Who the Hell is Frank Mitchell?

Comparative Character Generation 5

Another installment of Comparative Character Generation. This one covers New World of Darkness, Savage Worlds, Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, and other rules-light games. I'm only going to do two more of these, and then I'm calling it quits. Mostly it's for my own amusement, although I'd like to examine a few newer systems that are getting some buzz.

Character Generation 4

Another installment in the series, wrapping up d20 with actual characters, and exploring Labyrinth Lord, Warhammer, and Traveller.

Character Generation Report #3

Another essay/rant concerning running a D&D/d20/OGL game. No actual character generation in this one either.

The Invaders

"The Invaders" is another bit of nonsense from over a year ago. Part of the inspiration came from the UFO mythos, and part from Enterprise's "Temporal Cold War", where the pretty humans are the good guys and the scaly reptilians are the bad guys. Isn't that dull?

All Right, Who Started The Apocalypse?

"All Right, Who Started the Apocalypse" is a bit of nonsense I wrote a year and a half ago. Inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and the many near-apocalypses of Buffy, it poses the question, what would happen if the Elder Gods actually came back?

Character Generation Report #2

After a very long hiatus, I'm putting up the first half of an overview of d20-based systems. It's more of an evaluation of systems for a campaign I hope to run soon-ish, and certainly not an objective review of d20. You have been warned.

Gods and Religions in Role Playing Games

After a discussion on Dallas Roleplayers I've jotted down a few thoughts on the treatment of gods and religions in RPGs.

"Days of Judgement" Player's Guide

In advance of a "one-shot" RPG I'm planning to run Tuesday, I've put together the Days of Judgement Rules, or at least the player-relevant ones. It includes both an alternate combat and damage system for the base Prose Descriptive Qualities system, and background for the Weird West setting.

It's maybe too elaborate for a "one-shot", but, after filling in the blank sections, it might actually become a campaign.

Immortals in Role Playing Games

I've jotted down a few thoughts on playing immortal (or long-lived) characters in RPGs.

I Am Nyarlathotep!

I amNyarlathotep!

The 999 forms of Nyarlathotep are a point of meditation for the true initiate. It is through these manifold faces that the secrets of the universe are made known. Called "The Crawling Chaos", Nyarlathotep is the disembodied ego of Azathoth and thus the universal "I" of known reality. Some of the many documented forms are; Father of Knives, Nephren-Ka, the Black Man, the Beast of the Lashing Tongue to name a few.

Which Great Old One are you?

Character Generation Report #1

[UPDATE: Added comments from readers.]

After ten evenings or so, I've finished a comparison between six tabletop Role-Playing Games. If nothing else, HeroQuest players might be interested in a Big Damn Table of Probabilities.

The Dreaming Princess (Rough Draft)

The Dreaming Princess is a novella I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2005. It's still a very rough draft -- basically from my brain to the page, with minimal editing. The title may change too. So read it at your own risk. A ZIPped version is also available for download.

Updates, At Last

Not only have I updated this site after a year, I'm making drastic changes. When I first put up a title page back in Dec 2004 (!!), I wrote the following:

Those who know me know to look elsewhere for fancy CSS or dancing badgers or blogs recording the pointless minutia of my life. I type HTML directly into Emacs, my artistic abilities are extremely limited (duh), and last time I kept a journal the entries were months if not years apart.

I'm partly going back on that paragraph. This page is, of course, a blog, although most if not all entries will record updates to content, and provide a link. I also plan to do some CSS hacking, to make the site more readable and interesting. However, I'm still using Emacs.

On Writing

When I was in high school and college, I majored in Physics ... but I thought my real future was as a Writer. Capital-W writer. A few form-letter rejections and one line-by-line critique later, I pretty much gave up.

Now, with my very own website, I've made some more attempts at writing fiction, which I will post for your derision. (Hey, it's a sort of publishing, and it's cheaper and more ecologically sound than a vanity press.) My writing still sucks, although I hope not at an Eye of Argon level of sucking.

"... And The American Way"

"... And The American Way" (formerly titled "Form US-5187") is a transparently political dark fantasy I wrote in October 2003, cleaned up a bit.

Bookmarks

A Ruby script to collate bookmarks from Netscape/Mozilla, Opera, and IE into a single YAML database. Instead of preserving the original hierarchy, it uses folder names as "labels" attached to each URL. (I found that I had the same links filed in different ways in different bookmark files.) At some point I might write as script that converts the YAML file to Mozilla bookmarks, using a description of the canonical hierarchy of labels.

The tarball also includes a multithreaded link checker script, to verify that links still exist. I haven't gotten around to a proper installer, so if you want to use this as a module elsewhere, you'll have to copy it to the appropriate location yourself.

Download here.

Eiffel Dependency Metrics

Ruby scripts to compute Robert Martin's dependency metrics, as described in Agile Software Development, in Eiffel code. I have a sporadic interest in Eiffel, and wondered how Martin's metrics translate into Eiffel.

Most other languages have an explicit statement stating what modules or classes a source file uses (C/C++ #include, Java/Python import, Ruby require, etc.), but Bertrand Meyer in his infinite wisdom decided that resolving class names to their definitions happens in an "Ace" file when a program is assembled. Right now the scripts don't use Ace files, and assume (hope) that names are unique and that Ace files don't rename classes. This poses problems in, for example, the GOBO libraries, which have different versions of the same class for each compiler supported.

Like the Bookmarks scripts, this program is divided into several modules, one of which is an "Eiffel scanner" which is arguably more complex than a true Eiffel parser would have been. The scripts need not only packaging but better tests, so the numbers may not be accurate.

Download here.