The first project I have started is a “Horror on the Orient Express” campaign this is one that I have wanted to run for close to 8 years now. The current plan is to have the players (havent assembled a group yet) created characters and run two shorter scenarios to give the players and the characters a bit of experience. This is to get me some time to adapt to be the keeper and the players used to my playstyle, and giving the characters some mythos experience that will help in the”Horror on the Orient Express”. Even though I havent read the entire thing if the players are to naive when playing and not collecting enough clues along the way they are going to have a though time finishing the campaign.

The prelude scenarios will take place about 10 years prior to the”Horror on the Orient Express” and will give the players time to evolve their characters through experience.

The other project is running an mini campaign based around “Escape from Innsmouth” and maybe starting out with some adventures from “Before the fall”. This mini campaign is radically different from any other as this is a action centered adventure with lots of combat and suspense right from the start. Adding “Before the fall” adds some extra background and detective work to the action packed raid segments in the adventure.

My planning so far has most of the first two scenarios for “Horror on the Orient Express” mapped out. Need to get all the handouts in order, maybe create some new handouts using MS Publisher. Getting the right music for the scenarios, have gotten the nature sounds sorted now to get some mood music and combat soundtracks. Luckily I have an assortment of music left from when I game mastered last, many years ago, now to dig them up again from the basement.

Ill provide you with a link to the map

Google Maps

So I started playing Nintendo Wii again and realised that the Mega man games where realised on the Virtual Console so why not play them again and they realized Mega man 9 so I need to start playing again. I bought the Wii to play The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess and yesterday when I tried to play it again I somehow messed up my save game so I had to start over from the first wolf stage. That’s not that bad as I stopped playing the game during the summer 2007 so I don’t remember much of it anyway. I was actually amazed how good it looked and the sounded atmosphere so I really got into it again. And after placing out the surround speakers again after finished painting the lounge I really got to experience the change in sound that the two extra rear speaker makes. It really gave you all the extra depths for the forests and water all around you.

I have played about 5 hours into the game and not rushing trying to experience everything so I just saved the first of the spirits, Faron I think his name was. And I’m planning on continuing tonight and freeing the second spirit, if I don’t get to drunk.

Ultimate fighter season 9 the UK team did look like a team of killers and the US team came in overweight and didn’t have the killer instinct in my opinion. Further more the fights on the UK side looked like they where miss matched a lot of the fights ended really quick as if the fighters where not evenly matched. The thing that stuck with me from the second episode was Steve Mazzagatti and the poor refereeing in the fight between Santino Defranco and Waylon, the fight should have been stopped in the first round and given the W to “mini-sherk” but that’s just my opinion.

Talking WEC the fight between Miguel Torres vs. Takeya Mizugaki was a great fight and probably going to be on many peoples fight of the year lists. I like WEC because most of their PPV cards are solid and they put on a good show, the UFC have been a bit spotty in the last little while.

Strikeforce put on a really bad PPV the two biggest matches on the latest card was really disappointing. The women’s bout was so poorly done its frightening how did the athletic commission let that fight go on its beyond me. Cyborg coming in overweight, and fighting a much, much smaller opponent that have no business fighting at that weigh class…I know they wanted to build towards a Cyborg vs Gina fight but seriously. Please Strikforce don’t “Kimbo” Cyborg giving her cans to fight just to get a big payday in the end it will backfire. The Shamrock vs Diaz fight was really disappointing I know that Frank was hurt going in and didn’t wanna disappoint the fans like his brother has done, but he didn’t even put on a good show. This begs me to question if Frank Shamrock is truly done with MMA? He probably will fight Tito Ortiz down the road, if Tito signs which isn’t a sure thing. And that would probably be his last fight, could be the last fight for both of them actually as I haven’t seen Tito be competitive in a long while. A Frank Shamrock and Cung Le fight probably isn’t going to happen, I would love to see it if Frank can get his shit together again.

Bored with writing now, gonna go outside and fix the bicycles as the weather is finally getting warm and sunny, all the snow is almost gone, and then hit the weight room.

Ill leave you with some of the promo work that Shawn Michael’s did leading up to Wrestle mania. The light and dark promo was truly EPIC when he stood in the ring and took of the hat…magical…

As I don’t have anything useful to say ill just post some YouTube clips instead.

A little different version of a great song.

This is the song from the incredible movie The Wrestler, its a good movie even if you not a wrestling fan at all. It really got to me some of the more intense moments made me think of all the wrestlers that have died way to early and about what they go through in the latter stages of their carriers and why they do what they do.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/doctor-who/4935903/Dr-Who-Dalek-found-in-pond.html

This is just gonna be a short summary of the last few weeks, the new year started out with a SNÖKON and I had a blast lots of fun scenarios. A shame that people had gotten sick but that’s nothing to do about that stuff. A special thanks to the team “femme fatal” who let  me join their group as I didn’t have a scheduled game, and this alos let me play a scenario whom a friend of mine wrote and game mastered. I unfortunately missed the play testing session so this gave me a chance to actually play the scenario.

Looking forward to when we continue playing the complete mask of Nyarlathotep, probably in a few weeks which gives me enough time to actually physically write the letters that my character will send home to his lovely wife trying to explain his actions, most of the first letter is already written just need to clean it up a bit. And also make some journal entries about the trip so far, so we don’t lose track of the main plot, as we tend to get sucked up into character playing and that’s my main reason why I play. The last session we where a few people short and nothing particulary where planned so we just interacted with each other and the other passagers on the ship thats taking us over to England.

On a related role playing note I’m probably gonna try and put together a few games myself in 2009 giving time and inspiration. The ideas I’m tossing around now are a fantasy setting based on an isolated area of Terry Amthors “Shadow World”, that will be more a low tech, dirty no magic and superstition tale about human suffering. For that I will probably use a simplified version of Rolemaster, cutting down on the majority of the skills and such. My other idea for a fantasy game is doing a more down to earth historical setting based around the medieval Britain, using Pendragon as a base, but that will take a longer and more work on my part studying history and getting comfortable with the setting.

The last few weeks have been overrun by schoolwork lots of assignments due and deadlines missed, feels like im getting through It all in the end.

Ive gotten to see a few movies these lsat few weeks here are some honerable mentions

First out are Wind Chill heard it was crap but gave it a shot and I really liked it, my girlfriend got really scared and even got nightmares from it. I admit i jumped a few times during the movie but that’s not difficult as I scare easily from loud sudden noises as such. But overall the movie where enjoyable. There is a similar movie called Penny Dreadful that we have started watching but had to cut it short needed to go to a party this Saturday, had a nice time at the party BTW.

Rise of the Footsoldiers this is a grim movie, the violence is realistic and brutal. I really liked the movie and the story it told, got more understanding of why Britain is the way it is now because of its history but all in all a enjoyable movie. On the same topic we watched American Gangster which I also liked, I like Denzel even though he only have a few different characters that he portrais but I enjoy them.

On to UFC 82 saw the late Evan Tanner lose to Yushin Okami and Dan Henderson lose to Anderson Silva, Both of these fighters are in my mind pioneers of MMA and Even will be missed by many. Dan Henderson I thought wasn’t in shape for this fight and I had high hopes for him to actually beat Anderson but that wasnt the case that night. At UFC 84 Shean Sherk was defeated by BJ Penn I had a feeling that this would happen but as I’m a fan of Shean Sherk and don’t think he actually did steroids but thats a whole other discussion. UFC 85 saw Matt Hughes lose to Thiago Alves and I kinda suspected this to happen but I still like Matt Hughes and what he has done for MMA.

At UFC 88 Matt Brown and Chuck Lidell lost and that kinda sucked. I don’t care for Sugar Rashad Evans but what can you do, and Chuck Lidell is getting predictable and old he needs to reinvent himself and get a new gameplan.

UFC 89 Chris Leben lost to Michael Bisping which is another fighter I dont care for. Chris tested positive for steroids and have had alot of problems with the law but hopefully he gets back to his winning ways at the end of 2009 when his suspension is up. Getting close to the end of the year UFC 91 saw “The natural” lose to Brock which could be Randys last fight.

UFC 92 was the card that totally screwed me over I got all eight of my bets on mmaforums.com WRONG thats just sad. Forrest, Nog and Wanderlei all lost. This do set up some interseting rematches as I predicted a few months ago on mmaforums.com the losers of the heavy weight tournament will face each other and then the winner will get a titleshot. So the winner of Randy vs Nog would fight the winner of Brock vs Mir but more on this in my post on my predictions for MMA in 2009.

I will continue this post in part 2 where I will discuss other sport related events like NFL and professional wrestling and the continued fall of my heroes and why that was.

Det jag tyckte var det intressantaste i detta seminarium var de sidoprojekt Jens producerat. Speciellt Colors och hur denna applikation har växt och utvecklats. Detta visar att bara du har en bra ide och hittar rätt distributionskanaler kan du nå en bredd publik, över 200000 nedladdningar. Men även att när du som designer publicerar något har du även ett ansvar att hålla det relevant och uppdatera det, annars riskerar det att falla i glömska igen. Något som är fascinerade med den nya tekniken och möjligheterna till samarbete med individer som du inte har träffat fysiskt, Jens pratade om att han hade en “partner” som hjälpte till att uppdatera och administrera några av funktionerna i Colors.

Dessa nya digital distributionskanaler medför att skaparna får en större del av vinsterna, och det behöver inte kosta stora summor att distribuera. Jens berättar att när du skapar ett spel är många individer inblandade och majoriteten är grafiker som skall försöka att visualisera och skapa den visuella delen av ett spel. Sedan finns det programmerar som skriver koden och bygger spelmotorerna. Jens jobbade som programmerare och sedan avancerade han till lead designer vilken är ansvarig för att de olika delarna av projektet passar ihop samt har en överblick över att de visuella delarna passar varandra. Detta är viktigt för att det är ofta över 50 personer inblandade i ett spelprojekt och det tar cirka två år att slutföra.