Transitory States
Edward:
David S Leyman:
Hisham:
Luke:
James Kight:
king:
Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.
Irfan's Cik Ma and Uncle Farid got married on the 11th at Pondok Lubuk Tapah; and thus Uncle Farid was upgraded to Irfan's second Ayah Cik.
Since I had an exam the previous day, I arrived just in time for the festivities. Here are some photos from the wedding festivities.
Tsing visited with a gift: The Old Repubic Encyclopaedia, with material from the Star Wars MMO game set 3600 years before the movies and more than 300 years after the Knights of the Old Republic / Dark Lords of the Sith comic series. It's a great treasure trove of information not just for the game, which I do not play. It also has a ton of stuff I can mine for Star Wars RPG sessions set in the present.
New ships! Not much but PCs might come across some of these vessels in deep storage for thousands of years, just ready to be explored or to be used as their vehicles. Just make sure there are unknown dangers aboard after being dormant for millennia.
Strangely enough, my current desktop wallpaper is of an XS light freighter berthed in a landing bay.
Tsing, Michelle and their kids visited us for dinner last night. Having us as one of their regular stops during their vacation never fails to warm my heart. The last time they were back there were two children in two. This time there's three! Unfortunately I did not take a photo of baby Ezra because he was busy playing the keyboard, then sleeping.
Previously, the Agents completed a week-long mission at Inish Medical, a multinational medical corporation that was using the haemocanis serum derived from blood of certain East European dog breeds to give vampiric abilities to their subjects. Inish appeared to have larger, more diabolical plans for the serum application. It was up to them to discover what.
The Agents began a new mission: to gather intel on Romania. Inish took interest in criminal underworld in Bucharest, who helped them acquire special breeds of dogs in Romania before the Heimdall debacle.
They also had a secondary mission: to extract their ally Vienna "Vin" Cesarescu from Inish's task force - the R-Team - that had a job to do in Romania. Vin was a Romani woman who displayed vampiric symptoms and abilities even before Inish abducted her and forced her to work for them. R-Team would be arriving in Bucharest on Saturday.
Jacob Novazembla, freshly bitten by Vin several days ago during the Inish mission, had arrived a day earlier at the sea port of Constanța on a solo assignment to King Valentin a.k.a The Devil's Husband, a leader of a Romanian criminal organisation. (Jacob's player was absent, so he was relegated to the role of an NPC.) King Valentin's distrust of Jacob was alleviated when he sniffed his odour. When Jacob refused his insistence, King Valentin's men grabbed him and pulled down his pants for a visual confirmation. Valentin dropped his own pants as well to show what they both had in common.
Vampiric bite mark at the nether regions, caused by Vin. "The smell is unmistakable," Valentin remarked.
Then, still pantless, he embraced Jacob with glee and growled happily, "WE ARE BROTHERS!"
Valentin agreed to help the Agents.
Jacob wished his pants were back on.
I once posted about BU-77 the ARC Trooper, my Star Wars D6 RPG character from the Team: Sabredart campaign, complete with D6 stats.
Recently, I found a line art of BU-77 that I drew after became a fugitive from the Republic and wore a new costume he found aboard the Mandalorian Dungeon Ship Lost Hope. So I imported the drawing to GIMP and painted it up a bit.
One more month before the big T-W-O! Whee!
* Mouse over the pictures for captions
Jegergryte did not wish to disturb me after I created artwork for his Edge of the Empire group, so he requested an artwork on SWAG. After a month or so without being picked up - and I had some free time to spare - I yoinked it
The drawing of the modified Kuat Drive Yards EF-76 Nebulon-B escort frigate would be used for the cover of his Edge of the Empire homebrewed supplement entitled Cartol's Emporium.
To make the Emporium seem busy with business, I also included other ships in the artwork. Ships from campaigns I ran or played in! Clockwise from lower left:
The supplement will be released December 2013. Watch this space for further announcements.
Kuat Drive Yards HAV/w A6 Juggernaut drivers seem to have an enjoyable and rewarding job.
Post script: Well, yes, obviously I'd been visiting some Toys R Us somewhere in the city.
Some months back, I drew some player characters for Jegergryte's Edge of the Empire RPG player characters. I pushed my digital painting abilities, exercising my skills so they would be closer to what they should be if I am to land better freelance art jobs.
Jace Maverick is a swashbuckler with a vibrorapier and a charming smile. I thought I'd give him a costume design resembling the Naboo Security Force's.
Thracken "The Kraken" Artox is a grimy Rodian gadgeteer with a cyborg eye and a MerrSonn Type-434 "DeathHammer" heavy blaster pistol which obviously has been through a lot.
Doc Ariela Mengalic a.k.a. Ghia Necil Zilar is a Colonist / Doctor. She has a Tenloss DXR-6 disruptor rifle, a medpac on her hip and a bandolier of ready-to-use stimpacks.
Walian "Blue" Mothma is a human Force sensitive assassin who wields a BlasTech A280 blaster rifle, with a underslung grenade launcher.
Che Rohn is a Cathar thief who wields a Merr-Sonn Quick6 blaster pistol with a grappling hook launcher attachment and a wrist-mounted dart shooter.
SY-RS2003.12 is a unique pilot smuggler droid with a Thunderer T-6 blaster pistol.
These are awesome player character concepts. Wish I was in this campaign with these characters.
For the first time ever, Irfan gets an award for an academic achievement in school. I not just proud of him, but grateful to all my friends in meatspace and cyberspace who gave Ain and I suggestions and solutions to how to get Irfan interested in reading and to learn, even as I suspected of him having a mild learning disability. Some of them even sent books for him to read.
Also, when Irfan played more tabletop games this year, he gets better at his studies. Coincidence? I think not!
Eclipse Phase: Clouds of a Morning Star continued from the previous session.
Location: Aphrodite Prime, about 50 km above Venus' surface.
Active Gamera Security (GamSec) Personnel: DANAI and Wandering Ina (and Wandering Ina-α) the infomorphs, William Cable Jr. - paranoid terrorist in a neotenic pod morph and Hokusai Tarnungshaut - neo-octopus artist in a slitheroid morph
Inactive Personnel: Badal Jones - Lunar Lagrange Alliance (LLA) envoy and Boris Ivanov Rasputin the Second - a neo-hominid lawyer in the shaper morph.
Mission: To provide security and investigative services to Badal's superior the LLA's ambassador during an art show at the Cumulus Hotel, where reclusive posthuman artist Marquis d’Homem-Christos from the asteroid 163693 Atira would be showcasing alien sculptures he collected from the extraterrestrial Factors. LLA had intercepted a vague communique about a terrorist attack during the event and would like the attack thwarted. Their secondary mission was to help Gretchen Ambelina of Pax Familae by covertly disrupting the Marquis' event which will deal a blow to the terraforming efforts of Venus, something the Solid Ground Initiaive (SGI) was a proponent of, and what Venusian terrorist groups like the Free Fall Network (FFN) were against.
Crossposted on Obsidian Portal.
DANAI found herself frolicking in a green field beneath a bright blue sky and under a nourishing yellow sun. Baffled by current events, she looked down and discovered that she was in a body of a living fox, red bushy tail and all. What had happened before? She was uncertain.
Suddenly a window opened in the sky. A man looked at her from behind the window. Just when she wondered why there was a window in the sky, another one slid open seemingly across from the first window. Another man was there looking at her.
He then looked at the first man and asked, What does the fox say?
Then DANAI woke up from her strange dream.
I missed the last two Night's Black Agents RPG sessions.
Since inflitrating the freighter Heimdall in the Irish Sea, Nikolai Kaidanovsky, Sami Harkonen, Shiina "Misha" Mikado, Zlatan Kljulic and Abraham von Helsing the Russian borzoi hound (all wearing keffiyehs - even Abe) escaped and sank the ship killing the vampire hounds in the cargo compartment. They abducted the surviving technician Jones who told them everything he knew about the Emartech Pharmaceuticals' and Inish Medical Group's plans to use the haemocanis parasite-infected blood from Eastern Europe dogs for nefarious purposes. Before returning to London, Jones had to take a walk with Zlatan because he knew too much and could identify the agents.
It was time to stake out Inish. They rendezvous with Jacob Novazembla - who had returned from Italy - at their headquarters, while Misha had to forego the mission to visit her daughter. Before heading to Brentford in Ealing, Sami put Abe in the care of his dog handler contact out in the country.
The entire town of Brentford was under the thumb of Inish Medical. The Inish headquarters complex was a large building overlooking a golf course. A lot of the localtown services were contracted to Inish, such as security, medical and waste disposal. Information out of the town was monitored and filtered by Inish.
The founder of Inish Medical, Donal Inish, had died in a helicopter crash many years ago, leaving a wife. Among the confirmed vampires at Inish were Farris Barrar the Vice President of Safety who was the one that Misha saw tear the small-time mob boss Gary Camon into pieces. They also suspected one Mister Chow of being a vampire as well.
Jacob's contact at Blackberry Benny Snowden informed him that Inish was installing hardware and software in their servers that would allow encrypted communications for important employees via brand new Blackberry 10s. Jacob would infiltrate the heart of Inish Medical as "Rory Winston" one of the Blackberry employees tasked with installing and configuring the new gear. His real mission is to install a back door to their secured servers which the agents would be able to access.
Jacob, as Rory, got in easily enough. He was chaperoned by Anise, a beautiful Inish employee. While Jacob charmed the IT team over the course of five days, Nikolai, Sami and Zlatan stayed in B&Bs in town monitoring the situation. The IT team loved Jacob. They even went on a pub crawl that led to a brawl with some football hooligans, which the IT team later said they'd enjoyed! Jacob also learnt that Jessica Ellis, Zlatan's failed date (to put it lightly) and former Emartech employee from the Cardiff mission, was an informal security consultant there as well.
It was during the fifth day that Jacob, escorted by Anise, bumped into Vienna "Vin" Cesarescu, the vampire who was once their prisoner. She had been a member of the Camon Gang who was abducted by Inish Medical after the murder of Gary Camon and destruction of the group. Vin looked pale and anaemic.
In the deserted hallway, Vin hypnotised Anise, clouding her mind while she pleaded Jacob for help. She would meet him in the Rehabilitation Clinic level of the headquarters the next morning.
The Rehab Clinic took an entire ground floor of the Inish headquarters. It faced the golf course, although there was a security moat that prevented golfers from entering the facility grounds. Sami and Zlatan took up a reconnaissance position from within the bushes in the golf course. Encrypted comms allowed them radio contact with each other. Once in a while, golf balls would zip near their heads dangerously.
All Hallow's Eve, an event that was eagerly awaited in the Renstrom household - at least by one little girl in particular. And this year, Papa said we could get a pumpkin and carve it (after some begging on the part of the particular little girl).
Doug ran a great Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG session just in time for Halloween! Continuing the previous session Feet of Flesh, Feet of Steel!
After discovering that the blue box that the Doctor and Cindy brought them into was bigger on the inside, Max Fox the amnesiac robot engineer from the year 3027 and Doctor Olujimi the Kenyan country doctor from 1975 were ready to leave the planet Klaris.
At the control room, the Doctor - looking bewildered - asked if they smelled something cooking. Max and Olujimi did. They followed the Doctor who ran through a doorway that brought them even deeper into the TARDIS. Ultimately, they halted in a room full of pipes. There was a heavily-built man, blonde and barrel-chested with thick arms wearing a grimy apron and a chef's hat. He was frying a kipper while singing The Turkish Song of the Dead. There was no stove, just glowing hot surfaces in the room. He had an array of condiments and a bottle of olive oil on a makeshift shelf on the wall, which might not have been designed to be a shelf. Olujimi asked, "Why do you have Popeye in your blue box, Doctor?"
He introduced himself as Sebastian Cuddy a sailor from Alaska who the Doctor picked up at a previous stop. He offered them some kipper, but the Doctor was aghast at his usage of the Transducer Modifier as a hot plate. After being chided by the Doctor, Sebastian cheerfully stowed away his cooking gear. Even the kipper was stuffed into his trousers pocket.
Sebastian appeared to believe that they were aboard a seagoing vessel, talking as if the TARDIS had a sail, an engine room and a bilge.
Without warning the lights went out. Even the Doctor was surprised. In the dark there emerged a ghostly vision of five faces: An African man wearing a top hat, a lady, a little girl who suddenly threw a spectral brick at Max scaring him, a shivering man with pointy ears and a woman with her eyes looking down. Suddenly the woman looked up at them and screamed a spine-tingling shriek.
As abruptly as it appeared, the vision disappeared.
The Doctor called everyone to follow him as he returned to the control room. He pulled on levers and pressed on buttons. Everything rocked and swayed violently. Cindy, Sebastian, Max and Olujimi struggled to stay on their feet.
The rocking ceased and the Doctor rushed to the entrance and opened the door. Cindy told the others, "You'll get used to this."
To Max and Olujimi's wonder, the TARDIS was now standing in a small clearing forest field surrounded by maple, oak and birch trees on what is recognisably the planet Earth. The Doctor led them all through the woods where he claimed there should be a town. Soon, horse-drawn carts were trundling past them and chimney smoke rose into the blue sky not far away.
Only two months until the big second birthday for the boy! 
* Mouse over the pictures for captions
Eclipse Phase: Clouds of a Morning Star continued from the previous session at Wira Games and Hobbies.
Location: Aphrodite Prime, about 50 km above Venus' surface.
Active Gamera Security (GamSec) Personnel: DANAI and Wandering Ina (and Wandering Ina-α) the infomorphs, Boris Ivanov Rasputin the Second - a neo-hominid lawyer in the shaper morph, William Cable Jr. - paranoid terrorist in a neotenic pod morph and Hokusai Tarnungshaut - neo-octopus artist in a slitheroid morph.
Inactive Personnel: Badal Jones - Lunar Lagrange Alliance (LLA) envoy.
Mission: To provide security and investigative services to Badal's superior the LLA's ambassador during an art show at the Cumulus Hotel, where reclusive posthuman artist Marquis d’Homem-Christos would be showcasing alien sculptures he collected from the extraterrestrial Factors. LLA had intercepted a vague communique about a terrorist attack during the event and would like the attack thwarted. Their secondary mission was to help Gretchen Ambelina of Pax Familae by covertly disrupting the Marquis' event which will deal a blow to the terraforming efforts of Venus, something the Solid Ground Initiaive (SGI) was a proponent of, and what Venusian terrorist groups like the Free Fall Network (FFN) were against.
Crossposted on Obsidian Portal.
Badal Jones stayed close to Karamojo Bell, his fellow Lunar ally and self-fashioned big game hunter from the Mare Imbrium Credit Union, whose biomorph killed during the battle with the flexbot combiner at the Ikea-Tata Constructions site at the Aviary. Unfortunately for Badal, Bell in his new morph has a new fun hobby: to get infected with tailored extinct diseases, enjoy the suffering and then purge the disease before the end. If he died from the disease, he would just happily resleeve in a new morph and enjoy a new disease all over again.
Elsewhere, Cable was just finishing up in a healing vat in a hospital, the medichines in his body expediting the treatment. Hokusai arrived to visit with some flowers. Unsure what to do with the flowers, he dumped the entire bouquet over the top of Cable's vat. Boris arrived shortly just in time to see flower petals drift down toward Cable's face.
Then Cable munched on them.
Back at the airship in his sheldon morph, Ina was preparing to unleash his DDOS attack onto the whole aerostat city's security systems. When Aphrodite Prime's systems would be under attack, it was hoped that the FFN's embedded agent would be flushed out. Meanwhile, out in the skies over Aphrodite Prime, a regatta was underway. Sleek, lighter-than-air racing dirigibles were circling the city's airspace.
Suddenly, the GamSec mesh network alerted them that the Marquis d'Homem Christos was now farcasting into his body all the way from his asteroid 163693 Atira. Isolated within the Marquis' resleeving computer in Total Rekall Resleeving Inc., DANAI and Ina-α were ready for action.
Earlier today, there was an Eclipse Phase game at Wira Games and Hobbies in Subang Jaya. Irfan came along for the ride. At first his plan was to buy his own set of polyhedral dice. His Own Stuff that he'll be able to use with games like Swords and Wizardry whose quickstart he'd printed out. Then he planned on reading or watching us play. However, Chang, the owner of Wira Games had a better idea.
He and his staff taught Irfan to paint Warhammer Fantasy miniatures, starting with a High Elf mini.
The Star Wars RPG adventure continues from the previous session with Act 2 of The Long Arm of the Hutt free downloadable adventure (PDF download, low res version, 2.4MB). The original title of this chapter is Geonosian Negotiations.
On the run from Teemo the Hutt, the smuggler Hondo Pash found himself with new Twi'lek allies on Ryloth after helping to overthrow a bullying mining boss at the town of New Meen. The Twi'leks of Nabat, including the commander Nyn Kablo and the fighter Numa, helped Hondo to repair the YT-1300 light freighter that he had liberated from the Trandoshan slaver Trex. The ship had now been renamed Lava Jaeger.
The return trip from New Meen to Nabat was uneventful. The Twi'lek miner B'ura B'an had decided to stay behind at New Meen to help with the clean up. Upon their arrival, they immediately reported to Nyn Kablo, who informed them that a crashed Dunelizard fighter was found about 30 klicks south of Nabat. It might have been the one that attacked the Lava Jaeger (then the Krayt Fang) during their Ryloth approach. No pilot was found, but they discovered a partial holo recording of Teemo the Hutt ordering a Kubaz named Thwheek to kill a Geonosian droid engineer. The recording of Teemo said, "The Geonosians must never know what Sivor discovered. Archduke Poggle the Irredeemable (no relation to Archduke Poggle the Lesser) of the Kaliklak Hive must never know we killed Sivor if we are to purchase battle droids from him. Bring Sivor to Trex. He'll dispose of the body. Meanwhile, track down this Hondo Pash and kill him."
Why had Teemo ordered the Archduke's droid engineer killed? What had Sivor found out? Numa said, "We must not let Teemo have battle droids. We have to stop it."
Numa geared up with an armoured jacket and grabbed an EE-3 blaster rifle that she had left with Kablo for safekeeping. As they headed for the Lava Jaeger, they saw someone slink out of the docking bay's front door. It was a Kubaz. Thwheek?
The Kubaz unholstered his blaster pistol. Numa fired a burst to distract him. It worked as Hondo's subsequent shot hit the Kubaz. Although wounded, he still stood. The Kubaz's blaster scored a blow. Hondo was hurt (minus 9 wounds to 3 Wound Threshold.) Numa managed to shoot his pistol out of his hands (Triumph in an attack roll.) He attempted to jump the weapon but failed to grab the tumbling blaster. Hondo had his DL-17 pistol trained on the Kubaz and he pulled the trigger. A flash heralded a billow of smoke from the Kubaz's chest.
Kablo and other armed Twi'lek came running to see what the commotion was all about. Hondo found two grenades on the Kubaz. Before their flight to Geonosis, both Numa and Hondo performed a visual inspection but did found nothing out of the ordinary on or aboard the black-and-yellow Lava Jaeger.
