Penny Arcade

I did my best to warn him, but he’s quite certain that The Deck of Many Things has a place in his campaign.  On this point, we don’t entirely disagree; the only material distinction is that he believes it will “spice things up,” and I believe will be its burning, meteor-pocked ruin.

I’ve used the iPhone 4 over the weekend, and since I was upgrading from the 3G the difference is pretty striking performance-wise.  With every update, and the last one in particular, that beautiful, classic device has transformed cycle by cycle into a gasping, wheezing creature, unable to tug its increasingly onerous cart.  Now, Fruit Ninja runs like whipped butter.  Games that had loading screens in place to occupy the user flash up for a moment, and are gone.

I got two phones, though: the other one is for Brenna.  The whole reason I got the phone for her was that the camera takes good pictures and decent video.  But it doesn’t seem to work particularly well as a phone, so the rest of it is ridiculous.  She hasn’t mentioned the screen once, for example, even though it be mad crizp; the A4 can fuck itself.  Aluminosilicate probably isn’t even a real word.

It is always dangerous to make assumptions about people’s basic philosophies, and those assumptions tend to (quite conveniently) track with the way you, yourself see the world, so maybe I should limit the scope to myself purely for safety.  I tend to think of technology as a force.  It’s not so much a physical object as it is a manifested capability.  Having serviced technology, and having loved it for years beyond that, and now utterly dependent on it for both my livelihood and leisure, my relationship with it has an (ironically) pre-industrial quality.  When I actually think about it, of all the ways it intersects with my being, I wouldn’t know what else to call it but worship.  I’m not trying to be a poet.  I believe that statement to be accurate.

There’s a pragmatism there.  If you’re going to have a god, you want to be able to call on Him; it stands to reason that you might want to make a call on Him.

This is not true for Brenna, and the content immediately above would make her angry.  She sees that phone the same way she would see a hat, or a ladle.  If you had a ladle and you tried to get soup with the ladle but the soup came out, or fell out, or whatever the culinary equivalent of a lost call is, she would try to break it over her knee before throwing it in the garbage.  She was calling the bank to get her password reset, and it kept dropping the call right when the man was saying “your password is,” until eventually she began to make a sound like a jaguar.  When my phone drops a call, I don’t like it, certainly.  But I’m always a little surprised it worked at all, that it ever worked - technology failure is like inexplicable drought or some other natural phenomenon.  I wonder what I have done to anger the spirit which dwells inside the phone.  I look to my own life, and seek to purge the sin.

The Mario Marathon is toiling away for our collective amusement, having progressed far, but let us lead them to their victory.  They need your literal coins to continue collecting the figurative ones, which might as well be real coins because they’ve already raised almost forty-six thousand dollars for Child’s Play.  Is that enough, do you think?

No, probably not.

(CW)TB out.

(instrumental)

Hey did you watch last weeks PATV episode? What’s that? You say you didn’t? Well you better go watch it right now then!

-Gabe out

If you saw my Twitter last night you know that I ran a pretty crazy game of D&D. My players ended up int he Elemental Chaos, a place called the Moteswarm to be exact. I wanted to create something that would really give them the feeling of fighting on these giant elemental motes in bizarre gravity. So what I did is create a series of 3D “planets” for the encounters to take place on.

The first thing I had to do was build all this stuff. I ended up settling on Styrofoam balls for my planets. I chose Styrofoam because it’s lightweight,you can sculpt it and it’s easy to paint.

I needed to figure out a way to secure the minis to the planets though. I went through a bunch of different ideas. Everything from a big magnet inside the ball to covering the surface with tape. I ended up creating “anchors” out of the felt pads they make for furniture.

Without the felt these are just little discs with nails on the bottom. I cut out a bunch of Velcro circles and secured one side to the top of the anchor and the other side to the bottoms of the minis.

Now I could place the anchor anywhere I wanted on the planet and just stick the mini on top. These worked perfectly but I did ask my players to set aside their metal minis and use plastic ones just for the night. I think they could have held the metal figs but I didn’t want someones mini falling and breaking.

So now I had these Styrofoam balls and a way to secure the minis to them. What I needed next was a way to make them “float” in space. I briefly considered suspending them from the ceiling with fishing line but then I wouldn’t be able to move them around. part of the craziness in the elemental chaos is that all this shit is constantly spinning and tumbling though space. I decided to create stands for each planet that would raise them up off the table but still allow me to move them around when I wanted to.

I ended up finding precut wooden clock faces. These wooden discs were perfect since they already had a hole drilled in the center. next I picked up some wooden dowels with the correct diameter to fit into the hole and glued them all together.

I spray painted the entire thing black so it would blend into my black table cloth and then set them aside. Next I started working on the planets. When spray painting Styrofoam it is important to choose craft spray paint specifically designed to work with Styrofoam. Most spray paint will contain chemicals that will actually dissolve the Styrofoam. I gave each planet a couple coats with the spray paint and then started with the details.

For the ice planet I used a screwdriver to chisel out a series of cracks and crevices. Once I had these carved out I used acrylic paint and a brush to try and make them look like ice. I also cut out some shards of Styrofoam and hot glued these to the surface. I painted these as well and tried to make them look like icebergs.

In order to create the grid on the surface I cut out a little one inch by one inch square of cardboard. I laid this down on top of the planet and traced each square individually with a silver pen. Since I was drawing these squares on a curved surface they got sort of wonky in some places but that is why I made separate ares of grid zones on each planet.

For the lava planet I did the same thing with red and orange acrylic paint. I brushed in my rivers of lava between the gridded off islands. Then at the top of my volcano I used pipe cleaners stuck into the Styrofoam to give the impression of exploding magma.

For the smaller crystal planet I chiseled out a huge chuck from the side and filled the crater with fake jewels I got from the craft store. I also hit it with some glitter paint in a few different spots and simply scrapped away the surface paint around the grids and left it white to look like crystal.

I pushed the planets down onto the wooden stands and used some glue to secure them. At this point I was pretty much done with the fabrication side of the encounter. I had my planets and I had a way to secure the minis to them. Now I just needed to figure out the mechanics and build an encounter that would be as cool as the props. I’ll go into that in my next post.

-Gabe out