Lolcats. Love em or hate em, at least they give the internets something to do with all of those extraneous cat pictures that are just lying around and taking up harddrive space. So, the theme of this comments section is – post your favorite lolcat picture!! Is is Longcat? The sad lolrus? Or some sort of invisible noun? Post ‘em up. If nothing else, it might be worth a few lols!

I’d also like to remind everyone about the UStream broadcasts on Sunday nights. We’ve got a great crowd of regulars, but everyone’s welcome, and the more geeks we have tossing around jokes & puns, the more fun it will be!! We broadcast every Sunday night at 7:00 MST, but I’m also trying to figure out what weekday might work best for the European and Asian Weregeeks in other time zones. I’ll let you know here on the blog and on Twitter whenever I do an broadcast for you guys!!

Last night, during the UStream, someone posted a link to the new Ultramarines trailer. I thought I’d pass that link along for all of the Warhammer 40k fans out there!!

Ultramarines: The Movie

It looks like this is going to be a direct to DVD release, but if the rest of the movie looks anything like the trailer, I do believe I will have to order myself a copy. The 3d modeling and rendering is beautiful, and I think that it suits the setting nicely.

I do wonder, though, just how much any of the other Warhammer races will factor into the movie. The teaser trailer is just that – very ‘teaser’y, so we only get to see one of the Ultramarines. Will there be Orcs or Eldar? Gorgeously and grotesquely detailed Tyranids? If so, sign me up!!

Also, they’ve got John Hurt and Sean Pertwee listed as voice actors, and you really can’t go wrong with the Storyteller and The Doctor’s son.

MUSH musings, Part II – Why a MUSH?

So, last week, I reminisced about how I got into gaming via MUSHing. So why then, after so many years and so many different ways of roleplaying – pen and paper, forum RP, chat-based RP, and LARP – do I still have a special fondness for a good ol’ MUSH??

Part of it has to do with how immediate the play was. Unlike forum based play, which often requires days of waiting for replies, you and whoever you were playing with were both right there, right now, and could trade posts back and forth for as long as your keyboards held out. And unlike something like a weekly D&D game or LARP, you could log onto the MUSH whenever you had a spare hour or two (or five…) to kill.

This spontaneity led to some very interesting story twists! It also, I like to believe, sharpened my skills as a writer. Being forced to come up with a character’s reply on the spot was a really great writing exercise, as was having to convey something that you’d normally just do as a gesture in words. Let me say that during my MUSHing days, the thesaurus became a very good friend of mine!

Which isn’t to say that there weren’t downsides to MUSH as a media for roleplaying, because there most certainly were.

The biggest downside was that many times, you’d log into a game only to discover that everyone was either sitting around idle, or off sequestered on their own, likely writing some *ahem* rather private stories… While the game was always there, it didn’t necessarily mean that the players were always ready to play.

Also, because everyone posts in turns (ie, I go, then you go, then that other guy goes, then I go again… Rinse, repeat), as soon as you got more than five people in a room together, it seemed as though so long would pass between your turn that you might as well just be playing on a forum!

There are, I’m sure, far more problems than this, but these were the ones that I remember causing me the most grief. But on the whole, I still wish that I had the time to log onto a game every now and then and relive the glory of my MUSH client’s green text on a black background. Those were, indeed,  good times. If only my old haunts were still around… But that’s a discussion I’ll save for Part III!

*      *      *

- Part I: Before LARP, there were other strange acronyms…

- Looking for MUDs, MUSHes, and etc? Try the Mud Connector!!

Hey all!! Just wanted to remind everyone that I’m going to be at the Phoenix Comic Con this Memorial Day weekend!!

The convention kicks off on Thursday, from 6-9, and runs until Sunday. I’ll be sharing a booth with the folks from Little Vampires, so drop by and say hello! We’re at booth 306.

You can find a convenient map of the hall by clicking on the picture to the left.

So it’s recently occurred to me that I really don’t use this blog space often enough, and I was thinking of doing a regular feature where I talk about some of my favorite role-playing games, both old and new. This won’t be a particularly journalistic review, just some of my random thoughts about games that I get excited about. Maybe if there are some games that you readers would like to hear me talk about, you can make suggestions in the comments and I’ll see what I can do. In fact, if you have an indie game that you’ve written that you’d like me to try out, or if you represent a gaming company and have new products that you’d like me to review, send me an email and we’ll work something out! I don’t have a lot of free time lately, but I’m always interested in checking out new things!

Today’s Topic: Before LARPS, there were other strange acronyms…

I got into gaming in sort of a strange order. Most people I LARP with tend to have picked up tabletop gaming back in high school and then worked their way into LARP through that. *I* went completely backwards. I got into tabletop gaming LAST, after Id’ been LARPing for nearly a year. And my first experience with roleplaying was not sitting around the gaming table on Friday night, but online.

But Alina, you say!! What sort of roleplaying games were online in the early 90′s??

Well, aside from the various chat room/#IRC/forum/bulletin board based games out there, there were MUSHes.Or MUDs. Or MUCKS or MOOs or whatever the room that you played on called itself. (There are differences between all of those terms, but sometimes said terms were used incorrectly. It was a confusing time.) Whatever the term you used, it all boiled down to text-based roleplaying.

I played on a variety of MUSHes long before I ever heard of pen-and-paper games. Some had character stats, automatic dice rollers, and complicated mathematics to crunch combat between two characters with a simple command. Others had no rules at all and relied wholly on the imaginations and politeness of its players to mediate any combats that arrived. There was a curious code of honor in these games, with any powergamers or twinks who would write another player’s actions FOR them being shunned by their nobler compatriots. It was wild, wacky, freeform roleplaying in the extreme.

It didn’t always work. Sometimes, you’d sit in a text-based room for hours, waiting for someone to log on. Sometimes, you’d be in the middle of an epic drama in your own private room, only to have someone else’s conversation about Star Wars suddenly break into your game. But I loved every moment of it…

***End Part I

(Part II to come!!)

Its now just shy of one week until the Phoenix Comic Con, and I can’t wait!! Why am I so excited to be going to Phoenix, you ask?

Well, aside from it being a FOUR day con over the Memorial Day long weekend, and aside from smilin’ Stan Lee himself putting in a Sunday appearance, I’m also super excited to simply be back in Arizona.

For those who don’t know, I spent a year living in Tucson back during high school. During that time, I got to see javelinas in my back yard, grew fond of the giant saguaros dotting the horizon, and was completely ruined for winter. (85ºF in January? I’ll take that!!) So I’m terribly excited to finally be headed back to the desert!!

Oh, sure, it’s the beginning of the hot season, and I’ll have to remember to bring about a metric tonne of sunscreen lest I spontaneously combust, but still. It’s a dry heat, right?

I am also super excited because I’m going to be sharing booth with the fine folks from Little Vampires! If you’ve never read the comic before, then you’re missing out on the cutest, tiniest and (in their own minds) fiercest vampires the world has seen. So, drop by our monster mash of a booth (Booth 306) and say hi!!