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Hoi, Chummer. Welcome to the 21st Century of gaming. With a return to gaming as a player, I've taken up the task of just trying to get notes down about what has happened in the game sessions so that some of the information isn't lost over time and help track what the group is up to. Rather than just using something simple and old fashioned, like paper, or slightly newer ideas, like a Word document, I've taken to utilizing a new tool that has been discussed before.

Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Weekly or monthly titles that fed the imaginations of millions with colorful images and headlines whose titles would rival the best catchlines that a muckraker of the turn of the century would envy. Creating such as a GM might make for great ways to introduce players into the flavor of a campaign, but not everyone is an artist, or has the time to create such works.

RocketJump, a media company started by the minds behind the Youtube channel FreddieW, have started a Kickstarter project for funding the second season of their show, Video Game High School (VGHS)

More and more electronics are invading lots of spaces that used to be the domain of the ripped off piece of paper that was hastily scrawled upon to create a reminder of something for the next adventure. Laptops and Tablets have become more affordable and the use of PDFs and other file formats and programs have reduced the large, heavy library of books for one’s game to a much more manageable weight. On top of these devices comes the ability to manage one’s campaign with digital tools; from the basic like Word/Excel to more advanced programs like The Obsidian Portal site.

Syfy in conjunction with Machinima Prime is releasing Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome as a series of webisodes on youtube. All 10 parts are now available on the Machinima Prime channel, or just watch the playlist in this post to see everything that happens.

Yes, I'm aware that these aren't real videos, but fan created products. Each of these spots was created by splicing together scenes from other shows and movies, but they are still very creative and imaginative in telling a story with those works. First up is a TV Spot by user "Bloodrunsclear." I'm guessing this is a Farscape reference.

Second is a Movie Trailer from "Harleykeen"... Yes, I get it, Harlequin... very cute name.

Stalker, from the Shadowrun Forums has created an interesting utility for Gamemasters. It is an Initiative Tracker that includes the ability to roll and sort the initiatives of PCs and NPCs alike. This utility can be downloaded to your local computer so that the javascript can be edited so that the PCs of the party are automatically inserted into the list of people in the fight, saving the GM some time. Currently it does all the rolling for every character placed in the initiative tracker, but Stalker is considering a way to allow Players to roll their own initiative with dice and that result just entered in for the character and sorting them into the order along with the NPCs. This should be a great utility for most GMs to help deal with larger numbers of NPCs and since it can be downloaded to your system, doesn't require a connection to the Net to be able to use at ones gaming table. Plus it should work on tablets and other systems that support Javascript in their browsers.

Nostalgia: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also: something that evokes nostalgia

Remember those days when getting together with friends and running the latest adventure meant brightly colored maps in nice, neat hexagons? You know the ones. A few bright colors, with each terrain type fitting so nicely into each little area. Well, I stumbled across a site, Mystara.thorf.co.uk that resurrected or recreated quite a few of the old maps from the old D&D modules and campaigns.

On top of the color maps, the site also has a FAQ on the various fonts that were used to produce the modules and boxed sets from the TSR days. So, if you’ve ever wanted to produce your own adventures in a similar looking fashion to the old TSR modules, check out the fonts section to mimic the look of the old settings.

A recent posting by another Savage player brought me back to the idea of using GraphViz in gaming. This particular example was in mapping player characters with their in game relationships to people, places, things and ideas to help a GM visualize how they are all interconnected. I went through the post and created several .gv files that have presets setup to make doing more of these easier should I continue down this path with my own games.

Now this is an interesting find, especially given the current playtesting our gaming group is currently running through. The Pathfinder Random Treasure Generator V3.0. It offers lots of options for controlling the kinds of treasure given out. Magic can be set to low to reduce the appearance of magical treasures, or increased to make them more common. Do you want to give out more coins? or would you rather the party found gems and other items instead? How hard was the fight the party faced? What is the average level?