The girls are all into playing D&D whenever they can pry me out of my comfy chair and will run to get books and dice. They will then stand expectantly with puppy dog eyes till I (sometimes) acquiesce. I’ve created a bit of a monster… but I guess that’s part of the point of D&D - slaying monsters, right? I’m using 3.5 rules since I have the core books and I never really got my fill from the very few games I played of it last summer. I’ve been using PCGen, a java based open source character generator which makes rolling up and equipping characters (in any operating system!) as well as maintaining them so very easy. So far not much has really happened in the game - the party is on a mission to find a youth who disappeared from a nearby village and the trail has brought them to a small mining town in the hills.
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We were out at the LI Irish Fest which was held at the Abbess Farm in Calverton from about 2 until 11 on Saturday, and I had been having such a good time I had forgotten to take any pictures at all. All I have are some crappy shots from a cell phone, though I think Sport had a camera with him. There were 7 tents of various sizes, all very impressive. I quipped that we should find out how much it costs to have one of these put up, so we wouldn’t need to set up any tents at all when we camp; We could just partition the huge thing into rooms! In fact, the only thing that wasn’t impressive about the fest was the turn out. I don’t know if it was a lack of advertising or what, but there were some awesome bands playing to nearly empty tents which was a shame. The lack of crowds was very welcome to me personally, however - I just hope they broke even at least. Those tents were probably not cheap.
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Many years ago I was probably the only gaming geek on the Island whose mom attended more I-Cons than I did. She would go back when they had Dr. Who guests, but as Dr. Whos popularity faded in the US, she stopped going. Now into it’s 27th year (next weekend - I-Con April 4-6), I-Con is a science fiction convention held on the campus of Stony Brook University. Usually they’ll have somebody from Star Trek or Babylon 5, and lots of sci fi authors and sci-fi film makers, anime artists, sci-fi movies around the clock, science shows, filking, medieval re-enactment fighting exhibitions, and lots of gaming of all kinds. My friends and I would attend mainly for the gaming - non-stop role-playing and board games run by volunteers filling entire lecture halls with long-haired, dice-wielding miscreants. Trek guest is Jeffery Combs (who played, among many more unsung roles in heavy makeup, Weyoun on DS-9). Weekend pass is $55 if you didn’t hook up with a membership long ago. Anyone interested this year?

There was a time in my life when hanging out was synonymous with games. Video games, let alone personal computers were still in their infancy at the time and we had all grown up role-playing, so tabletop games were a natural extension of that interest. It didn’t matter where we ended up hanging out, there was usually some kind of game involved, though the games with all the little chits and cards were only busted out when we weren’t role-playing. There were lots of different classes of games, but a favorite was that of the “beer and pretzel” variety - games that evoked the spirit of role-playing in some way with none of the messy thinking.

Games like Wiz-war, Space Hulk, and Talisman were turn-based games were you rolled the die, moved your piece (which was usually a painted model of some kind since you had a ton of them anyway), and worked out your encounters so the next guy could go. Then you were free to grab another beer or go and twiddle with the stereo for a few minutes. Though I can’t say that Talisman ever was a personal favorite, it was good to haul it out of the closet again to recapture that spirit.
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Sundog is by far one of my most favorite games from the 1980s. Originally written for the Apple II in 1984 by Wayne Holder and Bruce Webster and released by FTL games (founded by Wayne Holder in 1982), I didn’t play it until version 3.0 was released as a port to the Atari ST in 1985. Sundog was just one of the successes of FTL. Any gamer awake around that time would recognize that other big FTL hit game series, Dungeon Master.
Thankfully, I can still play Sundog on my Mac using NoSTalgia 1.42. This emulator hasn’t been updated in several years, but it works well. Of course, you’ll need the game ROM to play the game as well. note: I have it on good authority you’ll find it on Automation Experts 116.

The original intent behind this post was to write up a history of the game and review the gameplay a bit, until I discovered this has already been done by Maury Markowitz, and quite well in my opinion. Ian Hadfield’s Sundog Information Page has loads of information about the various cities, planets, and commodity exchanges in Sundog.

The 20 sided die evokes memories of all night Dungeons and Dragons gaming sessions. I never imagined them being rolled in ancient Rome! Gaming blogs were all over this story when it first broke in 2003 when Christies announced it was auctioning off a Roman 20 sided die. I guess I just don’t run in the crowd of folks that can afford to plunk down $18,000 for such a bauble, but I have to admit that it’s intriguing. Measuring 2 and 1/16 inch wide and covered in arcane symbols, Christies claimed the deep blue-green glass piece was made sometime around the 2nd century AD. The die was supposed to have been found in Egypt in the 1920s by the father of the seller. Most of the blogs I have found have the same information, all gleaned from the Christie’s website lot info (no longer on the web), and all mentioned that ’several polyhedra with similar symbols are known from the Roman period’, but I can’t find anything (quickly) to support this statement (yet?). The fact that a University professor in Maryland paid the aforementioned exorbitant sum for the die at auction does not provide enough evidence for me that it’s not just an early 20th century oddity passed off as an ancient die. If anyone has any information about other polyhedra of this type, or can point to a scholarly study of the piece in question, please let us know!

My plant closes down for the holidays every year, and although there are many more productive things I might be doing during my time off, I usually end up spending much of the time hunched over my laptop either working on my websites or figuring out how to get obscure games running on the various flavors of operating systems I use. I’ve managed to squeeze a goodly amount of both pastimes in over this year’s break. I’ll let the site updates speak for themselves (check ‘em out!) and spend more time talking about the games I played.

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