Posts Tagged rpgs

UK Games Expo 2008… in one post

Posted by Rockjaw in Day Today, Events, Links of Others, MMO-related, Weird self portraits on September 1st, 2008

Yes, so this is three months late. It’s been written in fits and starts. When (if) you get to the end, you might understand a little about the delay. Enjoy.

Let’s start with a quick recap of…

Friday 30th May

Just two weeks after our last VanQuest we were off again, feeling a distinct sense of déja vu as we assembled at the car hire place, packed the van and ended up at Oxford Services for lunch. I find it slightly worrying that I’ve considered – twice – getting a ‘Frequent Customer’ card at the coffee place there.

A series of unexplained slowdowns on the M25 delayed us a bit, but apart from that we made good time, pulling into the Clarendon Suites’ car park before 5pm. Then it was a quick and easy unload, followed by a stress-free setup, the only slight kink being that we had to ‘haXX0r’ the wifi password for the venue.

The fact that we could hack it sort of speaks volumes… Read the rest of this entry »

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Wired on Gary Gygax

Posted by Rockjaw in Links of Others on March 11th, 2008

You may have heard that Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died recently. While I never had a high level of tolerance for his brand of rules-heavy gaming (At least, in early editions of (A)D&D), I can’t deny that without him, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing for who I’m doing it for. (Yes, sometime I will bore you with my pen-and-paper RPG background.)

I didn’t expect this Wired article on his life to be as good as it was (I should have; Wired is amazing, generally), but it’s really quite excellent, delving into the history of D&D, and the fundamentals of how it turned out as it did. I found it additionally interesting to see that Dave Arneson only became ‘co-creator’ of D&D after a lawsuit. Naively perhaps, I always thought that he wasn’t as big an influence as he was… and I now see without him, D&D probably just would have been an elaborate wargame.

Anyway. Absolutely worth a read.

Oh, on a related note, the heavily D&D-influenced webcomic The Order of the Stick did this cartoon on Gygax after his death. I saw it earlier today and for some reason it really got to me; I practically cried reading it.
RIP, Mr Gygax.

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