Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Updated: Found his youtube account! I’m certain this is him. The name is the same as from the comment, and the worlds he uses are identical. I can’t believe he’s 35, though. Can’t be a lick over 12.

Okay folks. This is my personal gaming blog. You don’t have to agree with everything or even anything I say, but I imagine that if you’re reading any of this, you are in some way, shape, or form interesting in my words, and a decent enough human being to enjoy rational discourse.

This morning I woke up to find a rather nerd-ragey comment in my approval queue from this guy:

I didn’t read most of it, because I don’t speak Troll, but it’s pretty obvious from the first and last sentences that A) I don’t personally know this person and B) he has no internet social skills. Last time I left a comment that bad was when I was 14, on a local Dial-Up BBS in my hometown, spewing my trap about what is and isn’t “punk rock” – yeah, I still face-palm the memory of that one.

His comment was on this post of mine about D&D 4E. Take note that I didn’t say anything at all scathing about the game system in that post, and only voiced why it isn’t working for me. I even compliment its mechanical tightness and speak lamentations of my failing faith

I’ve decided to post his comment here for all to see and discuss, instead of letting it hide at the bottom of that post. This is an example of a mega-nerd gone bad, and succumbing to the very same blind nerd rage that he accuses me of no less than four times.

Below the cut is his post. I’ve bold-highlighted my favorite parts. Yes, he actually said that I was “like Akira,” and he actually called me a “turd burglar.” He keeps comparing 4E to 3E like that matters to me, although I get the feeling those are the only games he’s ever played. The funny part is that I loathe 3rd Edition, and don’t find Pathfinder any better, so I have no idea why he thinks these comparisons are so crucial in making his point. I’d laugh this off as a joke, but it’s a bit too specific to be intentional satire.

Hey Kid: This isn’t a WoW forum. Go somewhere else.

I warn ya: major lack of social graces follow, and that’s about as nice as I can state it. Enjoy. Read more

(I totally meant to post this Friday, but when saving it I forgot to set the auto-post time-thinger and only realized it today. Might as well add a few more notes to it, then.)

I was going to mention this last week but got side-tracked: the Alliterated Games Forums are down for an indefinite period of time. No one was using them, and they were just collecting spammers and bots. If I bring them back up in the future, it will likely be as part of…

The new website I’m putting together! The current AG website isn’t all that easy to update without me breaking things, so I’m setting up a content management suite to handle the basics. My first order of business is to get the basic game pages set up and an official newsfeed. After that, having a forum again would be nice, but it isn’t a major priority. I also want to set up a cart application, so folks can buy things directly from my website, without me having to handle fulfillment through Paypal.

Alpha Protocol continues to rock my knickers. I am only halfway through the game, and I’m already itching for a second play-through. My current style is the suave, stealthy master of the silent kill. My second play will be all BigGuns McDoucheBaggins, the no-questions-asked bullet-loving commando. I am looking forward to see more of the drastic changes in story and play I’ve already sipped with the handful of checkpoint replays I’ve experimented with in the game so far.

One thing about it that I really dig – and wish other games would pick up ASAP – is the Social Mission. A lot of Alpha Protocol’s game play involves hands-on espionage, sneaking into secret complexes and doing all that cool stealth-action spy stuff that makes movies like The Bourne Identity awesome. But almost as many game missions are purely social: you arrive on scene, meet a guy, try and make a deal of some sort, and hopefully walk away with a new ally or piece of information. The clothes you wear in these missions frequently makes a difference, so you should remember to switch out of that tactical armor before heading off to have dinner with the syndicate honcho, otherwise you might piss her off with your incredible social faux pas. I love this, and aside from Mass Effect 2 – which only has a small handful of missions like these – I’ve not seen it implemented in other mission-based games.

This coming weekend will be Free RPG Day! Every year I get excited about this one, as my favorite local game store Guardian Games always has a big shindig to celebrate. This year I’ll be running the new teaser adventure Final Sanction for the upcoming Deathwatch RPG from Fantasy Flight Games – the newest RPG in the Warhammer 40K product line. I’m not well-versed in the W40K universe, but this one looks nice – it’s the equivalent to me of the Starcraft storyline: Space Marines in massive suits of power armor fighting wave upon wave of infectious buglike monster hordes.

I leave you with a video for a song that’s been stuck in my head all morning:

Three updates!

First off, I want to let everyone know that the Cannibal Contagion pre-orders were put in the mail yesterday, as well as the special prize copies won during the GameStorm events. Expect them hopefully before the end of the week.

Second Update: I plan on having a new website up on the day after Zombie Day (see below). This new site will be a portal for Alliterated Games, leading to the forum, this blog, and pages on the various games.

Third Update: If you weren’t already aware, you should all attend “May of the Dead” Zombie Day at Guardian Games, on May 30th. It’s an all-day 11 AM to 10 PM (and later, for the adults and night owls) event. Events include: Two planned demos for my own newly-published survival RPG Cannibal Contagion, two separate 8-player prize tournaments of Left 4 Dead on the XBOX 360 (and all-day general playing of Left 4 Dead as well), two demos of the now out-of-print exclusive board game Last Night on Earth, some full-expansion tournaments of Zombies!!! the Board Game, six select zombie movies playing non-stop on the projector screen, a zombies-themed recurring D&D campaign, a zombies-themed demo scenario for the RPGA, some prize rounds of Zombie Flux, and multiple on-site zombie makeup artists – if you get made up as a zombie, you get a store-wide discount at the store for the day, and you are eligible for special prizes too!

I’m giving away free PDF copies of Cannibal Contagion to anyone who players in the demo sessions, as well. You should all come. It will be a grand affair indeed!

I’ll likely post an actual flier in the next week. But for now, mark your calendars, and come join the contagious fun.

And a surprise fourth update! I promise, I am still working on those GameStorm game reports. Life got unexpectedly chaotic these past few weeks, so suffice it to say I’ve been very distracted with other issues. The drafts grow a little every week, though, and I’ll be posting them when they’re perfect.

I’ve assembled a new set of self-hosted forums for Cannibal Contagion and my other current and future game projects. I don’t expect much activity at all at the moment, but I’m hoping to use it for feedback and discussions once the first run of orders is finally sent out.

Head on over, register, and say hello!

I just spent a large chunk of the morning backing up long-unused SQL databases and then cleaning them off the web server. Specifically, most of the old Reality Merchants data is now gone, leaving only the RMG blog, photo galleries, and now-defunct GYGO Wiki pages still operational. Most of these I’m just keeping around for nostalgia’s sake, although I do harbor the notion of running another LARP event or three under the Reality Merchants banner sometime in the future.

While backing up the data from various private wikis I’d been using to work on my own game design, I ran across the prototypes of both the “BMF” core LARP rules system and the 2nd Edition Streetwise LARP rules from which the former were derived. These triggered long-dormant chunks of memory regarding plans and design goals, and I already can see ways to kickstart them back onto their journey to exist and become tangible things. It’s time to convert them all into Google Docs. Perhaps a near-future project will involve me finally getting the Streetwise LARP into print, possibly even for free…

Deleting all this data and cleaning up my server has worked as a sort of “sounding of the death knell” for a prior chapter of my life. It’s one more vestigial limb of my East Coast existence that I’ve now mostly managed to amputate. The Reality Merchants had some good times, and we met some amazing people through our events – hell, for a while, I was actually engaged to a woman I met in a, ahem, fairly “controversial” event that we organized. From all my time in Atlanta, I can honestly say that I have more wild and crazy memories from the Reality Merchants crew than from any other source or venue, however great they may have been.

My life has been forever marked by those people, and I plan on keeping those galleries online and operational for as long as I possibly can.

Next in the other of business: setting up a cart & commerce system on this site. Why? For pre-orders, silly…

I recently started playing Oblivion on the PS3. Okay, I like this game, but… let’s just say were I ten years younger, I would love this game. I just don’t have the time these days to devote to traveling this fully-immersive fantasy world. There’s just so much to do that I’m completely overwhelmed. I wonder how this bodes for the upcoming release of Fallout 3, which I’ve actually reserved a day off from work so I can play all day? Will it too be a completely suffocating expanse, or will there actually be some kind of story I can play along with? Hmmm, we shall see…

I’ve been updating a crap-ton of stuff for Cannibal Contagion. I’m gonna wait a few more weeks before I post the new playtest update, as there are so many changes and additions that I think it deserves a bigger all-encompassing release. The Contagion and NPC rules have been drastically re-written, I’ve added a big mess o’ sample bad guys, and I’ve made allies easier to incorporate into the flow of the game. Slowly but surely, the game is falling into the perfect flow, and I’m very proud.

I’m totally in love with the stuff that Vero and Leo have been sending me. Here’s a sneak peek at a piece from the core rules, intended to introduce the section of the rules for running and arranging the game:

Fabulous! Every new pic they send me makes me all the more excited. So far, with spacers for full-page art, the game is quickly approaching my original mark of 125 pages, and there’s a small chance it might even be more.

Thanks to Travis Brown, Cannibal Contagion now has discussion forums over on the GoPlay! PDX website. Drop on in if you have questions or ideas!

Obama won the Oregon primaries. Sweet. He currently (read: still) has more delegates than Hillary. Even sweeter.

Hillary needs a new do. She has Andy Warhol hair, and it’s quite hideous.

That game One that I mentioned?  Sweet Jeebus it’s hard.

I want more TV shows and movies where the main characters are ugly, or even just plain-looking.

Portland now has a gay mayor who shares a name with both a crappy beer and a long-dead former Governor. He’s also pretty handsome, too.

Anyone remember Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure? I think the character Large Marge should have her own TV show too.

Looks like I might be kicking up an InSpectres mini-campaign in June, to get read for the Iron Kingdoms game in July. This mini-campaign would be modern, and the characters would be a new franchise of the widely popular Ghost Facers company.

I’m enjoying a really good discussion on methods of player narrative empowerment within Shadowrun.

I’ve just now gotten around to setting this place up for extended use. I sense a long road ahead with this project. Ultimately, I would like to move all my games here, and set up an Alliterated Games section, preferrably with a different header image.

- Nathanael Phillip Cole