The minions shook the hold of Nintendo DS and actually learned something this weekend

We had a stay-in -Lair day yesterday, thanks to heavy rains in the area. I looked out amongst my throng of Minions and noticed that their eyes were all glued to little tiny screens. I thought this would be a perfect time for a forced learning experience. I ordered all electronics turned off and then told them all that their would be a block of instruction on the a facet of the American West.  I started with a brief lecture on ranching, the cattle industry, and the logistics  of getting beef from the rural ranches to the cities in 19th century America. I then wrapped up the lecture with a showing of John Wayne's western classic: The Cowboys.  

For those of you bereft of a classical education, The Cowboys is the story of a rancher who is forced to use schoolboys to help move his cattle 400 miles from his ranch to the rail lines. The movie is a wonderful coming of age tale and one of "The Dukes" best performances. 


The Minions enjoyed the movie and at Sunday breakfast they regaled  "She who must be obeyed" with a review of the movie and how folk in the big cities got their beef.  So all in all, the lesson stuck.


Next week we'll be taking a look at the tensions between Norman and Saxon in Merrie Old England with a showing of Errol Flynn's - The Adventures of Robin Hood.

And the Winners are...

David J. West of the Nephite Blood, Spartan Heart Blog

                      

 &

YoyoRobbo of the Back in '81 Blog

Thanks to all you guys for participating and for hanging in there during my hiatus.  This was fun My minion,  Nicholas had fun drawing the names. 

Congratulations guys. Please send me your shipping info to Boojiesdad@gmaildotcom

And for those of you who didn't win this time around, remember, this is the season of giving -so buy a copy of Legends of Steel so that I can GIVE myself an IPad for Christmas. 

Lair Update

I figured we are about due for an update from the Lair…

Both Barbarians of Lemuria ZeFRS edition and BASH Ultimate edition are out of my hands and with the layout folk.   Chris at Basic Action Games will be handling the release of the BASH Ultimate edition and I’ll be handling ZeFRS. Both are in the home stretch folks…

I’m going to try something different with Dicey Tales. I’ll be releasing it as a periodical.  The first issue will deal with the first part of a pulp era expansion for Barbarians of Lemuria. The second issue will include the raining parts of the pulp expansion. The third issue will revisit Erisa with new material for Legends of Steel.

After that, I will probably try to keep the content pulp-centric –and my definition of pulp is as wide as the genre, so there will be opportunities for material for everything from Sword & Sorcery, Sword & planet, and westerns, to the supernatural and 60’s techno-adventures.

Here is a sample of some more art appearing I Dicey Tales.  The character art is from Chris Schieffer, the firearms are by Chris Harper.

As a side note, Chris Harper soon plans to release a set of pulp era firearm stock art.  If anyone has a suggestion for a particular weapon please let him know in the comments section.

A small thank you to the "Followers"

Wow, I've been gone a couple of months and my readership actually grew!  I'm not sure what to make of that.  But  as a small "Thank you" for sticking around I'll be raffling off TWO hardback copies of The Barbarians of Lemuria edition of Legends of Steel. All you need to do is drop a comment letting me know you want in on the drawing. Everyone who has been a follower of the Lair or the Facebook site from 12082010 or earlier is eligible (Sorry "Anons"). deadline for the raffle is 11:59pm on 12/12/2010.

It was a Merry day!

It was a wonderfully peaceful Christmas. 

The Minions all received Nintendo DS Lites and a bag O' games to share. So once they were firmly in the grip of the tiny vidscreens, "She who must be obeyed" and I went off to see "Sherlock Holmes."  The movie was long, but enjoyable. I will be buying the DVD though since I'm sure I missed much of the dialogue, "The King's English" is a difficult language to follow.

My gaming coup of the day was a copy of the Pathfinder Core book. 

My eldest Minion and my wife braved the odoriferous challenges of the local game store's clientèle, true love wins again! 

Very disappointed and then pleasantly surprised.

The Minions were home with me this week, the victims of flu bugs and a badly sprained arm. The easy way to get through all that was to plant their sick and injured butts in front of the Xbox and let their brains glaze over on video games. Instead I took the opportunity to try out a couple of recent gaming purchases on them.

Now while I'm a dedicated RPG gamer I never really got into the dice and card games. but I figured they might be fun to pass the time with the minions without having to invest the hours setting up a RPG session. so I picked up the Inn fighting dice game from WOTC and the Munchkin card game from Steve Jackson games.

We tried Inn Fighting first.


Inn Fighting basically tries to simulate a classic barroom brawl at an Adventurers tavern. each player gets a character card with the various races and classes of the D&D world. Each card has advantages, disadvantages, and special abilities in line with ones race or class.

The rules seemed simple enough, until you got into actual play. once we started playing a few questions popped up that needed resolving before play could continue, probably not a big deal amongst a group of experienced gamers who were willing to slog through it until they got it down, but with kids or non-gamers it can be a real drag-which it was. I ended up saying screw-it and putting the game away and moving on to the next game, Munchkin.



Now Munchkin is a card game where each player is a member of an adventuring party that's looting a dungeon. It's a parody of every cliche you've ever seen while going through a dungeon crawl. Munchkin was quick to learn, funny as all hell and got us involved in some good old fashioned wheeling and dealing as well as backstabbing fun. The Minions and I loved it.

I always heard that Munchkin was SJG's big moneymaker, even more so than GURPS, now I see why- the game is fun quick, and really easy to pick up even among non gamers. And to capitalize on the games success they have a ton of expansion sets, which I'm sure I'll soon be collecting.

Legends of Steel Savage Worlds Edition reviewed on Game Geeks!

Legends of Steel Savage Worlds Edition was given a great review at Game Geeks!

AWESOME!

Friday night at the Lair

I'm so excited!

Friday night is "Slumber Party Nite". My favorite part is Sorority nude Twister, and after that we LARP some GOR.
Good times.

Evil DM Productions has a forum

I just wanted to send a quick not out to let you all know that I have opened a forums section on the Evil DM Productions website. The Forum actually consists of two parts. First is a section dealing exclusively with Evil DM Productions – Information on releases as well as forums for each product line. The second section is an open forum geared to discussions on Heroic Fiction in all its various mediums and genres, such as the various branches of Pulp, Men's Adventure, and Historical Adventure - Everything from Conan to The Executioner.

I know it's "Another forum" and if you're like me you probably belong to three too many as it is. Never the less, I want to extend the invitation to all of you. Whether you interest lies in gaming or the any other area of Heroic Adventure in the media, I invite you join this new group and help me grow it into a interesting place to discuss our shared enjoyment of action and adventure.

Thanks,

Jeff M.

You can find the forum at the Evil DM Production website under "Forums"

http://evildmproductions.net/default.aspx

Or you can go directly to it at:

http://evildmproductions.prophpbb.com/index.php

“Want to give God a good laugh? Tell him your plans”

I just wanted to give everyone an update on Legends of Steel. To reiterate It’s written, It’s all done. It has gone for layout to add the art, table of contents, etc. Unfortunately the person doing the layout is under the weather at the moment. I heard from him yesterday and he is down for the count and focused on getting better. As I sit here I have three of my minions down with various stages of a cold. So even the Lair is not immune. I don’t want to string folks along with false release dates and stalling tactics. The first priority is ones health and family. LoS will come out as soon as these issues are resolved. But the good news is that this should be the final hurdle.

In other news, work on Lost World of Hador moves forward. Joffery has finished the cover and will begin work on some interior art, Ryan has turned in his latest updated version of the campaign map and I as always doing “research” and writing.

Make Mine Microsoft!

For the past week or so I have been struggling with trying to get some type of website put together for the up-coming release of Legends of Steel –Savage Worlds Edition. 

Since I started Evil DM Productions I have received lots of offers for website and Logo design. Unfortunately, I really cant afford the prices that I’m being quoted. At least not until I can recoup some of my initial investment.  So I needed to take the “do it yourself” route.

I can cut n paste – drag n drop with the best of them, but when you start talking about source codes and HTML, my eyes just kind of glaze over.

So I not only needed something free but also easy.  My first stop was my usual go to- Google.  I had a crappy site there already and I figured all I needed to do was update it. But then I find out that Google is no longer supporting their Google pages product, though they keep it running for those who want to keep using it. I really didn't want to tie my site to that hitching post.

So then I went to Tripod. And quickly left.

Finally I looked at Microsoft .

Now I’m gonna say something that may cost me a few readers, but fuck it.  I happen to like Microsoft. Nay, I LOVE MICROSOFT!

When I was In college Microsoft Office got me through many a late night.  I know for a fact that Power Point was responsible for at least three A’s based on my final presentation. And if it wasn't for Excel I would have dropped out midway through my statistics class.  And the first computer game I ever bought “Close Combat: A Bridge too far”  was from Microsoft ( I still whip that baby out and run it every so often), and as if I needed one more reason: my XBox360 lets me kick Nazi ass every day with Call of Duty . So yeah, me and Microsoft- tight.

So anyway, I do a lot of stuff on office live. I noticed that office live has a sub site-office live small business. Hey that's exactly what I want to be- a small business. in this suite of stuff they have a website designer. Nothing fancy at all, but it works and its free.

Even with this bare bones, no-frills program It still took me almost two days to hammer something halfway decent out of it.

So here it is.

http://evildmproductions.net/default.aspx

She aint gonna win any beauty contests but she does her job.  Thanks Bill.

More later.

Hi, I’m the Evil DM- Trust me.

 

The other day at Target I picked up season one of the classic TV show “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.”  It’s a great show to steal ideas for Mission:Adventure!

As I was watching the episodes I came across one where the crew begins acting strangely, it turns out that saboteurs have introduced a hallucinogenic gas into the submarines air supply. I was thinking of the viability of using this plot device in an adventure. The only problem is that the players need to put their trust in the GM. 

Now I’ve found from personal experience that getting players to trust the GM is easier said than done.  Maybe its flashbacks from adolescence when a sadistic  DM killed their 9th level Elven Ranger with a trap from the Tomb of Horrors module or some such silliness, but I've found that players will rarely give up even a smidgen of their characters fate without a fight.  and while that's come to be expected in most RPG’s I find it an extremely  tough issue to get around in Pulp gaming.

Pulps almost always invariably have the hero cornered in an impossible situation where their death is all but guaranteed, only to have fate, amazing luck, or wild coincidence save them at the absolute last minute.  Now for that type of situation to happen in an RPG setting the player MUST trust the GM. The player needs to go along with the GM (with a wink and a nudge) for the good of the adventure and the ultimate enjoyment of everyone at the table.

In my case I believe my failure was that I didn't adequately explain this to my players (in my defense I will say that this was a play-test session using pregenerated characters, so I wasn't expecting quite the level of commitment to the characters as compared to a character that's been nurtured through years of constant play).  As a result, Half my players went one one way,the rest went the other, and the game folded with uncomfortable silence all around. 

The next day I beefed up the section in LoS on trusting your GM and letting your character get captured once in a while, so I guess something good came out of that awkward and embarrassing experience.

So the moral of the story:

Communicate with your players, let them know the tone of your game and remember that they look to you to provide the canvas. 

And players trust your GM. Remember that your character is one cog in a large engine that is the campaign.  There may be reasons for what is happening that is beyond your knowledge or understanding- and that's OK. You don't need to know everything right away. 

Evil DM update

Just to let you all know that I have been hard at work on not only the ZeFRS version of Legends of Steel but also on Lost World of Hador. This explains my lack of posting and presence on some of the message boards I usually frequent. I can easily blow half a day just reading blogs and looking at funny pictures.

So if the posting is sparse, it’s because I’m actually trying to be productive.

Legends of Steel is at layout. I heard from James via email this weekend and we went over a couple of design things. It is being worked on and will come out as soon as It possibly can.

Lulu is starting to look like a viable option for those who want a printed copy in their hands (I know I want one at least). So I’m tackling that.

Hador is coming along nicely, Ryan is making good progress on the map, Joffrey is coloring the cover art, and I’m getting all my thoughts onto paper.

The thrifty DM

Lately I've become quite the thrift store hunter. For reasons unknown to me Sacramento has a plethora of thrift stores, from your standards like Goodwill and the Salvation Army to esoteric ones like WEAVE (Women Escaping a Violent Environment) and St. Jude DePaul.

I’m no stranger to thrift stores, as a kid I went with my Grandmother to Mass every Sunday, and part of that trip always included a stop at what my grandmother referred to as “La segunda” (segunda being Spanish for second). she and my aunts would hunt through the baby clothes and house wares while my cousins and I hit the toy section. When I think back at the treasures I found back then- plastic bags filled with miscellaneous action figures (GI Joe, Major Matt Mason, Johnny West) and toy soldiers, it almost brings a tear to my eye.

My return to thrift store shopping was prompted by a chance visit to the “Thrift Town” near my gym where I netted a dozen or so Alistair Maclean titles for .50 cents a piece. Since then, the more hunting I've done, the more treasures I’ve uncovered.

New bookstores don’t carry any of the older pulp paperback titles I look for, used book stores and antique shops slap a “vintage” sticker on them then sell them at premium prices, and EBay is no longer the bargain place it once was, the book may only cost $2.00 but shipping is what kills the deal. The hunt is both affordable and enjoyable, and while spending a dollar on a copy of Swords of the Horseclans isn’t as titillating as stuffing it down a strippers G-string, it’s a heck of a lot safer for me when “She who must be obeyed” looks over the Visa statements.