Recent content by carpocratian

Just to throw this out there, you can actually hitch goats to carts and train them to pull them. If you hitch up a whole team, they can even pull a cart with an adult and gear in it. Ches McCartney, the "Goat Man," is an interesting historical figure who did just that. He would make a great...

The best mentor I ever had was someone who wasn't very popular among his peers (library directors) in the area, or even most of his staff. He had a lot of ideas they thought were "radical," and liked to push the buttons of the ones who were resistant to change. He was very effective at his job...

Yep. It is impossible to tell the difference between sales figures for games versus how much they get played, since GMs tend to purchase the majority of them, but may never have the opportunity to run them. Buying games to mine for ideas (or just to read) is really common.

Donkeys have an inborn hatred of canines. They can pretty easily stomp a dog, coyote, or wolf to death. They can get along just fine with family dogs if they are raised around them, though. A lot of ranchers keep a donkey with their sheep or goat herds as guard animals. You see that a LOT in...

That is a good approach. A lot of businesses are on two or three year replacement cycles for computers, surprisingly. One of my friends who is an IT contractor ends up with a LOT of nice equipment that he buys from his clients, or that they just give him outright.

Very cool! I look forward to hearing how it goes. I'm doing some mini-painting events in my library this summer, with a combination of painting kits and minis donated by Reaper and some minis from home that I will probably never use. I'm going to focus on the tween/teen age categories for...

I can see those numbers if we are talking about current (the last few months) purchases of core rulebooks. Once you get into third-party products for game lines, in print or PDF, though, my bet is that CoC sales far outstrip the Marvel RPG ones.

I have supported a lot of Kickstarters in the past, but I stopped doing that for the most part about two years ago. For me, a lot gets down to the wait time. Something I'm interested in buying right now may not be something I am interested in a year or two from now. My interests or needs...

Yeah, Blade Runner would have been much more useful as a sourcebook, rather than a standalone game. Then again, I think MOST games - particularly those based on existing media properties - would be better as sourcebooks than full games. That's something I think Steve Jackson games got right.

I'm not really blaming anyone. I don't think there is anything wrong with that approach, or even with having all those metacurrencies. They just aren't things that appeal to me. They do to some other people, though. Most of the guys I was playing Conan 2d20 with liked the game. It just...

Reiterating what some others have said, I don't have an issue with the existence of the games, and don't really have any particular critiques of the mechanics (though they aren't ones I enjoy). It is more the slavish "you should use PbtA/FitD" response over and over again that you tend to get...

It is the industry standard for certain types of books, particularly those trying to do mega Kickstarter campaigns. There are a lot of games that are still done with primarily black and white art, though, or in simpler styles with a more limited color palette.

For actual Howard stuff I pull things from various older books (non-gaming), articles, old fanzines, websites, etc., or just straight from the stories. On the extended-Conan front I like that Marvel "world of Conan" single-issue comic (can't recall the name off the top of my head) and the old...

That was a big part of my problem with the game. In the campaign I was in, the other players spent most of their time focusing on how to maximize use the metacurrencies, and less on the story itself.

Having played in a Conan campaign for a little while (and eventually quit, mainly due to the system) the metacurrencies in it are a big part of what turned me off, and pretty much soured me on all other 2d20 Modiphius games. I didn't really care for the character creation part, either, but that...