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The oldest thing on this site is the Drifting World,
a role-playing game world built primarily for GURPS. The Drifting World is a part of the
GURPS WebWorlds project,
a now largely defunct attempt to make use of GURPS's
potential diversity by presenting a bunch of campaign worlds and methods for connecting
them for a potentially multiversal
campaign.
I have a campaign description for a PBEM RPG I was going to run
for some friends that never
got off the ground (but I may run it live for a different group of people), a description of
a newer campaign world (described as the Renaissance meets Dune),
and this is where you can find my architecture rules for GURPS. Rumor
has it that an upcoming GURPS book is going to cover architecture, if only tangentially, so
these rules will probably become obsolete before the year is out.
Elsewhere on the web, you can find a set of
encounter tables for low-tech
settings which I'm still happy to have written. It's part of Incanus's excellent, if no
longer maintained, collection of "rare
GURPS items" (largely culled from Usenet postings which have likely vanished from
all servers and are therefore hard to find).
I don't just write this stuff for fun, you know. I'm a real live published author-guy.
I've placed several articles in Pyramid magazine,
an on-line magazine about gaming, on
Pyramid is a subscription site, so you can't read the articles unless you're already a
subscriber, but it's quite inexpensive. I've also got contributions to a number of books
published by Steve Jackson Games:
Then there's the techie stuff. Entire books of it. I wrote parts of
Mastering Lotus Notes R5,
somewhat more of Mastering Lotus
Notes R5 Premium Edition and Mastering
Lotus Notes and Domino 6, and all of
Lotus Notes and Domino R5 Developer's
Guide to Building Applications. I believe these are still available at Amazon:
The Developer's Guide (mine)
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Mastering Notes R5 Premium Edition (other people plus me)
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Mastering Notes R6 (other people plus me)
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They're both selling better than my brother's book.
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Some years ago, while I was working on my MA in archaeology, I spent a summer in
Cyprus and was fortunate enough to see a great deal of
Cypriot ecclesiastical architecture and art (and meet some of the very nice Cypriots).
And speaking of the real world, I've been to southern Africa,
Nepal and India, and Ireland,
taking many pictures and writing snarky commentary.
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This book is the one which we relied on most for the Ireland trip. Stephanie and I went
through it independently, noting things we wanted to see, then we combined the two lists
on a AAA map of Ireland and figured out a course which would take us through the greatest
density of things we wanted to see. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone thinking
about going there. It's marvelously well organized. I'd also strongly recommending
supplementing it with B&B guides available through the Irish tourist board or any travel agent.
This book can tell you things to look for; the B&B guides will tell you where to stay.
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Speaking of archaeology, North America is home to a great many
threatened archaeological sites. Some countries (for example,
most of Europe) recognize the enormous historical value of archaeological
sites and so protect them, even if they are on privately owned
land. American law, on the other hand, allows landowners to do
more or less as they will, which means that a landowner may dig
holes, strip the soil, and so on, disturbing the site and destroying
any informational value it may have had. Because the laws are
not likely to change any time soon, the
Archaeological Conservancy
tries to protect threatened archaeological sites much the same
way the Nature Conservancy protects threatened habitats: by buying
them. As you can imagine, they're in need of donations.
The motley assemblage in the picture are my old gaming crew, a
batch of people I have known for longer than I'd like to admit
(as we like to say, "Solitudinem facimus, apellamus pacem"). From
left to right, they are Tim (Beaker) Van Beke, my brother Andrew,
Colin Klipsch, Steve Drevik (at whose house this picture was taken),
Allen Hsu (from whose web site I stole this picture), and the
mysterious spirit of Benson Fong.
Among the people I know who aren't in the picture are more recent friends
Naomi and
Phil. Some of the people I game with these days
or have gamed with in the past, particularly James,
Lyman and Rob,
have web sites, so I suppose I should provide links.
One of the nice things about the net is that if you want classic literature (say,
Shakespeare or Ambrose Bierce), it's probably out there. More to the point, it's
probably at the University of
Pennsylvania's on-line books page.
Through oversight of their literary heirs, the works of two of my favorite authors have
fallen into the public domain and have likewise started appearing on the web.
H. P. Lovecraft should need no
introduction. But there's also the unjustly neglected
Clark Ashton Smith. Smith was a friend and
correspondant of Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, and was along with them one of the
founders of modern fantasy (imagine a style half way between Dunsany and Jack Vance,
and shame on you if you don't know either of them). Speaking of Dunsany,
some
of his works are likewise available on line. His family seems to be doing well selling
fine linens and other housewares from their castle in
County Meath. I absolutely must go there the next time I'm in Ireland.
I keep up with a few on-line comics, particularly Sluggy
Freelance and PVP. Very, very amusing, in an
appropriately geeky sort of way.
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