16-bit Doctor Who

Not quite the Doctor Who role-playing you may be looking for, here’s an amusing take of recent events in the show as a console RPG. Looking like it hails from the halcyon days of turn-based combat and curious choices in sentence construction, this video takes you through the last two seasons of Doctor Who, as seen through the lens of a console RPG. Companions are gained and lost, bizarre actions rendered as characters waving an arm in the air and through it all, we are reassured as to the reason for all these shenanigans.

Check out the video over on CollegeHumor.com.

The Eternal Dance

GAME MASTER

In this campaign you’re all playing Xs.

 

PLAYER

Can I make a Y instead?

 

— The start of every World of Darkness game ever, original and new.

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^[0] Where X and Y are two different character types, often entailing different rule books and incompatible motivations and drives.

Superheroes of Vermont

I don’t know where he got the idea, but Andrew (@GeekMtnState) started a Twitter game of Vermont-based superheroes this morning. So, for reasons of back-patting if nothing else, here are my contributions:

• Catamount The Man-Cat, a former hunter possessed by the spirit of the last of the catamounts.
• Monstrous Mudder, a mud elemental.
• Skisassin, who specializes is skiing-based murder for hire.
• Silent Cal-prit, the stealthiest burglar in the world.
• Dairyman and his neighbor across the way the Incredible Wook foil Flatlander’s dastardly development deals — The Flatlander is @el_timbo‘s invention.
• Meteora, superheroine by night, meteorologist at the Fairbanks Museum by day.

These and the rest can be found under the #comicbookvermont hashtag, for as long as that lasts on Twitter.

Crimson Mystical Mages Chapter One Listening Party

Following on from this morning’s post, this is the official conversation post for the December 27, 2010 listening party of the first episode of Live from SModcastle‘s Crimson Mystical Mages silly role-playing campaign, as “SMastered” by Kevin Smith. The fun starts at 9:00 PM EST, so if you’re a late comer, try to sync up the episode as best you can.

I’ll be tweeting using the hashtag #cmm0 as well as keeping up with comments here on Held Action. After the fact, I’ll compile the tweets here as well for posterity.

Whatever else, this should be funny!

That’s the Clunkiest Looking Wand of Light I Have Ever Seen

Today we have a treat from photo blog There, I Fixed It, celebrating epic kludges and questionable engineering choices. Is that a Chessex battlemat underneath the projection? Looks like it to me.

Homo viatoris waldensis

While notable in many regards, perhaps this cryptid is most exceptional in its near blanket distribution of sightings across the globe. Despite the lack of hard evidence for breeding populations or an ultimate native biome, Homo viatoris waldensis has been sighted literally all over the world and throughout history. Bas reliefs in ancient Egyptian pyramids depict the cryptid lurking on the outskirts of construction sites. Ranchers in 19th century Australia tell fireside tales about the time they glimpsed an H. v. waldensis, or “striped ambler” as it’s more colloquially known, loping alongside the herd in the mid-summer twilight. And no neighborhood in a major urban center is complete without the legend of the skinny man someone’s brother’s sister’s cousin’s personal trainer saw one time striding down an alley with no exit, only to vanish from sight on turning the corner.

With such a plethora of oral traditions, how can photographic evidence of this nomadic hominid never been captured, particularly in this modern age of digital photography and a camera in every hand held device? Some cryptozoologists speculate that a striped ambler’s spectacular natural coloring acts as the camouflage equivalent of the big lie, overpowering the human visual cortex, so that it is seen only in bad light or out of the corner of the observer’s eye.

One parapsychologist with the Spengler-Stantz Institute theorizes that reports of H. v. waldensis seen wielding and using tools, particularly a walking stick, suggests the possibility of an advanced society of cryptoterrestrials living alongside or among humanity without detection, as Mac Tonnies hypthesized. Such a civilization would certainly need excellent camouflaging technology to go unperceived by the human race. Alternately, a small clique of self-proclaimed sensitives attached to the Mt. Shasta School for the Gifted of urban legend insist the Walking Man is not an unknown species of creature, but a single entity all throughout history, a physical expression of this sephiroth‘s basic essence of change and motion.

Whatever its motivation or origin, H. v. waldensis seems content to stroll across the earth in solitude, seemingly without purpose, destination or visible means of support. Only when provoked does the ambler become aggressive, as two amateur cryptozoologists found to their chagrin.^[1] As human settlement of the planet continues, it’s only a matter of time before someone stumbles upon a habitation zone or other physical trace of this peripatetic cryptid. The truth may prove far more surprising than anyone could imagine.

^[1] Thanks to ThoseLilRabbits’YouTube video for the initial laugh and inspiration.