The Wizard of Troy - Image Gallery

Don't have to much to say about this, this was a set up for a commercial back in 2006 or 2007. It's the city of Troy my Dad built.

Click to embiggen. 

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 010

On this day, the crew and I continued to search the ruins. We have a single encounter, discovering a room with 30 secs. worth of coins in it.

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship,
2 Hopper with 15 units of fuel,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,
24 Repair units.
3 Skimmer,
1 U-bot.
and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I now have 410 secs.

This closes out the week. Normally, on Ten-day I would be paying 300 secs. for the ship but I did that on day one. I now have 10 more days I can stretch, but I'm probably not going to do that.

On this day, I fork out the crew pay, which is rather minimal. 40 secs. leaving me with 370. I'm not comfortable yet but this week has been pretty safe.

I don't have an ad today, but I want to share a link to Wikipedia's article on Metric Time. It sounds brain bustingly hard but is probably what Star Smuggler is doing. 

Stupid Hobby Collision D&D+Linux

I like Linux and D&D. Rarely do these hobbies collide, but sometimes I can force it. Not that I am a great Linux user. I like Linux. I like Ubuntu with XFCE. It's a great environment for my purposes. I am newbie when it comes to terminal skills. This post assumes you have zero skill.

I wanted a simple way to generate 6 D&D Character Abilities scores using Linux. There are the classic methods of using a spreadsheet, but what if I don't want numbers in a spreadsheet? What if I merely need them displayed on the screen or in a text file?

Well... terminal can do that with the shuf command. Open a terminal and try this command:

shuf -i 3-18 -n6 | paste - -s -d ' '

Breaking it down, shuf will select a seemingly random number. -i is the input of an expected range, in this case 3 to 18 or 3-18. The headcount or the number of numbers generated in this fashion is -n6. Everything after the pipe | is formating. Basically, this part will turn the typical column of numbers into a row of numbers. 

If you play D&D like me, you let players re-roll ones. In this case, your command would need to cover a range of 6 to 18. Two times three dice is 6. Try this line: 

shuf -i 6-18 -n6 | paste - -s -d ' '

Ok. That's great. You get six numbers in a row on your screen. What if you want that in a text file? For sanity, use the cd command to move from wherever you are to the Documents folder. (I lose lots of files and time by NOT doing this...)

cd Documents

Now that you are in a safe place, let's add some information to that line of commands:

shuf -i 3-18 -n6 | paste - -s -d ' ' > Stats.txt

The instruction > Stats.txt at the end will create a file called "Stats.txt" in your current directory.

Go open that file:

Great. That is one character's worth of stats. Let's make more: 

shuf -i 3-18 -n6 | paste - -s -d ' ' >> Stats.txt

Note the double >> symbols. All that does is tell terminal to append the current information to the file described. Note: I clipped my screen to show gedit and terminal in one screen shot for the next step.

Repeat the last command with a small modification, change -i 3-18 to -i 6-18. Since you didn't close gedit, you will get a new button which refreshes the file. Before you do, repeat the shuf command again. This is easily done by pressing the up arrow and then return. Do this twice.

Ok, now hit that refresh command. You have 4 sets of stats, where the first two have a range of 3 and 18 and the second is 6 and 18.

Shuf is not exactly a random number generator, but it's good enough for government work* and character stats. I THINK it is using it's the process id time and doing a computation based on that value. That means if you run a bunch of these commands in rapid succession and that interval is less than a second, then the seemingly random numbers will all be the same or very close to it. This is why I didn't make it generate 6 character at a time. You probably can't hit up arrow + return in less than half a second so the effect is not as noticeable.

Lastly, you could always run info shuf to see the full documentation of this command or to read at your convenience, try info shuf > Infoonshuf.txt

*This is joke. DON'T use this to generate random numbers for government work.

The Troubleshooting (artwork) Post

I've been messing around with svg art using Inkscape. For whatever reason, when I upload these images they look fine on a desktop device, but are dark grey on a black background on mobile devices. I think I either uploaded some .pngs or perhaps forgot to flatten the image when going to .jpg.

Anyway this a test of 2 Skimmer ground cars.

These are 3 Greek soldiers. 

These figures have been a part of my Strictly (Duke) Springer posts, which I hope to fix soon. 

I'd like to scale them down to 1/4 and 1/2 sizes for counters. 

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 009

Dear Diary,

We went back into the ruins again. We found a pair of skimmers. One was intact, while the other was cannibalized for a single repair unit.

Skimmers probably don't have wheels.

Here are today's stats:

1 Antelope starship,
2 Hopper with 15 units of fuel,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,
24 Repair units.
3 Skimmer,
1 U-bot.
and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I'd like to circle back and talk about the various "units" in the game. There are repair units, life-support units and fuel units. Life-support or LU, provides air, food and water to all people in a vehicle for a day in a bad air or vacuum environment. On this planet, the air is good and we don't need them.

Fuel units power the hoppers and the skimmers. For a hopper, they provide one movement point, say from the ruins to the spaceport or from the spaceport to orbit. There is a multiplier for gravity.

Skimmers also use fuel units, but one per day. Only a few characters can drive the skimmers. The engineer has that skill, as do skimmer drivers. Skimmer drivers are a quirk, the will not leave the system they were from, so you always need an engineer. Were I to change a rule, it would be this one. I would allow bodyguards and medics to drive, but not starship pilots or navigators.

Obviously, the hopper is faster but the skimmers are more efficient.