Sept 3rd 2014 and World Inspirations

(Christope Vacher, Untouched Garden)

Yesterday I talked about my Dungeons and Dragons world I am working on.  I said that I get to lean on the crutch that is "classic fantasy" cliches because it was meant to be a typical D&D fantasy world.  I did not intend to make it sound boring.  I do have some features added in.  One of those are the Floating Isles that might define the setting.  These large floating stones are scattered around the planet with no explanation of what they are.  Even the gods refuse to speak about them.  Much of the History I wrote pertains to what these stones really are, and it is something the players will not know, but may find out if they adventure in the world long enough.  Anyway, these stones have existed since before recorded time and even oral traditions that survive to today.  They are as part of the world as The Moon.  There are songs sung about them, legends attributed to them, even an Astrology like study of them for scrying, fortune telling and moral advisory.  Its not weird for their world, they have simply always been.  Recent scientific study of them has proved they move without traveling, that they have a forcefield about them that prevents dirt from accumulating or harm to come to them(except for the famous Halfling "living" stone that supports grass and has celebrated picnics upon it).  There's lots of little details and let me tell you they ALL have meaning, they ALL have history, they ALL have reasons to them and explanations.  That's part of the reason why there is so many pages dedicated to this stuff despite the players never seeing or knowing it.  While I want the players have mysteries, NOTHING is left a mystery to me, nothing is added in "just because", it is all known to me so that I'm prepared to have answers if I need them.

(Christope Vacher, The Sentinels)

It was the work of Christophe Vacher that inspired me in this new world.  I have known his work for over a decade now, and it has influenced some of my D&D ideas here and there, but never on the massive scale that this new world takes it.  His amazing paintings featuring floating isles near land were always so fascinating to me, and actually played a part in me calling "floating blocks" in Minecraft to be good luck omens.  Other works of fiction,  from Magic The Gathering to Ni No Kuni have inspired parts of the world also, but in my head it is Vacher's landscapes that have me visualizing the world as I type.  Brendon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss have equal parts to do with how magic goes, while Ni No Kuni added a bit of Shinto to the primal nature of "nature magic".  Slayn's shop in Lodoss War and the Hootiques in Ni No Kuni inspired me to add the first "magic shops" I have ever put in a home-brew campaign world of my making.  Of course you'll see Tolkien influence with the Elves.  Its just hard to not do a "split Elven" kingdom, which EVERYONE seems to do since Tolkien did it, I will just strike this up as homage to Tolkien and ease my creative conscience :P  I'm doing this for a small group of friends after all, I"m not making money or profiting by it, so what does it hurt.

(Chrstophe Vacher, The Frontier)

September 3rd, 2014

I was almost snarky yesterday.  I had such Nerd-peen and correction fever that I almost signed up for an account at a certain game news forum just so I could call their "Lead Tech" guy out on not knowing shit.  People go to this guy for purchasing advice, after all.  He did a mid-range PC build and almost none of his choices make any sort of sense.  His reasons made just enough sense or sounded just good enough that people that don't know any better would nod and agree  I can deal with that, I"m fine with people making computer choices that I don't agree with.  What got me riled up though was that he chose a computer case that pretty notoriously does not have space for a CD-Rom drive, and yet with his list was an entire page detailing that he personally still needs a drive and that this one was worth its expense.  I WAS NOT going to call him an idiot or threaten his life, I was simply going to post "and where are you going to fit that drive?" and see if he changed his article.  That's his job, he's a tech guy for a website on the internet.  A couple of times a week he writes a few paragraphs.  While I don't expect him to know everything, he could at least research what he's writing about.  I realized though that it wasn't the end of the world, and it wasn't worth the effort just for me to be a smart ass... at least not this time.

I watched Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the feature film recently.  There was actually a set of cartoons just called Star Wars: Clone Wars before the 3rd movie came out.  It was done by Genndy Tartakovsky, the guy behind Samurai Jack.  It is a cartoon, where as the newest one is computer animated.  This new one was done by a different team altogether, and actually seems like it might be great.  The Tartakovsky series seems like something George Lucas had more a hand in, or rather the development team felt they needed to stay very close to Attack of the Clones.  I can not watch all of the Tartakovsky series because Anakin is his whiney self, just like in Attack of the Clones.  No effort was put forth to make him a more likable character, the person doing the voice is immitates his whine.  In the newer "Star Wars THE Clone Wars" it feels like the crew really attempted to fix Anakin Skywalker and make him something people would like.  It feels like the team really wanted to try and correct how bad the prequels were, and from what I hear from people that watched the whole thing, they succeed to an extent.  Give the movie a shot and decide for yourself if the show might be worth taking a look at.  

Milkyway in its Super-cluster

If I had a true appreciation of mathematics, I would have been an astronomer, plain and simple.  From my first book of astronomy to the opening scenes of Star Trek Next Gen, I have always loved the universe and craved new sights and new photos of it.  I have probably still not recovered from the heartbreaking realization that I do not like math enough to devote my life to finding these things out.  You can even read in that article that scientists had to subtract the expansion of the universe and map the flow of galaxies.  They did not do this using photos, they did this by analyzing thousands of pages of printed data.  The same goes for finding planets.  People think they take pictures and maybe squint their eyes... but no, all planets found so far have been found by math, and only a few have been imaged in visual light AFTER being found using math.  My next love would be history.  History I could do, history played to my strengths.  When I ran out of resources to find out new information about our world(my elementary days were pre-internet access after all), I made up my own histories for role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. 

Sep 2nd, 2014

September 2nd, 2014

(Christophe Vacher, The Messengers)

Interview after interview of the creator of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi, seems to come out lately and a clear fact comes out:  Final Fantasy 6 was his masterpiece and the poor guy does not even realize it.  I have thought for many a year that Final Fantasy 6 was sort of a black sheep in Japan.  When you read that Famitsu, the biggest name in gaming magazines in Japan(which still make bank there), does polls and asks opinions, it seems Final Fantasy 5 is the favored one over there in the SNES era.  In two interviews recently he has expressed surprise at the gaming blog "reporter" asking so many questions about FF6 instead of FF7.  He sees FF6 as a sort of failure in the west because it did not sell well.  He claims that one of the reasons they went "big" with FF7 and did away with 2D sprites, and spent $100 million on advertising was because FF6, according to Sakaguchi, didn't sell well here.

The other day I posted about all the new technologies converging in computers.  The stuff is still so new that they would add way over $1000 for the components that are first gen of their tech, which means they aren't hugely more powerful.  What it really means is that we're coming to an end to "patch in just a little more power" to an older system.  A Z77/Z87 platform computer will need to resort to extreme measures to keep up with Z97 and newer platforms.  Pushing DDR3 to DDR4 speeds will involve high voltage overclocking.  Non-G sync video cards will require overclocking as they still try to draw as many frames per second as possible instead of only drawing what is needed.  Many mid and lower CPU's were not created with the idea of PCI-E channels being used for things like Hard drives, and if you're rocking dual or quad videocards trying to keep up graphical power you probably will not have the lanes for a new SSD.  All this overclocking and extra stress put on the motherboard is going to reduce the computer's life for only marginal power upgrades.  I speak from experience.   I played Fallout 3 and Mass Effect on a system that was maxed out SDRAM(non-DDR!), a super overclocked single core processor, a IDE connected Velociraptor Hard drive, a PCI-E videocard re-engineered to fit in an AGP slot, power cable adapters to work with the new SATA and 6/8 pin connectors.  All these "patches" individually were more expensive than the better working upgrades, but could be done one at a time instead of a whole upgrade.  It gave this computer about 1 extra year of life before it burned down and melted.

On the D&D world building side of things, I have completed the World History notes portion of my planning.  It clocked in at 25 pages of single spaced, size 8 font.  If you are potentially one of my players, do not let this scare you.  This is a lot of information and notes that players will never have to know.  It is part of the equation in the world that gives reason to many of the current events.  I would say that 50% of it is stuff that no one living in the game world knows.  Later I will take World History, Magic Theory, Government profiles, Class Write ups etc and trim each of them down, combining them into a small "player knowledge packet" with only a couple of paragraphs per page and some artwork to set the mood correctly.  Its not my first rodeo, and I would classify the amount of information for this world to be "medium" in size.  Its a take on the "classic" fantasy D&D world, leaning on cliche is ok because people want it to feel like D&D, so its easy to fill the world out.   Why do so much work if only I will ever know what it contains?  Well sometimes weird shit happens.  Sometimes you have a player cast some sort of lore finding spell on a statue that has nothing to do with the story, but I will want to be able to talk about where it came from, who made it, why its there, and why it is important/unimportant.  Also I find it fun.  In fact, world building is my favorite part of the D&D experience.  The more world I build, the more "open" and "sandbox" the game can be.

Experience Points 04: Quad and September 1st, 2014

Experience Points 04: Side Story

The Gaia/Blazer/Creation Series

(original larger post here)

Quintet was Enix's "go to" developer near the early days of the SNES.  Soul Blazer is the least amazing looking of the 3, but it probably has my favorite gameplay "gimmick".  In Soul Blazer you are given the task of finding and liberating a soul that is important to an area, and after liberating it, you start seeing the town grow and mature over time.  Illusion of Gaia was made a bit differently than most action RPG's.  There is a linearity to it, leaving previously visited areas of the game unreachable for the rest of the game, this gets rid of the traditional "sandbox" style of gameplay that is expected with this genre. The masterpiece of the series and Quintet's crowning achievement was Terranigma.  Again the protagonist rescues a dying world that has been devastated by a war between 2 gods, and instead of rescuing towns like in Soul Blazer, you're reviving entire sections of a world.  Until I saw the "chip" enhanced games Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean, I chose Terranigma as the most impressive 2-D achievement on the SNES, the game is beautiful.

 The "series" has its own Enigma, one I had not realized despite it being a personal favorite of mine.  There is a game called Granstream Saga, a game I rented and later had to own myself.  In the early days of the Playstation, many games were 3-D-kinda-sorta, but not.  One of the first fully polygon RPG's I played was Granstream Saga, and it had beautiful anime cutscenes to help the story along.  If you are a fan of overhead Legend of Zelda and Secret of Mana games, this series is a must play.  While they fall short at various points to being as good as those series, they all have enough great gameplay and awe inspiring(for the era) sequences.  By the time you get to Terranigma, they are doing some things that just aren't seen in some games, and by then were pros at using the hardware.  The Trilogy is only a loose one, so you do not need to start at the beginning, you can choose where you want to start and go from there.

The reason why less is known about the series is that Soul Blazer was released in very little numbers here, and Terranigma was left in Europe, as Enix was not finding as much success in North America and thought the cost of marketing in our stores would not lead to enough profit, if any.  Its a loss and a rather large hole in our gaming knowledge that should be revisited as these types of games are given new life in the indie scene of today.

September 1st, 2014

Starting out with something light hearted.  Never let anyone tell you that Europe has a more progressive tax set up(keep with me, this is neat/silly).  They have what is called a V.A.T. which stands for Value Added Tax, and if you have ever dealt with shipping things to the European Union(of which I did quite a bit of), you have to deal with this.  In the EU, things frquently travel across boarders to finish assembly elsewhere.  Europe has a Tax set up so that at every part of the creation process where value is added, they tax it.  Add paint, V.A.T.  Add two separate pieces together, V.A.T.  Ok, this leads to some pricey taxes that businesses like to get around.  Enter the GREAT BISCUIT/CAKE WAR.  Biscuits of course being "cookies" to us in the U.S.  See, there is this thing called a Jaffa Cake that is popular in Britain.  The catcj is, Cakes do not get V.A.T., causing them to be cheaper.  Cookies, however, do get V.A.T.  The makers of Jaffas consider their product a cake, the European Union sued them, saying that the name didn't mean jack, it was a cookie.  They went to court, where it was decided that a definition of a cookie and a cake was needed.  In the end, the Jaffa was indeed classified as the less taxable cake.  Why?  Because if you leave a cookie on a counter, it gets softer as it grows stale.  If you leave a cake on a counter top, it gets hard as time passes.  They left a pack of Jaffa Cakes out on a table, and after a few days examined:  they grew hard like a cake.  Jaffa Cakes are not subject to the V.A.T. fees.

Ok.  So the decision for Nintendo to market their newest console as the Wii U was not the smartest of decisions.  Understand it or not, the truth is a high % of their Wii gamer base though the Wii U was an add on, and they had already been conditioned to ignore upgrades throughout the Wii life cycle.  You would think that with the upper management at Nintendo admitting it was a mistake, they would stop making decisions to confuse the hell out of their customers.  Enter the new 3DSLL.  Let's look at the past.  The Nintendo DS came out, and then there was the DSi and DSXL, both were just shape and style changes, but played the same games.  Then we got the 3DS, then a 3DSXL and the 2DS, both were just shape and style changes, they all played the same games.  Now we have the 3DSLL.  The 3DSLL looks like a larger 3DS, but has been upgraded, so now games made for the 3DSLL will only be usable by the 3DSLL.  The system looks the same.  There is no "3DS ADVANCE" name, there's ONE letter different in the name, the cartridges look the same.  How is this not going to confuse people?  They are literally splitting their market without having the balls to do a real new system.

Half a decade.  You all have had half a decade of consumer/enthusiast grade parity on PC tech, and I honestly do not think this has happened in my life time, let alone the past 20 years.  For half a decade your ram, CPU and GPU options have pretty much stayed similar.  The same slots, the same motherboards, the same tech in hard drives, and even GPU architecture is largely the same.  If you created a top of the line consumer PC 5 years ago, it would all look similar to the best you can get last week.  The end to this era starts this week.  Usually new tech trickles in fairly singularly, but we're having a converging storm of technology releases in the next year.  A new standard of RAM is being implemented that is not backwards compatible.  Monitors are going to need upgraded as videocards adopt "Active" and "G-Sync" refresh. Solid State Drive tech is set to plummet, and having 1 TB of SS storage is not going to break the bank.  Then there comes the new hard drive war for your PCI-E slots, with M-2, SATA Express, and a couple of other tech vying to win an update war to the SATA connect.  Not only motherboard layouts are changing, but cases are as well.  Both leaders of the gaming case market, Corsair and NZXT, are now releasing cases that do away with 5.25 inch drive bays(where your CD roms go).  They're using that space for radiators and hard drives..  Does this mean if you are building a high quality computer now that you should wait?  I would say no.   I know I rarely do 2 part posts in the bottom area, but this is getting long.  So tomorrow I'll explain what this means and why it doesn't make sense to spend so much to "future proof" your computer right now.