It's Eric Woodward (dotcom)

Last year saw the release of the “Universes Beyond: Doctor Who” set for Magic: the Gathering, which included 188 new (and mechanically unique) cards based on various doctors, companions, villains, and other characters from the long-running TV show(s). As a lifelong Whovian^[1], I thoroughly enjoyed the set and loved how they wrote each cards mechanics to be representative of the characters. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that a few characters were missing^[2] (well, one for sure, the second only in a vaguely-related way, but I digress…). At the same time, I stumbled upon the highly-functional (if somewhat overly ad-encumbered) MTGCardBuilder.com, so I thought - why not make the missing cards myself?

Of course, unlike my usual custom card fair, I wanted something that would still be legally playable (or at least, legal in my weekly Magic game), so I decided to make them as Skinned Cards - that is to say, skinned version of other, legal (real) magic cards. This allows me to use them as proxies for other cards I already have in my collection.

In truth, both of these are also in my “15 Doctors / Tribal Timelords” deck (coming soon), and coming up with themed proxies just makes them fit better with the rest of the cards.

Jack Harkness, Torchwood Captain

First up is everyone’s favorite flirtatious immortal, Captain Jack Harkness. His omission was a grave mistake, IMHO, but making a proxy for him almost broke me. After sorting through the 683 legendary humans in the Gatherer (as of writing), I finally found the one that had just the right abilities (and subtypes):

Dr. Who, Eccentric Scientist

The second one came about a bit differently… I started working on (what would become) the 15 doctors deck about a month after the set dropped. It was basically the best cards from the Blast from the Past and Paradox Power decks, plus a handful of singles for the missing doctors and other Timelords, and next thing I knew, I had a 5-color deck full of Timelords and their companions… That is to say, legendary Timelords and their legendary companions… Hmmm…

So, who do you choose to lead a tribal legendary deck? Only the best commander the job, Jodah the Unifier^[3]. But he’s a human wizard, how can I tie that in the any version of Doctor Who?

And that’s when I remembered the strange, Technicolor-saturated Peter Cushing “Dr. Who” movies of the 60s, wherein the good Doctor is actually a weird, whimsical, human inventor who fights off evil alien robots with his time machine, a description close enough to a “wizard” for me:

I hope someone enjoys these and finds them useful. If you do like them, you may also like my other custom magic cards. And a word of advice: if you want to get them printed at your nearest corporate print-shop, you’ll probably want to use the “self-service” copiers to avoid any uncomfortable conversations with the staff about copyright and fair use.

Oh, and while I was working on these, I went ahead and did another round of custom (and completely broken) Saturday Night Planeswalkers.

Until next time, share and enjoy!

Announcing the arrival of the most important interplanar publication since the great Encyclopedia of the University Eternal; a wholly remarkable tome, more popular than the Idiot’s Guide to Running an Astral Business, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Subjective Gravity, and more controversial than Balyx Balator’s trilogy of metaphysical blockbusters: Where the Gods Went Wrong, Infernus: Fairy-tale or Fiction?, and The Lie of Alignment…

It’s The Planar Vagabond’s Guide to the Multiverse!

This incredible (but exceedingly portable) guide includes everything you might want to know about the various planes of existence, the creatures that inhabit them, and the strange (but potent) magic items that one can encounter while traveling among them.

If you want to know how to get around the astral plane on less than 5 silver pieces a day, this is your guide!

GET YOUR FREE COPY TODAY!!

OK… Truth be told, the PVGttM is a new website that I recently launched which serves as a dumping ground for all of my OSR RPG homebrew (including classes, races, creatures, and magic items), as well as a place for documenting the rules that my friends and I use in our Monday night astral RPG^[1] and the multiverse we’re building together.

From a technical standpoint, the site uses more-or-less the same engine that this site does, combining a custom markdown-based parser with some EJS templates to render static HTML, served with a smile by the same Pi4 + nginx combination that this site runs on.

There’s already a fair amount of content published there, and I plan to start posting here about some of my favorite things from the site, so stay tuned!

And until next time, Feare Naught!

Way back in 1997, I released my first (and, so far, only) computer game, Camp Happy Island Massacre (hereafter referred to as #CHIM), a comedy-horror text game for the DOS operating system. Originally written while I was still in college, the game is about a cursed summer camp and the 3 surviving counselors who try to stop a horrific force before it claims them. I put it out for free (more-or-less) on the internet of 1997, and though it was never a huge success, I’ve always been proud of it.

Fast forward to 2018: although I’ve known about the Internet Archive’s MS-DOS Software Library for some time, I’d never really thought about the specifics of how it works until I read an article which talked about the Em-DOSBox project. Em-DOSBox is a port of DOSBox emulator which runs in the browser via the Emscripten JavaScript library. As I was reading the article, a thought struck me: could I get CHIM running in the browser?

I decided it was at least worth a shot, so I began with step 1, building Emscripten from source. That went off without an issue, so I moved on to the next step, building the DOSBox JS files, and that’s where I ran into my first snag: the only way I was able to get it to build was by disabling the “emterpreter sync” function (emconfigure --disable-sync ./configure). It complained about the lack of empterpreter sync, but it built, and that lead me to the next step, packaging the dosbox.js file for use in a browser via the ./packager.py command. Even though this seemed to work great, there was obviously something wrong with my resulting files, as the JavaScript engine in my browser kept throwing an error (“missing function in Module”). After toying around with it for a while, I found that, if I used ./repackager.py (the Emscripten-less version of the packager) to package my files, I could get an empty DOSBox window to come up, but it still wouldn’t load the actual EXE.

By this point, I was flummoxed, and was about to give up. And that’s when I found the answer: js-dos!

After 30 minutes with this tutorial (and some source viewing on a couple of js-dos game pages), I was able to get CHIM working.

But my work wasn’t finished yet. Even though I’d kept nearly all of the files for CHIM for the last 21 years (with the exception of the game’s original C++ source files, which were lost in a hard drive crash shortly after it was released), I hadn’t really messed with them much in the last decade, so there was some cleaning up to be done. I updated some of the questions (and answers) in the FAQ, replaced the license, and generally tried to clean up the supporting text files. And that’s when I ran into one last unexpected issue: text encoding.

You see, I had forgotten that, when I first wrote the game and the supporting files, I had used some primitive ANSI graphic characters in an attempt to enhance the look of it. And now, when I tried to view those files on my Linux laptop, those graphics came out… weird.

The fix was to convert the files from the “IBM-862” format to the modern UTF-8 format:

> iconv -f IBM862 -t UTF8 INTRO.TXT -o INTRO.UTF.TXT

This allowed me to edit the files in Mousepad (and serve them up with Nginx), while still keeping the graphics intact. Finally, I added the Unicode Byte Order Mark, which makes it display correctly in the browser, even when served from a file:// URL (you can add the BOM via Mousepad, under “Document -> Write Unicode BOM”).

So, if you’d like to try the game out, check it out here, and good luck - you’re gonna need it!

TL;DR - I made a game and got it published, so I made an app to help people play the game, and published that, too.

ICYMI, the card game I designed and ran a Kickstarter for was finally published a few months ago.

<gratuitous-plug> It’s called Mythic Wars: Clash of the Gods, and it’s available now at many fine gaming stores, or directly from either the Excalibre Games website or Amazon! </gratuitous-plug>

I had alot of fun designing and playtesting the game, and I’m quite pleased with the finished product. While I admit that I found the entire Kickstarting and publishing process to be somewhat less fun (and quite eye-opening), overall, the fact that I can now hold my game in my hands (and see it for sale at my friendly local game store) makes me enormously happy.

Since I am a code monkey by trade (and a web developer by choice), I wanted to complement the game’s publication with the release of a simple, searchable database of all of the cards available for it. Taking inspiration from the Gatherer, the official database for Magic: the Gathering cards (the best example of such an application that I’m aware of), I mocked up something over the course of weekend, tweaked it over the course of a couple more weekends, and soon, The Codex Mythica was born.

It’s my first publicly-available Node / Express application, so the code’s kinda ugly, but I think it has some neat features, like a responsive layout designed to work well on different screens and devices, and a category-based searching / filtering system for sorting and selecting cards (along with the obligatory word search functionality). Plus, each card has links to both its art and to the Wikipedia entry for the its subject (or the Lovecraft wiki entry, in the case of some of the Outer Gods and their minions).

It also (finally) gave me an excuse to share something on GitHub! You can find it at https://github.com/ItsEricWoodward/codex-mythica

<gratuitous-plug> So, if you like games about gatherings of mages, ascended beings, or worlds where war is crafted, check out Mythic Wars: Clash of the Gods, available now at many fine gaming stores, or directly from either the Excalibre Games website or Amazon! </gratuitous-plug>

(Sorry, I’m contractually obligated to get in one more of those.)

Anyways, if you have any suggestions for The Codex Mythica, feel free to open an issue on GitHub or drop me a line (I can’t guarantee I’ll implement it, but I always appreciate the suggestions).

With a view 9 years on, I have decided to banish this piece into the dustbin of history.

I still have my doubts about the whole purpose of “video game journalism” (especially as it relates to YouTube), but I feel like this is one of those times where the bullshit around the topic (mostly by the hateful MRAs and their disgusting apologists) has made even the #GamerGate tag itself toxic, and I don’t want it anywhere on my site.

David Wolinsky has a great article on Unwinnable capturing his thoughts on the whole “ethics in game journalism” / #GamerGate thing.

It’s time we retire the term “videogame journalist.”

Most writers in the field need to accept that they, too, are marketers unless their approach or something else in the landscape shifts and changes.

Part of the problem, as he sees it, is that videogame companies aren’t driven to do PR with journalists that might give them serious criticism (a.k.a. bad reviews). As a result, traditional “videogame journalists” have to choose between being a PR puppet for the game companies, or not being at all.

Part of the reason for this all-or-nothing attitude are the YouTube streamers, whose undeniable popularity means that they are getting courted more and more often by the game companies in lieu of print / online journalists. For example, look at Pewdiepie, and his 36-million followers:

Thirty-six million subscribers means roughly anything he puts online is more popular than Nirvana’s Nevermind (somewhere around 30 million sales) or Michael Jackson’s Bad (also around 30 million).

Think about it. An audience that size, bigger than the population of Canada (a country), and they are all paying attention to one person’s opinions about videogames. That is staggering on a basic human level.

He hits on a lot of different notes, and it does tend to run long, but it’s an overall great read for anyone that wants to move beyond the black-and-white #GamerGate in-group / out-group fighting and into a serious discussion about marketing vs. journalism, and what ethics in gaming can (and should) be.