Monday, 22 March 2004

Recent Reading

• Trollslayer, Skavenslayer, Daemonslayer, by William King; Games Workshop Publishing, 2000. I finally got around to reading these Gotrek and Felix books set in the world of Games Workshop’s Warhammer games. I don’t play any of Games Workshop’s miniatures games, but I do play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay when I can, and it is set in what’s more-or-less the same world. (WFRP was published in 1989 and GWs repeated revisions of their Warhammer games and the world they are set in has increasingly diverged from the grimmer, grittier, low-powered world seen in WFRP.) They’re ok for gaming fiction, and have a few interesting glimpses of the world in them. I tend to leave the steam tanks and flying machines out of my version of the Warhammer world, though, and judging by Skavenslayer and Daemonslayer those elements are increasingly common in the stories of Gotrek and Felix.

OpenRPG

I’ve been playing around with OpenRPG a little bit lately, and it seems to work reasonably well. It provides multi-user text-based chat, a shared map with miniatures, an a few other things useful for people playing pen-and-paper adventure games online. On problem that the current 1.6.1 release has is with the fog feature: in 1.6.1 there is a bug that causes massive instability when the fog feature of the map is used. However, there is a patch for it that fixes the problem.