On the publishing front 2013 will see my Detachment 7 campaign setting released.  (Modern counter-terrorism style techno-thriller action.) I may go ahead and put it out for several rule sets; most likely Savage Worlds and Traveller.

There will also be a fiction push as well.  More details on that soon.  I have a story set in the Black Tokyo world being written, among others.

My gaming group is trying out a new virtual table-top called Roll20 and so far I really like it!  You can run everything right from a browser, which is awesome.  About the only downside we have found so far is that rolling dice in Fantasy Grounds “feels” like rolling dice around the table and Roll20 doesn’t quite capture that.  But their dice macros are easy to implement and run, so it works. You can also run Roll20 in a Google HangOut.

The recent shooting.  Since the move to Boston, Connecticut is just down the street as it were.  I drive through there every time I visit D.C.  Feelings are raw, and people are emotional.  I was told to F&%k off and  un-follow another RPG publisher on Twitter because I had the audacity to point out that registering 300+ million guns is not as simple as registering 300+ million cars since guns can be hidden in a coat.  (And we all know cars are never stolen or used without proper registration, right?)

Let me lay out my thoughts in a few more words than can fit  in a tweet on this issue.

I want to point out that there are currently 300 million guns in America, right now as you read this. No law passed can stuff all that toothpaste back in the tube. Wishful thinking about people not having semi-autos is just that; a fantasy since we have already had them for 100+ years. If we could magically go back and change history, then that might be worth discussing. Most pro-gun control folks just don’t seem to “get” that you can’t control 300 million guns that are already in circulation. Ditto with preventing bad people from getting their hands on them; they always have, and always will. The real question is “how do we minimize the damage bad/evil/sick people can do when they misuse a car/gun/bottle of gasoline?”

The fact is that bad guys will have access to weapons (guns cars, blades, bats or just physical brute force) no matter what. On the other side of that equation is the fact that firearms are used over a million times a year to defend people, most of the time without a shot having to be fired. A million times a year. If you are in high school or college for four years that means four million times before you graduate firearms are used to defend the law abiding against criminals. Now, how many of those would have resulted in someone dying? Who knows, I don’t. But I do know that the number is not zero. It is more than 1, 20 and probably more than all the students at a typical high school. How about we honestly examine the “more harm than good” claim about guns. Hard to do when there are a bunch of dead children on the news, I know, but no less relevant.

Again, if what most of the low-information tweeters and Face-bookers advocate would *actually* make us safer then there might be a case for it. Leaving aside the constitutional questions, we are still faced with the fact that bad people can steal guns from the law abiding, or get an accomplice without a record to buy guns for them. Naturally, these actions are illegal but if you want to commit murder, what’s adding a firearms violation to the mix? I submit that it is a fantasy to think that you can keep bad or mentally ill people away from guns when so many are already in circulation. What the gun-control advocates are proposing does not and would not take guns out of circulation. We made alcohol illegal and it certainly didn’t stop the beer from flowing. Meth and weed are illegal and the drug trade is thriving. Make guns illegal and to think that they will somehow magically vanish from the streets is naive. At worst, it will be yet another thing the cartels can sneak into America along with drugs. Thus, my point; “control” is a non-starter so the real question is and always has been “How can we minimize the damage evil/sick people do with guns?” You can “believe” strict gun control works but you can’t point to anyplace where it actually *does*. Check crime stats in Chicago. Want to look abroad check out crime stats in England; which is an island which should make it easier for them. The bad guys there still have and use guns. And remember, mayhem and murder can be committed with more than just guns.  I don’t think this is a “gun” issue at all really, so much as a bad/sick/evil person issue.  (Not a single firearm was used on 9/11 to kill thousands of people.) Yes, we need a mental health system overhaul, big time. There are things that can and should be done; I just want to focus on things that will *work*.

For some reason the “left” has the default position of passing feel-good gun control that (and this is key) would NOT prevent this from happening again.  Lets say there was already massive gun control legislation passed and the killer only had ten round magazines; would more six year olds be alive or would he have just re-loaded a few more times?  Were a gaggle of children and a kindergarten teacher going to rush him while he was reloading?  I really don’t think so.  Ditto for revolvers as they can be reloaded quick too.  They think they can write some words on a piece of paper and *POOF* have 300+ MILLION guns vanish off our streets, with no way for any more to be made or smuggled or stolen into the wrong hands.  So please tell me who is being more “reasonable” about this discussion; someone pointing out the reality of the situation as it exists or someone dead-set on a fantasy that will never match reality?

But, speaking as a voice of reason let me just say this.  These things CAN NOT BE STOPPED.  EVER.  That is the big secret no one really wants to face.  There are just plain evil and sick bastards in this world. Humans are capable of great evil on a colossal scale.  I “get” that and it no longer surprises me.  Looking back over history you can see massacre after massacre.  It was never a question of if this would happen, but when and how often.  I mean seriously, lets make all the children go to a place every day where they are kept in a room and no one is there to protect them.  What could possibly go wrong?

Am I advocating that we not have schools?  Or malls?  Or movie theaters? Or military bases?  No, I am not.  What I am saying is that evil acts, perpetrated by terrorists for political or religious motives, or a sick guy lashing out at a world that wronged him or any other reason can’t be regulated and stopped. Sure, there will be the “lets put a cop in every school” people, thinking that one guy with a gun and a badge can protect a 100,000 square foot building with dozens of classrooms and hundreds of students, but I think that is silly. Just as silly as putting ten or fifteen cops in every school is the answer.  (Or the mall or wherever.)

I’m not proposing anything other than this; once we accept the fact that there are, and always will be fucked up people who will commit rape, robbery, terrorism, torture and murder without remorse and that THERE WILL ALWAYS BE SUCH PEOPLE IN OUR SOCIETY, that the idea of somehow catching every single one of them before they do something bad is a non-starter.  People who tell you otherwise are either lying or have an agenda.

There ore over 300 million people in America.  There are also over 300 million guns in America.  We will never “control” either of those things enough to completely stop tragedies like this.

So if we live in a world where evil people exist, and can cause mayhem that we can’t stop but only react to; then what are the most effective ways to minimize the damage?  (Not stop it, can’t be done, as I stated.)  That is where the conversation actually starts to mean something in my opinion.  But no one wants to hear that because they are still just pissed off and emotional about little children being killed.

My two cents.

Two for Black Tokyo, one for Psi-Watch and a Pathfinder release.

I know, its been FOREVER since I updated here.  So, in no particular order here is what is going on with Skortched Urf’ Studios and me personally.

At the end of June I hat surgery to repair my torn rotator cuff.  I’m doing the physical therapy thing (Read: Paying a guy to hurt me.) and hope to be back to full range of motion in three or four months and back at 100% within the year.

The Kickstarter for Badass Zombie Killers wasn’t successful.  We did top the magic 30% number, but we are re-tooling and will give it another stab shortly.

In bigger news, Skortched Urf’ Studios now has an official office space!  I rented space at the Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, MA.  The Asylum is one of the largest Hackerspaces in the country, with a full wood-working and machine shop, welding rigs, electronics area, 3D Printer, laser cutter, computer lab and screen printing shop all under one big roof.  I rented a 100 square foot space that is the new home of Skortched Urf’ Studios.  (Well, aside from my thumb drive and laptop, that is!) Naturally, this means I’ll be able to draw upon these resources to expand on the products Skortched Urf’ Studios can bring to the market.

(Not my actual space, but representative.)

In that same vein, I’m starting a new venture at www.armorclass10.com making T-shirts for the RPG gaming crowd.  I’m using Kickstarter to..ahem..kick it off and the project will go live in a few days!  Following that, I have some very specific ideas on using the laser cutter and 3D printer for future projects.  I’ll also be using the laser cutter to make the tokens that will go in the Badass Zombie Killers game when we re-launch that project.  (Look for it in October!)

I’m planning to go in and re-vamp our category layout in RPGNow/DriveThru in the coming weeks.  I have all of the Otherverse stuff under one category, and it needs to be broken out by setting.  Black Tokyo will get its own category, as well as Psi-Watch, Galaxy Command and Fursona. Plenty of work to keep me busy there.

On the gaming front the online Fantasy Grounds 2/Savage Worlds game came to a screeching halt when one of our stalwarts sold his house and is living in a high-speed internet dead zone for a while.  We did get another player back from military duty in “The Sandbox” so we are pressing forward tomorrow night with the next session of our fantasy campaign.  I picked a copy of the new Warhammer 40K box set last week, so I’m looking to start playing 40K again.  I have a Necron army, a massive Ork army and the making of a Space Marine army if I ever get the figs assembled and painted. Haven’t played much Xbox lately, but I am very much looking forward to Halo 4 and Black Ops 2 so I expect some controller-time in the near future.

Boston is treating me well so far, I’ve met some great people and really like the city.  I can even get a few places now without having to resort to the GPS!

That about sums it up for now.  More info soon!

The big news right off the bat.  I’ve partnered (as anyone who reads this blog already knows) with Lee Garvin of Reality Cheque to publish the card game Badass Zombie Killers.

The KickStarter project page is HERE.

Get thee hence and pledge to secure a copy of this game for yourself! Pretty please?  Srsly, you were just gonna blow that money on something stupid like food or gasoline or comic books, right?  Come on, how about putting it towards something that *MATTERS* instead?

A smattering of the BZK cards

I did manage to take my Necron army out to a not-quite-local game store last Thursday night and lose to some Tau.  (Well, mostly Kroot and some Rail Guns but there were a few Tau mixed in as well.)  I’m still figuring a few things out but gave some of the new figures a good shakedown.  I still want to play with a few more of the troop choices.  Due to the size of the game (1250 points) I wasn’t able to play the Deathmarks.  I want to field some wraiths as well.  Heck, I may even dust off the Flayed Ones I never used and see what they are like under the new edition.  Wife needs the car this Thursday night so I won’t be playing this week, which is fine since I think we’ll be doing the Detachment 7 RPG that night anyway.

I need to get back in the swing of regularly hitting the keyboard to get some writing done.  I tend to want to carve out massive six or eight hour blocks on weekends rather than trying to do one hour blocks every day.  Slow and steady wins the race, right?  I mean if I only write a thousand words a day at the end of a month I’d have 30,000 words, right?

Saw John Carter on Friday and it was Awesome!  I very much enjoyed it.  I downloaded all the books on my kindle but have not read any of them; waiting to see the movie first.  Now I want to dive into the books and see what they are like.  I read that the movie “bombed”, with about 30 million domestic and 70 million foreign against costs of 250 million.  I find it a bit boggling that a movie that made 100 million on opening weekend world-wide will not turn a profit; especially with the “long tail” of DVD and digital sales. I may take the wife to go see it since she was not with me on Friday.

I watched season 1 of A Game of Thrones last week also.  In a word; awesome.  I found it really did a great job of following the books, and can’t wait for season 2.  Not sure if I’ll add HBO to my FIOS plan so I can watch it or just wait for the DVD like I did with season 1.  Oh, and on The Walking Dead they are all still too stupid to live.  I swear, even Shane went all squooshy after killing the prisoner and couldn’t bring himself to kill Rick so he could get with his wife and adopt that kid that likes to wander off on his own during the zombie apocalypse. I mean, they have been living at this farm for what, like a month? Only *NOW* do they start checking the fence and boarding up the windows.  So naturally, the woods is now crawling with zombies since no one the whole show has ever heard of a silencer or has any clue how to cobble together the means to make on.  (Clue, a simple cardboard tube stuff with steel wool will make a passable silencer out of stuff you can find at any grocery store.  Let alone what you can make from the contents of a hardware store!) So next week we get to see a hoard attack the farm. I’d put money on “Token Black Guy” getting eaten since he’s barely had a line worth saying since he cut his arm on the freeway. I don’t know why I keep watching, but I do.  They truly are “The Walking Dead”.  (Oh, and Dale died in a much cooler way in the comic book!)

Over at RPGNow/DriveThru the annual GM’s Day sale is going on.  We thre our hat in the ring and are offering a 25% discount on all our products.  Sales are good, but I haven’t noticed a massive spike or anything.  I did wake up yesterday to find ten new ratings of various products; all one-star!  Naturally, no reviews just ratings.  What are you gonna do?

Over the weekend I started putting together a bunch of Necron figures I got for Christmas.  I dusted off my old army and put together a unit of Deathmarks, Immortals and a Command Barge.  I am in the process of building the Ghost Arc as well.  I may go out Thursday night and see if I can play a game at one of the local stores.  I haven’t played a game of 40K in a few years, and frankly I’d like to get back into actually gaming.  Since moving up here to Boston, I haven’t gotten out as much as I’d like, and hitting the local gaming circuit sounds like a fun way to get involved.  I stopped by Battle Grounds in Abbington last week for the heck of it and I found a copy of Campaign Overlay: Fantasy Firearms on the shelf!  That was pretty cool.  They are running a 40K tournament on the 24th but I already have plans that day.  Maybe the next one.

Chris Field sent over a new release, I’ll get that up later today so look for it soon.

A quick review of the Navy SEAL movie Act of Valor.  I checked it out last week when it came out and it was perfect inspiration for the Detachment 7 RPG I’m running. As a movie it was simply OK at times and awesome at others.  The acting was nothing to write home about and frankly I found a lot of the “emotion building” scenes to be ham fisted which, coupled with the stilted non-actors made them fall quite flat.  Parts of the movie did indeed feel like watching a live action version of Call of Duty, even down to the FPS camera view.  In most of the instances it was OK and did give you a feel for the danger at hand.  In one scene your following the POV of a SEAL when another shadowy form appears in the hall in front of you and is almost a “friendly fire” incident.  I think that scene was really well done. The Jason-Bourne Camera-shake-documentary style worked in most cases but in one scene we are seeing two CIA agents in an apartment or hotel room talking and the shakey-cam follows one of them out onto the balcony and it really took me out of the moment.  Save that for the action scenes and fire fights. The technical aspects of the film were great.  I for one really enjoyed seeing a movie that involved “actors” who actually knew how to use the guns they carried around. I am so used to watching gun handling in movies and thinking “You’re Doing It Wrong!” that it was refreshing to see one that made me think “Huh. I’m Doing It Wrong.” Worth seeing?  Yes, I’d say so.  Inspiring for a modern military RPG? Absofrikkin-lutely!  Heavy handed, spread it on with a trowel join-the-Navy unapologetic propaganda?  Yes.  The last few lines of the movie were a bit over-the-top even for a military hawk, pro 2nd amendment, Libertarian like myself.

We then jumped back to the CIA operatives who had captured two of the fleeing couriers in Pakistan.  They landed at FOB Hammer in Jalalibad with their two prisoners and set about interrogating them.  Instead of letting the captured terrorists know they were being held by Americans, they instead made them think they were captured by the Pakistani ISI.  This led the bad guys to say it was all a misunderstanding and they dropped the name of a General in the Pakistani army to get the “misunderstanding” sorted out.  Naturally, it was the same general the PC’s had observed on site at the OBL compound minutes after the raid!  They gleaned from the prisoners that this General and others within the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies were actively helping senior Al Queda leadership.  They also learned about a small village in the tribal region where much of their message traffic ultimately ended up, and suspect it might be where another senior Al Queda leader is making his base.

The PC’s were ordered to draw up raid plans and given a task force of Army Rangers to help carry it out.  With areal images captured by drones they started planning theoperation.  A sniper element and a raid element will insert early and trek in on foot so they are in position when the remaining troops deploy via helicopter.  They will seize the main building just outside the town where they terrorists are believed to be, and cut off re-enforcement from the town with more troops and circling gunships.  We ended the session there as it was close to midnight.  The next session will play out the actual raid.

I’ve been working over the Savage Worlds rules relating to modern weapons and have made a few tweaks. I had the GE Mini-guns mounted on the choppers originally doing 3d8 damage, but instead changed it to 6d4.  I really liked doing it that way better since there was a significantly higher chance of rolling the maximum number (4 in this case, a 25% chance) so that you got to roll again and have it “Blow Up”.  I rolled it both ways and the 6d4 consistently had several dice “Blow Up” resulting in an overall higher number.  I think it captures the feel of thousands and thousands of rounds of incoming fire pretty well in the Savage Worlds setting. Will get to use them in combat next session, and am looking forward to it.  Another thing I added was a +1 bonus to hit when using a “tricked out” rifle that incorporates the latest widgets like picatinny rail system, vertical fore-grip, laser/flashlight, adjustable stocks and whatever else gets slapped onto a “Tacti-cool” rifle now days. It gives people using these accessories a good bonus to hit without getting bogged down in the details of exactly what gets added.  Scopes give a +1 at anything from Medium range out, and a red dot or Eotech holographic sight gives +1 at short to med range.  So if you co-witness a magnifier you end up with a +1 at any range.

I did a quick scan of the mass combat rules and I don’t find them terribly helpful for a Modern setting.  They seem designed more for mass combat in a fantasy setting with troops clashing on the field of battle.  So I made up several “units” in the combat tracker with ten men in each, some for the Rangers and others for the Taliban or Tribal Guards.

In the name of “research” I’m going to see Act of Valor tonight.  I’ll drop my wife off at one of her friends house so they can get all crafty making scrap books or something, and I’ll settle in with some popcorn and goobers to watch the Navy Seal version of Top Gun. I’ll post a review and let you know what I thought of it, but I’m not expecting too much based on the reviews I’ve already read.

Oh, and Look for a new release later today from Chris Field that melds two of his best selling lines; Fursona and Balck Tokyo!