And there you go! I really have to sit down and read my copy - it arrived, and I was so busy getting the new job I just put it on the shelf.Originally Posted by Hrugga
This also highlights the usefulness of 'secondary sources'. James and Jeff Dee are good examples of people who do look stuff up in the on-line sources, and then developing the fragments that Phil left us into very useful texts.
It's probably in the Blue Room; I remember a thread on the Nlyss, going on, at one point.
Phil liked to do his scripts in a specific bit map for use with his Macs; we have the original files he did, and we're working on a converter to use to display them. I can get the files to open and display on our older Macs. We kept all of our fleet from over the years, so a lot of the older and very obsolete programs are still accessible to us; it's getting them out of their original formats and into something modern that's the issue. (NASA has the same problems, I've been told.)
We got through there twice, once in the very early days on one of those marathon tubeway car trips that we sort of fell into. We'd be trying to get to some destination, and one of the group would be absolutely, positively, sure that they knew how to program the car to take us someplace.
Of course, they didn't, and we'd get to visit all the 'PC tourist traps' like the Lost City of Bayarsha or the City of the Red Tiled Roofs (which looks just like Berkeley from the air; I have my suspicions.) Given how often we'd see these places, I am pretty sure that Phil had a mental list in his head where he'd have us roll d100 and he'd mentally pick where we were were going. He was very consistent about it too, so one of the things I've been looking for is a written list; we have a copy of his personal playtest copy of EPT - one of the green cover versions - and I'm pretty sure it's in the back of that.
(One of the downsides of all the turmoil of the past several years has been the lack of time I've had to go back into the files and do all these research projects I've been wanting to do for decades. Hopefully, with the new job, I'll have the time to do it.)
There's going to be more on this in the book, as you might expect, but the gist of it was that we'd show up at the station near the place, get out, and discover that the locals were pretty nasty. We'd make a run for the station, hoping that the car was still there, and Get Out Of Dodge In A Hurry. They do keep the stations guarded, so we didn't get very far into the local area before getting jumped. We mostly got to see the Hlyss cities at a distance, just long enough to be able to admire the alien architecture - very 1930s and 1949s pulp, it was, just like the Hlyss themselves - and then we'd get hit by the local version of the welcoming committee.
Keep in mind that Phil liked to roll everybody up as if he was rolling human NPCs, and that he played them as being just as smart and just as fast as we were. (In the case of some of the party, it wasn't a stretch. Phil really was smarter and faster, most of the time, then a lot of us were - myself included.) As a result, we had to be very careful.
I thought that it has been very good. I'm still getting used to being out and about in daylight, but being around people again has been quite nice - I've been pretty isolated for the past eight years due to my work schedule.
I do a lot of work-flow management, which I am pretty good at, and a lot of mechanical work with large, noisy, and very dangerous machines. I enjoy that as well, but I am being very careful!
Lots less stress, my blood pressure is going down, and I'm enjoying being awake when other people are. It's all quite nice, actually.
Well, the upper levels are like Grand Central Station a lot of the time, with humans from the various temples, player-characters and other adventurers, and non-human 'PCs and adventurers' all over the place; undead are the particular specialty of the Temples of Ksarul and Sarku (and their cohorts, of course) so they tend to be localized to these areas at this level. Go lower down, and you get a lot less traffic; fanatic devotees and adventurers, and undead and various creatures serving more-or-less as 'minefields' for the unwary. Lower yet, it's mostly undead (again, localized to points of interest to their temples0 and wandering horrible creatures; you do tend to get a lot more of the ancient mechanical traps this far down. Usually at the very bottom, you get the tubeway car stations - traps in and of themselves, as far as I'm concerned - and lots of the biological and technological guards / traps of the ancients.
Gonzo wizards, undying or otherwise, add spice to the mix with their intrusions and whims; they tend to leave odd stuff behind to ensnare their rivals - for all I know, they sit around at the College at the End of Time laughing at each other over this sort of merry prank - but when a party find them it's usually pretty bad news for us mortals.
Welcome back to the living.. I'm glad you're enjoying the new gig. You couldn't pay me enough at this stage of my life for me to work the off shifts on a regular/fixed shift. No thank you. Been there done that for too long.
Shemek.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
Chirine,
Just wondering if you could tell us anything about the servants of the One Who Is. You know, the white reptiles, four arms, four legs, red eyes, use blow guns...
Shemek
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
Delighted to hear it. Swing shift is a bitch, isn't it?
I don't care if you respect me, just buy my fucking book.
Formerly known as Old Geezer
I don't need an Ignore List, I need a Tongue My Pee Hole list.
The rules can't cure stupid, and the rules can't cure asshole.
Just played the FFG Star Wars X-wing miniatures game again last night. DAMN, that's a good game.
I don't care if you respect me, just buy my fucking book.
Formerly known as Old Geezer
I don't need an Ignore List, I need a Tongue My Pee Hole list.
The rules can't cure stupid, and the rules can't cure asshole.
Yeah with all the different games, Fleet, Fighter, Skirmish, and RPG, it would be cool for a FLGS to put together one of those mega-crossover events like they used to do with 40k's Battlefleet Gothic, Epic, Apocalypse and 40k. You could do the whole Battle of Endor (or whatever).
Even the the "cutting edge" storygamers for all their talk of narrative, plot, and drama are fucking obsessed with the god damned rules they use. - Estar
Yes, Sean Connery's thumb does indeed do megadamage. - Spinachcat
Isuldur is a badass because he stopped Sauron with a broken sword, but Iluvatar is the badass because he stopped Sauron with a hobbit. -Malleus Arianorum
"Tangency Edition" D&D would have no classes or races, but 17 genders to choose from. -TristramEvans
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