There were massive quantities of beer consumed (homebrew Noisy Wingnut Steam Hefeweizen, and Cream Ale), good food, good friends, lots of gaming.

One of the things which consistently impresses me about my friends are the fact that they actually read real books (not many people do these days), and they are interesting. Present and being read were:

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Some random thriller called Excaliber
• Kitchen Confidential (Bourdain’s book)
• The Cuckoo’s Egg (this one was mine).

The game table also got used, though I didn’t get a lot of action shots, we got a few. Games played were:

• Munchkin Cthulu
• Munchkin Quest
• Lord of the Fries
• Shadowrun

Socks inspects the game board by shoulder surfing Erich

Aftermath

Aftermath

Eclipse Phase is an interesting roleplaying game which deals with conspiracy and horror (always good things for fiction), and far future science fiction concepts of post-scarcity economies (Star Trek style replicators) and transhumanism (consciousness transfer, cybernetics, etc.). It is also noteworthy as the first game (at least, of which I’m aware) released under a Creative Commons license. This is not an OGL thing like D20, where some of the text is okay, and other stuff isn’t, etc. This is the whole deal. You can redistribute the PDF, create derivative works, etc. I think the only restriction is on commercial use (which makes sense – if you want to do that, get a license).

I wish more publishers would do that.

Anyway, to the point.

I was browsing around and found this blog page by Rob Boyle. All the PDFs, for download, for free.

If you like it, please support the artists by buying the print books.

He returned it, and asked me “But what about all those people who take it too seriously and hanged themselves when their character died”.

Dude? Really? You play guitar in a rock band – do you really believe Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne made kids do bad things?

However, he got me thinking – I know the origin of the tale is the Jack Chick “Dark Dungeons” tract, and there is a Tom Hanks movie “Mazes and Monsters”, but are there any ACTUAL documented cases of folks taking it too far?

svan_1004

• There were originally supposed to be two combat encounters – zombies in the bar, and zombies in the farmhouse.
  • The bar was handled by getting on the radio to the sheriff and bartender trapped inside, telling him to get down, and then putting a few hundred rounds through the front of the building at about 4′ high. Zombie chop suey. Of course, these were spore zombies, so half the team got infected by the inhaled spores.. not that it was really dangerous – they happened to have two magical healers who cured the infection.
  • The farmhouse was supposed to be fighting with a possessed human, a walking space-tree thing, and a couple dozen zombies coming out of the corn. This didn’t take very long, considering that they tried to talk to the girl, then dropped her with a headshot when she pulled a scattergun on them. At that point, everyone else wasn’t human, so bring on the propane truck and a fuel-air explosion.
• They broke into a radio observatory, stole these poor students’ data, then never used it.
• With all that, they got finished early, so I had to invent more encounters.. hence the zombie pigs, cows and crows.

I think that’s about it.

I’m still impressed with Savage Worlds.

• A goat
• About 5 lbs of C-4
• Containers of salt and nails

Answer: The world’s largest, walking, demon-spawn attracting Claymore mines….

Roleplaying game players are often very, very creative..

Oh, and Savage Worlds works really well.

• Been sick with the seasonal flu. Got better. Mostly. Have this nagging cough which is bothering me. But, feeling a little better each day.

• A guy emailed me asking about his website. WTF? Well, apparently there is another Matt Caron, who owns 8bitorange.net, and this guy was looking for web design. Of course, I go look at the site, and I’m like “gack! You need a website redesign, so instead of just doing it, you put up a witty placeholder?” So unprofessional. I didn’t even do that when I redesigned this site, and it’s just a hobby/personal site, not something for a business. But, this ia one of the problems with the state of the industry today. Surprising that anything works.

• A friend sent me this very amusing video clip

Aside from looking interesting in general, it also licensed under a CC BY NC SA license. More info is here.

Not only does this mean that I can grab bits of the book to legally make and repost a GM screen, or make a character sheet, without fear of being sued (so long as I don’t sell it, which I won’t), it ALSO means that I can SHARE the PDF for noncommercial use. Don’t believe me? Look at the first item of the license [0].

Realistically, what does this mean?

Well, it means that I bought the $60 book and PDF bundle. Catalyst has been putting out freaking gorgeous books which I want for pure fanboy squee, even though I tend to read the PDF.

It also means that I can legally share the PDF with my (imaginary) gaming group and legally copy/print the pages out of the book/PDF as reference material.

“What’s the big deal”, you say, “I always used to do that”.

Yes, except now it’s legal.

I think the main thing here is that they get it. Roleplaying games are not a closed box where you sell lots of product by making it scarce – it’s about building a community of fans and evangelists who go out and get more people to play your game. Ultimately, you’ll move more product than if you kept it in a vault.

Good on ya, Catalyst Games and Posthuman Studios. Let’s hope more folks follow your lead.

Now, while they have every right to protect their copyrights, and indeed have a financial responsibility to do so, and further, stopping PDFs of in print products may make sense, that doesn’t change the fact that:

• They’re stopping it on the grounds what we, and by that I take it as I, am stealing from them.
• They’re stopping it for out of print products too.

For the second thing – remember, I did post this, a long time ago. I was hoping to pick up books from the out of print Alternity line. Guess not. Way to go, WotC.

Now, then there’s the insulting thing. The last folks who called me a thief were the RIAA. As such, it’s been 10 years since I bought an album from an RIAA member label, because they keep pushing DRM, extending copyright, and suing folks. Similarly, I tend to avoid Disney.

So, I suppose this means that I will not only be boycotting WotC, but also all of Hasbro. I suppose my money will have to go to other companies.

And, to think, I actually bought the 4th ed boxed set.