Cthulhu’s girlfriend is really more of an adventure game person.
This comic accompanied the freshman orientation issue of the Thorn, which was only distributed to freshmen. Naturally, I thought it would be a good idea to depict the readers of the comic as a bunch of impressionable children. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
President Hulbert was the much-loved and eternally admired friendly old president of Rose-Hulman. He’d been president forever, but he finally retired after my freshman year. He proved irreplaceable; we went through two more officially selected presidents during my time there, as well as the assorted interim administrators and de facto triumvirates that arise during any rough political transition.
Fun fact: During my first quarter, I got to play a ninja who was kidnapping Dr. Hulbert for a Film Club production. I was the one who held the chloroform rag to his face. I may be the last Rose student to ever get that close to the man.
This is the last comic from my freshman year at Rose. Year 2 heralds some longer (loose) storylines.
I play in and run tabletop RPGs. For many games, like White Wolf’s World of Darkness series, all you need for supplies is paper, pencils, and some dice. However, some games call for a more elaborate setup. Since at least its third edition, Dungeons and Dragons, the perennial mainstay of the form, has pretty much required some sort of gridded surface and tokens for use in battle. The combat system depends on knowing how many squares (inches) away two combatants are, and many rules deal with the exact position of characters as compared to enemies and scenery. For years, I’ve used a slightly-misaligned Chessex battlemat and wet-erase markers for the surface and environment layout, with simple wooden disc-shaped tokens labeled in tape for combatants. Lately, however, I’ve found myself yearning for a more visually evocative battlescape, and I think I’ve found it in the form of Fat Dragon Games’s 3D cardstock terrain.
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Lovecraftian horror names are hard to spell and pronounce. According to some stories, Lovecraft would give each person who asked a different pronunciation of “Cthulhu.”
I think my first encounter with gaslighting was in the book The Twits by Roald Dahl.
I’ve finished up a little game that’s partially a test for a conversation engine I cooked up. It’s called “Narthex.”
After a long journey, you will reach the Narthex, the waiting place before the oracle. There you must wait until your time. Then you will be given the answer to a single question. This game has two endings. The second is not worth getting.
Play “Narthex” at Ludus Novus.
I suspect that “Last Saturday…” caption is there because that was when roommate assignment requests were due. The Thorn newspaper went out on Friday mornings, so I must have been concerned that the topic wasn’t quite timely enough.
Rose did not have co-ed on-campus housing.
It’s always cool to see art inspired by one of my games, and I think Mick “RicePirate” Lauer has captured a scene from the game perfectly. Click through to the art on Newgrounds for a link to the full-sized image.
My latest game, Looming, is up at Newgrounds. Looming is a game about… well.
This game is about two lovers named January and September.
No, wait; it’s about a group of people who don’t believe in the sky.
No, it’s about a pantheon of scientific disciplines.
Or maybe it’s about an ancient beast who knew exactly when it was going to die, and how.It’s about a place. A place called Looming.
Play Looming on Newgrounds.
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Chemical Engineers are strange creatures that only use computers to talk to their friends and download spyware.
Hoosiers are strange creatures that play games that aren’t digital, use cards that aren’t collectible, and have rules that make no sense.
Cthulhu has no problem with killing humans. He is, however, aware of the complications that other humans would experience if they do so.
Geeky college students often have trouble distinguishing between making humorous allusions and parroting tired lines from popular works. The cake is a lie.
