Flaming Monkey

In case anyone still has Flaming Monkey on their RSS reader, or has followed a link and stopped by, I’ll make if official and say that this blog is effectively dead.

Right now I’m only occasionally reading gaming forums like Story Games and The Forge,  I haven’t bought a new game in more than a year, the RPG convention I helped run (TBR) has closed up shop, and I’m in one sporadic D&D3.5 game.  That doesn’t leave me with a lot to post about, which is probably why it’s been almost a year since my last entry.

While it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that I might start posting again in the future, for now I’m just leaving all of this up as an archive, with comments closed (or soon closing).  If you’d really like to offer a comment on something, just drop me an email.

Thanks for reading!

FindPlay has been down for a while now, but there’s a new site out there for those gamers looking to find more players in their area. It’s called NearbyGamers, and it uses functionality from Google Maps to provide a graphical display that I personally find more useful than the straight text that FindPlay provided. Right now there are plenty of indie gamers listed, as well as lots of more traditional D&D and White Wolf sorts.

In an attempt to make the conversations that have been taking place on Anyway easier to follow, Vincent Baker’s started up a forum (using Vanilla) that he calls I would knife fight a man: Sex, God and RPGs. This oughta be interesting….

In case you hadn’t heard about the cool new kid on the forum block, check out Gamecraft. As founder Levi Kornelsen said:

This is a forum for discussion of tabletop roleplaying games. It is not, by design, a standard forum for general use; for that, visit RPGnet or theRPGsite or ENworld. GameCraft has a mission and a target: To become the best place to refine play from the ground up.

In other words, it’s about making play better, rather than being about game design.

The RPG forums I visit (which mainly means Story Games) have seemed pretty quiet lately, except for discussions about defining (or redefining) jargon and who’s picking on whom.

And I haven’t bought (or played) any new games for a while.

Which doesn’t leave me with much that I’m inspired to post about.

Which is why I haven’t been posting lately.

Hopefully this will change at some point.

Since this seems to have now migrated from LJ into the rest of the blogosphere, I guess I’ll give it a shot.

Name 12 characters you have played in RPGs, before looking at the questions that follow. List your characters numbered 1 to 12, with the name of the RPG you played them in. Once you’ve picked your 12 characters, look at the questions and answer accordingly. (No peeking until you’ve picked your characters!) Put your answers behind a cut.

1. Jerrym (Amber Diceless RPG)
2. Captain Wesley Hobart (ADRPG variant)
3. Alishish “The Damned” Rajish (fantasy heartbreaker)
4. Alexander Kovalev (GURPS Fatherland)
5. Greunthard (GURPS Discworld)
6. Marcellus Hamlin (D&D 3.5)
7. Brother Virgil (Dogs in the Vineyard)
8. Amir bin Muhammad bin Ibrahim bin Nasir bin Safwan Al-Majid (aka The Mad Arab) (ADRPG variant)
9. Alvaro Lopez (ADRPG variant)
10. Tony Chen (aka Fat Chen) (ADRPG variant)
11. Garrinton (Timemaster/GURPS hybrid)
12. Benedict Pons (ADRPG variant)

(more…)

Last week, Ron had a post over on Story Games where he explained his vision of the Forge:

But the Forge isn’t their vision. It’s ours, just Clinton and me. And not only that, Clinton and I (I keep saying both of us because we talk about this stuff, and I’m representing those talks right now) want to keep the Forge’s function right where it started – finding people in the canebrake, struggling with their designs, or having produced an amazing design but not knowing what to do with it. We like it working best and most for the guys with a crappy Geocities website and a neat game idea, who aren’t quite sure how the internet can help them further.

As long as the Forge lasts, it serves those guys first, and that same spirit/attitude of theirs which both Clinton and I individually try to preserve in ourselves. That’s why it is not, and will never be, an imprint of the kind that would force membership or identity of any sort on someone just considering or along-the-way of developing their own game and perhaps company.

It might be the single most lucid version of his ideas that I’ve seen, and he even manages to get through it without once saying something that makes me think he needs a thwap upside the head.

On a somewhat related note, Ron’s started a thread over on the Forge for what he’s calling the Forge retrospective project. The basic idea is that people choose a limited period from the Forge’s history, summarize it as best they can, and then comment on things that they find especially interesting or surprising. Given that one of the problems I’ve always had with the Forge is the volume of material that goes by, I’m hoping that people end up posting about some interesting things I might have missed.

Here’s the shortlist for the 2006 Diana Jones Award:

The Gamechef game-design competition
Irish games convention charity auctions
Magic the Gathering, 9th edition (Wizards of the Coast)
Perplex City (Mind Candy Ltd)
Spycraft 2.0 by Patrick Kapera, et al (Alderac Entertainment Group)
Twilight Struggle by Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews (GMT Games)

I’m not really sure how you can compare a game design contest to a collectible card game to a charity auction, so I have no idea at all which of the nominees is likely to win, but I still think it’s pretty cool that Game Chef made the list.

Over on Livejournal, Madeline has posted a really long discussion on specific things to do to better include women in gaming, in which she draws parallels between a study of gender inequality in British physics departments and the world of gaming. There’s lots of good stuff in there, though I did get snagged here and there on some of the generalizations.

I also wished that she hadn’t chosen to use Story Games as her example of a board community, since I’ve found it to be a unique and odd place to which several of her suggestions can’t actually be applied (for example, most anything involving diversity among mods, since Andy is the one and only). I get that much of the recent commentary on inclusiveness got started because of a thread there, but I still don’t think it was the best choice for an example.

On the substance of the issue though, I agree with the overall goal of trying to make gaming more inclusive of women (and lots of other folks). It seems kind of obvious. At the same time, I can see why people might reflexively defend a community they’re a part of when it gets accused of not being welcoming enough, and there were unhelpful comments on both sides of the debate in various parts of the internets. Let’s hope that the reasonable people can have a discussion that actually gets us somewhere.

And no, I hadn’t really intended to end up with what is in large part a “me too” post, but I decided I didn’t want to get involved in debating certain people either.

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