Riding my first ambulance

Last Sunday evening, my wife and I had our own little 'special adventure'.

At about 1:45 at night, she woke me up groaning from serious pains. I thought she was going into labor (over 2 months early), but according to her it weren't really contractions. Furthermore, her whole body started to cramp up, she was getting sick, and she felt like she was going to pass out.

I immediately called an ambulance to take us to the hospital. At around 3, we arrived at there, and she was immediately attached to a monitor, which recorded her contractions (by then, they actually were).

By the time the questions and monitoring and paperwork were done, we were finally allowed to try and sleep a little. However, with the pains my wife still occasionally felt (although much less severe), and me being given a sofa to sleep in, we didn't get much of it.

In the morning, there were some more questions and monitoring, while we were waiting for the doctor to come in and decide whether or not we were allowed to go home, or stay for a couple of days. At about noon, we got the word that we could go, so I phoned my wife's mother to ask her to come pick us up. More waiting.

She took us to her place, cooked us some food, let us sleep on the couch and in the evening dropped us off again at our place.

Looking back at it, it was kind of a surreal experience: woken up in the middle of the night, to ride an ambulance (with siren, running through red lights) to the hospital, where we had to wait and wait and wait, to finally be sent home again. In the end, everything was back as it was before (except for extreme tiredness, and some extra hospital bills to expect).

We're both hoping never to have to go through all this again, even though it all turned out okay in the end. Except, of course, for giving birth itself, which we agreed with our new baby would not happen before Octobre. It was sealed with a kick.

Come one, come all! Hear ye, hear ye!

The first screenshots and ingame movie trailer of Larian Studios' new game 'Divinity 2 - Ego Draconis' are released and can be seen in this article from computerandvideogames.com.

Also, Larian Studios is looking for playtesters. If you live close to Oudenaarde, Belgium and are willing to spend an afternoon trying out the new game, be sure to sign up!

Brain Teaser Paradise

A nice little discovery in the obscure shadows of the internet: the website of Vegard Hanssens.

Among a few interesting math applications (such as fractals and birth primes), he's got a number of challenging puzzles on there as well. Each puzzle type has a huge database of specific puzzles, and for each one you have the option to solve it online, print it out, or let it solve itself. I suggest to go check it out.

My personal favorites are the hashi and arukone puzzles.

'Giant leap' in cheap, environment-friendly power

Some researchers at MIT have discovered a way to store energy from solar power, which was until now not possible.

The fact that solar energy was not available when the sun doesn't shine, was apparently the only reason why we couldn't completely rely on it yet.

Until now, because a simple setup of neutral pH water with a special catalyst in room-temperature (inspired by photosynthesis - the way plants get their energy from the sun) will enable us to store any surplus power the sun freely gives us. And it's totally carbon-free, which means no more mining for fossil fuels and no more toxic exhausts.

And did you know that the energy of one hour of the sunlight reflected on our planet is enough to provide the entire earth with power for one year? I didn't.

Larian out of the closet

Larian Studios, my employer, has yesterday completely restyled their website in anticipation of an important announcement, that should come any day now.

If you're interested in computer roleplaying games, I suggest to keep an eye (and a bookmark) on the Larian website.

Glee!!

Favorite Roleplaying Tools

After almost a year of running our current home campaign of Shackled City (D&D 3.5), and a little under a week away from starting a new homebrewn campaign at work (D&D 4), the time seemed appropriate to revise my collection of computer tools that I use to run my games.

In the past, I've been using one particular all-encompassing tool most often, and tested a few others that were much alike. Until recently, however, I realized that these tools didn't really help me improve my efficiency as a DM anymore. In the past, they used to, because they took care of all the nitty-gritty rules details for me, but since then I've grown and I've learned, so much so that I feel these tools are now holding back my creativity.

The features I need the most are the following (separated between 'planning' and 'playing'):
- Planning: a quick and clean way to write down ideas and inspiration, and still be able to go through them easily enough in the future
- Planning: a fast way to design maps, where the tool itself doesn't slow me down (otherwise, I could just use pen and paper)
- Planning: preferably some way to make the maps visually appealing
- Playing: a battle map
- Playing: a way to quickly find important PC and NPC stats
- Playing: a good overview of rules that can easily be searched (so I don't need to flip pages when looking up a rule)
- Playing: a batch dice roller, for rolling all players' saving throws at once, for example
- Playing: a flexible initiative tracker

So I've spent some time looking for a way to improve on these issues, and I think I'm almost there. Allow me to present you my suite of favorite tools (all of which are totally free, and system-independent).

To brainstorm on campaign and adventure creation, and to jot down ideas, I use a tool called Freemind, which is a freeware mindmapping tool. Mindmapping is ideal for this job, and Freemind does well what it's supposed to do.

Making maps goes through a number of tools. First, I create the basic idea and layout of the environment (dungeon, landscape, cityscape, etc.) in AutoREALM. This tool has some basic and a few advanced drawing capabilities, a nice collection of icons, and a system of layers that make rudimentary mapmaking quick and easy. Moving stuff around and relating all features to each other is a brease, which is ideal for the planning process of the maps.

AutoREALM has a few features that can improve your maps visually, but I personally find the resulting maps lacking appeal. Therefore, once the layout of my maps are satisfactory, I export them to GIMP (or even better: Adobe Photoshop, if you're rich), and start drawing over them. This is the hardest part, and takes some practice, tricks, and preferably a drawing tablet with a pressure sensitive pen, but it gives the best results. I might in the future make a blog post with some tips and tricks on this matter.

For campaign notes during play, I use the very simple, but very elegant KeyNote. It's just an rtf text editor, but with tabs and a tree-structure of notes. This allows me to neatly sort all rules summaries, PC and NPC stats, campaign notes, and more in a single file, with a nice overview and easy access. Unfortunately, the tool is no longer being supported, but the latest version has all I need.

Handling combat is done, for now, with Calc (it's the OpenOffice alternative of Microsoft's Excel, except it's totally free). It allows me to put a combatant with some info (like AC, hp, status effects, combat notes) on each line, and easily sort the whole initiative list when necessary. I might change to another tool for this, but for now I will try this one out.

Finally, showing maps to players is done with the ultimately cool MapTool from RPTools. It supports a client-server approach where the DM has his maps with fog-of-war, topology (i.e. obstacles that block player view), monster tokens to be moved around (and the possibility to show stats on mousing over those monsters), simple drawing tools which may or may not be visible to the players (DM's choice), a macro system that allows custom rolls to be made (rolling all PC spot checks and NPC hide checks at the same time, for example), and much more. This is by far the best tool I've ever seen, and it's constantly being improved on and new features are added.

Monster and player tokens (visual representations for the battle grid in MapTool) are created with the TokenTool. It's really fast, easy, and professional looking.

The only thing I'm still looking for, is a tool where I can link all my maps together (sort of like an interactive atlas), but MapTool (see above) might soon have that feature too.

The preparation tools have already been tested (and approved). I'm wondering how the playing tools will behave, but I already extensively used some of them (like MapTool and KeyNote) and I'm pretty confident the rest will do its job too. I just hope I won't fall into the trap of relying on them too much. I need to make sure I spend most of my attention on my players instead of my screen.

I'm curious...

Schwarzwald

Last friday, my wife and I returned from our week of holiday (actually, our honeymoon) in Schwarzwald, Germany. Our son stayed a week with his grandparents, so my wife and I could really relax and enjoy.

We stayed for 5 days and 4 nights in a quiet little hotel in Muggenbrunn, making small trips to surrounding sites like the Feldberg, Belchen (from the top of which we could see the Alps), the Todtnau waterfall, etc... Even in Muggenbrunn itself, there was ample opportunity to make small walking trips into nature. Really sweet.

The food in the hotel was absolutely incredible. In genuine German hospitality style, you get an oversized plate stuffed with delicious meat, flavored vegetables, and baked potatoes or home-made 'Spätzle'. Whenever you're halfway through your plate, though, they come fill it again for you; we never once were hungry in that entire week.

There's much more to tell, but I'm not going to bother too much. Instead, I'll show off (*ahem*) some of the drawings I made while we were there.