After a week’s hiatus so I could play with the kids on an island, our Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition playtest campaign gets back underway tonight. The campaign’s officially moved to “active” status, and now has its own campaign home page in the GriffWiki. For those late to the show, we’re using Planetorn as a … Read more
On this episode of Radio Active, geek fitness gets a gut check, Nuketown delves deep into statistics and I discover a new path to gaming adventure with the Pathfinder RPG alpha. I also try two new online productivity tools and offer my thoughts on how to write a better role-playing game adventure in less time. … Read more
This episode of Nuketown Radio Active is brought to you by the letter F. Also, StarGirl turns five, we buy a car-camping tent, Nuketown gets upgrades to its anti-spam capabilities, Critical Hits blogs about the life of RPG gamers, Reaper announces modern day miniatures, and the MacMommy figures out how to balance teaching, technology, and raising … Read more
The Dark City A Team campaign (and we really do need to come up with a better designation for the upper level characters) resumes tonight after the unexpected death of the entire B Team at the hands of the Kobold King last week. Before we do so though, we’ll be running through a playtest of … Read more
Friday’s game day was supposed to see our lower-level Dark City campaign characters’ wrap up Paizo’s Crown of the Kobold King module and then return to our home city of Obsidian Bay for some much needed down time. And then … Total Party Kill. It was our own fault. We went up against a dozen … Read more
DrupalCon Boston is looming large, but before I get there I decided to go visit my sister in New Hampshire. It’s a long trip — seven hours or so from Easton, longer with the family in tow — so I had plenty of time to get caught up on my podcasts. First up with Pulp … Read more
This week’s Game Day sees us returning to the Dark City campaign to wrap-up our quest to save a bunch of kidnapped kids from some dungeon-dwelling kobolds. It’s a fun adventure, but I find myself straining to connect it to a Game Day column. So instead I’m going to stick with the semi-random rambling approach … Read more
Back in November, when I was working on my novel, I wrote a scene in which the main characters got together for a graphic novel book club. When I mentioned this to my gaming group, they thought it was a great idea … and that we should give it a try in the real world.
After much discussion and a few delays, we’re finally doing it. Our first-ever Graphic Novel Book Club will take place tonight at WhichBrew, where we’ll be eating good food, drinking local beers, and discussing Alan Moore’s classic (if highly depressing) graphic novel Watchmen.
It’s a tough novel to start with because it truly feels like a novel. It’s dense and literary, with some chapters that spin the narrative wildly out of control, and an ending so depressing it could drive you to drink. It’s dystopian alternate history 1980s has almost no sympathetic heroes; there are plenty of reasons to hate them, and almost none you can admire.
I’ve been fighting the good fight against RSS bugs in Moodle 1.8.2. The problem isn’t actually with Moodle, but with Snoopy, the PHP class that emulates as a web browser and which Magpie RSS library uses to fetch the feeds.
It seems that the current version of Snoopy has some issues with redirected URLs. It has trouble following 302 Page Moved messages and has an annoying habit of putting the port number into redirected URLs. While it’s not technically wrong to do this, not every web server thinks that the urls foo.com and foo.com:80 are the same (strange but true).
Case in point: The Wall Street Journal. The following feeds involve redirects (apparently served through FeedBurner, so I’m betting any feed using FeedBurner would have the same issue):
http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7011.xml
http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7014.xml
After a few days of working with Open Office’s word processor, it was time to turn to the spreadsheet. I don’t work with spreadsheets much at home, but I do have a few specialized uses for them. One of those is a campaign manager for my Mutants & Masterminds campaign – I use it to … Read more