Joey’s Musings

Musings Downtime

Well my blog was down, but is now up again. The day after I had jury duty (June 13th) the server was hit with a DOS (Denial of Service) Attack. That lasted until last Friday (June 20th). So about a week and a half the server was down. I made a post similar to this one. Unfortunately because of a weakness in the server they moved my page from chornjr.hostnmore.com to chornjr.myscoutserver.com. But they only moved the posts before that over (their last backup before the move) and didn’t tell me till yesterday (though I didn’t really find out till this morning). So some of my planned posts may be a little delayed, but they are on my hard drive already so maybe not.

Also, I plan on acquiring a proper domain name, but it is going to be a few days (weeks). I’ll let you guys know about the change before it happens.

AHHH!!!!!!!! - Jury Duty

I’ll take a Dragon over Jury duty any day of teh week. Why? Because Jury duty is boring, only pays $40 a day, I can’t wear shorts in this blistering hot weather.

Anyways. I might not post for teh next day or two because of it (Or I may have lots of posts). I hope to get dismissed after only one day, but who knows I may unfortunetly get picked to serve on a case, in which case youa re all invited to my funeral because I am going to go and shoot myself (or do something to get a baliff to shoot me)

Dragons! – Part 1 – The Introduction

When you hear Dungeons & Dragons what do you think about? If you are anything like me you probably think about Dragons. And why not? They are not only in the title of the game but they are universal to just about every culture on Earth. Heck there are even dragons running blogs (see my review of Dungeon Mastering).

Unfortunately for them there is always a little debate about how often they should be used in a game. If you want to see some of this debate you can find it on ENWorld. My personal opinion is that they should be used. No, not every adventure should have a dragon but hey, they are included in the game for a reason; to be used.

Dragons can be a great challenge for parties from 1st level all the way through epic levels. You might now be saying, “But wait a second, Dragons for a first level party? Aren’t they great big creatures who breathe fire and send spells flying?” And you would be correct, if you were talking about Great Wyrm Red or Gold Dragons. However there is a whole spectrum of dragons (literally) which come in an assortment of sizes and ages.

I hope to hear from all of you about your opinion on the subject and next time we will have some examples of Dragon encounters.

Dungeon Mastering - A blog run by a Red Dragon

Yes. You read the title correctly. There is a blog run by a Red Dragon and his name is Expy. However we’re not supposed to know that. The blog is called Dungeon Mastering and can be found at www.dungeonmastering.com. Now he tries to pass it off that a mere mortal human by the name of Yax runs the site. However, my guess is that Yax is just a Kobold who worships Expy and does the typing because well, let’s face it, it’s hard for a dragon to type with his claws.

Now let’s see what we get when a Red Dragon runs a blog. When you first type in the blog’s address (the URL for you techies) you come to a cool looking front page that looks like it is coming out of the screen at you. I think that is awesome. Now this page has of course the name of the site and a small description under it. Below that are links to various other parts of the site. I’ll go into a little bit more detail about them in a second, just let me finish the front page first. Now right below that is an advertisement for 4th Editon. At first I didn’t realize it was ad ad. I just thought it was a cool animated banner. Personally I hope he never changes it.

Now below that ad there are two posts listed on the left. One is the featured article and the other, at least at the moment is site related post. Now below that it gets divided into two columns. The left most column is a list of the recent posts and the right is a list of series that they have done. All the way on the right side of the page is the sidebar which you will see on all the others parts of the page. This sidebar has the usual suspects, an RSS feed, an email subscription, links, recent posts, related posts and a poll.

Overall I love the design of the site. It is simple and elegant and even though it has ads it is not the annoying Google AdSense or get in your face and make the site look cheesy and crappy ads. Great work guys

Now let’s talk about the reason we all go to blogs to begin with, the actual content. Remember before when I said I would more about those other parts of his page, well now you can stop holding your breath because I am now. Of course it has an About Us page. This is where Expy begins his plans lulling you into a calm about a Red Dragon being involved in a web site and claims to just be a mascot for Dungeon Mastering. Now you will notice three really cool sounding links; Free Adventures, Instant Campaign Builder and Instant World Builder. Expy and Yax has under the Free Adventures a list of 83 FREE, adventures and where to get them. Now to my knowledge neither Expy or his (probably Kolbold) worshipper Yax made any of them but none the less it is awesome to have such a list because there are so many free adventures out there it is sometimes hard to many of them.

The Instant Campaign and Instant World Builders are an awesome tool for both new and experienced DMs (or GMs if you prefer the generic not cool sounding title). Now these are on-line tools that will do the work for you. They are both PDFs created by Expy and Yax which give guidelines on how to create your very own campaigns and campaign worlds without doing too much work. They are based off of a series they did back in the day with tips, tricks, suggestion from those who left comments on the series. Please make sure you download (AND READ) them. They are worth every byte of disk space on your hard drive and the 40 to 60 minutes it will take to read both in their entirty.

Expy has Yax normally posting at least one post a day normally. Sometimes there are two or three posts. Very rarely (if ever) are there no new posts. Many of the articles become part of a series of articles. That is how the Instant Campaign and World Builder started. Currently he has a series called “Pimp My Character” This series just started and Expy and Yax don’t do too much of the work, but let the viewers do it. (They seem to be big into having community participation). How this series works is that people had to send in a basic character concept of no more than 30 words. Then the community would help that person flesh out the character a bit by giving a back-story, list of abilities and powers which could be cool or how the character can fit into an adventuring party. It was also revealed after the first pimping that if more than 50 people leave a comment helping to pimp out this character some of Expy’s hoard would be used to get an character sketch done for this character. So go and help Ian pimp out his character and get a character sketch.

There are two days a week in which there are regularly posted items. One is some very interesting quizzes every Sunday. These quizzes vary in challenge week by week but none are so easy where you will sit there and go “Why should I bother?” I do have one gripe with these quizzes. It modifies your score based on some psychological profiling modifier which add or take away from your score. However it seems to be a random number and not a set system of improving this modifier. But the quizzes are for fun and are not, normally, major competitions. The other is Monday Morning Speed Linking where several sites are listed for your perusal. They are normally somehow RPG related. Expy does find some awesome sites.

PROs

• Run by a Red Dragon
• Awesome design
• Posts often
• Posts are interesting and useful
• Excellent use of graphics
• Great links

CONs

• D&D Books Page link is merely an advertisement (however if you are buying D&D books and you like the site use it so they get some cash to keep producing an awesome site)
• Poll is all the way on the bottom of the sidebar
• The DAMN psychological profiling modifier on the quizzes

On the Joey Scale of 10 being the perfect site and 0 being why did I bother to ever look at this site Dungeon Mastering has earned a 9.5 So head on over to Dungeon Mastering and give it a try. You won’t be sorry, I promise you, unless you anger the Red Dragon of course.

Power-up Abuse in Manga’s

So the latest issue of the Naruto manga come out last Friday and is available at www.narutofan.com. Now it was announced that this would be the “Year of Sasuke.” And it has been. He finally had the showdown with his brother Itachi, and won. Unfortunately they now introduced Madara Uchiha who is Sasuke’s ancestor and he is still somehow around. He convinced Sasuke that Konoha is the enemy. So team Sasuke is now an enemy of Konoha. I don’t mind any of this. What I do mind is that he now has a new and improved Sharingan.

Now I thought the Sharingan was cool. It allowed Sasuke to copy ninjutsu from others without learning it the old fashion way. I thought it was cool that it allowed the Uchiha clan to have very powerful genjutsu (create illusions). I thought it was really cool that it has something to do with the Kyuubi (Nine Tailed Fox Demon, or Chakra Beast in the case of the Naruto series). Now however it seems that the Sharingan has morphed once again. Now they haven’t shown us his new powers but it is starting to remind me of Dragonball where they ran out of way to make the characters cool after Super Saiyan and kept increasing the level all the way to the very hairy Super Saiyan 4. It was jJust a cheap ploy to try and keep people interested in a series without actually introducing something new. I loved Dragonball Z, and I still love Naruto. It is cool to power-up one thing once or twice, but in a series like Naruto they should be getting cool new attacks not just making one single ability more and more uber. They also need to go back to Naruto and the rest of Team Konoha because hey, the series is called Naruto, not Sasuke.

Some Changes to Joey’s Musings

Since I basically had to start Joey’s Musings again from scratch I have decided to do things a little different. First I want to ensure I post more often because without me posting, well Joey’s Musings is a waste of space and time.

I decided I was bored with the “Misty Look” theme which I was using and decided to put my web development skills to use and make my own theme. No this theme isn’t created by me it is just here till I finish my own theme.

I also decided I wanted to try some new wordpress plugins. So as we go along you may see some things come and go from the blog as I test them out. If you have any plugins you have seen, used or heard about and think are good and would be a good addition to Joey’s Musings then just let me know about them.

Downtime

As you have noticed, and shame one you if you didn’t, my blog has been down for a little over a week now. My server got upgraded (WAHOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) but unfortunately my database was lost in the upgrade process and stupid me never made a backup of it. So I had to reinstall Wordpress and start all over from the beginning. A very important lesson can be learned here. ALWAYS, ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA.