Year: 2013

Randomonday: 11/4/2013

November 4, 2013 Brody No Comments

Each Monday evening, we pick someone at random from players who are online and award them a random amount of Saga Points – as much as 30,000. This week’s Randomonday winner is Kethren! And the prize amount: 10,644 Saga Points.

OtherSpace

NaNoWriMo 2013: Knee Deep, Installment 1

November 3, 2013November 25, 2013 Brody No Comments

In the purple November twilight, the abomination rising on the east side of Interstate 95 looked to Jim Larman more like the familiar silhouette of his youth: a great sombrero atop the 200-foot tower of the roadside attraction formerly known as Nico’s Natural Wonderland.

But then, inevitably, the rosy pink neon and spotlights switched on, laying bare the truth of the monument’s evolution.

Now, the cone of the sombrero was a freakishly pointy metal breast – one that would’ve felt right at home in Madonna’s bra in that old “Express Yourself” video, he mused. Atop the dark nipple, a crimson aircraft hazard light blinked its soft warning for planes that might be coming from or going to Cypress Knee Municipal Airport or the Wings Over Florida retirement community north of town.

The brim of the sombrero had become a glazed brown doughnut with candy-colored sprinkles and swirls of white frosting.

A billboard beckoning motorists off the highway at Exit 325 proclaimed: NAUGHTY NICO’S WILD WORLD.

Fiction, NaNoWriMo, Tales from Cypress Knee

The arsenal, gathering dust…

November 3, 2013 Brody No Comments

Quick sketches of some of the many characters I’ve portrayed in real-time online roleplaying (on OtherSpace and elsewhere) over the years:

OtherSpace

Long time hooked…

November 3, 2013 Brody No Comments

Zork was my gateway drug.

Using a relatively basic command parser, this text-only computer adventure game by Infocom allowed a single player to explore a grid of rooms, solving puzzles and gathering treasure, all the while trying to avoid being devoured by a grue in dark chambers.

I had no idea when I first played Zork, back in the 1980s, that my explorations of the Great Underground Empire would lead to my work on OtherSpace.

But Zork and other Infocom games undeniably served as the basic foundation for what would become my pet project for the past 15 years (and counting).

In the mid-1990s, I played a MUD (multi-user dimension) for the first time. It was called Infinity. Like Zork, it was text-based, with a grid of rooms and puzzles to solve. The difference, however, was that I could interact with other players from around the world in the same virtual space.

I enjoyed the diversion while the novelty lasted.

Ultimately, though, I found myself drawn instead to another multi-player text-based game called TOS TrekMUSE. This game, inspired by Star Trek‘s original series with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, didn’t have built-in puzzles to solve. It required players to submit a character biography that proved they grasped the theme. It had a coded space system, so players who joined Starfleet might be assigned as crew to virtual starships, such as the Yorktown and the Excelsior.