Environmentally Humorous

With Dante out of town this week, it was my job to pick up the slack, and I actually fell asleep on the job this week! But I've been percolating this idea for awhile. So here's my random thought for Friday!

There's been a lot of press lately about use non-plastic alternatives for shopping bags. You can buy cloth bags from just about every store now (at least in our area). My mother-in-law has several of them in her car so they are handy for shopping purposes. I was looking at them the other day and noticed all the corporate logos and whatnot all over them.

And I got to thinking, how much cooler those bags would be if they had roleplaying-related slogans on them. So I've come up with the following:

1. My other bag is full of dice
2. I rolled a 20 on my Knowledge (Nature) roll
3. A dragon ate my refridgerator, so I have to buy more food
4. The DM said to bring snacks or else
5. This is my Bag of Holding
6. If you don't save (plastic), you take full damage

Perks of Travel...

For starters, allow me to apologize for the lack of a new post yesterday. I arrived back at my hotel at 11:55 pm, so I thought it best simply to collect my thoughts and give you something interesting to read today instead of a crappy "sorry, missed a post" post.

Navigation and storybuilding, both tricky tasks...

In my various wanderings around the mountain countryside, I determined that navigation is made much easier by large, looming markers of direction (like, say, the Rocky Mountains). It's also made considerably easier by the addition of a Garmin nuvi 350, which one of my coworkers brought with her.

The respective bonuses to Intuit Direction have to be at least +2 and +10 respectively.

Even with this assistence, I still found myself lost a few times. This was only a little frustrating, however a few choice encounters have inspired me for a few campaign ideas. I am in the process of fleshing out these ideas into a servicable 4e campaign, which should be fun to both break me into 4e and unleash on my unwilling player characters.

One may glean from this information that I am finally reading my 4e books in depth, and that means that before long you'll start hearing glowing praise/moderate indifference/seething rage depending on my mood at the time I sit down to write my various reviews.

I haven't decided how I intend to structure my opinions of 4e, but I am leaning toward an "in theory" and "in practice" set of segments that would outline how I see a new aspect of the system handling, and then how it actually handles once we get into the game itself.

Any opinions would be greatly appreciated on what you want to hear me talk about. Here's your chance, blogosphere... choose your own adventure!

The Longest 30 Days of the Year

By the time I post this, we'll be 29 days to Gencon! I'm very excited about this year, it's going to be a great year full of exciting events. And if you're still looking for something to do this year, feel free to join us at the following events:

Queen of Geeks Pageant - In some crazy fit of insanity, I decided to compete for the title of "Queen of Geeks." So, Friday morning from 10am to 1pm, I would appreciate your support during the competition!

Mastering Your GM-Fu - Saturday morning from 8am to 10am, DNAphil, Chatty DM, Vicki Potter and Zachary Houghton will be sharing with us how to master our GM-Fu with Session Prep. I think this is going to be a great event... these are very informative GMs, and I know they will have some great advice to share.

RPG Bloggers Unite! - Saturday afternoon from 1pm to 2pm, the StupidRanger crew will be joining several other bloggers as we share our blogging experience. Come meet us all, it'll be a blast!

Out of the Box Roleplaying - Sunday morning from 10am to 11am, Dante, Vanir and I will be hosting our own little event. A little D&D with our own crazy brand of insanity. Maybe something useful, we haven't decided on that yet. Either way, you will be entertained!

Online pre-registration has ended, but you may want to check out the events spreadsheet for other gems. Online pre-reg reopens Aug 13, just before the con opens, so you can will-call your tickets... 'cuz you sure don't want to miss these fantatic events!

Have notebook, will travel...

I'm on the road for my real job again, and before leaving home last night I loaded up a small 512 MB USB thumb drive with a series of D&D related books and some draft campaign ideas that I've been working on.

I find travelling and gamebuilding particularly troublesome. You don't want to waste a bunch of carry-on space with books, nor do you want to check a bunch of baggage with it (since they're charging per bag now, that gets expensive).

For me, the best solution is to go digital. I keep my campaign notes in Google Docs. I keep a running document on my thumb drive for times when the Internet eludes me, or I'm on a flight. The only part I don't have licked yet is how to design maps while on the road. I can draw in a physical notebook, but then translating that elsewhere is often troublesome and sometimes I lose notebooks.

I know there are plenty of mapping tools out there, but I'd love to find one with little to no learning curve and the ability to save your progress in some easily trasmitted format for editing on the go. Ideally, it would be a small enough footprint to carry around on a thumb drive or design in a web browser.

Maybe the interactive 4E tools will fill this void when they're available, only time will tell! Any other recommendations for how to game-build on the go can be added to the comments. If there are any new tools to be tried, I'd love to burn a little of my extra hotel time with trying them out this week!