You can grab the file here (might need to right click on the link and “Save URL as…”): Fate d12 definition for Dicenomicon.

How to use this file is not explained that well in the app and not that obvious. And way harder than it should be. I’d love to say “go to the obvious screen in Dicenomicon and type in this URL to download it”, but I can’t, because that inexplicably isn’t an option. There are supposed to be several ways to get the file there, but most of them don’t work (the “import from documents” route fails with a “stream had too few bytes” error).

1. Download the definition file.
2. On your iOS device, launch Dicenomoicon and hit the info button in the top right.
3. Tap “Sharing”.
4. Tap “Web-based Editor”.
5. You are about to turn your device into a web server, briefly. Make up a username and password and tap “Start Server”.
6. At the bottom of the screen, your device will display a URL to use. Open a browser on your computer (assuming it is on the same network as the iOS device) and go to that URL. When asked for a username and password, enter the one you just made up.
7. In the page that comes up, click “Upload File”.
8. Choose the dice definition you downloaded. Select “Numeric Die” in the “Kind of Upload” popup. Click “Submit”.
9. Back in Dicenomicon, stop the server and go back to the main settings screen.
10. Tap “Customize”.
11. Tap “Custom Dice”. You should see the new “Fa12: Fate d12″ in the list.
12. So back to the customize screen. Tap “Dice Bar”.
13. Tap “Edit”.
14. Scroll to the bottom on the list and tap “Add Die…”.
15. A “d6″ will be added to the end of the list. In spite of being in Edit mode, you can’t edit this new die and this point. Tap “Done” instead, even though you are not.
16. Now tap the new “d6″ at the end of the list.
17. In the screen that comes up, you will see a “d6″ in a circle. Double-tap it.
18. In the dialog that comes up, choose “Custom Numeric Die”.
19. In the selector that comes up, choose “Fa12: Fate d12″.
20. Click Done. Go all the way back to the main screen.
21. At the end of your dice bar, you should see “Fa12″, which you can now use like any other die.

You may have noticed I’m not running a similar “$1,000 for an indie game” concept this year. This is mostly because I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with running it this year, but also partly for other reasons. Since the first lark, Kickstarter has grown popular for managing the risk of an indie game launch, and it may be a better fit for bringing quality games to market than contests like this one. I have made a point of funding nearly any rpg-related Kickstarter I find. I have to check to see if I’ve spent $1,000 on Kickstarters yet, but it seems like it might be a better use of the cash. Still thinking about it though.

I thought it might be interesting to see what became of some of the other ideas pitched a year ago. Some of these were already close to completion at the time. If you pitched last year, and I get the current details wrong or couldn’t find information about the game you picthed, post a comment to correct me. In the order they were pitched:

• A working copy of The Detective Heroes Gods Role Playing Game was offered for free by its author.
• A test version of Generic Live Action Simulation System can be found in a free system test document.
• The design for Longshot may have found its way to to some of the author’s other games.
• The Final Girl has cover art and long list of playtesters, so appears to be nearing production.
• Seed RPG is on hiatus, but will likely be Kickstarted as some point.
• Peng Lai: Cinematic Chinese adventure! was last seen looking for playtesters.
• Geasa is now available on RPGNow.
• Hot Guys Making Out is being tested at conventions.
• Final Hour of a Storied Age needs beta playtesters.
• Rakehell is being internally tested.
• A Kickstarter for Shelter in Place successfully funded in mid-October.
• I see no mention of Coyote Traffic on its author’s site.
• The progress notes for Rulers don’t lists dates, so it is hard to tell where it is. (By the way, its author created a nifty $1,000 contest of his own.)
• Cthulhu Apocalypse has been published by Pelgrane Press.
• All the references I have for locating Love & Lucky are in languages I do not speak, so not sure where it is.
• Googling for symbolic phrases like M20# is problematic but, since the author acquired the rights to the line, I’m guessing that this pitch mutated into the next official version of MicroLite 20.
• Can’t find information about Digital, though that was a working title, so maybe it is now called something else.
• The author’s blog makes no recent mention of Warriors From the Mystic Mountain.
• The author’s blog makes no recent mention of Gunner Rex.
• As far as I know, Jared A. Sorensen was able to pay his rent.
• Perfect, Unrevised is now available for sale.
• I can’t find any recent references to Life of a Fallen Star.
• I can’t separate the noise when Googling for Redemption in various ways (+rpg, +author’s name, etc.). So, this either means it hasn’t been published, or that I just can’t find it.
• Criminal Element was released at 1KM1KT.
• The design notes for Mortar of Utopia don’t mention any progress.
• Also not getting much search love for Syzygy.

If you try them out, let me know how it goes.

Thoughts on doing this are still in the experimental stage, but have progressed far enough to share and, importantly, get feedback. If you have ever played Mecha or BattleTech (or, better yet, both), let me know what you think either in a comment here, or on this Story Games thread.

You can read the progress of this project in the following Google doc: Succession

The contest page offers a PDF containing all the winners, but also take a look at some of the other 70+ entries. I loved the idea behind Mystery of Godzina House, for example.

In honor of this event, I will be setting up DivNull Lark aimed at giving the Lost Laboratories a bit more more flesh, and some love to open source systems. Stay tuned.

This playset has not had much testing, so if you play it, let me know how it goes and how you actually used it. Chances are I will revise it at some point, based on feedback.

Thanks to Jason Morningstar for sending me his standard playset InDesign template. Normally, I would share the source documents for something like this, but the template and the fonts are not mine to share, so I can’t. You can, however, consider the contents of this playset to be free to hack, mutilate, mangle and destroy.

The PDF can be downloaded here: lw01_vegas_baby.pdf

When reading through it, it should be pretty obvious that the experience your players have will be highly dependent on their access to teleportation magic. The title assumes they don’t have any, so that their only choice at escape is to work through the dungeon. If, however, they can teleport on their own, the focus of the whole adventure changes pretty drastically, shifting to more about exploration and investigation of what the place is and how the players might use it for themselves. Some parties might get sucked into the network, take a quick peek, teleport out, and never think about the place again. Others might do serious exploring and be more interested in finding out about its builders, and so on. (If tamed, it would make a pretty great “home base”, for example.)

I am open to feedback on this dungeon, so post it if you have any. Though I have already submitted this entry, the contest allows resubmission with updated versions, so I have until the end of March. Also, feel free to post how you’d flesh out the rooms for a specific system. If anyone is really clamoring for it, maybe I’ll build a Pathfinder version once the contest is over, with MapTool maps and such.

At a more “meta” level, this dungeon makes explicit the notion that all dungeon maps are really just directed graphs. The graph is plain to see in my entry:

One of the reasons dungeons remain popular is that their directed graphs not only represent the geography of the dungeon, but also the flow of the narrative. The dungeon is a tool to control the pacing and sequence of the story and place payouts such that reaching them requires certain challenges. You can see some explicit examples of this in a thread on this topic at Story Games. This thread has a number of opinions on what traits these graphs need to make dungeons “fun”. I also provide side by side comparisons of the maps of some classic dungeons (Tomb of Horrors, Keep on the Borderlands, White Plume Mountain) with their directed graph representations. For example, here is the graph of White Plume Mountain, which clearly shows its “three silo” design:

As a quick example of how graph analysis can be used, take a look at room 2. The graph makes in painfully obvious that the adventurers will be moving in and out of that room multiple times. So, it would be good to make that room memorable somehow or, perhaps, contain some kind of trap that needs to be dealt with each time through the room. The revised version of White Plume delivers here (see PDF at link above), with a challenge that is similar general each time through, but still different enough in the specifics that it doesn’t get annoying.

One thing I don’t spell out in that thread is exactly how I built these graphs. The key is a program called dot, which is part of the GraphViz package. Once you get that installed, you need to make a .dot file to represent the dungeon. This is just a text file that follows a specific format. These can get complicated, but for turning dungeons into graphs, we only use a really small portion of the format. It starts with a shell definition that defines the file as a directed graph, and contains a single graph attribute for spacing out the nodes:

digraph G {
	ranksep="0.4 equally";
}

Let’s use a smaller example from one of last year’s One Page Dungeon contest winners: map three from Antti Hulkkonen’s “Den of Villainy!” (reproduced to the right through the magic of the Creative Commons license). At each room on a the map, enter one line for each connection the room has. For example, room 1 on the map leads to rooms 2 and 9. So, one line is "1" -> "2" and the other is "1" -> "9". Do that for each room. Then save the file and open it with graphviz (or open a command line and run dot on it). That’s the basics of it. You can also add some embellishments to each line, like using a different color for secret doors and so on. The result might look like this:

digraph G {
	ranksep="0.4 equally";

	"8" -> "3" [dir="both"];
	"1" -> "2" [dir="both"];
	"1" -> "9" [dir="both", color="blue", style="dashed"];
	"2" -> "3" [dir="both"];
	"2" -> "4" [dir="both"];
	"3" -> "5" [dir="both"];
	"3" -> "6" [dir="both"];
	"4" -> "5" [dir="both"];
	"5" -> "13" [dir="both", color="blue", style="dashed"];
	"6" -> "7" [dir="both", color="blue", style="dashed"];
	"9" -> "10" [dir="both"];
	"9" -> "12" [dir="both"];
	"10" -> "11" [dir="both"];
	"11" -> "12" [dir="both"];
	"11" -> "13" [dir="both", color="blue", style="dashed"];

	/* Mark the entrance rooms */
	"1" [shape=Mdiamond];
	"8" [shape=Mdiamond];
}

The graphviz package will handle the layout of the nodes automatically. Sometimes it does a better job of this than others (and there are tricks you can use to make the output better), but as these graphs are just to visualize the dungeon, they don’t need to be perfect. In this case, the result looks like this:

The flow of the dungeon becomes more clear in this graph, with the one whole branch only accessible through secret doors, a main interconnected section, and two key secret rooms (which, significantly, are furthest away from the entry ponts). All very rational.

The hardsuit community (apparently) has evolved a number of “standard” body types, where the core of the model uses a particular idea, which is then embellished. I selected a number of these standard cores, but only present one example of each. I believe that I give credit below to the originator of any given standard core, but it can be hard to track this down, so I may have got it wrong. Let me know if you know better.

As before, I had to guess at some of these models, going by pictures posted to the net. In most cases, I changed the head entirely, as hardsuits typically use minifig heads, which Mechaton models usually avoid. I also sometimes added extra stuff or changed a bit here and there. I’m sure I also guessed wrong in a few places. So, if these drift from the standard, that is why.

The LDraw files use the latest part collection, but may contain unofficial parts. (Also, you may need to right-click on the .ldr files and “Save Link As…”.)

	Blacktron by pasukaru76 Source: Flickr LDraw file: pasukaru76-blacktron.ldr		Double Edge by xezav Source: Flickr LDraw file: xezav-doubleedge.ldr
	Hardersuit by Alvaro Gunawan Source: Flickr LDraw file: alvarogunawan-hardersuit.ldr		Reclean (based on “Cleanbot”) by PolarBear!! Source: Flickr LDraw file: polarbear-reclean.ldr
	Retriever by xezav Source: Flickr LDraw file: xezav-retriever.ldr		Übermann by Geoff Herndon Source: Flickr LDraw file: geoffherndon-ubermann.ldr
	W. Mk1 by W. Mark Source: MocPages LDraw file: wmark-wmk1.ldr		ZSF-AHTP by Mr. Villa Source: Flickr LDraw file: mrvilla-ZSF-AHTP-4.ldr

To view these files, you’ll need some kind of .ldr viewer, such as Bricksmith or others.

Lastly, a repeat of my earlier plea: when you come up with the next great frame, please give the world an LDraw file for it, so we can marvel at your genius from any angle we like.

Congratulations and best of luck to Mr. LaTorra. We can’t wait to see the result.

I haven’t found this easy, as often all you have to go on are some low resolution photos that never seem to include the angle you need. To spare would-be frame builders some of the irritation I went through, I created some LDraw files detailing step-by-step instructions on how to make some of these frames. (You may need to right-click on the .ldr files and “Save Link As…”.)

	The “Classic” by D. Vincent Baker Source: Mechaton rules LDraw file: vincentbaker-classic.ldr		Chucker by D. Vincent Baker Source: ptimanya designs LDraw file: vincentbaker-chucker.ldr
	5gen by D. Vincent Baker Source: ptimanya designs LDraw file: vincentbaker-5gen.ldr		AIn-11 by Joshua A. C. Newman Source: the glyphpress LDraw file: joshuanewman-AIn-11.ldr
	Radial by David Laurence Source: Brickshelf LDraw file: davidlaurence-radial.ldr		Conscript by Soren Source: Flickr LDraw file: soren-conscript.ldr
	MgN-302 by Malcolm Craig Source: Mechatonic LDraw file: malcolmcraig-MgN-302.ldr		Mini-frame by Squieu Source: Brickshelf LDraw file: squieu-mini-frame.ldr

To view these files, you’ll need some kind of .ldr viewer. I use Bricksmith, but there are others. Note that a number of viewers can also generate part lists from a model automatically.

There may be part mistakes, as I pretty much just guessed on a lot of things. If you find an error, please drop a comment about it below. It would help if you used the LDraw part numbers to identify both what part is wrong and with what it should be replaced.

Lastly, a plea to all you frame builders out there: when you come up with the next great frame, please give the world an LDraw file for it, so we can marvel at your genius from any angle we like. Heck, post a link to it in a comment below. I’d love to see it.