Blog Archives
New System Thursday: Star Wars Roleplaying Game
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The game, based on WEG’s earlier Ghostbusters RPG, established much of the groundwork of what later became the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and their sourcebooks are still frequently cited by Star Wars fans as reference material. Lucasfilm considered their sourcebooks so authoritative that when Timothy Zahn was hired to write what became the Thrawn trilogy, he was sent a box of West End Games Star Wars books and directed to base his novel on the background material presented within.
By the end of the game’s run around 140 sourcebook and adventure supplements were published for the game during its run through three editions.
In addition fifteen issues of a magazine series, the Star Wars Adventure Journal, were published between 1994 and 1998. The Adventure Journal was published in novel format of around 280 pages, and consisted of adventures and articles for the game, plus short stories intended to provide inspiration for gamemasters and news relating to Star Wars.
WEG’s license to produce Star Wars material was lost after the company declared bankruptcy in 1998, and the license was later picked up by Wizards of the Coast, who held the license until 2010.
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New System Thursday: Flashing Blades
Get your outrageous French accents ready, because this week we’re traipsing through 17th century Paris as Musketeers!
D'Artagnan?!
Ok. Not that kind of Musketeer. The kind from the movies that buckles swashes and swings from chandeliers. That’s right kiddos, this week we’re adding Flashing Blades by Fantasy Games Unlimited!
“It was a question of honor, and honor was always foremost in the minds of the men who strode through the age of the Sun King. A deserted courtyard on the edge of Paris was the stage on which they met with… FLASHING BLADES.”
So? What are you waiting for? Grab some candy, grab some friends, get the rules, and create a Flashing Blades campaign now!
Crash fix for Android browsers
We know that many of you have been having problems loading the site on Android browsers. It took us a while to get our hands on an Android device and pin the problem down, but we’ve finally got a fix.
Basically, the login system we use that allows for Google, Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest has some parts that are incompatible with Android 2.1 and below. Whenever the login section would load, the browser would crash. The upside is that we can intercept that and keep it from loading on those Android devices. The downside is that login with 3rd party is unavailable on those same devices. If this causes problems for you, send us an email and we’ll help get you sorted out.
If you’re still having crashing problems on your Android device, please let us know and we’ll keep looking into it. Otherwise, thanks for all the bug reports, and enjoy!
New System Thursday: GAMMA WORLD!
Gamma World is here! And by here, I mean here on Obsidian Portal. Don’t know what Gamma World is? Well check out these three handy links:
- Part two of our chat with Mike Mearls and Rich Baker
- Wednesday’s Penny-Arcade all about Gamma World
- Dave “The Game” Chalker’s review of Gamma World
So? What are you waiting for? Grab some dice, grab a copy of Gamma World, grab your d-d-dancebot, and create a Gamma World campaign now!
Character Quick Select popup
It took me a few hours on Saturday and a few more on Sunday, but I’m ready to announce our coolest new feature: The Character Quick Select popup!
The old way
One complaint we heard long ago was that it was a real pain to be writing a wiki page and want to reference a character. You’d have to open another browser window, navigate to the characters tab, and look up the slug or ID of the character in order to link them. To fix this, we added the sidebar with the dropdown box containing all your characters.
This was a decent solution, but I was never pleased with it. For one, it’s cumbersome if there are a lot of characters. Plus, it doesn’t help when you’re busy writing and want to define a brand new NPC. This happens to me A LOT when I’m planning out an adventure or new area.
The new way
To help with this process, I’ve revamped the lookup process to be much friendlier, and moved it to the textarea toolbar.
Simply click the little character-in-a-folder button, and voila! You’re looking at the new quick select popup.
New Characters
You can create a new NPC for your campaign, right from here. No more need to go add them via the characters tab then come back to where you were editing. Click the New Character button, fill out the basics, click save, and your new character is added to the list, ready for immediate insertion into your post.
Filtering
Just start typing a character’s name or a tag. As you type, the list will automatically filter itself to the characters you’re looking for.
Insert
Found the character you’re looking for? Click the Insert button to insert the link tag right into the post.
Known Issue
There is one main irritating bug that I’m aware of. Sometimes the textarea you were originally editing loses the place of the cursor. When you click the button to insert a character, the wiki tag is inserted at the start of the textarea, instead of where the cursor was originally. This is a limitation of how textareas work, but I’ll see if I can find some sort of workaround.
Like it? Hate it?
I’m very proud of the quick select popup, as I’ve needed it many times in the past. Let me know what you think, and if there are any ways it could be improved.
Dynamic Character Sheet bugfix
We found a bug in how the dynamic character sheets were being stored, and we pushed out a fix tonight (Oct 6, 2010). Essentially, there was some duplication of storage where the same character would be stored in two different states in two different places.
We did our best to pull the different pieces together and keep it all straight. However, there may be some slight changes to your dynamic sheet values, like a wrong stat here or there, depending on if the data merge was 100% successful. We’re confident that it worked correctly in the vast majority of cases, and we humbly apologize if any of your data was incorrectly modified. If you’re seeing huge discrepancies on your dynamic characters sheets, please let us know.
We’ve fixed the problem and everything will be smooth from here on out. Again, our apologies for the inconvenience.
