Monthly Archives: May 2009

Star Trek

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I’ve never been a ‘fan’ of Star Trek.  I’m certainly not a hater, and I’ve probably seen more than 60% of the episodes in any of the different settings other than the Enterprise final one.  It was sci-fi, and so kinda of my thing, and so I watched.  I cringed a lot because to me it always felt twee.  The movies were something I sort of watched if they were on, other than the first couple when I was young and really interested.  Some of the ones in the middle I’ve never seen end-to-end, only cringeworthy scenes of twee-thigh-slapping moral-delivering tweeness.

Hmm, maybe I am a hater.

Anyway, suffice to say, Star Trek was okay, I know the stuff at a superficial level and TNG is the one I’ve seen most of.  So I was kind of curious about what JJ Abrams would deliver with his reboot.  I thought Cloverfield was an excellent movie which I didn’t enjoy because of the camera work, but the direction and production were excellent.  After watching Fringe and hearing about Lost I know that JJ’s attention to detail is beyond incredible, and knowing he was a Star Trek fan, I was curious to see how much he kept and how much he ditched.

I was very surprised at the small size of the release in the UK, and I read it was the same in the US.  Over here, Wolverine and State of Play are the films in the Premier seating screens and Director’s Lounge, not Star Trek.  Only on two screens at a time in the Showcase.  I was a little nervous.  Anyway, we grabbed our tickets and sat with the unwashed masses (normally, we hide in the premier seats), ready for our two hour Trek experience.

And wow.  What an experience.  Spoilers follow, probably.

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The Garden Update

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted about the garden, but we’ve certainly not been slacking.  Neither of us can quite believe we’re enjoying doing the gardening so much.  Despite the fact that I have a suspected hernia, I’ve been trying to help Grete as much as I can but she’s having to do most of the heavy lifting now.  In fact, the pain really flared up a couple of days after I carried the top soil around from the car to the back garden last week.  Anyway.

Grete’s done an amazing job sorting out the left side border, we both put in a lot of effort getting the soil under where the deck had been turned over, cleaned out of bricks and rubble to some extent and mixed in a bunch of new top soil.  We’ve seeded that with grass, hopefully to get it looking like the other side and stop the soil washing away in the first heavy rain we get this year.  We’re still not sure what to do with the exposed brickwork and fence panels, but we’ve got some wooden edging we hope to use to hide some of it when I get the chance, and as for the rotten wood holding up the fence panel, that will have to wait until we’re both a bit more confident.

We stopped in B&Q today and picked up 6 shrubs for the right side, and a Japanese Acer for the area we’re grassing to replace the honeysuckle, so hopefully they’ll all put down some roots and do well.  The weather is certainly on our side.

Updated some photo’s at the picasa page (here if you’re really keen), and here’s a couple of my favourites of the cats from the last couple of weeks.

Not a cat! A plant!Bubbles enjoying sun and shade at the same timeShe'd been rolling in the dirt and needed a cleanThe great black hunterShe loves the stick

New restaurant

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There’s a new restaurant / takeaway place opened up in town, Indian and Nepalese cuisine.  We saw it a couple of days ago and a menu was popped through the door today.  Quoting verbatim, you may enjoy the following dishes (I checked my spelling four times, anything I write below is verbatim),

  • Tender of baby lamb traditional bring spiced from Nepal add fresh garlic & highly flavour coriander.
  • Tender of lamb cubs slow heating cooked with fresh herb and spiced.
  • Cooked with chef secret spices creating exotic taste on the top boiled eggs.
  • Assorted fresh vegetable light spiced herb freshness cooked.
  • Charcoal grill salmon tikka tandoori king prawn, prawn cherry tomatoes fresh fenugreek leafs, home made spices, smooth sauce.
  • Cooked creamy coconuts nuts very mild dishes
  • Plain think curry cooked with fresh green chilli and spices.

I kinda feel sorry for them, I think they rushed the menu out and opened in a hurry but if I was printing their menu, I would have called them up and maybe offered some advice.

More encounters

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Wrote a couple more 4th edition D&D encounters last night, again won’t really know how well they play out until the characters get to them (maybe this week, maybe not, depends how quick we get through the remaining encounters in the ‘intro’ adventure).

I knocked up a quick spreadsheet (yes Grete), which does the work of adding up the numbers so you can play with how many of each creature type you want included.  That makes it easy to move between a load of minions and a few tough mobs, to more tough mobs and fewer minions while staying within your XP budget.

I did flirt briefly with the idea of signing up to WoTC’s D&D Insider thing which gives you access to some online tools, but decided not to in the end, we’re on a budget this month for one, and secondly I think I can probably hack together anything I really need.  We used to do all this by hand you know 🙂  I’ve enjoyed working out the maps for the encounters as well, trying to take into consideration the different kinds of terrain and situations that affect abilities, to spice things up.

The three encounters are sort of bridging encounters between the starter adventure and the published module I want to run.  I’ve added some treasure although it’s a bit of guesswork as to how much I should be giving out.  All-in-all it should be enough to get the PC’s to 2nd level and give them some excitement.  We’ll see if they turn into pushovers or are so deadly the PC’s die three times over.

Proving who you are

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Wizards of the Coast provide a mail service where you can send rules queries for their games, including D&D.  This is cool, because it seems no matter how well a rulebook is written there are always some issues which are confusing.

I thought I’d send them a query about a rule – and you have to sign up to their site, okay, I guess that keeps the spam down.  So I started the signup process.  They needed the regular stuff, username, e-mail, date of birth.  My postcode?  Filled them all in – then, three, security questions and one additional question you might get asked on the phone, all required so they can prove who you are if you forget your account details.

Come on.

It’s a forum user ID.  If I answered those questions they’d know more about me than the bloody tax office.  Anyone who did manage to get access to my data would know enough to convince other people they were me.  It’s not like WoTC are running a banking operation or something like that.  I just wanted access to their forums and the option to mail them a rules question.

Clearly, I just made up answers to the questions that I’ll remember but that aren’t true, in fact to simply things I just picked the same answer to all four questions even if it made no sense.  Reducing the point of them having multiple questions.  Sometimes you can have too much security.

D&D 4e – Creating Encounters

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I tried my hand at creating an encounter last night using the guidelines in the 4e DMG – and I have to say, I found it a lot more intuitive than it was in v3, and none of the random guesswork and knowledge of creatures required in 1st and 2nd edition.

We’ll see how it plays out when the party meets the bad guys.   I can see that it could turn out a little formulaic, but then it’s based on a formula so there’s always going to be that risk, the difference will be how well a DM can turn things around to give the same results without always ending up with the same encounter structure.

I created a 4th level encounter for a party of 5 1st level characters, which makes it a pretty tough encounter.  I love minions, in older versions of D&D you’d end up to 2 or 3 tough creatures and the fight would feel small, with 4e the encounter has 11 creatures and feels much larger and epic even if 6 of those have essentially 1hp.  I tried to make sure the terrain played a role, giving the enemy cover and adding some terrain which slows movement, and then picking creatures which could take advantage of that (don’t want to say *too* much since my players are reading!)

I certainly feel more confident that the encounter will at least be appropriate, without having to test it too hard or run through too many details, and that leaves me more time to think up exciting situations and more encounters.  I’d love more electronic tools for doing this, but I’m not going to pay Wizards for theirs, I may have a go at putting some basic creatures values into some spreadsheet tables and just giving myself the option to quickly build encounters and add the XP totals as we go, which is the only non-creative hard bit.

I may post the encounter was the players have defeated it.

HeroQuest!

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I loved HeroQuest, even though I never really got to play it enough.  I have several versions, and some expansions, in various states of repair, and that means I have a lot of plastic mini’s that came with the game.  I’d mostly forgotten about them until last week, when I was wondering about getting some figures for our D&D sessions.  It suddenly occurred to me I probably had enough stashed away (I wanted something durable, and lightweight that we could chuck about on the battle map and not worry too much about) so I collected them all up and yep, there’s loads.

Mostly unpainted though – but I set about fixing that.  Finished up all the zombies (8 of them), and decided to start on the goblins (since both myself and Chris need a lot of zombies and goblins in the games at the moment).  I asked Grete if she wanted to lend a hand, and she did, helping paint her first miniatures.

Here’s the resulting goblin hoard (I base coated them yesterday so they’ve gone from nothing to game-ready in 2 days).

Goblins!
There’s 18 of them all-together including one I painted years ago.  It’s a superfast paint job, base coat, wash, dry brush, clothing, wash, drybrush, detail.  But it does the job for miniatures you’re going to be gaming with.

Now, if only I knew where to get the 4 red dragons in hard waring plastic resin I’ll need for the next game … 😉

Scaring your players

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How do you scare the players in your D&D campaign?  Tell them you thought you’d paint ‘a couple’ of miniatures ready for the first encounter of the next session, and then show them this photo 😉

Bunch of HeroQuest miniatures