About Fred
Fred Hicks does layout and art direction for role-playing games. He also publishes and plays them. He likes his television and he likes his cooking. He loves his wife and daughter. Life is good.
Tag Archives: gaming
Bandwidth
So, common gaming question: if we had superheroes in the actual world, what government agency would regulate them? If you’re from the United States like me, your first answer is probably The Department of Homeland Security. But that’s too pat and too boring of an answer for me. So I’m looking to head in another [...]
PDF, Print, Pricing
Today I want to talk about PDF pricing, after seeing my friend Matt react poorly to the pricing of the recently released Dr. Who RPG PDF. (Don’t take this post as an attempt to jump on Cubicle 7′s case. As I’ve said before, I like the guys at Cubicle 7, and there are things I [...]
Brutal
I just finished reading Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold, a sort-of sequel to his The First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and The Last Argument of Kings), in that it’s set in the same world. I like grim fantasy (at least in some varieties). The horrible things that happen to characters [...]
Obligation.PDF
There are a lot of good things I could say (and have said) about Diaspora. I liked it enough that I offered to run the publication of it for VSCA, the current publisher, if they wanted to transition off of Lulu (which at least as of a couple weeks ago looks like it might have [...]
Starblazer
So back in late October, I jumped in on a thread on RPG.net comparing Starblazer Adventures and Diaspora. I got more than a little colorful with my praise of Diaspora, but before I got there I felt I had to give some background as to why I found myself personally favoring Diaspora over Starblazer Adventures. [...]
Discount
This isn’t a full-blooded real blog post. It’s a plug. Because Diaspora is back, and with a discount available until the end of the year. I’ll just quote the publisher: Not strictly blogworthy, but it links to prior posts a little. Anyway, you can again get Diaspora at Lulu now. Problem resolved and Lulu has [...]
Diaspora:
This is a continuation of yesterday’s post about Shock:, which was itself a continuation of the one about Vernor Vinge’s writing. So, Diaspora. (First off, let me note that Diaspora is normally available only through Lulu.com, but Lulu screwed the pooch recently and the title isn’t currently listed. As soon as it’s back, you want [...]
Shock:
This is a sort-of follow-up to my earlier Vinge post. I’m the sort of guy who wants to love Shock:, the role-playing game of social science fiction by Joshua A. C. Newman. It has a simple but potent engine for generating Big Ideas for science fiction — “situation” of a sort. It should get me [...]
Vinge
I started reading Cheri Priest’s Boneshaker recently. About 8 or so chapters in, I had to admit it has a well detailed steampunk world, nicely grimy, and focused on an interesting tale of parents and children. But I just wasn’t gripped by it, so for the moment it’s been put aside on my “promising, but [...]
Indirect