~Gorbash Kazdar
Tick.
Hey all, this is Earthflame. No, I'm not coming back any time soon. No, I'm not entirely better yet. I'm going to return at some point, but until then, I'll satisfy myself with writing articles. I'm not yet back on /tg/ or the sup/tg/ IRC, but I will answer questions posed in comments or emails. I'd prefer if these focused on the game or matter being discussed, rather than my own personal health or somesuch. There'll be plenty of time for that later.
This brief Article will, hopefully, serve as a foundation, giving the basic premise of the following articles, as well as a list of the games I've currently thought up, letting people know what's coming.
It also serves to let me put out a little of my game design philosophy. First and foremost, I design my games to be fun. Second, and nearly as important, I try to design games which will, at the end of the day, work with the players to make a good and interesting story.
But, what’s OCR? Why should I care if my PDFs are tagged with the (OCR)? Well, fair reader, let me explain.
Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a method of recognizing letters in a PDF in order to make it searchable. By stringing letters together to form words, the program – Adobe Acrobat – is able to turn what was a jpeg or similar image into clickable, highlight-able, searchable text. Sounds pretty handy doesn’t it? Why yes, yes they are! OCR technology makes reading a PDF that much simpler. In addition to making the text interactive, it also allows for the compressing of PDFs. Take your average Dark Heresy scan. It’s about 200 megs, give or take a few megs for the differences in scans available. Once run through an OCR converter, that size can shrink all the way down to under 50 megs. Repeat this process for any book out there.
“But if OCR is so good, why aren’t all books OCR’d!” one might be wondering. Well. There is a slight loss of quality involved in the process. The same Dark Heresy book lost some of its quality. It still remained an excellent scan, however during the OCR process it does lose some. The remaining problem is the necessary equipment. Not just any program either. Adobe Acrobat is the only one I’ve found so far that is able to perform the process. Along with the program, a certain amount of time is needed, usually a few hours for the OCR to take place. During this period, the program uses a large amount of resources, making other endeavors nigh on impossible.
However, this brave author, has started OCRing books, in a venture he calls UNLIMITED OCR WORKS. Through this program, he’s OCR’d a fair number of books, and the library grows often. Though intensive, I have a number of books that I have OCR’d personally. The catalog will be updated and posted shortly, along with handy links.
If you have a particular or special request, please field them. It’s kind of fun to OCR books and stuff, so let me know over the IRC or something.
As you may have guessed, I love mechs, and Mekton is my system of choice for robot fightan. What you may not know, though, is that I greatly prefer “harder” scifi to Newtype hax and experimental mind-powered units that are actually the demons. I have created a setting to accommodate this, and in so doing, I feel, have curbed the worst excesses and exploits of Mekton. These mechs are powerful, sure. But they rely on a good pilot, accurate shooting and tactics rather than flying, beamspam and the Itano Circus (although I would argue the Bane-3, YMN-6Y or LGB-12C could probably outshoot any Valkyrie when you’re talking missiles, but a Battletech versus Macross debate should probably stay in /m/.)
This article will take the form of a series of flavour texts for 6 “medium” mechs, followed by a link to where a collected set of datasheets can be downloaded. They make good enemy units or NPCs in a semi-realistic, “3025-era Battletech” style campaign - the weapons are not hax powerful and there aren’t any really odd things.
~Thin Fatguy
~Mitchell_Henderson
I have never seen a setting or a game that really used all the creatures in the MM. They were assumed to be there, somewhere, yes, but did you ever see them in an adventure module? Did you actually seriously use one in a game? Have you seen someone else use one?
If you confirm that you have for any of these creatures and prove me wrong I will hate you forever for the rest of the day.
(Editor's Note: I'm going to take some credit for putting the images together for this one, particularly the ones that took me 9,001 hours in MS Paint. All other images copyright Wizards of the Coast, except for when it is not, derp.)
Oh god I was hungover and grumpy because i recorded this once but didcked it up i'm sorry i sound so horrible oh god how did this get here i am not good with computer
(Editor's Note: Man, I almost choked to death laughing when he finds out what the nation name turns out to be.)
~CAPSLOCKGUY
I'm a big fan of under-represented games, as nearly 2500 points of Battlefleet Gothic, Inquisitor rulebooks and Mordheim warband suggest. It's only by virtue of my FLGS not stocking them that I don't have a horde of Battlemechs and Heavy Gear figures in my cupboard. So when I was given the chance to try Urban Mammoth's small-scale sci-fi game Urban War, I leapt at the chance.
And I found a real gem there. Long story short, it's a very fast paced skirmish game with a healthy variety of factions to try out and some nice minis. While nothing is going to topple GW's domination of the market for light, fantastical wargames, UW is a nice alternative. The aesthetic is a bit more video-game or anime themed than 40k, but I don't feel you lose too much from the lack of Grimdark. I'll begin with a rundown of the faction aesthetics and play style (the fluff is interesting, but I personally wouldn't say it sells the system) to whet your appetites, then move into a discussion of the rules.
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