arcady

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group...

I was hanging with someone who is starting a new caimpaign, in a D20 system, just last week.

Keep in mind, I've never played 3.5 ed, only played 3.0 ed about 4 or 5 sessions although I've skimmed the books. He has played quite a bit

 

I seem to know the rules a lot better then he does or his players who have also DMed. I don't know how much of it is an inability to read or a total disintrest. I am not talking house rules here either. Hell sometimes not only did he not know the exact rule he didn't have any exact rule when one was needed, and would reply with a shurgged shoulder and a eh.

When I would look it up and explain the book, he would understand it, but I lack confidence in his abilities.

I hadn't been around GURPS in years, and you could say 'it was 4e so what can you expect when everyone is new to it' but among the others were two GURPS fiends.

By somewhere in the second or third session I was the one with all the rules info - and the 'there's a rule for that?' was common enough for a response.

Of course, it also made me realize just how frustrating of a system GURPS actually is, as half the rules I looked up where things that prevented me or someone else from playing in the style that would have been most enjoyable...

Levels of reading comprehension vary greater, and even more so the ability to look at something and then see how it would or might apply in a different circumstance is greater lacking in most people (thankfully, or people like me would be out of work in the legal profession... )

Re: Valdorian Characters

Not when it's stupid' date=' I'm not. [/quote']I'm not talking about you use in your own game or someone else's game, but here, in a collection of characters meant for the larger community - that should stick to official even when official is in violation of the spirit of the Hero system and the rules of Hero as it has otherwise stood for the past 24 years...

 

Official now has an exception, for one single genre, that is different than every other case of low powered Hero gaming, but that exception is official...

Re: Valdorian Characters

Bah. Valdorian characters are just 50 point characters who have sold off 25 points worth of stats for some bizarre reason. It's probably the only thing in the book that I think is a completely dumb idea. He should have just added a house rule that permitted Valdorian characters to sell off all stats to 8' date=' if they chose. It'd have been simpler for all concerned.[/quote']I agree. I think it's a bad rule because it goes against everything Hero has done as far back as 1e for both low and high powered games alike. It's just an 'un-Hero system' thing to do. But they did it, and now it's official, and in anything like this we're stuck with what is official.

Re: Comments on sexism and racism at the outset of Pulp Hero

We went the other route. Surprisingly' date=' to me at least, the person who pushed the most for us to stick to the less pleasant aspects of the genre is the only "person of color" in the group.[/quote']This is no surprise, nor should it be.

 

If you did a game in 1930s - 40s Germany, and never once mentioned any of the elements going on with the Jews, or in 1800s USA, and ignored both slavery and the genocide of the indiginous people - that would be -EXTREMELY- offensive to most people, and especially 'people not bleached' such as myself.

 

Denial of the true horrors of history or of the state of mind of the people who commited that history is more offensive than an exploration of that history by vast leaps.

 

To keep this on point, the Pulp genre is littered with racist themes, and the worst thing you can do is act in denial of that. Ideally you should either make heroes who rise above it, villains who revel in it, or be true to genre and make villains who rise above it and heroes who revel in it -IN GAME- while acknowledging and perhaps even examining out of game that your characters are not you, but rather there but for the grace of god and 70 years of progress go I.

 

In the last year or so I've taken to making complex villains as my characters, precisely because I find idealism and its desire to deny truth so dangerous. So I make people who are 'true to their moment' and explore if they can become something better than the idealists or sink into their own failings.

 

Pulp however, is an idealist genre - and in fact I suspect that is why it managed to be so easily full of racist norms and stand up as a tool of propaganda to promote the ideals of racialism. You can acknowledge that, game to it as an excercise in seeing that thankfully fading worldview, or you can game around it in one way or another - but if you deny it's presence you actually work to uphold its norm in the present day context (a problem that doesn't exist doesn't get fixed).

 

This is -NOT- to say that these elements need be the only thing you explore. There are a lot of positive elements in the genre and in history that can be looked at and made into central themes. But doing so while denying the existance of the unpleasant side is the very act of 'revisionism' that is so dangerous.

Re: Turakian vs Valdorian?

The Valdorian Age is Thieve's World's "Sanctuary" sitting in the middle of Hyborea. The Turakian Age is Greyhawk situated on Middle Earth.

Personally, I think Turakian Age's world works better than either Greyhawk or Middle Earth though.

As for timelines between the two, I personally would use them as completely seperate worlds with no connection to each other or any other age.

Re: Anybody playing Valdorian Age?

I disagree with just about everything that Arcady has posted concerning racism' date=' etc., but rather than respond to it, I request that any such discussion (and Arcady's further comments on that topic, if any) gets directed to the Non-Gaming Discussion area.[/quote']Keep in mind that it is only here because you -SPECIFICALLY ASKED- me to say what issues I had with VA. I answered. You can't then claim my answer to your question is not proper here, if it is my actual issue with the setting.

 

I have also stated it is not a major issue in this particular case, due to the way I find it showing in the setting, but that point, like the above, has also been ignored by those who don't want their questions actually answered...

 

As I've said before, if you don't really want an answer to a question, don't ask the question.

Re: More Turakian Age - modelling nationalities

I would try to avoid making any parallels along any of these lines, and instead just focus on the region as it is actually described and think of how people in such an environment would form their lives - then base NPCs and package deals on that rather than on trying to allocate ethnic stereotypes (which are so often grossly incorrect).

What I would do if I felt I needed more than the book provides is create 5 'buzz-memes' for each culture / region in the book based on no more than the description of that region itself, and its neighbors alongwith how it interacts with those neighbors.

A buzz meme is just a 'catchphrase' that captures some cultural element of a society. I found them very useful in building my science fiction setting.

Here's a sample from that, showing the 'key memes' of one culture in my sci-fi setting:

1. Look out for number one, nobody else will.
   
2. A person's virtue is measured by their wealth and influence.
   
3. Never follow, and be wary of leading – a leader is only the follower in front.
   
4. New is best, tradition holds you back.
   
5. Protect the rights of all or there will be rights for no one. You could be next.

This for me works as nearly all I would need to figure out three basic kinds of people from this culture:

The fanatic who takes those ideals like they were 'the word of god' and follows them to an extreme, the 'average joe' who exists in moderate conformaty and spouts the rhetoric while really just getting by with life, and the rebel who tries to be an opposite of what her culture upholds.

From that, I would build out NPCs and package deals around those themes, and would not try to pin that list to an actual Earth culture (even though in the above case, as a near-future setting, it is a list actually based on a movement currently happening in China's major cities - other lists for other cultures might not be based on real cultures, and this list is for a people not in the present day, so they shouldn't act like real world people nor even stereotypes of real people).

Re: Anybody playing Valdorian Age?

[We're just a bit too focused on racism nowadays' date= with some school districts banning Huckleberry Finn and Disney burying Song of the South. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", you may recall. These works acknowledge slavery. They don't in any way glorify it.]

Huck Finn is a book about overcoming racism, and showing how wrong racism is.

That said, society is not focused on race enough - we slide it under the table, pretend like it's all over now and everything is fixed, and as a result the problems just continue to get passed through the generations, the social system, and in our individual actions.

That's the same complaint that I have with every book SLong has published so far. I am the archetypal lazy GM; I don't have the time to develop campaigns from scratch' date=' and even the published settings tend to be incomplete in this sense, all in the name of Flexibility.[/quote']I have the opposite perspective on this. I find the Hero system settings perfectly ready for me to just grab them and start running.

 

If I had players coming over tonight in the next twenty minutes, I could run Valdorian Age. In fact I have more confidence in that than I do in running Greyhawk or FR - which I've had many years of exposure to. Perhaps the way SL organizes his writing, and forces his writers to organize theirs, just works better for me and the way I think. I can open a Hero setting and know exactly where to find the answer to any given need, and I can feel the flavor of VA and other Hero settings well enough on glance to be able to run then faithfully even before I fully read them, and do so on the fly without pre-writing an adventure. In fact, I have more confidence in my ability to run Turakian Age than I do my own fantasy setting...

 

I went in to Howard's stories expecting a tonne of racism' date=' I found some, but nowhere near as much as I expected. It's also really shifted my perceptions on how "ethnic" sword and sorcery should be, and I mean this in a good way.[/quote']That's good to know. I'll have to finish reading my Conan novels that are by Howard to see how I feel on the same issue. I believe Conan had at least one 'African racial' romantic interest, and I think it was not in a 'domanant-submissive' dynamic, but that is only something I have heard and not yet read.

 

Conan after Howard might not be such a good picture though.

 

Note how different a picture one would have of Earthsea if they only saw the TV-Movie versus if they read the novels (where the race of most characters was opposite of what they were in the TV-Show, Hollywood made all the blacks white, and the one foreign-skinned black - this is a point of major anger for fans and the author).

 

If Conan is the premiere example of this genre of fantasy, and the actual Conan is very multi-racial (and not just multi-ethnic), then there is the question of why VA runs counter to the genre it claims to be based upon, instead looking more inspired by the Marvel version of Conan which at best tokenizes non-whites...

Re: Comments on sexism and racism at the outset of Pulp Hero

I also agree that history should never be sanitized. I would also say the generally the people who advocate for a 'PC world today' (which is nothing more than strive to treat everyone else as an equal and respect their differences) also tend to work to undo a lot of the 'sanitizing', 'propaganda' and 'political use' of history as it was read about or recorded in past by adding in the things not let in before - such as the truth of how minority groups live and lived in the USA rather than the version of suh our parent's generation got in their history education.

Pulp that recreates history has to deal with a world that is very ignoble. Modern users of the genre may or may not choose to have protagonists reflect this as well. I myself, if I were doing historical pulp, might very well make a protagonist who was either a perpetraitor or victim of this reality - but then I'm not a fan of idealistic characters or idealistic notions.

Re: Anybody playing Valdorian Age?

Off topic to Valdorian Age:

Pulp fiction was used to promote nationalistic agenda against the 'percieved threats' of the day - Chinese, Communists, Nazis, and Black middle class empowerment.

Much of the genre also works to justify the exploitation of indigenous people in the Amazon, Africa, and Oceana by depicting them as violent savages.

Racism is openly declared in such works as Tarzan and King Kong, along with villains who are built to engineer racial stereotypes such as Fu Manchu or depections of Japanese and 'jungle blacks / jungle amazonians'.

The genre was often an openly used tool of political and social propaganda by both the government and families such as the racist Hearsts (of Patty Hearst and SF Examiner fame, who engineered many of the anti-asian laws in California and had as the greatest moment, the internment of Japanese descended Americans in WWII).

Pulp reflects its times, but its times were racist. Modern readers, new writers, roleplayers, and re-enactments of pulp have to take this into consideration and address how they will deal with it in today's world were such themes are no longer viable, let alone acceptable. Further, there is a lot of pulp that goes beyond mere reflection of its times, and was a provocateur of its times - pulp often served to advocate extremes of racism even stronger than those present in its day in an open effort by some of the major publishers to 'indoctrinate a new generation' into racism.

We can enjoy some of the better aspects of pulp, but we have to be aware of and account for how to deal with the less noble side as well. Saying otherwise is like (albeit not as severe as) going to a KKK rally and only noting how it promotes brotherhood, alumus connections, social activism, and community awareness (all of which is true) while ignoring 'certain other' aspects. Pulp was not a reflection of its times, it was a tool - of both the good and bad agendas.

On topic:

As for VA, that only reflects back in the awareness that it is a recreation of the style of fantasy started under the pulps, and later less popular in the face of the two styles of modern literary fantasy and gamer fantasy.

VA's style of fantasy inherits some pulp themes, and some of those might be on the racialism end.

Re: DnD's Spiked Chain

It's not how I would handle it (I would prefer something along the line of allowing an "abort"' date=' as Arcady suggested), and I'm not sure the problem it was created to address was really that much of a problem, but it's not intrinsically unplayable. My main complaint is that it's too complex:[/quote']Yeah, the Spiked Chain is the only weapon in DnD3.5 that is routinely problematic when mixed with the Attack Of Opportunity rules. Most other weapons and situations for the mechanic work out well enough, although it is more complex than most DnD rules tend to be.

 

Given the nature of DnD, that's not all that bad of a track record. DnD's biggest flaw is that there are unique mechanics for so many things, and in that sort of situation you are bound to have issues pop up as the different elements come into interaction with each other.

 

That said, the spiked chain is an obvious interaction that should have been foreseen and addressed. And again, that noted, many DnD fans think it has been addressed by the simple requirement of needing a feat to be able to use the weapon. However the loss of one feat is not that major comparred to how much you gain, in my opinion.

 

That said, I don't do anything when I run DnD to address it. Part of the appeal of DnD is exploiting the flaws... Sit around a DnD table and the 'fanboys' will rant and rave about 'special combos' they have unlocked, mush as you might do when sitting around a 'Magic: the Gathering' table...

 

Spiked Chain is just the 'freebie combo' for the newbies. It's so obviously there, and it sort of 'wets the appetite' to novices to let them know that if they really 'get into it' with their DnD geekdom, they will unlock even more easter eggs that might prove even better than the Spiked Chain.

 

So if you agree with that logic, you might come away thinking Spiked Chain is unbalanced on purpose - to draw you in to what DnD 3e's authors like to call 'mastery of the game'...

Re: Filthy Rich Burghers

Can you have an agrarian civilization without cities and gtowns at all? In other words' date=' one in which there is no level of social organization higher than the village, and nobody but "adventurers" ever goes anywhere for any reason?[/quote']Historically, no.

 

Goods need to move from here to there.

 

Communities need to bond together for protection and the production of greater resources.

 

Without towns and cities you won't be able to support an agrarian civilization with technology advancement found above that of the people in the Amazon rainforest.

 

Without clustering of communities to be close together, you will be stuck at 'clan of the cave bear' if even that...

 

Without these adaptations, you will likely fall prey to nature, and if not that you will be overun by those who do make these adoptations.

 

To my knowledge, there are no examples in the record of agrarian people that lived widely spread out and isolated without some technology that allowed them to pull it off - giving them access to resources and safety despite their choice.

 

Nomadic people on the other hand can pull off dispersed societies, but even they tend to cluster at least once in a year in order to exchange goods, news, and prospective mates.

 

Consider the native people of the plains for example. During the warmer months we would move out onto the plains hunting and wandering - getting much better at it after the importation of the horse, and during the colder seasons we would cluster in camps in places like the foothills of the Rockies.

 

You'll see a similar pattern with Mongols, Gypsies, and other nomadic groups.

 

If you asked a learned individual in the first half of the 1800s how long it would take to settle whites all the way to the Pacific Ocean, the typical response was at least a thousand years, if ever, even if the original people could be fully exterminated. If you asked the same question in the decades after the railroad joined up, your answer would depend on estimates over how long it would take to 'pacify / exterminate' the original inahbitants. By the late 1800s, the question was settled, when the last militarily independant native group was pacified, and cities began springing up all over what we today call the 'heartland of America', and then we took the veterans of the 'Indian Wars' and sent them to war with Spain in Cuba and the Philipines with the dawn of the 20th century and the start of the 'pulp era' (there were many people who fought both the Lakota and the Philipine resistance at opposite ends of their military careers, with the 'greens' of the Spanish War being the old dogs and leaders in WWI - its all really that recent and close together).

 

Which is just to point out that even early industrial civilization lacked the technology to settle without clustering. The ability to have the spread out model we Americans think of as normal is very recent.

 

 

Civilizations without a railroad are limited by their ability to support water travel that can move perishable goods between places, as well as a supply train for military, move 'breeding stock' around enough to prevent genetic decay from inbreeding, and get raw materials to manufacture and then back into the system as finished goods.

 

 

You can answer all of this with magic, but if you do you should actually answer it. Make sure your magic system meets the above listed needs with enough strength and frequency to not need to settle the issue.

 

If you do this however, you need to ask why there is any tech at all.

 

If magic can supply perishable goods, military safety, safety from nature, supply, refine, and work raw materials into finished goods, and provide diversity in mating options, then why isn't everybody just running around naked and playing like 'happy-pill hippies' all day long?

 

I tried that once, I built a fantasy setting with magic that was potent and common and could support the people. Then I made the mistake of asking myself, what happens next? I ended up with a global 'garden of eden' that was completely useless to me as an adventuring locale.

 

 

You can also just say it's just fantasy, and I don't care about it making sense. But at that point, you shouldn't be bothering to ask how many wealthy people should be in the city, you should just be putting in however many your plotline desires.

 

 

This is one of the big issues I have with DnD. It starts out actually trying to answer a lot of these questions in how it sets out numbers for classes, leaders, and so on in settlements, but then the answers it gives are -ALL- horribly wrong.

 

If you don't intend to answer correctly to the best of your knowledge, then don't answer at all. Better yet, don't pose the question if the answer itself is not important to you.

 

If getting it right is not important, if it is 'a certain kind of story' you are after, then shoot for that story and stop answering the wrong question incorrectly.

 

Eberon was for me, the worst offender here, when it gave population demographics that were horribly wrong, and in reply to being called on it told us 'people who want to know population demographics have no place being gamers'. To which I say, 'people who don't care about population demographics shouldn't bait us by putting them in their books'. If you put it in there, you are trying to appeal to people who find it important. If you are trying to appeal to such people, you should appeal them right - by meeting their need correctly. Otherwise leave it out and let them add it correctly on their own.

 

Likewise, if correct demographics are not important to you, don't worry about how many of thise or that kind of people could be in this or that kind of settlement - the answer for you should only be 'whatever it takes to hand over the kind of game I -do- desire to impart.'

Re: DnD's Spiked Chain

Having been in a war museum and seen an actual several hundred year old 'used in the field to fend off Japanese raiders' 12 foot long sword, I'm not so ready to pass off exremes in weapons as something that couldn't be used effectively.

Re: Filthy Rich Burghers

Problem is two fold there:

1. The 'wild fronteir' of America had a population of about 15 million people before Americans moved into it (but only 200 thousand by the about 1900 among that same group). This is a different topic though.

2. The main issue. 'agrarian societies' require highly dense populations. England in the middle ages just around the black plague was about 40 or per square mile, where the rest of Europe averaged 80-120 per square mile, and this was lower than most of the civilizations of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. (there were multiple cities in the millions during that same time period, just not in Europe).

Outside of that time period, Europe had much higher population densities as well.

Agrarian civilizations tend to need a village every hours walk, a town every day's walk, and a city every maybe six to a dozen towns.

You need to be close together to handle the fact that you don't have refrigeration, trains, or trucking. Supplies need to be able to be moved from one point to another before they spoil, and you can only hold territory you can deploy troops to within a fairly short time span.

This is why you get so much wildlands. Perhaps between 40 to 60 percent of Europe in the middle ages was not occupied by anyone. It was the land between kingdoms, rather the land within them.

The city sizes you see in DnD, based on places like black plague England, are city sizes of civilizations in near collapse or early stages of recovery rather than stable or even surviving conflict. At those numbers, its a coin toss whether you will end up being the British Empire or the Mayan Ruins.

Fantasy is one thing, but it works best when the elements that are not fantastic and do not have declared and explained fantastis rationales are rooted in something sensible and not outright silly.

Compare New England to the rest of the USA. The 'west' had so few white people for so long because until they got the railroad they had no ability to support their kind of civilization out there. By contrast New England fit the model of Europe in its healthy periods - very close in dense communities of villages clustered in a web around towns that cluster in a web around cities that clustered together to form a colony / state.

The South by contrast went for plantations, built much like medieval manors, which clustered around towns which clustered around a smaller number of cities that would bring in / out resources to the colony / state. Southern plantations were a lot like medieval serf villages (and serfs were also a form of slave btw, albeit a lot better off than the Southern slave).

Both models stick to the same basic format of clustering civilization rather than spreading it out - the main difference is 'capitalist north' v 'fiefdom south' (if you read people like Jefferson and Madison, it is interesting to read how evil they found the ideas of capitalism and democracy - but that again is another topic).

Back to original question: In reality, there should only be zero to one really wealthy person, but for good story dynamics, three works best. Two makes the competition too obvious, three makes a triangle and intrigue is just like romance - it gives the best fiction in a triangle.

Re: DnD's Spiked Chain

That's a problem with DnD's Attack of Opportunity rather than the chain itself.

The Attack of Opportunity mechanic is supposed to simulate getting the drop on something coming into or through your space without being prepared, but it gives you a free attack rather than an 'abort' of your upcoming attack, and as such it becomes the best way to get multiple attacks per round in DnD.

Rather than being a mechanic to get the drop on people, it becomes a mechanic to make you move faster...

If it worked as an 'abort next attack to take a swing on them before they can swing at you' it would balance in conceptually and not cause the DnD spiked chain to be an unbalanced weapon.

That said, a DnD combat round is six seconds long, and I know from my own past fighting experience that many entire fights can play out in full in that space of time with multiple hard strikes on both sides.

Re: The purpose of a system - academic and geeky...

Question Everything.

If you aren't asking questions, you aren't living.

The joy in having a mind is in using it. I see the -to me illogical- comment of 'stop analyzing it / asking questions and just have fun with it' a lot, and I have to say, if you aren't analyzing it and asking questions about it; just how can you enjoy it? I make no apologies for being an intellectual and being unable to turn off my brain.

Re: DnD's Spiked Chain

I don't think DnD's chain does too much damage itself, I think that because DnD has the Attack of Opportunity rules it ends up delivering too many attacks and thus doing more damage than 'would be nice for game balance'.

That said, getting hit by a spinning spiked ball on the end of the chain should be a bone crushing as well as impaling moment. Flails are not nice things to get hit by, and they don't get any nicer for removing the stick handle part and having 'a chain and ball/blades on both ends'.

Flails, in my opinion, have more momentum behind them than swords of equivalent usage. That spiked-chain / kusari is even more so. it won't beat the cutting power or precision of a sword, and an opponant might be able to tangle you easier if they can get you wrapped around something, but it puts all of its weight on the end and that counts for something.

Re: DnD's Spiked Chain

I think a lot of people just don't have a good mental visual for how it 'works' and so they think it is either unrealistic or impossibly hard.

Having seen more acrobatic styles of fighting than the 'SCA stand there and thwak them with your cardboard sword' variety, I've no issues with the weapon. Its just all about keeping the 'dance' going - and even stopping your motion is no problem - its an object that moves very rhythmicly.

Re: Filthy Rich Burghers

Probably three.

Also, I know DnD likes those small cities, but historically they're not really realistic. DnD seems to have based its numbers on the height of the black plague in only England as if it was some kind of norm.

15,000 is about half the size of my college campus, and that fit within a 2 block square radius with plenty of open space.

Classicial cities were often only a mile or two square, but they were also very concentrated (dense) and a lot more populous than in DnD. If you're working coastal trade cities, I'd look at population figures for Italy, Byzantine Empire, Greece, or Spain and not England.

Re: DnD's Spiked Chain

At first glance' date=' Arcady, a STR Min of 13 seems a bit high to me for a Spiked Chain; I mean it isn't a ball and chain, the end isn't particularly weighted; but then again 10' of metal chain is pretty heavy;[/quote']Actually I think I -was- working on the assumption of something on the end of the chain like a blade (as in the Reaper mini of a spiked chain warrior) or a ball (as in Kill Bill).

 

Some of the design is a game balance issue though. If I recall my Hero right off the fly, you can use a weapon with a Str Min above your strength, just not as well as you could one your are above. Correct? If not, it might need lowering, but then again if not, all weapons would need lowering.

 

In play, the weapon never came up during my Fantasy Hero game. We ended up in a game trapped in a lot of investigation and social interaction and very little action.

 

So I never got to see if my build actually did in play what I hoped to achieve - get across the flavor of the DnD spiked chain without the game imbalance.

Re: Strength Cost: 1 point or 2

Don't think I've ever heard of this house rule. So for me, 1 point per point. It's never presented a problem for me in play, so I've never thought about it.

I haven't picked up a copy yet, but I read the initial section in the local store yesterday.

I wanted to say that I do strongly appreciate the open recognition of the roots and truth of this genre. Such statements go a -LONG- way towards smoothing ill waters. The recognition of the very strong themes of sexism and racism in the fiction of the Pulp era was honest, thorough, not dismissive in the way so many people in the rpg-hobby have been over the issue (in this and other genres), and for once insistant about the need to stay aware of how it is dealt with in gaming.

I didn't get the book yet, because I went home with Teen Champions and the Combat handbook instead (and I was glad to see an address to the issues of racism in the teen book as well under cliques), but it will go on the list in time.

Re: Ritual Magic Limitations

The system I used in 'Fahla' was heavily built with the presumption that most major magic was done through rituals:

http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/fahla/Gaming/magic_Hero.html

In specific:

http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/fahla/Gaming/magic_Hero.html#ritual

Re: Herophile Fantasy art

Of the top of my head' date=' I don't recall - but I'll check it out for you. It is freebie, that much I know.[/quote']Put me down on the 'where'd those chickens come from' list.

Re: Your "2005" Pet Gaming Projects

My lifepath project has moved.

An official downloadable version 1.0 is now here:

http://www.geocities.com/arcady0/SciFi/lifepath.html

The older copy on my other website has been removed for now. The above URL has both a zip download and an online usable version.