Heh, Heh, Heh ... Take THAT, H.P.

"A devil from the Outer Dark," [Conan] grunted. "Oh, they're nothing uncommon. They lurk as thick as fleas outside the belt of light which surrounds this world. I've heard the wise men of Zamora talk of them. Some find their way to Earth, but when they do, they have to take on earthly form and flesh of some sort. A man like myself, with a sword, is a match for any amount of fangs and talons, infernal or terrestrial. Come, my men await me beyond the ridge of the valley."

--Robert E. Howard, "The Vale of Lost Women"

One of his weaker stories, actually, but I always gotta chuckle at that passage.

-The Gneech

Boring Americans!

Snagged from koogrr:

John Dvorak: Bland Americans

He's on to something here, but I think he may be misinterpreting the data. It's not that people actively want to not have color; it's that we're cheap, and color isn't worth the extra cost in time and effort. The reason the good ol' Model T Ford was "any color you want, as long as it's black" was so they never had to worry about matching paint, and black was cheap in bulk.

Also, to quote lythandra: "Also, we went through a period where they went wild with color, and everything was ugly. I'm all for color if used correctly. But when it's not, look out!"

Try going to Las Vegas sometime ... all the color you can eat. :)

-The Gneech

Happy Birthday, level_head!

Scumbag the Birthday Clown was apparently intimidated by the thought of singing The Birthday Song to a dragon, so I'll just pop up here myself and say, "Happy birthday, sir! You rule in vast quantities, and I hope it's a great one!"

-The Gneech

Ever-Popular Gaming Geekery Stuff!

Bit the first: The Big List of RPG Plots, c/o Psion on the ENWorld boards.

I have found that the "god-touched" feats jamesbarrett needs for Nadira (the NPC fighter/cleric in his game, affectionately known as "our lady of buttwhup") are in Dragon magazine number 305 ... which has mysteriously gone missing from my bookshelf, dang it all! I'll prowl around the house some more, but I have no idea where it may have gone. About six or seven issues that I know I bought are wandering around on their own, instead of obediently waiting for me on the Gaming Shelf, and this appears to be one of them. D'Oh!

-The Gneech

Missing Magazine Followup

Well, I did a quite thorough inventory and organization of my Dragon and Dungeon magazines and managed to pin down that the only one that was actually missing from my collection was the aforementioned Dragon #305 ... all of the other gaps are caused by issues that I didn't actually buy. And #305 was very likely in the binder with jamesbarrett's copy of Against the Giants that went south due to an unfortunate tendency of a certain puppy to use any vertical surface -- including the top of a trash can -- as an impromptu table. I went to the Paizo Publishing site and bought a replacement for #305 and back issues for some of the missing Dragons, although I couldn't find anyone that had Dragon #278 or #279 in stock, alas!

I did break down and buy Dragon #300 (the infamous Book of Vile Darkness tie-in), which I didn't want to buy when it came out because I wanted to discourage them from going down that path. I did not, however, buy the associated Dungeon #95, because that was $10 as a back issue! Foo, I don't want a complete collection that badly.

Popped over to Game Parlor this evening looking for back issues first and saw the 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook, but I didn't get it -- I've never actually used the 3.0 Psionics Handbook as it is! It's not that I don't want to, so much as I've never had a pressing reason to. jamesbarret is the only other member of the group who is an "oldschool" D&D player and thus the only one likely to care about psionics -- and they leave him cold. (I admit it, psionics does and always has felt like it was arbitrarily tacked on to D&D ... so camstone and lythandra aren't likely to miss them in their absence.)

I suspect that what will happen is that I'll get the Expanded Psionics Handbook once the matching data set comes out for E-Tools. In the meantime, if I come up with a cool idea for a psionics-based adventure, I'll switch E-Tools back to 3.0 mode and use the earlier book. I do have a ton of cool 3.0 content available to me in E-Tools now, I should really take advantage of it!

Hmm ... I wonder how the characters would fare against a kitsune psychic warrior...

-The Gneech

PS: The new NIMH site is up, finally, hooray! What a bear that project was!