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Saturday, May 07, 2011

RANDOM THOUGHTS #39

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.

1. The average wife has three secrets she has never told her husband, the biggest of which is that she has secrets at all.

2. Bucky Katt plans to create a new television show called Fantasy Peninsula, which would have all of the fantasy but half of the travel expenses of Fantasy Island.

3. I watched a fascinating TV show the other night called "How the States Got Their Shapes" about how state borders came to be. I knew some of these fun old stories, but didn't know others, such as the 3/4 mile bulge in the Vermont-Quebec border caused by a surveyor's mistake (which is still there), and the 1835 shooting war between Michigan and Ohio over who would own Toledo. Worth catching, and the two-hour show (apparently shown last year) is now becoming a series of one-hour episodes with more fun stories of strange borders.

4. Leanna's new "Have a meeting every day in which she gives each Steve a list of things to be done on new products in the next 24 hours" seems to be working. Steven Petrick is able to tell people "I cannot do what you want because I have to meet my work quota from Leanna."

5. Leanna got a mailing tube from Cattleman's Supply of Fort Worth, Texas the other day. It's about 3 feet long, 3 inches in diameter, and required an adult signature. I'm really not sure what it was, but she said I'd find out if my work quota was not met.

6. I really enjoyed doing STARSHIP ALDO which was finished and started printing on 29 April. This 16-page RPG adventure is being given away via Free RPG Day (and will be sold at Origins, and our webstore and e23 after Origins). The story goes that after the General War, all of the government sold off a lot of leftover starships. (This worked nicely with Chuck Strong's work on F&E ISC WAR, where the sales of those ships neatly reduced the fleet sizes and paid for the empires to recover from wartime exhaustion.) A female Kzinti, who was the captain of an Armed Priority Transport, took her back pay and the inheritance from her father (and money from her deceased husband) and bought another ship like that and went into business (looking for war wrecks she could salvage). She hired about 30 ex-military people (Kzinti, Klingon, Federation) and had a lot of contacts with Kzinti and Federation business, military, and port people. One day, her ship came upon a wrecked hulk of a freighter. Painted letters on the side spelled "aldo" and her intelligence officer (Jena Biblios) looked that up, and thought it might be either the freighter Geraldo Rivera, the military auxiliary Aguinaldo, or the luxury liner Waldorf Astoria. She sends a boarding party over to find out. (The boarding party consists of the six guys who played the Terrorwerks gun run at Origins last year.) There are deck plans for the freighter, die roll charts to find out what is in each compartment, and character stats for all eight people (in both GURPS and PD20M). Jean has made a lot of "oooooh" sounds and says she didn't realize that I could do such a creative job writing RPG stuff. She's already laying plans to turn the 16-page booklet into an entire 120-page magazine called Final Frontier #1, which she will edit and publish when she moves to Amarillo in 2013.

7. Jean's plan for FF#1 is to add deck plans for an APT, more crew characters, and several planets they can investigate. One would be Texmex, where Kzinti travelers stop to hunt live cows and deer. Another would be a Klingon colony where you can buy tons of war surplus weapons. Another would be the Leebyaah mentioned in SFB, where a civil war is raging (and you can sell the rebels meat from Texmex and guns from the Klingons). You will recall that the leader of Leebyaah is Moon-em-moor Klodhoppy, the commander of the Air Force is Yezzir Imarat, and the head of the church is Ayatoldyouso Kokamamie. Thanks to research by Mike Grafton, we now know that the prime minister is Maddog Inadinnerjacket.