Last Spring we played a Dust Devils Revenged campaign over the 'net via Skype and a Vassal  Engine playing cards module that I had hacked especially for that purpose. After the campaign ended I thought about publishing the Vassal module for others to use and improve. 

Finally I've had the time to polish it. So, here's the first version of my Dust Devils poker hands playing module for Vassal Engine. It still has a few glitches in the graphics and needs a help file to go along it, but those are coming very soon, I promise. 

The module is intended for playing out conflicts in Dust Devils. In the game, each player draws cards according to their character's traits and forms a five card poker hand. Bets are also used. The module supports up to six players and a dealer with concealable card hand windows for each player, has two card decks combined so you want run out of cards even in a massive conflict, chips, a chat window (as per Vassal Engine). You can also save and load game situations in it.

The module is based on Tom Dufresne's playing cards module; the card, the card deck and the player hand functionality are his design. The module also has the poker hands chart from Dust Devils Revenged book with approval of Matt Snyder to include it. 

I've been skimming over the archives of the Sons of Kryos podcast (by Jeff, Judd and Storn) in the past few weeks. There are lots of really useful stuff and I thought that I should break some of my finds out for you.

The first podcast of Sons of Kryos was published in July 2005. There have been 62 podcasts since. Each podcast consists of three or four sections each lasting about 15 minutes. In my recap effort I'm now in the third season, somewhere around episode 40.

The only drawback of the Sons of Kryos podcast is that the starting times of different sections in the individual podcasts are not marked in the archives. Here I'm trying to give approximate numbers for those, also.

This is similar effort to the Cull blog where Ryan Stoughton recaps different rpg blos and podcasts and tries to point to the most bestest material. My effort here differs in that I haven't even listened to every Sons of Kryos podcast and my selections are simply a result of my personal interests right now. Regardless, I hope this is useful to you.

A short list of my recommendations, the full descriptions follow in full text:

• Episode 12, section I: Bangs (At the beginning)
  
• Episode 12, section 3: Inspired Games (Starts at 30 minutes) 
• Episode 15, section 1: Good sentences - This is what the game is about (At the beginning)
• Episode 15, section 2: Stakes (Starts approx. at 15 minutes) 
• Episode 18, section 2: How to Start a PTA Game (Starts at 23:40)
• Episode 27, section 1: Managing Screen time (At the beginning)
• Episode 35, section 2: Good sentences - No (Starts at 16 minutes) 

Efemeros, a Finnish role-playing article collection has been published last week. The collection contains two articles from Sami Koponen (also the editor of the collection) and an article each by Wille Ruotsalainen and Eero Tuovinen. The article collection is available only on paper, only in Finnish and can be ordered here (in Finnish). It costs 20€.

Comparing different methods of rolling dice in terms of their results can be an exhausting exercise, especially if you are an approbatur-level mathematics drop-out student like me. Luckily Torben Mogensen has developed Troll, a language for describing dice roll mechanisms, as well as an interpreter which also calculates the probabilities between the different alternatives in the mechanics described.

Simply put, Troll handles every kind of dice, every kind of roll, (almost) every kind of mechanic. You name it, you can do it in Troll, and test it in the interpreter. The primary entities in Troll are rolls (2d6) and numbers ("4") which can be combined with all manner of arithmetical (-, +, *) and logical (<, largest etc.) operations. It also supports variables (d6*d6 is different than x=d6, x*x). You can also use if-then-else structures, functions, repetitions and the whole kitchen sink.

I cannot say enough praising words about this creation. It is exactly what one needs when designing an/or tweaking a game with dice roll based resolution. A classic. Anyone not using this should seriously stop anything they're doing right now and take a look. Torben Mogensen's page on Troll, with links to the interpreter and its manual.

A tiny disclaimer: You need to learn about arithmetical and logical operations a little bit to use Troll efficiently. If you can write code, you'll be ok. If you are a mathematician, you'll do ok. If you can do formal philosophical logical operations, you'll learn this very quickly. Otherwise, just take a look at the examples in the excellent manual.