The McNod Group

May 25, 2020March 14, 2021 / jstater

Hey all you cats and kittens … just writing a grab bag today because hey, sometimes you can’t focus … especially not on the last nice week of weather Vegas will see until October!

I’ll be covering things today like they did on the McLaughlin Group, hence the stupid post title.

ISSUE ONE – Slipgate Chokepoint

Andrew Walter has a Kickstarter running for a pen & pencil re-creation of a 90’s era first-person shooter video game. If those games make you all goose-pimply, then check it out. The product is a supplement to the Stay Frosty RPG, and aims to turn the action in that game up a notch – faster and more deadly. Give it a look see, ladies and gentlement. There are still 22 days left on the campaign, so plenty of time to get in on the ground floor.

ISSUE TWO – MEMORIAL DAY

Another Memorial Day rolls around, and unfortunately we have even more American warriors to remember in 2020. My grandfather served in World War II as a doctor in a field hospital set up to take care of the survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. He didn’t tell stories about it, because I imagine the things he saw he didn’t want the rest of us to struggle with. A great-uncle of mine was a Seabee. I remember him talking about how eerie it was to be on an island, thick with jungle, and know that there were Japanese soldiers out there, just beyond the lights, watching.

I also have a couple uncles who served in the Korean War, one in the US Army, the other the Marine Corps. My father served in the US Air Force during the Vietnam War. What I’m saying is that I’ve been lucky enough to know many people who served their country, and I’m sure many of you readers have as well. If you don’t know anyone who served, I’d say get out there and get to know one – it enriches your perspectives about a great many things. There aren’t many World War II veterans left, nor veterans of the Korean War. It’s hard to believe that the Vietnam Veterans are now as old as the WW2 vets were when I was a little kid. I’m not saying you should try to drag war stories out of people – those tales can be very painful. I’m just saying it’s very worthwhile to get to know people who have survived the experience of war. And honor them, because they need the love.

ISSUE THREE – THINK SMALL

I suppose there are some readers out there who aren’t mired in Great Depression-era unemployment as a result of lockdowns from COVID-19 – count yourselves lucky. My own state of Nevada has hit 28% unemployment, the highest in the country and double what we had during the Great Recession. Folks, it’s tough out there, and especially for small businesses. If you have the ability to do so, throw as much of your business as possible their way. The giant megacorps will suffer, but not nearly as much, and frankly, if half the McDonalds or Starbucks had to close, there would still be lots of McDonalds and Starbucks … though I’d hate to see their employees lose their jobs.

Still, when little independently run businesses give up the ghost, they’re gone forever. In the last couple weeks we’ve gotten back out to Cash 4 Chaos, the punk/rock shop we dig – got a VHS copy of Ladyhawke we watched last night and a some bitchin’ shirts for my daughter and me. We hit our favorite antique mall on Saturday, all masked up, and then ordered dinner from our favorite mexican restaurant, Casa Don Juan, which re-opened this weekend. We’ve been hitting as many of our favorite spots as we can, including the awesome Omelet House 50’s Diner we’ve patronized for the last 25 years – it’s run by some really beautiful folks. It sounds like Zia Records is open again, so I’m itching to visit them, and to get back out to Boulder City and all their great restaurants and shosp. Remember, these folks are really hurting, and they need your help to stay open, so please consider throwing your coin their way.

ISSUE FOUR – LADYHAWKE ON VHS

Since I brought it up – how great is Ladyhawke? It’s such a cozy movie in many ways – up close and personal, not grand and overbearing like so many modern flicks. It’s not a perfect film by any means, but Broderick is great (and I wonder if this movie had any effect on him getting Ferris Bueller), Michelle Pfeiffer is wonderful and so lovely and Rutger Hauer just loosk perfect on that black charger, hawk on his arm, zweihander by his side. The curse of the lovers is tragic, keeping them apart, and I dig the ending, whereby it becomes more a “man vs. self” story than “man vs. man”. If you haven’t watched the film, give it a shot. The uber 80’s soundtrack lends the movie an air of weirdness, but if you grew up on that sound, it’s just nostalgic gravy.

Like I mentioned above, since I got a couple working VCR’s last year we’ve been enjoying grabbing some favorite movies on VHS. In the last month, we’ve done some old school viewings of Ladyhawke, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Legend (which I’d never seen straight through) and the three Star Wars films (there are only three of them, you know … Return of the Jedi was the last one they made … just leave me to my illusions) before that Lucas guy messed with them.

Watching the movies on VHS is partly nostagia, since I grew up not only watching those things, but working in the World’s Largest Video Store (and meeting my future wife there). The picture below is of the music video section at my store, the Video Park – it was a rereation of the Beetle’s Yellow Submarine. We had a real haunted house for the horror movies, a circus tent for the kid’s movies, and a brothel for the adult films. We also had some really awesome bosses in Dale & Lisa Clark and Harold Vosko. I notice that in the left-hand corner of the picture below you can just see a bit of the sports section, which looked like the Thomas & Mack center. God, I miss that job!

I also like VHS tapes because DVDs sort of piss me off. Too much nonsense before you get to the film, and too little control over what button you can press and when. A VHS tape is simple and friendly – put it in, hit play, maybe fast forward through some previews if you’re not in the mood – and you watch your movie.

Just remember – be kind, rewind!

ISSUE FIVE – DANCING TURKEYS

To end on a happy note, here is a video of Jimmy the Turkey dancing from the Kyle The Rooster channel. Stay strong folks, and try to keep that glint in your eye and grin on your kisser.

More game related fun coming soon!

Hex Map Redesign

May 10, 2020March 13, 2021 / jstater / 3 Comments

I spent most of Mother’s Day 2020 celebrating my wife, the mother of my daughter, who is just plain awesome. My best friend in the world and the best thing that ever happened to me!

But while I was waiting for her to get ready to go out and celebrate the re-opening of one of favorite shops in Vegas, I had time to play around with a new way of doing my hex maps. I thought I’d provide a sneak preview to what I’d currently call a rought draft.

I’ve been using Hexographer for about a decade now to produce my hex maps, and I really like it. The maps it creates look great, but they do present a few small problems for me. First, I just recently switched to using a new computer, and last night had to do some digging to find my license key. If I hadn’t found it, I might have been in a sticky situation, so bringing the map creation completely “in house” would be safer for me, and give me more control over my product.

The second problem is that the hex maps I have been creating do not reproduce well in the PDF format. I’ve done just about everything I can think of to improve them, but I just cannot get them to look right. That’s why I provide the hex maps as downloads on the site … but if the site ever went away, the maps would go with it, and that wouldn’t be good at all. In addition, having the maps more at hand for GM’s would be a big bonus. I really want to include the maps in the books.

The final problem has to do with the format of numbered hexes. When you are looking at a map, you can see right away where cities, towns and villages are located, but you cannot see where all of the other enounters are located. As a GM, you have to reference every hex the party travels through to see if there is something in it, which is a pain in the rear and makes it really easy to miss something.

Thus, the new design:

My idea is to include with each hex crawl an overview map without hexes to give the GM a general overview of the region being described. This map is then subdivided into smaller sub-maps. The sub-maps look like the one above. Descriptions of the settlements and numbered encounter areas would be located after the sub-map in the hex crawl.

Each sub-map is labeled A, B, C, D, etc., to allow encounters on one sub-map to be referenced in the encounters for another sub-map, something like [A3] or [F4], rather than the current [0122].

I won’t use this new style on the next hex crawl – that map is already created in Hexographer. They will probably premiere in the next crawl, and in the compilation books I’m hoping to start publishing in 2021 under the title The Nodian Cosmography. These will collect the old hex crawls, starting with the Wyvern Coast and Nabu – and the city-states of Ophir and Ibis – published in the first issues of NOD. The new books will update the hex crawls to the 2nd edition Blood & Treasure rules, fix errors, and include some new material where appropriate.

Abbeys and Armorials

May 2, 2020March 7, 2021 / jstater / 2 Comments

Hey all – just a quick tidbit today. Work has been hectic and I’ve been writing a bunch and playing with heraldry for the upcoming halfling hexcrawl – fun, but boy am I tired.

Anyhow – I was working on making simple schematics of a halfling abbey (or klaster) and cathedral (or kotella). As alluded to in an earlier post on the halfling saints, I am doing a faux-medical Catholic church vibe for the halflings, but using a mother goddess and her “kitchen saints”. The design, though, is pretty much the same – I copied these from Canterbury Cathedral and … well, I don’t remember the name of the abbey. I figured these might come in handy for other folks looking for a simple representation – just ignore the stuff about pantries and holy kitchens – it’s a halfling thing – and sub in a more traditional altar and such.