So, I’ve been thinking about that whole multimedia experience thing, and for the CthulhuTech game I’ve been running (which is to say, I’ve run it more than once, in a somewhat timely fashion) I want to try having some music playing in the background. This is kind of uncharted territory, so I’m open to suggestions.

I have some ground rules:

• It should not be “busy” — lyrics are almost definitely right out, as is metal and probably anything that you can’t just let sit in the background. Letting it be part of the game, good. Eclipsing the game, not so good.
  • No camp, either. The game may have horror threads woven into it, but I don’t want nonsense like howling wolves and creaking doors and so on.
• It should at least vaguely fit the theme of the game. No happy romance anime music during investigating unspeakable horrors on the fringe of civilization.
• There should be a lot of it within a theme, so I’m not managing the playlist more than I am the game. My initial thoughts are a looping “general play” playlist, a “conflict” playlist, maybe a “touching moment” playlist, and a “resolution” playlist.
• This is more of a personal preference, but contemporary music is preferable, because it’s a modern game. Also, there’s a lot of bland background music, I’m not interested in that; not to restrict myself that is only known and appreciated by the masses, but I’m interested in “popular” music.

So, like I said, I’m open to suggestions. Mark suggested the Vitamin String Quartet for his hypothetical game, which is interesting, and a pretty good suggestion. And, they have a lot to play with, what with their covering basically every artist known to man. Other ideas of my own include Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV, Dale North’s Silent Horror, and a couple video games with a modern/future/post-apocalyptic bent to them. Flirting with sprinkling in Nightwish’s instrumental half of Dark Passion Play into the appropriate theme playlists.

If you have other suggestions, or stories of what worked for you, let me know by leaving a comment or something.

I think my favorite thing about Gen Con is that I can haul back a bunch of books and ride the high for weeks, maybe months. Today I finally cracked open Cults of Freeport, a supplement by Green Ronin for their Freeport setting, which is well-written and interesting stuff, especially if you like the idea of a Cthulhu/pirates mashup.

(Total aside: what is it with me and Cthulhu hybrid games/settings? CthulhuTech is bliss, and I really dig the obvious Mythos references in the Freeport setting. If there were benchmarks for modern day Cthulhu cultists…)

Not sure if I’ll use anything directly from the book for my True20/Freeport setting, but it definitely gets the gears turning. Also worth checking out is a tip or two for running 4th edition D&D in Freeport, hinting that they may make a 4e guidebook one day. That has the potential for fun stuff.

Otherwise, more house prep work, and more gaming. Slowly getting the ball rolling again on the play-by-IRC/wiki game in my custom/Freeport setting hybrid, need to do some plotting (and maybe even real writing!) for CthulhuTech. Awesome times.

So I did that thing I mentioned in my last post, with the aggregation. The front page now combines RSS feeds from my blog, gallery, and wiki, and my page on Delicious in addition. More to come, likely.

Also, hooray for others making an edit or two to the wiki. Friend codes (thanks, Nintendo, for the most annoying online experience, by the way), but more interestingly, Dan has touched the CthulhuTech section a little bit, which I’ve been negligent in updating. But thanks for that, and stuff. There are CthulhuTech things I’ve been meaning to put up that I have yet to.

Also, the front page has reminded me of how much MoinMoin’s RSS feed sucks. I wonder if I can replace that…

As I said I would, I finished my analysis/plotting of Framewerk, the system behind the game CthulhuTech. I’m tired of writing so I’ll just link to it and include a pretty picture.

CthulhuTech/FramewerkAnalysis - Empty Matter Wiki.

perl++
gnuplot++

The problem with having so many boxes to play with is that usually one of them gets a bit neglected. I still have a sort of love affair with my Mini-ITX router box, so that stays pretty regularly up to date, and my desktop is right in front of me most of the time I’m home, so I’m pretty good about that one too. The media PC not as much, but maybe once or twice a month it goes through the emerge rigors.

Which leaves Empty Matter.

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t touch it much, and I generally only (deep) update one component at a time, as servers like stability and all of that, and I don’t need to be taxing the CPU all of the time, but nevertheless, the Gentoo installation here tends to get a bit messy. And not by fault of Gentoo, do not get me wrong, but when you look at your cron logs and realize, by Cthulhu, I installed munin a couple months ago and forgot plum about it, that is not a good sign.

So last night (rather late last night, in fact) I decided I would try to fix a bunch of little bugs that have been showing up here and there. Most of them having to do with Apache, since that’s the majority of what this box does. Found some unnecessary 404s on the wiki because I never updated the default theme. Twiddled logrotate a bit so that I could actually have meaningful stats gathering.

Tonight is no different. Cleaned out my Apache root, removing some cruft and things scattered about following software uninstalls or my laziness. Removing some old cron jobs I no longer need. Checking my firewall configuration. Emerging a package or two while I’m poking away at random parts of the box. So very satisfying, this distraction of mine.

I had hoped to do a little analysis/plot of the Framewerk system as used in CthulhuTech, but my Perl coding went a little long and while I have plottable data, I’m not entirely convinced of its correctness yet, and I’m a bit puzzled how to plot the darn thing in the first place. Even when you factor in the three possibilities (highest single d10, largest N-of-a-kind, or highest-sum straight), there are bizarre holes in the results (did you know it’s impossible to get an 11? Or with five dice, there are 1,651 ways to get a 30, but only 45 ways to get a 28?) that don’t lend themselves well to a line plot. So suffice it to say that I have some verification left to do on these results before I go plotting. I hope to have that up tomorrow.

On the subject, I long for some CthulhuTech. Maybe this weekend…