Highmoon's Ponderings

Hey all. Just sending a quick hi from GTS in Las Vegas.

Yes, those are slot machines in the airport, right outside my gate…

What a weird place this is; so fake, so constructed, so artificial. Everything is AN EXPERIENCE!!! But it’s just a facade, and honestly, a very thin one, too. I’ll have more to say once I get back; right now I have to use the most of my time here for biz stuff (and I start my Day 2 account with a quick trip to Kinko’s to print business card, since I left mine in Miami – doh!).

The trade show is going good, and Pulp Gamer has been kicking ass in getting awesome podcasting coverage. Today I will be doing some interviews as well (hopefully). Fear the Boot’s Dan Repperger is here as well (schmoozing like a pro), as is Ed Healy from Dark Whisper (or as he is better known, the Kobold Quarterly Ad-Pimp Master), Fred Hicks from That’s How We Roll, The Butcher Block and Evil Hat, Chris Hanrahan from 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction, and Allan Sugarbaker from OgreCave Audio Report. A podcaster takeover could very well happen; watch the gaming news just in case.

WotC is being tight-lipped about the 4e GSL and its ramifications, Paizo is secretly dancing the fandango, Green Ronin is cursing WotC for out-staging their press release about the True20 open license, and the World of Warcraft pre-painted minis are OMG incredible.

More later. Have fun.

“And the Lord said unto Moses […] Thou shalt speak all that I command thee; and Aaron thy brother shall speak unto Pharaoh, that he send the children of Israel out of his land. And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments. And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch forth mine hand upon Egypt, and bring out the children of Israel from among them. And Moses and Aaron did as the Lord commanded them.”
- Exodus 7:1-6

Passover explores how to use this pivotal holiday in your Testament games. Use it as presented, or as inspiration for adding depth to a culture in your campaign setting.

This article first appeared in Targum Magazine #3.

Now Available from RPGnow.com!

I started this series of posts with HMP Experiments: Domains of Adventure a few weeks back. Since then I’ve been busy with a bunch of different things and have not taken the time to sit down and write the other posts I had planned. My apologies.

The one good thing about that is that in the interim, the first quarter of 2008 has ended and I now have some numbers to show when I do write those other posts. I’m actually waiting until for the 18th of April to pass so I can get the final numbers on another one of my experiments as well.

This weekend starts Passover, and next week I’ll be in Vegas for GTS, so the rest of the series will have to wait until at least two weeks from now, but by then I will have all the numbers I have been waiting for and hopefully I’ll be able to give you a much better picture of what I’ve been doing with HMP and what I hope to accomplish.

Dear Artist:

When I commission an illustration from you, you are working for me, for the agreed price. When you show me a sketch and I request some changes but otherwise approve it, if there are no further objections, I expect you to make the changes to the sketch you showed me and proceed to the final illustration. If for some reason you decide to make a whole new sketch, in which you change not only the things I requested before, but also the pose of the figure, the angle, in short, the entire drawing, I expect, then, to be shown the new sketch so I can comment on it and request changes and/or approve it.

When you take the sketch I approved, change it completely into a new drawing and only show me the final product, do not be surprised when I ask what happened, and tell you that I am not happy with the new final product.

Now, I am a sucker and decided to purchase the new final product anyway, mainly because I am fairly handy with Photoshop and believe I can fix the things that I don’t like about this new drawing. However, know that it is highly unlikely that I will work with you again. Which is a shame because your art is pretty good, especially for the price, but there are many more artists out there who are equally as good and know how the process of art commissioning works.

Thank you.

The Publisher

(Taken from GM Skarka, Judd Karlman, Steve Kenson, et.al.)

Entertainment Weekly has a web article where some famous folks talk about the comic book that hooked them.

For me, it was my first American comic: The Amazing Spider-Man #300.

It was 1988, I was 13; I was at the mall with my family and I was allowed to wander off to the nearby toy store while they shopped for clothes or something. I’d gone into this store before to look at the toys, but I’d never paid attention to the area near the front where they had a bunch of comics. For some reason that day I decided to take a look over there, and this issue grabbed my attention immediately. Spider-man in black?! Awesome!

I went over to my mom and asked for $2 to buy the comic, which she gave me without any fuss (I think it’s because it was for the comic book and not for video games) and I bought my first (American) comic. Now, I’d been buying comics for a long time already, but mostly of the .25-cents funny book variety in Spanish, of which they carried a lot in the stores in Puerto Rico (as well as some comics brought over from Mexico, like Memin and Kaliman), but Spider-Man 300 was the one that truly hooked me into comics as a hobby (addiction), one that I would indulge in for about a decade after that.

These days I don’t really buy comics anymore; I’ve lost patience with the monthly format and frankly, I’m so out of touch that, every time I go to the comics store thinking about getting back in, I get so lost that I simply leave. I did start buying some trade paperbacks for Marvel’s new Ultimate line (X-Men in particular) and have enjoyed them a lot, so I have kept buying them. My friend Josh is still very much a comics addict, so I now raid his house for new stuff to read.

Funny thing is, even though I started with Spider-Man, shortly thereafter I dropped it (after the wedding issue, I believe) and made the jump to the title(s) that would become my absolute favorite to this day, X-Men.