On Hiatus for the Week.

Hey guys,

I’ll be taking a short break from posting regularly from today until Friday.  Things have been sorta strange here lately, what with Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy) submerging Metro Manila in raging 20 foot flood water… and a second one on the way.

That said, I should consider myself lucky to have taken a leave from work for a week even before the storm hit.  I didn’t expect Ketsana to leave the kind of mess it did, and was looking forward to a relaxing week off with time to read up on my PDFs, and plan for my games.  Now things are quiet, and there’s a nervous silence over the city.  Stores are running out of food stock, traffic hasn’t sorted itself out, and several areas in the metro are still flooded.

You can imagine how difficult it is to try and write something cheery and escapist at the moment.

That said, I’m not quite abandoning the blog completely, and will see if I can post something during the week… I’m just setting expectations, just in case people wonder where I might have gone off to.

[Fantasy Craft] Character Sample: Xiao Ling, Striking Human Bard Courtier (Wuxia!)

Next up in our series of character samples based on the the World of Jianghu Wuxia Setting I’ve been fiddling around with is another popular stereotype of Wuxia fiction:  The Courtesan.

Admittedly for a character class choice, Courtesan doesn’t exactly inspire images of heroism in western fantasy, so I was intrigued when I saw it included in Fantasy Craft.  Then again, since I has Wuxia on my mind, I figured that it might be interesting, so I gave it a whirl and here are the results:

Wishful Thinking: If I had been in GenCon

Being in the Philippines has its merits.  Beaches that I never go to, warm weather that I hide from, and Typhoons that reduce the country to the dark ages every year.  But even all that excitement isn’t enough… because halfway around the world, they have Gencon.

Conventions are things of wonder for me, especially given that that roleplaying and tabletop hobby scene in this country still hasn’t managed to get something of that size.  Sure there are groups dedicated to RPGs and Tabletop games, and they’ve got monthly gaming meets for players to touch bases… but community is one thing, while the Industry is another.

That said, it is simply not feasible for most of the hobby companies to establish a presence here, in a third world country.  That’s why PDFs are the way to go here.  No need to pay double the cost of the book worth of shipping and taxes and bribes to the post office workers just to get your merchandise.

That said, Gencon seemed to have a whole lot of things that piqued my interest.  Among those that I’ve heard of, I am definitely interested in seeing:

• Eclipse Phase
• HERO System, 6th Edition
• Fantasy Craft
• Pathfinder
• Geist: the Sin-Eaters
• Dice! (Polyhedral sets are as rare as gold here.  Which makes pushing the hobby that much more difficult)
• Miniatures! (Anything that isn’t Games-Workshop and Warmachine is non-existent and paint prices are atrocious)

Still, given that the con’s now over, I just have to wait and figure out the rest of this years expenses… HERO 6th’s PDFs are calling to me with a siren song that just might break me.

[Mage: the Awakening] It’s the little things…

The Mage: the Awakening campaign I’m running is finally hitting its stride, as the players move closer and closer to stopping the antagonists of this first storyline.  At this point most of the players have hit 4 or 5 dots in their respective Arcana, making them potent combatants, and peerless investigators.

Philippine Gamer will Return After These Messages…

Due to some rather hectic RL workload, Philipine Gamer will be intermittent with it’s posting for the week.  Rest assured that I’ll be back and blogging as soon as possible when this crazy work week and it’s accompanying projects are over.

I won’t have a post today, but I’ll see if I can come up with something in the wee hours of the morning tomorrow, just before the workday begins and my mind is consigned to the Information Architecture Salt Mines.

Brain on Vacation

Given my sudden increase of work, I’m going to have to apologize since I don’t have an entry for today.

Life and Times of a Philippine Gamer will resume on Tuesday, March 18.  After I get my eye scraped by a doctor to correct the last few anomalies of my Laser Eye Surgery.

New Blog Template

Hey guys,

My girlfriend and I have decided that a little bit of change is in order, so we decided to clean up the blog template to something easier to read, cleaner to navigate, and changed the former copyrighted image to something IP neutral.

She’s responsible for the header image by the way, I’m very happy with it and certainly proud to put it up  Hope you guys like the facelift!

Today is a Day of Celebration…

Today is my beloved girlfriend’s birthday.

Happy birthday, baby!  I’m blessed to have you in my life, as your boyfriend and your GM

[OT] Weird Dreams

I don’t normally dream,  and I don’t normally dream of truly strange things. Last night was apparently an exception to that rule.

Dreams don’t necessarily have to make sense, but I was in a rainy part of Manila and for one reason or another, I discovered I could fly with a small amount of concentration.  I remember it very clearly since I was studying how I could fly in my dream… the amount of concentration to do it was similar to say running a mantra in the back of your head, or repeating the Lord’s Prayer over and over while you perform mundane tasks.  Not quite multi-tasking, more like a background process running on your OS.

It was quite a thrill, zipping up and down, learning to perform some aerobatics in the rain, until my dream turned weird and I found myself having to fend off what seemed to be the entire 30 years of Sentai, coming after me wave after wave, team after team.  The scene shifted to some other sort of battlefield, and I was somehow armored.  Throw in the fact that I had little else aside from flight to stop them and it turned weird as I rammed, kicked and stole melee weapons just to fend them off…

and then I woke up.

I’m on Vacation…

I’ll be posting irregularly for the week due to some much needed vacation time.