Hefeweizen.

Started this brew way back in September of last year. Due to a restriction in the number of bottles I had at the time, I could not get this bottled as quickly as I would have liked. The restriction was because I had and continue to have a number of my bottles holding the raspberry mead I started back in 2007.

The recipe I used is one of my own invention. It was not as cheap as it could have been due to using half grains and half malt extract instead of all malt. At the time the 2-row was going for about $3.50/lb., making it one of the cheaper grains I could get. Unfortunately for us brewers the price of grain has continued to rise making our once economically efficient hobby less so these days.

Here is my recipe:

2 lbs Rolled Wheat
4 lbs Bohemian Pilsen (2 row)
4 lbs Light Malt Extract
2 lbs Honey

1 oz Saaz
1 oz Kent Golding

The rolled wheat came in single pound plastic bags, I am guessing left overs from earlier shipments. I’m not sure how much these cost, but they could not have been all that much. I was doing my best to be as cheap as I could, retaining as much quality as I could. The Saaz were strong registering an AA of 7.5 that season. I hope that my supplier, Bacchus and Barleycorn, continue to get their hops that powerful.

I won’t get into detailing out the cooking experience except to say that it was one of the best, easiest times I have spent cooking a beer that I have ever had. Everything came together very nicely and I was able to hit and keep my target temperatures without any real trouble. I hope to be able to repeat it in the future.

On to a few pictures then.

The first is the anticipation shot of opening the bottle. I prefer the flip tops for their easy reuse and the ability to send some with friends when they want to try my brew out. The “C” you see on top of the cap is from an older, much older, attempt to add some cherry flavoring to a batch.

Getting ready to open and pour

And this is everything freshly poured. I want to note here that I continue to have problems with over-carbonating in the bottle and that if I do not act quickly enough when opening the bottle, I will have a beer fountain on my hands. In fact, this last time around I lost one of my liter bottles to a minor beer explosion. I am not sure if this is because I am not getting enough of the sugars converted in primary fermentation due to a lack of oxygen or if I am using too much sugar when bottling. This past time I made sure to include extra head-space in the bottles to eliminate that as one of the factors which could be causing the fountains to happen. The upside is that it takes a long time for my beer to go flat.

A good pour

This final shot is a close up to show just how nice and clear the brew is. I used some Irish Moss and made sure to strain my beer and capture as much of the particulates before primary fermentation. I personally like using a grain bag during the cooking and then straining the wart through that into one of my fermentation vessels a couple of times to get all of the flavor I can. The results is a crystal clear beautifully golden beer.

Yummy

Tags: Beer, Drink, Hefeweizen, Homebrew, Hops, Wheat beer

In a perfect world a book with supplemental material for a given game system will have all of the material needed by every GM and player. A book like that would resemble an encyclopedia in the number of volumes and would not be cheap. Which leaves us with our imperfect world and the imperfect supplements that get published, lacking in many different dimensions.

I would like to present my opinion of the sort of topics which should be included in supplements and a short justification for them.

The structure of a supplement revolves around what I call the “Three Pillars”.

The first is the Story part of the book. This is the part of the supplement which gives background information for the topic of the supplement and any available insight into the social structures or daily life as is applicable. It serves the purpose of presenting narration material to the GM and players. It presents story hooks. It is there to answer the questions of “Why” and “Wherefore” when it comes to the supplemental material. It gives justifications. Examples abound; Why do the elder gods want cults instead of going mainstream? How do they create their cults and what sort of people are attracted to them?

The second pillar is the the “How-To” part of the supplement. This section revolves around the numbers and statistics. It gives lists of spells or talents and the like. It gives specific instruction on the “How” of how it all works in the game world. It has any new rules, changes to the old rules, and any reconciliation necessary between the two. If possible, it gives examples of the sorts of common encounters that the GM should now be able to build and how to make them tougher or easier. Idealy, it has all sorts of instruction on how to build from scratch encounters for your players based on the new material. This gives all GMs an insight into the design of the rules so as to be able to give their players the best encounter suited to them.

The third pillar is the “Instant-Go” part of the supplement. It should not be confused with an included adventure or module. This is the part of the supplement where an encounter has been written and is ready to drop in any given adventure. It does not serve the purpose as an example of the material in the supplement but it is the new or changed rules prepared and executed. This gives a busy GM a place to go when they do not have the time needed to create their own encounter with the presented material.

The proportion of each of these sections in a given supplement is not a hard and fast thing. Some supplemental materal, such as a world book, is there to introduce GMs and players to a setting more than to new or changed rules. In such cases, there is going to be far more of the Story Pillar than of the other two. But by no means should the other two be dismissed or ignored. If anything in such situations there should be more attention paid by the writers and publishers to make sure that what How-To and Instant-Go writing is included should be of the highest quality and usefulness. Other hand supplemental material like a bestiary is going to require much of the page be given to the second and third pillars. Again just because it is that sort of supplement does not excuse it from not using the best story possible.

Tags: Games, Idealized, Supplements

To bring you the following:

I decided to do a bit of baking today and those cookies are the result.

These are my newly-invented dark chocolate, chocolate-and-mint-chip cookies. And they are incredibly tasty. My wife kept coming out while I was getting them onto the sheets and stealing tastes of the dough out of the bowl.

Alright, let’s go over how to make these so you too can get to baking them for family and friends.

I used a standard chocolate chip cookie recipe but added half again to the amount of ingredients for two reasons. The first is that I was adding 3/4 cup of dutch processed cocoa powder to the dough. This requires some additional fats and liquids since the powder will soak up both that are present in the current recipe. The second reason was that I was adding two different types of chips. The dark-chocolate and mint chips. There needed to be some extra room in the dough for all of that stuff.

If you plan on just using just one sort of chips or other ingredient like walnuts then go with your standard recipe and add a single additional egg to offset the cocoa powder.

1.25 cups Sugar

1 cup Brown Sugar

3 Eggs

3/4 cup Butter or Margarine

3/4 Dutch Process cocoa powder

3 cups flower

1 tsp Baking Soda

1 tsp Salt

1/2 tsp Cream of Tarter

Vanilla extract to taste

Dash of Almond extract

Cream the sugar, eggs, butter and extracts along with the cocoa powder.

In a separate bowl combine the flower, baking soda, salt, and cream of tarter.

Once the wet party is pretty smooth and consistent start adding the dry ingredients. I usually go with half of the total dry amount to start and watch to make sure that the dough doesn’t become too dry by going easy with the rest.

Add three-quarters of the bag of chocolate chips and three-quarters of the mint chips once the dough has come together. Fold the dough until there aren’t any lumps or clumps of chips and it looks like everything is evenly distributed throughout.

At this point you should have something that looks like this:

Then it is on to the cooking sheets and into the over at 375 degF for 8 to 12 minutes.

You know they are done when the top of the cookies are firm but yield to the touch and no longer have a wet look to them. Allow them to cool for five minutes on the pan before moving them to a cooling rack to finish.

And those are my amazing dark chocolate, chocolate-and-mint-chip cookies. This batch yielded 5 dozen cookies.

Tags: Baking, Break, Cookies

I have been working on getting a second adventure for the WFRP living campaign written up. So far I have spent a couple of days on it and I feel sheepish for what happened. I had one written. In fact, I had the next three outlines written up and ready to flesh out before now. But the file I had them stored in is gone. I have no idea what happened to it. I don’t know if I just left it behind at my last job or if I deleted it accidentally or what. For the life of me I could have sworn I put it in my google docs so I could jump on and start writing it at any time.

That is a good hint for those of you out there writing modules of whatever sort. It is not enough to keep a good notebook with you at all times but to also have back up of some sort. I personally like using g-docs as it is something that should never be that hard to get to as long as there is a computer present. There are other cloud-related places out there to store documents and there is also the ever popular remoting into your home computer from work that serves much the same purpose.

Back to the campaign. I am still driving at opening up the world for the players. Part of the underlying function to what I am calling “Season One” of the campaign is to get players introduced to the WFRP setting. I am going with the assumption that the players may have heard of WFRP but have limited or no experience with it. That a friend or a friend of a friend has talked them into trying it out for one session. The second module, thematically is dealing with corruption and introduces the Skaven. Both of which are major plot points in WFRP.

With this mod that I have been working on, and I think I am going to continue it with subsequent ones, is to put a note that gives the GM an idea what the players and their characters should get thematically from the mod. Right now it serves two purposes. It keeps me on task when writing the mod. Nothing like starting out with one idea and ending up in a completely different place. It throws off players expectations. And while that can make for interesting play every now and again, doing it constantly can actively drive players off.

The second is to help out those who come after me. Right now I am doing both the writing and GM duties. At some point someone else is going to be doing the GM part. Giving them some additional insight into the plot should help them run it better and hopefully give them a sense of where they can be flexible with the plotted events.

For the most part I don’t really care if the player experiences everything as I have written it exactly. I realize that I am not the world’s best writer nor am I going to be able to please everyone with some of the directions I take things. Add to that the knowledge that the best GMs are the ones who can re-write the plot on the fly to make things more interesting or centered better on their players and well, you get the idea. Mod writers can’t get too much ego invested in their work. You do that and you’re just setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment in the future. Not to mention a few fights as you come across players who have a good GM that brought the plot to the players instead of the other way around.

The last thing I want to bring up today for discussion is campaign rewards.

Campaign rewards has always been a tricky thing to do. I have friends that have participated in large living campaigns in the past where the power Munchkins have been able to ruin a lot of the fun by getting their hands on weapons and other items which break even the best written mods. Nothing like solving that Liche issue with a ring of wishing! Warhammer adds an extra layer of complication to the matter with how the characters progress through the game. Each new career needs what are termed “Trappings” as part of the requirements for the career. In a regular group this is something that is far easier dealt with since the GM can write up an adventure when it becomes time for their players to have something off of the list. A large campaign does not really have that flexibility.

For the time being, my solution is to have as part of the module a section called “Opportunities” which list the various career trappings which can be purchased as part of the completion of the module. It is my hope that I can use this for just about all of the careers save a few. Okay, maybe not so few now that I look at the book. (For instance how does one write a LC mod about giving a PC a legion of troops or a criminal organization?) But that is where I can get the motivation for players to contribute a story idea or module of their own. They need another 3 Grimoires to get into that Wizard Lord career, so write me a mod that ends with your character finding them. Sounds a bit underhanded but it gives people a chance to be involved which is the whole idea to begin with.

Tags: WFRP

There are a lot of things to do but I wanted to start the site off with a bit of homebrew gaming content.

The beer will be coming along later.

To begin this site I want to talk about a campaign. Not just any campaign. No, this is the ground work I am trying to lay for a living campaign. A Warhammer Fantasy living campaign.

For a few years now one of the groups my wife and I play in has been doing the Heroes of Rokugan living campaign. I have to admit that it has been a great way for those who own the system to get people invovled and keep up to date with their books and sundry. It has also been a good way to get involved with a comunity of players that has been one of the most fun and unbelievably mature comunities of games I have ever found.

So I was inspired to do the same for one of the systems I love most. Warhammer Fantasy.

Not unsurprisingly, I was unable to find one already in existance. This being doubly true as not too long ago, Games Workshop decided to shut down the publisher and yank the license from the current holder. Fantasy Flight games soon ended up with it, and while they seem to be doing a bit better of a job in keeping WFRP and its brother system, Dark Heresy, going I couldn’t find the sort of grass-roots active comunity that HoR has. I found that a vast majority of the sites are dedicated to the minis wargame than the actual RPG.

The first module I have written up takes place a few years before the events of The Storm of Chaos, the event which kicked off the 2005 relaunch of the rpg. It takes place during a fair being held in Altdorf, capital of the Empire. It has several events that the players can take part in. There is an eating contest, a drinking contest, tests of archery and gladiatorial pit fights. There is also a taste of chaos cults and how the empire deals with such threats. It does a lot to set the tone of the setting as well as leave open a number of avenues to take stories from.

I got to run it this past Sunday for a few people. After the initial hiccup of needing to create some more characters, we got started. And it was fun. I like the system as it gives me, as a GM, the tools necesary to allow the players shape the story of their characters. For instace, in the pit fighting, I got the chance to give the lone character a bit of a boost from the crowd since one of my other players was able to get the crowd to cheer along for them. There were several other instances of this thoughout our session and yesterday I wrote up some notes so I can go back in and make  changes to the module. Eventually, I hope to be able to release it and start up such a thing. This means having a few more modules to go along with it, but that is hudle to jump soon enough.

I did want to make one more note about living campaigns and supporting them.

Find one that has some quickstart rules. GURPS probably has one of the best sets of quickstart rules out there. D&D recently released their own for Fourth. Oddly enough, they put it out their as a pdf but I guess this would be something they want you to download. HoR also has one as well as several premade characters to start out with if you don’t have the core book. Warhammer sadly does not which left me the option of having to create one. At a very concise 2 pages, I had to rely upon the core book getting passed around to copy out all of the career information. Fantasy Flight Games recently put out a Career Compendium for WFRP but no quickstart rules. Which is really too bad as this would help those of us who like the system a bit of an easier time evangelicising it.

Tags: Living Campaign, Rokugan, Role-playing game, Roleplaying, Warhammer Fantasy

I have not been in the best of positions to be making posts lately.

Last week was a bit of an off week to begin with. I mean, I like long weekends but there is that outside chance that it will completely put off any rhythm you have built up. This is especially true when you’re not currently employed. Rhythm is very important in that it keeps your feet moving and your hands busy and your mind from wandering or getting too caught up in things it shouldn’t be. And last week my rhythm got off.

That’s okay though. I’m going to make up for it this week.

First I’m waiting on a tech interview to happen. That should be pretty easy. The job description is pretty open about the requirements and hopefully this is not going to be a quick trivia contest. For those of you recruiters out there. Take note: Trivia contests do not make for an interview. If all you can do is play “stump the techie” you’re doing interviewing wrong. Given that it is only supposed to take a half of an hour, I am hoping that I’m going to be asked about past projects and how I approach projects / problems. I could be wrong but then again that’s why I’m looking over my list of interview questions.

Speaking of all things Tech. I am getting to the point where I want to have a better phone. I have been watching my wife run around with her iPhone and I have to admit I am getting a bit jealous of the things she can do with it. There are a lot of other phones out there to check out, Blackberries, the new Palm one, and of course, Android phones. Once I get to be employed again I am going to check them out. Wonder if google docs are accessable on any of them. All the better to take notes with.