WarFlail's Archives - April 2001

Go to WarFlail's Archives - May 2001

A new addition to Bill Gant's HârnMaster House Rules is an adaptation of the HârnMaster (1st edition) price list. Actually, it isn't new at all - you will find this price list in my HMC House Rules v3.2 document. But last year, Swords & Shields map master Patrick Nilsson turned the price list into a truly professional-looking article, featuring a CGI-like graphical layout and even artwork by the eminent Eric Hotz!

Price List  (310Kb)

The above article can also be found at the Swords & Shields site.

ANZAC Day ...want to know more?

At long last, our Fearless Leader, Author of Hârn and overall Kèléstial Genius, Mr N. Robin Crossby, has finally rebuilt his website! He's even improved it! It is now up for all Hârn fans to once again pay homage to:

• Crossby Personal Website  <http://www.crossby.ca>

One extremely interesting piece of news on this site has been reproduced below (with Robin's kind permission):

Important News About HârnMaster
2001 April 24th

Good News! CGI and I have decided to convert HârnMaster Gold (both PE and GME) into expansion modules for HM Core. This should help eliminate market confusion, and achieve the best possible gaming system for the maximum number of HârnMaster afficionados.

It will also allow me more time to work on new environment modules like City of the Sea Kings and Trierzon. HârnMaster Gold Player Edition will, therefore, be withdrawn from sale as soon as existing stocks are exhausted. There are only 20 left. The same goes for version 1.1 of the Hârnic Tarot.

Converting HMg (PE and GME) to expansion rules will take some time, and quite a bit of work. We would appreciate any suggestions or advice which you might be kind enough to offer.

Please send any comments, suggestions, or complaints to:

hm@crossby.ca

So, it appears that HMG Players Edition is going to be out of print soon - definitely a collector's edition! If you don't have a copy already and you reckon you're a serious Hârn gamer, you might wish to consider grabbing one of the last twenty copies! Its value can only go up... :-)

It looks like my domain host, Doteasy, has rectified their network problem so WarFlail's Armoury is back in action! It must have been a fairly serious problem - it took them almost 24 hours to fix it.

Another addition to HÂRN LINK is this promising site by Jim Lassiter the Red Bearded Dwarf:

• CASTLEWALLS Medieval Fantasy Floorplans  <http://castlewalls.bizland.com/>

The site itself appears to be a work-in-progress, but it is coming along very nicely. Some excellent floorplans to be found there!

First, the good news: I had ADSL installed this morning through Telstra BigPond! It's amazing just how much difference in speed there is over a pokey 56k dialup connection.

Note that as I'm now subscribed through a different ISP, I will be cancelling my subscription with iiNet. This means that any email sent to my iinet.net.au or wantree.com.au addresses will become undeliverable very soon, and the following URLs will cease to exist after the end of this month:

http://users.wantree.com.au/~gant/
http://members.iinet.net.au/~gant/

If you have linked to either of the above addresses, please ensure that you change them asap to http://www.warflail.com otherwise you will lose the link!

Now, the bad news. My domain host, Doteasy, has experienced a network connectivity problem since this morning. So, you will have tremendous difficulty reaching this site and http://www.harnlink.com. Sorry for the inconvenience, but there's not much I can do about it. :-(

It's Don Quixote's birthday today (no, not that one!). Happy birthday, mate.

Easter Monday

House Rules Update: Okay, something I had been meaning to post on the House Rules page for ages is the following article, which describes a few new weapons for HârnMaster:

Exotic Weapons of Hârn  (54Kb)

All the (poorly drawn) illustrations in the article were drawn by me, by the way! :-) One important note about the statistics in the article is that they were written for HM1, not HMC or HMG (those editions didn't even exist at the time), so you may need to adjust them a little to suit your campaigns.

Easter Sunday ...want to know more?

House Rules Update: I've posted a small article listing common objects against which characters can use Brute Force & Ignorance (BF&I).

BF&I - Common Objects  (12Kb)

Topic change. While conducting my usual trawl of the Web, I discovered the following HârnMaster fan site, which has of course been added to HÂRN LINK:

• Klaus Æ. Mogensen's Role Playing Games  <http://hjem.get2net.dk/Klaudius/RPG1.htm>

Klaus has some intriguing house rules. The one I find most interesting is how he calculates the Armour Protective Values of layered armour. If you've thought that HârnMaster's armour values are too high, you may want to give this method a try.

Good Friday ...want to know more?

Friday the 13th ...want to know more?

Today is Scully's and my 5th wedding anniversary! Oh, how the time flies...

Today is also Nicole and Tony's wedding day!

Congratulations, guys, it was long overdue (IMO) but the wait was worth it.

I am very, very pleased to announce a new addition to my House Rules page. The incredibly talented Richard Luschek (aka Catfish) has completed the cover art for GunMaster Gold. Take a look at the masterpiece, Gârgún with Gun, here.

I've been notified by Hrafn that this page is a little difficult to read in Opera 5.10 - apparently, the text appears black on a black background! For all you Opera users out there, if you can read this, I am sorry for the inconvenience - I'll try and sort this problem out (assuming a newer version of Opera doesn't solve it for me).

Woohoo! Auran has acknowledged my contribution on their Project Hârn site by awarding me with a shiny Official Contributor badge! Check it out on my House Rules page. :-)

House Rules Update: Less than a week has passed and my HârnMaster Gold Combat House Rules have been updated yet again - it is now up to version 1.5 and is 10 pages long. It just gets bigger and (I hope!) better...

HMG House Rules - Combat  (72Kb)

As usual, this version supersedes all previous iterations of the HMG Combat House Rules. Enjoy!

The first Mars mission of the millennium was launched today, to search for evidence of water, map chemicals and minerals, and analyse the radiation levels on the Red Planet. The Mars Odyssey is expected to reach Mars on 24th October this year. Will this be the start of a new era of space exploration, or an abysmal failure like the last couple of disasters in 1999? Time will tell...

Whether the mission is successful or not, though, I am glad that efforts are being made to expand outwards into space. The International Space Station, a Mars Odyssey - we are living in exciting times! :-) 

More information on the Mars Odyssey can be found at:

• CNN.com  <http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/04/07/mars.odyssey/index.html?s=10>
• 2001 Mars Odyssey Home Page  <http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/>

Remember that  = rand (200,99) "riddle" in Microsoft Word? Move over, Don Quixote, we have Ned Kelly stepping up to the plate:

Ok here goes....my try

we know that the above formula creates the statement "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" on MS Word. I do believe this is a test feature left over from the programmers, if you go look in your font directory, you will find FONTS repeat the same statement. So that means that it is addressing a reference within Windows itself, which would make more sense than MS Word having the same statement coded into it.

First the RAND would be the address within Windows for "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", as I can find no other reference to it. As for the break down of the formula, the first number is the number of paragraphs that are repeated, the second number is how may times the statement is repeated within the sentence, e.g. try = rand (10,3)

Nice rebuttal, Ned! Do we have any other takers?

House Rules Update: I converted the articles on my House Rules page into table format, so that the page is easier to read. The downside to this is that the page is now twice as large as it used to be! If you would prefer that I create a separate page for each section of the house rules (to keep the page sizes down), then please let me know - I value your input. :-)

House Rules Update: My HârnMaster Gold Combat House Rules have been updated again - it is now up to version 1.4 and is 8 pages long. Take a look at it here:

HMG House Rules - Combat  (53Kb)

This version supersedes all previous iterations of the HMG Combat House Rules. I hope you find it useful! :-)

You may recall on 6 March I asked whether anyone could figure out the = rand (200,99) "riddle" in Microsoft Word. Well, Don Quixote has given me the most plausible reason behind this:

Just thought that I would put you out of your misery with the above formula. Firstly, rand means select a random number, or letter, with every part of the domain having the same chance of being selected. I would guess that in this case, some smart person has typed into the Word code that if a letter is selected at random, to give the generic sentence with every letter in it. The second part is even easier. The 200 (or the number before the comma) applies to the number of lines of text to be typed. The 99 (or the number after the comma) applies to the number of times the random sample should be typed onto the line.

He's a smart cookie, that Don. When he's not tilting at windmills, anyway. :-) Thanks for the answer, mate!

At long last, it's out! I just received my advance, pre-release copy of HÂRNMASTER BESTIARY from Columbia Games! I can hardly believe it has finally arrived, after all this time of waiting. The module looks excellent, printed on the usual high quality card stock. The mostly full-colour artwork - every creature is illustrated - is distinctly medieval in flavour and of the superior Hotz quality. I *love* the picture of the Áklash and Vlásta fight! :-) Absolutely brilliant.

Now, if only CGI can hurry up and get HârnMaster Military out, my life would be complete...

April Fool's Day

In 16th century France, the start of the new year was observed on 1st April. It was celebrated in much the same way as New Year is today with parties and dancing into the late hours of the night. But in 1562, Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar for the Christian world, and the new year fell on 1st January. There were some people, however, who hadn't heard or didn't believe the change in the date, so they continued to celebrate New Year's Day on 1st April. Others played tricks on them and called them "April fools". They sent them on a "fool's errand" or tried to make them believe that something false was true. In France today, 1st April is called Poisson d'Avril. French children fool their friends by taping a paper fish to their friends' backs. When the "young fool" discovers this trick, the prankster yells Poisson d’Avril! (April Fish!)  -- Ripped from some random website.

Here in Australia, it is common practice to play a minor prank on people on April Fool's Day. The cleverer, the better. The idea is for everyone to have a good laugh at the joke being played. ;-)

Go to WarFlail's Archives - March 2001

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