Bugs! Bugs! Bugs!
I wrote a city generator for my Dungeons and Dragons Tools, and I modified it quite a bit to use it to generate and save cities for Lauremor. It will save me quite a bit of time coming up with establishments for cities. I still have to do the hard work by hand of writing the fluff that goes with the crunch. Crunch is easy because you can automate it like I’ve done. The fluff is the hard part. Especially since I have 63 nations to detail. In those 63 nations are a grand total of 623 cities to detail.
The city generator worked fine until it was time to re-vamp it to do the heavy lifting for helping me create cities. I had a left out two lines of code that made the page look ok at first glance, but some of the vital data was missing from the details on the page. I had done 460 of the cities, and I thought I was on pace to finish them all out by the end of next week. Turns out that with this bug, I have go back and re-do all 460 cities! Oi!!
Fortunately, Perl came to the rescue. I wrote a script to pull out the info that I had on each city, and save it to a text file. I then wrote another script to use that text file to hit the web server and generate a new city. It works quite well. There is still some data entry to be done (like flags for port city, herding city, forest city, etc.) Once I get these flags set, I can run my script and let it go!
The data entry for the flags should take a day or two or three. Once I’m done, I’ll fire off my script and let it generate all 460 cities for me. It should be very cool to watch the script in action. I can’t wait until I’m done with my grunt work, so I can get to the fun part of running my script. It’s a damn good thing I know Perl. It’s saved me at least a week of grunt work on regenerating the city information.
The Venture Begins
We got started on the new D&D game last night. We made characters last week, but actually started playing them last night. It was quite fun. We’ve got 7 players total. It’s been a while since I’ve been in that large of a group, and I really enjoyed it. We kept hings moving along quite well, and I think (hope) that everyone had a good time.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time typing up the adventure log for the game, so I’m going to cut things short here, and just give you a link to the log.
Time to go get some food. If I have any interesting adventures while out getting food, I’ll make sure and fill you in on them.
Working From Home
I have a weekly D&D game on Thursday nights that starts at 7 PM. If I go into the office, I don’t get out of there until 6, then I have to pick up my wife, drop off my carpooling buddy, head home, gather my shit, and then head to the game. It puts me at the game sometime around 7:45 to 8:00. I’m running the game now, so I can’t be an hour late anymore.
I asked my boss if it would be ok if I worked from home every Thursday. He didn’t have a problem with it at all. I have to jump through a few hoops to do it, but they are reasonable, and I don’t mind doing it. I have to report to him on Wednesday to tell him everything that I plan on doing on Thursday while at home. Then, at the end of Thursday, I have to send him an email telling him everything that I accomplished. If I miss an item on my list, I have to tell him why I didn’t get to it, or didn’t finish it.
It’s a good oversight to have on his part. Other departments had work from home privileges that were revoked because of abuse. His policy helps prevent that abuse, and will help us maintain the ability to work from home one day a week. I enjoy having that option, and I will do everything that I can to make sure that I continue to have that option.
I’m just glad that I have a cool enough boss to let me work from home because of D&D.
New D&D Campaign
We started a new D&D 3.0 campaign last night. We have a total of 7 players (plus me as GM), with an 8th waiting in the wings to join in. It’s been a while since I’ve played in a large group, and I’m really looking forward to running this game. Characters were created, they were introduced to one-another, and we’re going to be getting things rolling next week. It’s been a while since I’ve run a large group, so I hope that I’m up to the challenge.
You can find details about the game at this page. Each session will have it’s own entry in the list. We game Thursday nights, and I hope to have the adventure summary up by noon on the next day. It all depends on how busy I am at work on Fridays.
Also, since I’m doing the adventure summary on Fridays, my blogs will probably be shorter than normal since I won’t have much time to do the adventure summary and the blog. We’ll see how it goes.
D&D Game
I joined a Thursday night group a few months back in the middle of an adventure. The premise was that a demon summoned up a black rain to pound the Prime Material Plane. We had to hunt her down in her home plane to kill her off to stop the black rain. We finally cleared out her home tower on her home plane only to find that she had taken a few thousand bladelings, a pit fiend, and a fallen angel to the Prime Material Plane to assault key locations. We gated her back to her home plane, dimensional anchored her there, and started beefing on her. She almost killed my mage twice, but the cleric came to the rescue. The cleric wasn’t so lucky. He got blasted by her, and died a horrible death. Don’t worry though… We’ll get him back.
The fight was rough because of all of her spells, spell-like abilities, fire breath, elemental immunity, high AC, and lots of HP. Turns out the the fallen angel had cast shield other on her, so half of the damage that we were doing to her, was affecting the angel. The angel finally showed up on the scene beaten and battered. The thief in the group caught him flat-footed, and ran him through for tons of damage. This did the angel in, and nullified the shield other spell. It was quick work after that to get rid of the demon bitch.
We stopped the game shortly before 1 AM at the end of the fight. We’ll have to rest for a while, so that my mage can re-memorize gate. This will allow us to head back home to take care of the remaining troops of the demon bitch. I can’t wait until this story arc is finished. Should be a nice homecoming for all of us.
Happy Birthday To Me!
It’s my birthday today. I’ve had enough of them (this is my 33rd so far), so it’s not as special as they used to be. My in-laws sent me a card last week. My mom sent me one yesterday. I’m not expecting one from my brothers or father. That’s just the way they are. I’ve gotten a few automated emails from some forums that I’m part of, and I really liked them. Even though I know they came from a machine, they made me feel special. One of my favorites came from Steve Jackson Games:
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
The Illuminati are watching
Everything that you do
Fnord!
Slacking Off
Wow. It’s been over a week since I’ve last posted. So sorry about that. Here are some things that are going on in my life.
Selling a house: We’ve had quite a few people look at the house. Some complained that it was a ranch, and they didn’t want a ranch. My question to them is this: Why the fuck did you look at a ranch if you don’t want one? Morons. Quit wasting everyone’s time. There have been some people that complained about the dog smell. We’ve taken steps to alleviate that problem, so it shouldn’t be an issue moving forward. We’ve had a few promising lookers. One said that it was up in the air between our house and another house. We hope they choose our house. We’ll see how things go.
Buying a house: Things are moving forward well on the new house. The radon test came back with a level of 21.3. The EPA suggests living in nothing more than 4. We’ll need to get a radon mitigator to take care of the problem. We tried to get the sellers to do this for us, but they said that “according to our research radon is not a health hazard.” Morons. I’m not sure which “research” they used, but it’s not the right kind, I’m certain. There was also some electrical work that needs to be done in the main junction box. They refused to fix that as well. However, their counter offer for the radon mitigation, and electrical work was that they would include their garden tractor with the house. They claimed that the tractor cost them $3500 last year. We went to Sears (it’s a Craftsman mower) to check on their price. The most expensive tractor that they had (with all accessories) came out to just a little over $2800. I got very pissed that they had lied to us about the price of the tractor. I was in a rage until I got home and checked my email. Our realtor got the specs on the tractor. We went to Craftman’s website, built out a tractor with the same specs, and it came out to around $3500. Looks like I got pissed for nothing. We decided to accept their counter-offer, and move forward with the purchase of the house. We’re scheduled to close on the 13th, which is a Thursday. We’ve got a few friends helping us move on Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, I have about 14 friends showing up to help us move. I’ve helped tons of people move in the past, and I’m calling in all of my favors. Things should go smoothly.
School: I’ve registered for my Fall 2006 classes that start August 28th. I’m taking Astronomy and Security Breaches in the first 8 weeks of the term. In the second 8 weeks, I’ll be taking History of Early Christian Ireland, and Wed and E-Commerce Security. I’m really looking forward to my classes. Should be lots of fun. I hope to learn quite a bit in all of my classes.
Gaming: My friends and I suddenly became interested in the Hero system. We bought books, software, and source materials for the game. Hero Games made quite a mint off of our purchases, so they should be in business for a while longer. We created some Champions characters, broke some rules in our ignorance, recreated the characters, and played for about 5 hours last night. It was a blast. I’ve played Champions before, but it was about 13 years ago. I had forgotten how much fun it is to roll 12d6 for an energy blast! Rolling lots of dice is such a good feeling. We’re going to return to our regularly scheduled games of 1st edition D&D Saturday. We’re in the middle of cleaning out a devil infested castle. Should prove to be fun if we can ever get past the first room of the castle.
That’s about all that has been going on in my life. I’ll try to keep you updated on a daily basis for those of you that are reading my blog… if anyone is.
From Zero to Two
Yesterday I lamented about going from two characters to zero characters in the D&D game that I play on Thursday nights. I brought my laptop with me to the game last night because I figured I’d pretty much be dead weight (pardon the pun) around the table. The cleric in the group discovered that he had a scroll of true resurrection in his equipment list. They quickly whipped that out, true-rezzed Ciramond (the evoker), and then told him to gate Holt back to Archeron with the group.
It was a good thing Holt got sent home. He was running short on arrows, and had enough time to hit the local armory to get more arrows. He wanted more bane evil arrows, but those aren’t exactly kept in stock, and he didn’t have time to custom order anything.
With the casting of two spells, the group was back together again, and ready to go. We marched down some stairs, hit a trap (symbol of hopelessness) that took out the evoker and both front-line fighters. Fortunately, my dice were with me this night. Holt was plunking arrow after arrow into azers, fire elementals, and dragonnes. The cleric’s wise use of an implosion spell took care of three very powerful enemies.
When the battle was over, the evoker made a spellcraft check and came to realize that the symbol was what was keeping all of the forgemasters prisoner and screwing with half of our party. I couldn’t dispel the symbol with dispel magic (I had already cast my greater dispelling earlier), so I turned to try to disentigrate it. It worked nicely.
One of the captured dwarven forgemasters started talking to our dwarven fighter, and we learned that they were working on a powerful scimitar of unnatural (and evil) powers. Our thief, wearing a ring of major fire elemental protection, walked into the blast furnace that they were using as a forge, and retreived the scimitar. There was a quick battle with a huge fire elemental, and the thief came out with some bumps and bruises. We decided to try to see if cold would damage the scimitar since it was obviously immune to fire. A few cold breath weapons, ice storms, and cones of cold later, we had shattered the scimitar.
This brought the attention of the she-devil that we were there to kill. We were running low on spells, low on hp, and low on desire to continue battling that day. We quickly cast a wind-walk and retreated 240 miles away to a formian hive that we had befriended. Our quick retreat threw the game master into fits because now he has to totally rework the adventure to fit the circumstances. I hope he doesn’t take out his frustration on us and kill us outright… even if he does do it, we deserve it, I think.
From Two to Zero
I play in a D&D game every Thursday night. The game is a long-running game that is well established, and I only recently joined. There were two floater characters in the group, and I managed to pick up both of them as my own. Last week we were assaulting an iron tower of a she-devil on the plane of Archeron. The motivation behind the attack was planted with the party shortly before I joined, so I’m really just along for the ride. I only have the faintest clue about why we are attacking her on her home plane, and what we expect to gain from her death.
The first character that I’m playing is the GM’s NPC, Holt. Holt is an extraordinary archer. He has all of the ranged weapon feats, and, when I hit, can really crank out the damage. He’s the third line fighter for those moments when he is required to drop the bow and stride into melee combat.
The second character that I’m playing is Ciramond. It was another guy’s character, but he dropped from the group, and the group kept him around as a pseudo-NPC type. He’s a 17th level evoker specialist with all of the appropriate feats for dealing out massive damage. He’s kind of fun to play, but most of his damage spells are area of effect. That means that when the fighters wade into the enemy ranks, Ciramond must hang back and pick and choose targets with his lesser powered spells.
Even though I didn’t create either character, I’ve been enjoying running the characters… until last week when I went from two characters to zero characters.
Ciramond was the first to go. We were fighting a Kyton (powerful devil [demon?]) and it wrapped Ciramond up in chains to the point where Ciramond was totally helpless. Just as the Kyton died, a mephit appeared behind Ciramond. Apparently, the mephit had a few levels of assassin, and shot an arrow through Ciramond’s neck. I rolled horrible for Ciramond’s fortitude save vs. death (I needed a 12, got a 4) and that marked the end of Ciramond. Fortunately, we are high enough level that a true resurrection is a possibility, but the cleric doesn’t walk around with that spell memorized. I have to wait for the party to rest for a night before I can get Ciramond back.
Shortly after Ciramond started his long dirt nap, we came across a cloud giant with his pet hydra. We were doing fairly well against the combination, but part way through the fight the giant bellowed out a word of power. Everyone made their save… except for Holt. Holt needed a 5, and I rolled a 2. sigh Holt did die, but he was banished back to his home plane, which is being ravaged by a black rain that was summoned by the she-devil that we’re trying to track down and kill.
Holt has no way to get back to where the part is at in any expedient time frame. The easiest way to get Holt back with the group is for Ciramond to cast ‘gate’ and bring Holt back to the group. The minor problem with that is that Ciramond is pushing up daisies at the moment. Looks like if the group wants their only wizard and their archer back with the group, they’ll need to true resurrect Ciramond, so he can gate Holt back to Archeron.
Tonight I get to see if that goes as planned or if I’m going to be stuck with my thumb up my ass all night.
Gods and Devils
I’m working on a new world for my role-playing games called Lauremor. In the past, I’ve gone way overboard in creating gods. There was one world that I created that had 131 gods! Yes, 131. I know. It’s insane. This time I limited myself to 20, but I had one oversight. I failed to create a god that was lawful evil. I decided to fill the LE void by making devil worship fairly common, and I even have a good reason why this is true in Lauremor.
Now that I’ve detailed the 20 gods to the point where I’m happy with them as they stand, I’ve got to go through the 9 levels of Hell, and detail out some devils for some people to worship. Fortunately, most of this work has already been done for me in books like the Manual of Planes, and on a few web sites. Some quick searches online have revealed a plethora of knowledge. Now it’s a matter of distilling that information into something that I can use for Lauremor.
