The Mexican town of Catemaco is hosting an unusual event this Friday: the annual International Congress of Witches. Politicians and businessmen come for power spells, and the lovelorn come for spells to entice a mate.
For $1,000 in donations Philip Reed will take two weeks to create a game titled 'FASERIP.' This will be a new, free, professionally-produced game that is opened so that other publishers may create supplements compatible with it.
FASERIP will be compatible with the old Basic and Advanced games that inspired it; the game's sole purpose is as an open source document for publishers. Players can use the game to play, but they'll gain little new value from the free product planned. It is the new supplements that can be created that will be of true value to everyday players.
FASERIP, if funded, will be created and released as a free PDF. After 30 days all feedback will be considered and the file updated at which point it will also be made available in print at cost.
NOTE: No work has been started. FASERIP will not be created until after it is funded.
If you have any questions about FASERIP please contact roninartspresident@yahoo.com.
Over almost three decades, a small laboratory at Princeton University managed to embarrass university administrators, outrage Nobel laureates, entice the support of philanthropists and make headlines around the world with its efforts to prove that thoughts can alter the course of events.But at the end of the month, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, or PEAR, will close, not because of controversy but because, its founder says, it is time.
The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university’s engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling.
“For 28 years, we’ve done what we wanted to do, and there’s no reason to stay and generate more of the same data,” said the laboratory’s founder, Robert G. Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton’s engineering school and an emeritus professor. “If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.”
Princeton made no official comment.
The gaming potential alone for this occurrence is pretty phenomenal. Where do all of these researchers and the accumulated knowledge go to? I am sure that there are corporations and shadowy organizations and individuals who would want to get a hold of the knowledge and researchers.
Obviously this information, like any other, can be used for either good or ill.
This are photos of my gaming collection, posted here and to Flickr. Every now and then you have to take stock of your habits.
Premise: Rebellious transhumanists uncover a shocking conspiracy in the furthest reaches of the Astral Plane.
Genre: Crime/Pulp
Robert Anton Wilson Defies Medical Experts and leaves his body @4:50 AM on binary date 01/11.
All Hail Eris!
Skirmisher Publishing LLC is excited to announce that it is partnering with Pagan Publishing to resurrect The Unspeakable Oath, a leading periodical devoted to various manifestations of Lovecraftian horror in games, books, and films.
The Unspeakable Oath was last published in 2001, and the partnership will resurrect it in summer 2007 as an annual digest, containing top-notch articles, scenarios, and support material for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, Pagan's Delta Green campaign setting, Skirmisher's Cthulhu Live, and more.
Hundreds of episodes of BBC programmes will be made available on a file-sharing network for the first time, the corporation has announced.
The move follows a deal between the commercial arm of the organisation, BBC Worldwide, and technology firm Azureus.
The agreement means that users of Azureus' Zudeo software in the US can download titles such as Little Britain.
Until now, most BBC programmes found on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have been illegal copies.
Beth Clearfield, vice president of program management and digital media at BBC Worldwide, said that the agreement was part of a drive to reach the largest audience possible.
'We are very excited to partner with Azureus and make our content available through this revolutionary distribution model,' she said.
Fans and bloggers are planning a worldwide blog-a-thon to commemorate the life and legacy of Carl Sagan -- consummate scientist, communicator and educator -- on Dec. 20, the 10th anniversary of his death. Sagan was Cornell's David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences.
The only cartoon-themed restaurants that I've eaten at have been at theme parks and the only memorable one was Marvel Mania at Universal Studios, Hollywood. It has since closed down (probably because the food wasn't that great), but it was kind of entertaining to have Spidey hanging out at the dinner table. Perhaps drawing inspiration from that one selling point - that it is fun to sit with the characters - from such themed restaurants, a new cartoon-themed restaurant has opened up in Toronto that takes the theme further.
iMaid Cafe is a cosplay restaurant, which basically means that all the staff members are dressed in costumes and play a certain role. In this particular case, that role is of a maid from Japanese anime cartoons. 'I call them maids not waitresses,' said 24-year old Aaron Wang, the owner of the restaurant who is originally from Beijing. 'They smile a lot and they are cute. I want somebody cute like the characters from cartoons -- big eyes, long hair and young.'
Martin Nodell, the artist co-creator of Green Lantern, died this morning less than a month after his 91st birthday. I'm afraid I have no further details other than that Marty had been in poor health lately.
Marty was born 11/15/15 in Philadelphia. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and later, Pratt Institute in New York. It was in New York that he began working as a freelance artist, in or around 1938. He soon started freelancing for several comic book companies that either didn't pay or didn't pay well. As he later told the story, he got tired of being stiffed by the smaller firms and decided to make an all-out effort to break into the majors. He called at the offices of the biggest publisher, DC Comics, and was told they were full up but that there might be work at an affiliated company, All American. The editor there was Sheldon Mayer.
Mayer gave him a little work. When Nodell asked what it would take to get steady assignments, Mayer, who was looking for a new feature for the company's signature title, All-American Comics, told him to come up with a character. Nodell returned a few days later with sketches and the germ cell of a strip called Green Lantern. He said the idea had come to him on the subway when he saw a man waving — you guessed it — a green lantern. Nodell also said he wrote and drew the first few pages of the first story...but he wasn't a writer so Mayer brought in one of comics' top writers, Bill Finger, to rewrite and finish the first tale. The result was that Green Lantern, by Bill Finger and 'Mart Dellon,' debuted in All-American Comics #16, cover dated July of 1940. The character, which drew inspiration from the legend of Aladdin, was an immediate hit on the magnitude of the firm's other new superstars, The Flash and Wonder Woman, and soon received his own comic. (The All-American company was later absorbed by DC Comics. A new version of Green Lantern was created in 1959 and that version remains popular today, though the original Nodell incarnation has also been known to reappear.)
Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Between and Climax. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too.
A total of 519 communities have been erased from the newest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.
Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere 'placeholders,' generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.
YMB's crack investigative team has unearthed the long rumored, but never confirmed, collaboration from 1983 between Marvel's Chairman Emeritus Stan Lee and religious comic tract creator Jack Chick.
Long out of print and now only infrequently stumbled upon in the odd truck stop bathroom (as all good religious witnessing tracts should be) YMB is now able to present to you 'Galactus is Coming!'
A SPICY sausage known as the Welsh Dragon will have to be renamed after trading standards’ officers warned the manufacturers that they could face prosecution because it does not contain dragon.
Jack Williamson has been in the forefront of science fiction since his first published story in 1928. Williamson is the acclaimed author of such trailblazing science fiction as The Humanoids and The Legion of Time. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Williamson with inventing the terms 'genetic engineering' (in Dragon's Island) and 'terraforming' (in Seetee Ship). His seminal novel Darker Than You Think was a landmark speculation on the nature of shape-changing.
Jack Williamson died Friday 10th November at his home in Portales, New Mexico.
I'm going to start this out by saying something that won't come as a big surprise to some: I'm not a big fan of fantasy literature. Sure, I've made my attempts at reading Tolkien, Jordan, and so many others that are out there but most of them have just not sparked my interest. There have been a few fantasy writers that I've liked over the years, but they tend to be sword and sorcery writers like Moorcock, Leiber and Howard. I guess that I just liked their energy a lot better. Because of this disinterest I got out of fantasy gaming round about 87 or, except for a couple of one shots back in college and a rather long run as a player in a D&D 3.0 game a couple of years back. The stuff just doesn't really get me going in a way that makes me want to run or play in a fantasy game for any long period of time.
I'm stating that so that we all have a baseline for the conversation here. This isn't going to be a 'let's talk Chris into liking fantasy literature' discussion.
However, recently (do to my buying up some old RQ3 stuff online...most of which I am still waiting to arrive) I've been eyeing putting together a fantasy game to run. Obviously I want something that will interest me as a gamer and a GM, which means that the heroic fantasy stuff is straight out. What I am interested in is something that has a very strong fantastic element to it, but without being the 'stereotypical' fantasy stuff that I am really not as interested in going into. Obviously, from the title of this thread, I am looking to run something with no magic in it. Period. No spell casters, no clerics with healing magic...none of that. I do want there to be elements of the fantastic in there, however. I want bizarre non-humans who are different from elves and dwarves, and who are more than just the familiar tropes and conventions dressed up in new clothing.
I want a world that is dangerous, strange and more than a little dark around the edges *but* at the same time I want the the heroes (the PCs) to be grand and larger than life. They are heroes who kick ass and take names, but at the same time there are grander threats to them out there in the larger world. But I don't want those threats to be so overwhelming that there is no chance of the PCs being able to achieve victory over these threads. I want mythic and fantastic, but without the usual trappings of magic that populate most fantasy games and books.
An unemployed man was arrested Wednesday for strangling a woman he had got acquainted with through a suicide website, police said.
