NFL Championship, Power Outages and Bolt Cutters

Between the Bills washing out of the playoffs, today's power outages, and me getting ready for school, we taking a week or more off.

I have been hanging out with the players so I do have an idea of what happens next. I'll call it "Ortaire-4-9-3". One of my players asked if there was a spell that would remove shackles. A different player inquired about bolt cutters. So the players themselves have decided to free Ortaire the Raider from being auctioned off as a slave. 4-9-3 refers to the 4 raiders, the 9 characters of the player's party and the 3 elves.

I was expecting this very type of rebellion from the players, but not right in the face of the Coven of Ash. These are a triplet of 3rd, 5th and 7th level magic users. They can totally destroy the party in a direct confrontation.

Let's restate the facts:

• The Emperor and his council have given the players a letter which allows them to purchase or hire a ship at a price not to exceed 4,000 pounds silver. (40,000 silver at 1/10 of pound is 4,000 pounds). 
• Anytime this letter comes into play, it's being read as a grant of power which allows the players to do whatever they like as if they have the Emperor's blessing. 
• Roleplay is making this happen, as the players themselves don't state this and are only vaguely aware that this is happening despite a lot of hints, like the reader can't read or notes the Seal of Office on the outside.   
• Theoretically, they could simply demand that the town officials turn over Ortaire with that letter. (I would make them lose it in this play. It's a problem.)
• The Emperor really wants to end slavery, so the PC kind of do have his personal and private blessing. But the Emperor is unaware of the PC's outlook, so blessings would come after the fact.  
• The Emperor is hamstrung by other forces which prevent an outright end of slavery. 
• The Coven of Ash will kill the characters outright if they try a bold approach. The city will go into lockdown mode to avoid the wrath of the witches, which means there will be no help. 
• Senator Vitus is willing to help the PCs free Ortaire, but he has already contacted the 3 elves to do this anyway. They don't have a plan yet. 
• The raiders don't necessarily care if Ortaire is freed or killed. His silence is enough. 
• The raider's plan is to hoof it to their comrade's farm far to the east of the city. They will not do this if the witches are chasing them, but think it's a good place to be in a fight with the elves or the party. 

If the characters do anything on the sly, and it looks like they will, this will not trigger the Coven to take direct action. They will make a play on the PCs through mundane means, perhaps by sowing confusion among the city guard which has lost it Praetorian leadership. 

Other points of interest, the Praetorians in this setting are 20% assassins, 70% fighters and 10% all other classes as councilors and advisers. All of the assassins were wiped out by the Coven, so the Praetorians are reeling and allowing city officials to issue orders. Nobody wants to be in charge while the witches are in Nace. 

I'm setting a goal of playing again on Feb 1st, but we might have a session before that. 

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 011

Today, I am doing something different. The ‘verse is a difficult place and one false move could cost me everything. For that reason, I am going to create a cache in the ruins. This is a collection of inventory not stored on the ship. If something happens, I can come back to this place and claim this junk.

To recover a cache, I roll two dice. The first one indicates the number of hours it takes to find it, and the second determines if I can find it again. In the ruins, there is a 1 in 6 chance I won’t be able to recover the items. The more time that passes, the harder it is to find something.

I won’t be leaving stuff in the cache for long.

Annoyingly, robots are not easily cached. If they are not in a stasis field, they will breakdown. So our one robot is moved to storage in Engineering. I move one Fuel Unit into the found boat to move it. I divide up 20 of the Repair Units between the two boats.

I cache the 3 skimmers, 4 RU’s plus 100 secs.

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship,

2 Hopper with 15 units of fuel between them

1 Stasis pod 2 CU,

20 Repair units.

1 U-bot.

and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I now have 270 secs.

In the cache in the Ruins of Regari are:

3 Skimmers,

4 Repair Units,

100 secs.

The Wizard of Troy - Image Gallery

Don't have to much to say about this, this was a set up for a commercial back in 2006 or 2007. It's the city of Troy my Dad built.

Click to embiggen. 

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 010

On this day, the crew and I continued to search the ruins. We have a single encounter, discovering a room with 30 secs. worth of coins in it.

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship,
2 Hopper with 15 units of fuel,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,
24 Repair units.
3 Skimmer,
1 U-bot.
and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I now have 410 secs.

This closes out the week. Normally, on Ten-day I would be paying 300 secs. for the ship but I did that on day one. I now have 10 more days I can stretch, but I'm probably not going to do that.

On this day, I fork out the crew pay, which is rather minimal. 40 secs. leaving me with 370. I'm not comfortable yet but this week has been pretty safe.

I don't have an ad today, but I want to share a link to Wikipedia's article on Metric Time. It sounds brain bustingly hard but is probably what Star Smuggler is doing. 

Stupid Hobby Collision D&D+Linux

I like Linux and D&D. Rarely do these hobbies collide, but sometimes I can force it. Not that I am a great Linux user. I like Linux. I like Ubuntu with XFCE. It's a great environment for my purposes. I am newbie when it comes to terminal skills. This post assumes you have zero skill.

I wanted a simple way to generate 6 D&D Character Abilities scores using Linux. There are the classic methods of using a spreadsheet, but what if I don't want numbers in a spreadsheet? What if I merely need them displayed on the screen or in a text file?

Well... terminal can do that with the shuf command. Open a terminal and try this command:

shuf -i 3-18 -n6 | paste - -s -d ' '

Breaking it down, shuf will select a seemingly random number. -i is the input of an expected range, in this case 3 to 18 or 3-18. The headcount or the number of numbers generated in this fashion is -n6. Everything after the pipe | is formating. Basically, this part will turn the typical column of numbers into a row of numbers. 

If you play D&D like me, you let players re-roll ones. In this case, your command would need to cover a range of 6 to 18. Two times three dice is 6. Try this line: 

shuf -i 6-18 -n6 | paste - -s -d ' '

Ok. That's great. You get six numbers in a row on your screen. What if you want that in a text file? For sanity, use the cd command to move from wherever you are to the Documents folder. (I lose lots of files and time by NOT doing this...)

cd Documents

Now that you are in a safe place, let's add some information to that line of commands:

shuf -i 3-18 -n6 | paste - -s -d ' ' > Stats.txt

The instruction > Stats.txt at the end will create a file called "Stats.txt" in your current directory.

Go open that file:

Great. That is one character's worth of stats. Let's make more: 

shuf -i 3-18 -n6 | paste - -s -d ' ' >> Stats.txt

Note the double >> symbols. All that does is tell terminal to append the current information to the file described. Note: I clipped my screen to show gedit and terminal in one screen shot for the next step.

Repeat the last command with a small modification, change -i 3-18 to -i 6-18. Since you didn't close gedit, you will get a new button which refreshes the file. Before you do, repeat the shuf command again. This is easily done by pressing the up arrow and then return. Do this twice.

Ok, now hit that refresh command. You have 4 sets of stats, where the first two have a range of 3 and 18 and the second is 6 and 18.

Shuf is not exactly a random number generator, but it's good enough for government work* and character stats. I THINK it is using it's the process id time and doing a computation based on that value. That means if you run a bunch of these commands in rapid succession and that interval is less than a second, then the seemingly random numbers will all be the same or very close to it. This is why I didn't make it generate 6 character at a time. You probably can't hit up arrow + return in less than half a second so the effect is not as noticeable.

Lastly, you could always run info shuf to see the full documentation of this command or to read at your convenience, try info shuf > Infoonshuf.txt

*This is joke. DON'T use this to generate random numbers for government work.

The Troubleshooting (artwork) Post

I've been messing around with svg art using Inkscape. For whatever reason, when I upload these images they look fine on a desktop device, but are dark grey on a black background on mobile devices. I think I either uploaded some .pngs or perhaps forgot to flatten the image when going to .jpg.

Anyway this a test of 2 Skimmer ground cars.

These are 3 Greek soldiers. 

These figures have been a part of my Strictly (Duke) Springer posts, which I hope to fix soon. 

I'd like to scale them down to 1/4 and 1/2 sizes for counters. 

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 009

Dear Diary,

We went back into the ruins again. We found a pair of skimmers. One was intact, while the other was cannibalized for a single repair unit.

Skimmers probably don't have wheels.

Here are today's stats:

1 Antelope starship,
2 Hopper with 15 units of fuel,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,
24 Repair units.
3 Skimmer,
1 U-bot.
and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I'd like to circle back and talk about the various "units" in the game. There are repair units, life-support units and fuel units. Life-support or LU, provides air, food and water to all people in a vehicle for a day in a bad air or vacuum environment. On this planet, the air is good and we don't need them.

Fuel units power the hoppers and the skimmers. For a hopper, they provide one movement point, say from the ruins to the spaceport or from the spaceport to orbit. There is a multiplier for gravity.

Skimmers also use fuel units, but one per day. Only a few characters can drive the skimmers. The engineer has that skill, as do skimmer drivers. Skimmer drivers are a quirk, the will not leave the system they were from, so you always need an engineer. Were I to change a rule, it would be this one. I would allow bodyguards and medics to drive, but not starship pilots or navigators.

Obviously, the hopper is faster but the skimmers are more efficient.

#TBT - The One About Character Sheets

Originally published on Jul 15, 2015. It is a #TBT post for Jan 9, 2020. Hard to believe it's been this long since I went to convention.

I played Savage Worlds at a convention a few years ago. The game was adapted to the World of Flash Gordon, you can pick up a copy at DriveThruRPG. Each player chose a pregenerated character from a selection available. There was Flash, Dale, Barin (me), Zarkov, Vultan, Thun plus many others. Having picked our characters, we waited for our eighth player to arrive.

Within a few minutes, we were all chatting and joking. A lot of the humor revolved around radio shows and Flash Gordon in general. Our last player was so late, we started playing without him. We had a good time, playing and making in-character comments all through out. The guy who had Vultan did a pretty good BRAIN BLESSED impersonation. Zarkov’s player used a styrofoam coffee cup to read like a radio announcer.

It was all fine and well until the eighth player showed up. He made some funny faces at the remaining character sheets and eventually picked Dale Arden. He did not engage in any of the humor at the table, even when our “Flash” threw some cheesy lines from the movie at him. After one particularly funny “Flash ‘n Dale” comment, Dale froze for a second and rounded on “Flash”.

“What the f— is your problem?” he demanded.

The table went quiet. It was a bit before we got back to the serious business of playing the game.

After a while, I spoke to our eighth player. He was sort of shy. He stuck to the basics of who he was and what he did for a living. He knew nothing of Flash Gordon. As I explained the story to him, he actually warmed up and was a decent sort of guy. He and I chatted for the whole game. It turns out he wasn’t able to play a game he wanted and just picked anything at random. He was kind of disappointed.

But this wasn’t why he snapped. Oh, lord no.

When were we done, he apologized briefly to “Flash” and left. I chuckled when he was out of earshot. Everyone wanted details. What was his issue with our “Flash”?

Our eighth player’s real name was Dale. He had picked the character sheet with his name on it.