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Showing posts with label C. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Resource Links: C

Last updated: February 9, 2014


Campaign Mastery
A very good source of ideas, tips and advice for building, maintaining and running a campaign for gamers.

Captain Action
The 1960's action figure has returned from the mists of obscurity to take his place as a modern-day superhero featured in comics and more.

Captain Spectre
A hero from the radio turns out to be real in an alternate 1939 where one man with a rocket-pack and a good right hook faces-off against electric soldiers, malevolent robots, and villainous masterminds bent on taking over the world. Excellent stuff. Highly recommended -- soon to be featured at Pulp Magnet.

Cartographer's Guild
The online place to find Maps and Makers of Maps. It's a forum, a shared gallery, and a place to show off your stuff and to find tutorials or tips on technique. A very worthwhile site for anyone interested in actually making maps, or in finding people who make great maps...

Chaotic Shiny
One of the absolute best sites for Random Generators that we've found. Their Academic Field Generator is a wonderful thing--we expect to be using it a great deal more as we return to Riskail and the rarefied air of The Academy at Devukarsha. This isn't the usual bunch of random generators--quite a few of these are intended for writers, not just GMs. The Zoomorph Generator is a lot of fun. Try them all!

Chaotic Shiny Productions
This is the place to find out about Bundle-Deals, New Products like Arcane Flavor, or to get the Newsletter. Arcane Flavor is one of the best supplements for D&D that we've read and it really does provide ideas and flavor that you can adapt easily to any edition of the game. Highly recommended.

Children of the Night Timeline (MOONSTAH)
An ever-expanding and updated chronology tracking a vast array of monstrous beings throughout pop culture. Very handy resource for those inclined to examine such beings in the light of Wold-Newtonry...

Chest of Books
A site that provides a wealth of free books, clip art and more. They have a nice section of Fairy Tales, Art Books, History, and Reference Books that are all of great good use. The Dictionary of Dry Goods will come in handy as we go to the Weaver's Isles...and the Dictionary of Wonders and Curiosities is fairly important to Wermspittle as well...

Chimera
A full-blown RPG from The Welsh Piper. We haven't gotten a chance to run it or play it yet, but we're interested in trying it out. The guy makes sense and the system looks impressive. Hopefully we'll get to play-test it soon.

Coming Attractions
A site that delivers all the news it can get on the Pulps. A great way to get up to speed on what's going on out there...

comModified
A thesis paper online that is as entertaining as it is disturbing, if you actually read through this stuff and connect the dots. Otherwise just have fun messing around. Oooohhh Shiny!

ConSimWorld News
A handy-dandy news-service for all things War Gaming/Conflict Simulation.

Creative Commons
A welcome alternative to the usual Copyright stuff.

Cumberland Games & Diversions
The mega-site of all things Risus, Encounter Critical, loads of custom FONTS, All Systems Library, Uresia, and more--lots more. Go there. Click around. Find greatness.

Curiosities of Literature
An uncommon blog/site that is compiling all of Isaac D'Israeli's collected miscellanea of book-lore. Fascinating stuff, but obscure and esoteric...which makes it our kind of stuff.


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Monday, April 4, 2011

Chocolate in History and Chocolate in an RPG setting


Thanks to the USDA for the cocoa nut photo!


Chocolate. Personally, it gives me a headache. But boy do some folks really, really love this stuff. Calvin and Hobbes especially. It's an amazingly super powerful commodity that has had a massive impact on history and culture, yet most people don't give it a second thought, unless they've just heard that Hershey has tried to claim that chocolate is a health food based on their corporate laboratories discovering that there are anti-oxidants in chocolate. Yeah and smoking keeps mosquitos away, too. Not.

You might want to check out the Which Food Has More Fairy Dust article at Forbes if you're still wondering what's wrong with an industry doing its own research into the health impacts of its products.

Some Sweet Chocolate History Links
There are a ton of links for Chocolate in History. These should be enough to get you started. It's a fascinating subject and one that hasn't gotten beaten to death like the high price of oil or which polearm best compliments your armor without making your chausses look fat. Like salt, paper, spices and coffee, amongst other such high-use commodities, chocolate is a big, big part of contemporary society and it fairly exploded into prominence as a resource worth importing, hoarding, trading in, or fighting over fairly early on. When chocolate was first introduced in Europe they served it as a hot drink in golden cups. It changed history. Fortunes were made or lost, and a lot of things were influenced by chocolate in ways that we're still sorting out and unraveling. It was a big deal. It should be when it gets discovered by any medieval-esque society in an RPG or work of fiction as well.

Considering Chocolate in a Fantasy Medieval Society
Most Fantasy RPGs like OD&D onwards predominently feature a setting that is loosely based on Europe in the 1400s to early 1600s. Some go earlier, some go a bit later, most mix it up vigorously and see what shakes out. Many of these games feature a good bit of exploration, either delving deeper into strange and often cyclopean megadungeons, scavenging ruined archaeological sites or forgotten graveyards (tombs, crypts, sepulchres, etc.), investigating various huge ruined piles or even hacking through the dense woods, jungles or dismal swamps to find New Lands to loot, new adventures to inflict on the local populace.

There are rules and supplements for ships, caravans, zeppelins and riding beasts. There are tons of rules and guidelines for wandering lost in a wilderness, nifty tools for mapping out said wilderness with diabolical glee (A, B, C & D just for a few examples), how to stock it with fell beasts and horrid monstrosities, and on and on. But what happens when a bunch of unwashed arsonists and half-starved plunderers come across something like Chocolate for the first time?

Most people think that gunpowder is a real game changer. Take a good look at chocolate sometime. It is arguably an even bigger and more disruptive thing to bring into the game than gunpowder or giving orcs a few crates of slightly used and refurbished laser carbines. What happens when the Greyhawk-esque pseudo-conquistadors discover the Olmec-esque Olman society and encounter chocolate for the first time? What happens when they decide to bring it back to their own pseudo-European societies? In the classic TSR module C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan which is being thoroughly analyzed and revitalized via The Cold Text Files series over at Lord of the Green Dragons, the pillaging ne'er-do-well player characters uncover a heavily overgrown ruined city of a mesoamerican culture, the Olmans. Tamoachan turns out to be the Northernmost outpost of this ancient, once-mighty empire. It's a very good bet that the Olman have chocolate. Maybe Scottsz will look into this aspect of things in a later post in the series? There really ought to be an index page for this incredible series. Ahem. In any case, back to Chocolate.

Chocolate isn't just for the poxy scallawags traipsing about with rune-inscribed ahlspiesses and demonically forged zweihanders or enchanted arquebuses and vampire-killer surplus gatling crossbows. It's a very hip and happening part of here and now. The role of chocolate in politics is even more interesting and fraught with plot hooks, twists and weirdness than the role of chocolate in history. Here. Go look for yourself and make up your own mind.

The Not So Sweet Side of Chocolate:
or Damning With Faint Praise
or We Prefer to Stand Back and Trust the Local Government
"The Ghanese have the best standards in the region. That's not to say they're as good as we want them to be, but they're certainly not as bad as the Cocircte d'Ivoire," Scharffenberger says. "From what we know about the government, we're pretty satisfied they aren't allowing horrible things to happen."
from Politics of Chocolate, Justin Burton of the Eastbay Express

Politics of Chocolate Links
As with the links to the History of Chocolate, these are just the tip of the iceberg and you'll find a lot more heated words, vigorous discussion, retractions, rebuttals and all sorts of agendas--even more than in a typical online forum--when you start to look into the Politics of Chocolate.
WebMD offers you a slide show of chocolate...just to end things on an appropriately bitter- sweet note.
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