts and pets).
The prices in the game store range from the reasonable (a new character slot is about 600 credits) to absurd (3000+ for high end ten-level suits of armor). I don't have the store up so these aren't exact numbers, but they give you an idea of what to expect. The core of the game experience is entirely free, however; they are aiming to generate revenue entirely from extras, which is an interesting approach and I really think it's the smartest way that Trion could do this.
Given that I got so much loot on my many characters, and even after spending a couple thousand credits on cool mounts, wardrobe slots, and even an armor suit for one of my low level characters, I still have around 10,000 credits to use and I have to admit, it's very nice to feel like I got a proper reward for my 18+ months of dedication to this game. I've seen other conversions to F2P riddled with greed (cough >Age of Conan< cough >SWTOR< cough) and then there's the way Trion did it. Very smart. Sometimes...treating your players with respect will make you more money. I hope this pays off for them.
Whole game's F2P now, so no reason not to check it out. Population has exploded, and I don't mind since I get preferential status in queue as a patron player. Check it out! Jump on the faeblight RP shard, it's got lots of good people on it.
Monday, June 17, 2013
And Lo' Did the Nook HD+ Descend in price for the Day of Fathers
...and so then did I, at the behest of my understanding wife, buy one. She thought about getting one as well, but it didn't seem to support all of the games she liked playing (yet).
I hadn't planned on upgrading my old Nook Tablet to a Nook HD+ until I heard about Barnes & Noble's decision to go open-platform (more or less) on the HD line with access to Google Play. Doing this instantly made the tablet more attractive. Knocking $120 off the price (I paid $179 for the 32GB Nook HD+ edition this Saturday) even for only a week was a great way to overcome consumer concerns about the long term viability of the Nook product. After all....even if B&N were to collapse, in theory it would still be a viable (albeit no longer updated) tablet with access to the Kindle App and all the other wonders of Google Play.
So I've had it one weekend now and here are my quick observations on what I already see as being an indispensable sixth sense---a third eye---to me:
Love the Size and the Resolution
The Nook HD+ is the larger style tablet, at a 9 inch display with better than 1080p (it's sold as 1080p but scales higher) resolution. For the first few hours I felt like I was managing a larger toy version of my Nexus 7. By day two the Nexus 7 and the old Nook Tablet looked like the toys and it was getting hard to remember how I survived on such a tiny screen. The resolution is stunning....as good or better than the Nexus 7, and it blows the old Nook Tablet out of the water. If you've only ever had a Nook Tablet (or older) this will shock you at how beautiful the resolution is.
Performance is Great
I don't know if these games were optimized for larger screens, but games such as Need For Speed, Max Payne and Asphalt 7: Heat were suddenly much easier to control and play...in fact I'd all but given up on these games on the Nexus 7.
However, the HD+ is a dual core processor and not quite as impressive as the Tegra Quadcore in the Nexus 7. I saw that the Modern Combat series (3 and 4) were optmized for the HD+ so I downloaded MC4 to see how it compared to the copy on my Nexus 7. It ran fine, but I noticed that it felt ever so slightly more tasked than it was on the Nexus 7. A very minor observation, though; it still ran fine.
Google Play Library for Nook HD+ Makes it Robust
While the proprietary store for the Nook has more software available for the HD+ than older Nooks, it's still anemic compared to the Google Play store. Surprisingly few games on Google Play did not indicate compatibility on the Nook HD+....a few oddballs my wife likes, none of which were graphics-intensive, so I guess they haven't been optimized for the Nook HD+'s specific vagaries of design. A few more graphics-intensive games that run on the Nexus 7 (like Backstab) were not on the Nook HD+ options....yet. This thing runs Dead Trigger, Modern Combat 3 and 4, Need for Speed:MW and more without a hitch, so I suspect anything in the store that's not available for it will be soon enough.
Competition is Good
Being able to buy from the Nook store, from Amazon Kindle App, Google Play Books or potentially any other number of retailers is a blessing. It may look bad for B&N on the surface, but guess what....their the ones with a tablet that will let you buy from the competition, meaning they out of necessity need to consider their pricing competitively. If you have a Kindle Fire, you're locked in to Amazon's prices (which are admittedly usually slightly better). I don't see a lot of incentive to buy from the Google Play store, though. It honestly feels like the place you buy books a few times here and there for those odd trips when you're bored, or want to have a book to read to impress other people....you know, non-readers. Kindle App and Nook Store are both much more robust and easier to search.
Holy Cow I can Read PDFs on this Easily
The Nook HD+ screen is big enough that looking at a full PDF page is perfectly feasible. The speed of the readers available is mixed, but you can download any number of PDF readers from Google Play to get the job done (I still favor Adobe). Although for Pathfinder books I still prefer to rely on Paizo's "Lite" reader editions, most other PDFs flowed great and searched fine. It's good enough that it may change my RPG purchasing habits, to lean more toward PDFs for some products, and print them out for actual use less.
Comics, on the other hand...
I still find comics and graphic novels to be a pain. Services like Marvel's Reader apps were less than stellar, shutting down without a wi-fi connection. The actual tactile experience of reading a comic in-hand is incomparable to wrestling with it on a screen, even a high res 9 inch screen. This could be a generational thing, though.
Consensus
For the price I paid, the Nook HD+ was a seriously good deal. It's going to be my go-to reader from here on out. I'll update if something changes (i.e. it explodes or otherwise does something unexpected and undesirable) but after one weekend with it I can't remember life on a smaller tablet screen. As for my Nook Tablet, I think I'll be retiring that one, and will look at refurishing it into a learning tablet for the kid. He's almost at the point where figuring out how to work a device like the Nook is more important than figuring out how to take it apart....as soon as we're past that threshold, I'll gift him the Tablet!
ADDENDUM: There's one bit I forgot to mention. The Nook HD+ uses its own proprietary plug-in for power/data, and is not at all compatible with the normal cables you expect for most tablets. In fact it's not even compatible with the older Nook Tablet cable. This does mean that, should you need to seek out a cable replacement, BN will be the only place to find it. If I do figure out that this style of cable is made elsewhere or has a third party version I'll let you know (or if you are familiar with it, let me know!)
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Focusing on the Positives!
Okay, back to the usual round of gaming stuff on the blog!
Penny Arcade summed up Microsoft's E3 presentation nicely:
At this point....like, literally the only thing Microsoft can do to salvage it's image issue with the Xbone is to recant some of its established position. My suspicion is that due to numerous behind-the-scenes agreements and issues already in place that this is not feasible, so I guess they'll have to keep figuring out ways to spin their current tangled web.
I mean....if you haven't seen the video by now, it's really quite amusing: PS4's process for sharing games:
Sony really owes Microsoft, they couldn't have made E3 so entertaining and successful without them!
Penny Arcade summed up Microsoft's E3 presentation nicely:
At this point....like, literally the only thing Microsoft can do to salvage it's image issue with the Xbone is to recant some of its established position. My suspicion is that due to numerous behind-the-scenes agreements and issues already in place that this is not feasible, so I guess they'll have to keep figuring out ways to spin their current tangled web.
I mean....if you haven't seen the video by now, it's really quite amusing: PS4's process for sharing games:
Sony really owes Microsoft, they couldn't have made E3 so entertaining and successful without them!
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
A Strange and Morbid Night
I don't know where to put this exactly. It's not a post I'd consider typical for my blog by any stretch, and I don't blog about my local hometown on an ordinary basis, but every now and then something comes along that's just a little too....unusual....not to at least talk about. Consider this a brief foray into the wilderness of local journalism for me, then. For some reason I just feel like I need to document this.
For several days now there has been construction going on where I live, a modest apartment complex that is trying to upgrade its previously neglected appearance. Landscapers are scraping old gravel, adding sod and installing a public barbeque area even as they renovate the long neglected pool. We moved in here in February, chiefly as a money-saving venture, and it's an interesting community to be a part of, and very pet friendly.
Last night on returning home from work I noticed a pungent aroma, one which was unmistakable. For several days now there's been a growing smell, but at first it was assumed to be a by-product of the construction churning old soil that had long been used by dogs in the area. Then it was thought to be rotting trash from one apartment where a couple retropunk gals had skipped out in the middle of the night just prior to receiving an eviction notice. And at last today I realized that this smell was unmistakably that of a rotting corpse, and it was coming from the open window next to the apartment marked for eviction.
Who lived there? He was a middle-aged fellow, who cleaned up the area on his own time as a courtesy, and kept largely to himself. I hadn't seen him in weeks, and didn't even know his name. As it turns out, others in the complex, including a young girl who was always trying to play with my son said he had visited the hospital a week ago for coughing up blood, but had been discharged. Her mom knew the fellow has cirrhosis of the liver due to a heavy drinking problem. This was not looking good. We called the manager. He said he could come by the next day and knock on the door. Next I called the on-site repairman. Turns out he was a former EMT, and when he came down to investigate he immediately recognized the smell and agreed with me. There was a body on the other side of that door.
After he secured keys, the handyman opened the door up and a quick investigation revealed the obvious. It looked like the poor guy had returned home from the hospital, only to resume his bloody coughing fits. He must have felt chilled, because the heat was cranked up to the max. He had died in the bathroom, and unfortunately by the looks of it thanks to the heat wave we've been experiencing plus his heater on his body rapidly swelled up and burst. It was far from the ideal way to go, let alone be found.
Police and Fire Dept. were on scene in short order, followed by the coroner for a proper documentation and investigation. Despite the likelihood he died of his health condition, it's the sort of thing you just can't say for sure about. When management called his emergency contact, the man's sister (I am pretty sure it was his sister) was apparently more relieved than anything else; my guess is she had been expecting a call for a long time, one in which he was found on the side of the road, or in a ditch, or in a back alley.
Amidst all of this my wife and her cohorts in the complex watched the police activity as it went on, and I got to wrangle my own kid and others, distracting them with video games (always a sure bet).
In the end, they had to use two body bags to properly handle the body, which was so distended and putrescent that it required hours of careful work to properly disinter the body from the bathroom for removal to the morgue.
It was an interesting night.
For several days now there has been construction going on where I live, a modest apartment complex that is trying to upgrade its previously neglected appearance. Landscapers are scraping old gravel, adding sod and installing a public barbeque area even as they renovate the long neglected pool. We moved in here in February, chiefly as a money-saving venture, and it's an interesting community to be a part of, and very pet friendly.
Last night on returning home from work I noticed a pungent aroma, one which was unmistakable. For several days now there's been a growing smell, but at first it was assumed to be a by-product of the construction churning old soil that had long been used by dogs in the area. Then it was thought to be rotting trash from one apartment where a couple retropunk gals had skipped out in the middle of the night just prior to receiving an eviction notice. And at last today I realized that this smell was unmistakably that of a rotting corpse, and it was coming from the open window next to the apartment marked for eviction.
Who lived there? He was a middle-aged fellow, who cleaned up the area on his own time as a courtesy, and kept largely to himself. I hadn't seen him in weeks, and didn't even know his name. As it turns out, others in the complex, including a young girl who was always trying to play with my son said he had visited the hospital a week ago for coughing up blood, but had been discharged. Her mom knew the fellow has cirrhosis of the liver due to a heavy drinking problem. This was not looking good. We called the manager. He said he could come by the next day and knock on the door. Next I called the on-site repairman. Turns out he was a former EMT, and when he came down to investigate he immediately recognized the smell and agreed with me. There was a body on the other side of that door.
After he secured keys, the handyman opened the door up and a quick investigation revealed the obvious. It looked like the poor guy had returned home from the hospital, only to resume his bloody coughing fits. He must have felt chilled, because the heat was cranked up to the max. He had died in the bathroom, and unfortunately by the looks of it thanks to the heat wave we've been experiencing plus his heater on his body rapidly swelled up and burst. It was far from the ideal way to go, let alone be found.
Police and Fire Dept. were on scene in short order, followed by the coroner for a proper documentation and investigation. Despite the likelihood he died of his health condition, it's the sort of thing you just can't say for sure about. When management called his emergency contact, the man's sister (I am pretty sure it was his sister) was apparently more relieved than anything else; my guess is she had been expecting a call for a long time, one in which he was found on the side of the road, or in a ditch, or in a back alley.
Amidst all of this my wife and her cohorts in the complex watched the police activity as it went on, and I got to wrangle my own kid and others, distracting them with video games (always a sure bet).
In the end, they had to use two body bags to properly handle the body, which was so distended and putrescent that it required hours of careful work to properly disinter the body from the bathroom for removal to the morgue.
It was an interesting night.
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| The complex, and my wife with some of her morbidly, ghoulishly curious cohorts |
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| Marcus was largely oblivious, and spent a lot of time running up to police officers |
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| Removing the body |
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| Add caption |
PS4 takes the First Shot and hits it out of the park
Who knew?!?!?! The idea that Sony, only slight less vitriolic and clueless at times than Microsoft, would properly announce a Playstation 4 that caters to all the features that the now infamous Xbone has specifically eschewed.
According to Gamespot:
The PS4 will support the used market as it exists currently....so no convoluted new scheme to force consumers to give up the Right of First Sale, nor to assume that there is any harm from the used market that must be squelched, presumably.
No online check-in required. Wow!
And at the Escapist (I don't recommend Escapist for properly researched news bits, but it is convenient):
Price point of the PS4? $399. That's one hundred bucks less than the Xbone.
It'll come packaged with a 500GB hard drive, controller, headphones and HDMI cable out of the box. Looks like it does come with a Sony Eyecam or whatever it's called. I wonder if it will be an "always on" element or not? Given the Ps4 is designed to facilitate offline play as much as online, I'm guessing not.
Also, it's shaped like a Rhombus and does not look like it fell off of a Delorean.
Tech Radar has the best overview I've found so far.
I'll be putting my preorder down for the PS4 it looks like. Nice to feel excited for a console, even if it's just to be a part of the process.
Your move, Microsoft.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Iain M. Banks passes away from Cancer at age 59
Akratic Wizardry alerted me first (he seems to have a hotline to recently deceased author news) and a full story is right here. I was unaware that Iain Banks had cancer so this was news to me, and it's very sad as he was a prolific author, and a very important contemporary SF force behind the development of high-concept transhumanist fiction and space opera. His Culture novels are excellent, complex and deep reads, and it is distressing to know that Iain is gone, and his future potential along with him. He will be missed.
Grumpy XBone Post #2
So Microsoft released more details on the XBone and it's not terribly reassuring for many people. Ars Technica has an overview on the new info here. In parsing out the new data, there are actually some decent features being pesented.....but they're modest and hard to appreciate in the wake of the other more draconian elements. Specifically:
1. You can have a family account with up to ten people on it. This is pretty neat actually, something Steam doesn't provide for on PC and something the current Xbox 360 only touches on with family accounts. On the other hand, I can pop a disk into my 360 and anyone can play it. In fact I am pretty sure the only limits right now are on DLC and XBLA downloads purchased on my account. Even Sony's PS4 is a bit more reasonable than that, allowing a certain number of current accounts to access my downloaded content (so my wife can play Demon Souls too, basically).
2. The phone in online-every twenty four hours or every hour at a friend's thing doesn't really bother me because I'm always online at home, but the friends part does because I like to drag my Xbox 360 to my friend's house once in a while for some Halo or Gears of War gaming and he's got occasional internet issues (also, he doesn't even have an Xbox Live account so we usually don't go online at all). The new Xbone doesn't favor this freedom. The loss of offline functionality for more than 24 hours is problematic for the two or three times a year that Comcast/Xfinity craps out, too. I've always been able to lean on the 360 in the past to fill those periods with gaming. Admittedly, that's not a big concern for me....I am not lacking for offline entertainment, I admit....but it's still a negative, another loss of freedom that Xbone's predecessor offered.
3. The used games issue isn't a deal breaker for me either, as I don't buy many used games. However, the key reason I will buy a used game is if I want to try it out but want to return the game should it prove to be a terrible experience, and Gamestop still offers that sort of return one week from date of purchase. I also happen to think that Microsoft's got lots of evidence on its own current XBLA store that they don't really plan on moving to a competitive digital sales model ala Steam, simply because they barely touch upon the concept now. Xbox Live weekly sales are occasionally cool, but 95% of the time most sales are "meh" at best and the typical cost of games on their current digital service are disproportionately high relative to the long-tail value of PC titles, for contrast. If you want even more compelling evidence that Microsoft has no interest in consumer-friendly pricing structures and sales look at the travesty that is the Games for Windows Live store. So in this regard I have to clearly state that Microsoft's demonstrated how it handles digital sales, and it's not pretty.
4. There's no upside best as I can tell to the always-on Kinect elements, and I'm going to show my paranoid colors here by stating that for every other issue with the Xbone, this is the one which kills it for me. Actually, the language Microsoft itself used is what's the deal breaker, as the curious covert double speak, suggesting that the Xbone can and will be recording if you don't specifically opt out, is a tacit implication that it can spy like this, and therefore one must assume at some point it will do so. Someone coined the phrase "Xbox1984" as a title for the new machine, and I think it's apt. Yes, they do state "we won't record you," but the fact that they then discuss "opting out" as a process you have to go through suggests the default setting for the machine is "we can record you if we want, unless you specifically tell us otherwise. And even then, who knows!" The level of detail the Kinect is capable of recording is even more disturbing.
At this point, literally the only reason I can see to purchase an Xbone is if I want to continue with the Halo franchise. Gears of War was a great series, I quite enjoyed it....but it was clear with Gears of War: Judgement that the franchise was done and had just released one more retread that I strongly suspect was intended originally to be a DLC content pack for GoW 3 before Cliffy left Epic. Meanwhile Halo 5 will have direct competition from its progenitors at Bungie with Destiny....which, of course, will also be on the PS4.
All Sony needs to do is announce a PS4 that operates in the same core model of digital sales and distribution as the PS3 currently, with continued support for used game sales and I think they've won this console war before the first machine is ever sold. We'll see. That...or Wii U needs to do some aggressive advertising and Nintendo needs to display a distinct uptick in the number of third party releases for its machine. However, if the PS4 jumps on the Xbone bandwagon and Wii U continues to look irrelevant....then I think PC gaming is going to dominate.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Post-Apocalyptic Plot Seeds
These sixteen plot seeds for Post Apocalyptic adventures originally appeared in TSS 43, but I'm reprinting them here....possibly for a second time, my memory fails me!...for your enjoyment:
1 While traveling through wasted ruins, characters stumble across a colony of sentient rats which have descended from genetic experiments before the holocaust.
2 The players see a distant shooting star that grows ominously large, and crashes somewhere nearby. On investigating, they find a starship, out of which emerges a cosmonaut who claims to have been part of an experiment to test a ship that could travel close to the speed of light. The cosmonaut’s ship left Earth orbit in 1970.
3 The entrance to a hidden vault is found, in which a fabulously wealthy billionaire from Old Earth, surrounded by very human-like android servants has whiled away the years, kept unnaturally young by telomerase resequencing treatments. Recently, he discovered that his auto-docs are failing, and he need to find the tools and materials necessary to repair his anti-aging system.
4 One of the players discovers what appears to be an impressive ebony sword trapped in a lava flow. After pulling it out, the local survivor villagers proclaim him a new warlord. Unfortunately, the sword was lodged in the chest plate of a powerful pre-cataclysmic warbot, which, weapon now removed, begins to heal up with nano-repair bots before shattering its rocky tomb. Oh, and it wants its sword back.
5 A nearby volcano (which may be a smoldering crater from the end times) is radiating a lethal cloud of spores, which infect local humans and animals with a silicone-based life form that drives them in to madness and frenzy. The spores are wafting from a lava tube inside the crater, where the deadly plants are blooming, having grown up and out after being exposed from the depths of the earth.
6 A war satellite is still functioning, zapping targets at random on the planet below with a powerful particle beam weapon. It is possible to be stopped, but this involves finding an ancient comm. Station, breaking in past the still-functioning robot security units, and shutting it off.
7 A squad of immortal super-soldiers wanders the wastelands, carrying out a need for war which was genetically encoded as a biological imperative. They wander in to the peaceful lands of a survivor community, and attempt to forge an army out of the weary folk, or destroy them if they wont cooperate.
8 An alien vessel arrives in orbit and sends a contingent of scientists down to the surface of the apocalyptic world to investigate. It turns out they are from Earth, and that the Wasteworld is really a colony that succumbed to civil war decades ago!
9 While traveling the across the wasteland, the players stumble across a humongous relic from the old war, a tripod-like tank left over from the Martian invasion of Earth.
10 Locals are terrorized by what appear to be immense ravaging dinosaurs straight out of the cretaceous and beyond. They ask the adventurers to stop this menace. The trail leads to a ruined laboratory where particle physicists once worked on creating wormholes. It turns out that the AI which runs the facility is still quite active, and finished their work, creating a wormhole in time which leads back in to the distant past. It’s trying to perfect a way to send people through, to test the laws of causality!
11 Sometime during the cataclysm an ancient army of war machines was buried beneath waves of lava. The basalt later proved to be a valuable mining source for a local colony of survivors, who were digging for the metallic parts and pieces entombed within. One of the war machines was otherwise preserved intact in the quick-cooling lava flow and has awakened! It now seeks to reconstruct the interred army of its machine brothers, to complete the job they started…and needs humans to serve as "living brain cases" for the hyper-advanced machine intellects!
12 A horde of slavering, liquefying mutants that generate voluminous quantities of highly corrosive vomit are marauding the land and terrorizing the local citizens. The heroes stumble upon a camp of survivors in an otherwise intact resort facility from before the end times who are being terrorized by these slimers.
13 An alien vessel investigating the burnt out shell of Earth has crash landed, and the alien is on the loose! The alien is masquerading as a mutant, or perhaps even looks human enough, but some of the more savvy scavengers in the area have gotten wind of this high tech marvel wandering around and are trying to find it. The characters might benefit from aiding the creature in repairing is starship, either for gifts it offers them, or a chance to escape the Wasteworld. Of course, they could just as easily by the scavengers!
14 There’s a local hermit in the mountains called Big Ben who is a survivor from the old days, an ageless cyborg soldier who has lived through a hundred years of struggle and doom. Rumor has it that he’s the only one who knows where the crazy cyber-mutants from the nearby city ruins are coming from, and the PCs need to convince him to help their little survivor town.
15 Monstrous mutant insects are coming from south of the old border, larger than skyscrapers and leaving massive swaths of destruction in their wake! The PCs are not only challenged with protecting their local community, they have to figure out why the bugs are migrating north, and what could possibly be so terrifying to these immense mutants that they would flee from?
16 The PCs are investigating rumors of a local mystery, where people are seeing a strange, supernatural entity that they are calling the Mothman. Someone still has a working DVD player, or one of them curious “books” about the mysterious Mothman, so they know this is a supernatural being from before the end-times, and a small cult is growing up around this being, which people believe is a harbinger of doom. A local skeptic thinks the Mothman is a fake, and that someone is behind it, maybe even the preacher who’s initiating the new cult growing up around the creature, and he wants the PCs to debunk it in favor of his techno-church that’s losing its congregation! Of course, the mystery of the Mothman could be a fraud, but maybe, just maybe there's something more to it....
1 While traveling through wasted ruins, characters stumble across a colony of sentient rats which have descended from genetic experiments before the holocaust.
2 The players see a distant shooting star that grows ominously large, and crashes somewhere nearby. On investigating, they find a starship, out of which emerges a cosmonaut who claims to have been part of an experiment to test a ship that could travel close to the speed of light. The cosmonaut’s ship left Earth orbit in 1970.
3 The entrance to a hidden vault is found, in which a fabulously wealthy billionaire from Old Earth, surrounded by very human-like android servants has whiled away the years, kept unnaturally young by telomerase resequencing treatments. Recently, he discovered that his auto-docs are failing, and he need to find the tools and materials necessary to repair his anti-aging system.
4 One of the players discovers what appears to be an impressive ebony sword trapped in a lava flow. After pulling it out, the local survivor villagers proclaim him a new warlord. Unfortunately, the sword was lodged in the chest plate of a powerful pre-cataclysmic warbot, which, weapon now removed, begins to heal up with nano-repair bots before shattering its rocky tomb. Oh, and it wants its sword back.
5 A nearby volcano (which may be a smoldering crater from the end times) is radiating a lethal cloud of spores, which infect local humans and animals with a silicone-based life form that drives them in to madness and frenzy. The spores are wafting from a lava tube inside the crater, where the deadly plants are blooming, having grown up and out after being exposed from the depths of the earth.
6 A war satellite is still functioning, zapping targets at random on the planet below with a powerful particle beam weapon. It is possible to be stopped, but this involves finding an ancient comm. Station, breaking in past the still-functioning robot security units, and shutting it off.
7 A squad of immortal super-soldiers wanders the wastelands, carrying out a need for war which was genetically encoded as a biological imperative. They wander in to the peaceful lands of a survivor community, and attempt to forge an army out of the weary folk, or destroy them if they wont cooperate.
8 An alien vessel arrives in orbit and sends a contingent of scientists down to the surface of the apocalyptic world to investigate. It turns out they are from Earth, and that the Wasteworld is really a colony that succumbed to civil war decades ago!
9 While traveling the across the wasteland, the players stumble across a humongous relic from the old war, a tripod-like tank left over from the Martian invasion of Earth.
10 Locals are terrorized by what appear to be immense ravaging dinosaurs straight out of the cretaceous and beyond. They ask the adventurers to stop this menace. The trail leads to a ruined laboratory where particle physicists once worked on creating wormholes. It turns out that the AI which runs the facility is still quite active, and finished their work, creating a wormhole in time which leads back in to the distant past. It’s trying to perfect a way to send people through, to test the laws of causality!
11 Sometime during the cataclysm an ancient army of war machines was buried beneath waves of lava. The basalt later proved to be a valuable mining source for a local colony of survivors, who were digging for the metallic parts and pieces entombed within. One of the war machines was otherwise preserved intact in the quick-cooling lava flow and has awakened! It now seeks to reconstruct the interred army of its machine brothers, to complete the job they started…and needs humans to serve as "living brain cases" for the hyper-advanced machine intellects!
12 A horde of slavering, liquefying mutants that generate voluminous quantities of highly corrosive vomit are marauding the land and terrorizing the local citizens. The heroes stumble upon a camp of survivors in an otherwise intact resort facility from before the end times who are being terrorized by these slimers.
13 An alien vessel investigating the burnt out shell of Earth has crash landed, and the alien is on the loose! The alien is masquerading as a mutant, or perhaps even looks human enough, but some of the more savvy scavengers in the area have gotten wind of this high tech marvel wandering around and are trying to find it. The characters might benefit from aiding the creature in repairing is starship, either for gifts it offers them, or a chance to escape the Wasteworld. Of course, they could just as easily by the scavengers!
14 There’s a local hermit in the mountains called Big Ben who is a survivor from the old days, an ageless cyborg soldier who has lived through a hundred years of struggle and doom. Rumor has it that he’s the only one who knows where the crazy cyber-mutants from the nearby city ruins are coming from, and the PCs need to convince him to help their little survivor town.
15 Monstrous mutant insects are coming from south of the old border, larger than skyscrapers and leaving massive swaths of destruction in their wake! The PCs are not only challenged with protecting their local community, they have to figure out why the bugs are migrating north, and what could possibly be so terrifying to these immense mutants that they would flee from?
16 The PCs are investigating rumors of a local mystery, where people are seeing a strange, supernatural entity that they are calling the Mothman. Someone still has a working DVD player, or one of them curious “books” about the mysterious Mothman, so they know this is a supernatural being from before the end-times, and a small cult is growing up around this being, which people believe is a harbinger of doom. A local skeptic thinks the Mothman is a fake, and that someone is behind it, maybe even the preacher who’s initiating the new cult growing up around the creature, and he wants the PCs to debunk it in favor of his techno-church that’s losing its congregation! Of course, the mystery of the Mothman could be a fraud, but maybe, just maybe there's something more to it....
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Fill Blog Wednesday!
I've been extremely busy with work which has been spilling into over time, and from the second I get home right up until his bed time my son has been absorbing my time. He turned 18 months as of May 25th, but his development is moving along at an insane pace. The kid's running, sprinting and his latest trick is the ability to open doors, which has of course led to an escalation in out-of-reach locks for the front door. His ability to understand is amazing, considering he's still focused on speaking single words, but his selective hearing when it comes to "doing what I want to do" vs. "what mom and dad are telling me not to do" is amazing. He's a stubborn and determined little fellow.
So I haven't built up a ton of blog content lately (I usually have a variety of pre-loaded blogs to cover for weeks I'm too busy to stay abreast of things). Hopefully this weekend I'll have some time for updates, but for now another rare "family blog."
On gaming news....the only real news is that Ultimate Campaigns for Pathfinder should arrive at my FLGS this week, and it sounds really neat. I'll talk about it more if it looks like the book has a broad universal appeal to more than just Pathfinder fans (I have a feeling it does, we'll see).
Also, for reasons not entirely clear Guild Wars 2 sucked me in finally and I think I'll be focusing heavily on that for a while. Other than that....some more graphic novel reviews on some of the other New 52 DC universe books I've picked up, and maybe another movie review or two. I may even get back to writing about games, still have some partially completed content I was working on for B/X D&D as well as Magic World.
Till then....back to work for me!
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| Marcus has decided he will drive |
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| Marcus balancing on his rocking horse (yes, I dragged him off immediately after snapping the photo) |
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| Marcus meets the candy bear in Old Town (and tries to free him from his shackles) |
So I haven't built up a ton of blog content lately (I usually have a variety of pre-loaded blogs to cover for weeks I'm too busy to stay abreast of things). Hopefully this weekend I'll have some time for updates, but for now another rare "family blog."
On gaming news....the only real news is that Ultimate Campaigns for Pathfinder should arrive at my FLGS this week, and it sounds really neat. I'll talk about it more if it looks like the book has a broad universal appeal to more than just Pathfinder fans (I have a feeling it does, we'll see).
Also, for reasons not entirely clear Guild Wars 2 sucked me in finally and I think I'll be focusing heavily on that for a while. Other than that....some more graphic novel reviews on some of the other New 52 DC universe books I've picked up, and maybe another movie review or two. I may even get back to writing about games, still have some partially completed content I was working on for B/X D&D as well as Magic World.
Till then....back to work for me!
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