6/02/10: After what must seem like the obligatory forever wait, I'm very happy to announce that Lisa Steele's most excellent sourcebook, Town: A City-Dweller's Look at Thirteenth to Fifteenth Century Europe, is finally finished to the very finicky satisfaction of myself, Lisa and her cohorts, and a large squad of proofreaders. If you're already familiar with Fief, then you know this territory well; the difference is that we've moved from the rural lanholding to within the walls of real medieval cities! If you have no idea what I'm talking with, time to catch up; it's good news.

Gone Dancing

1/29/10: Sandra and I are working on our thirteenth year of happy marriage now, and we're just as playful and affectionate and silly as we ever have been (if not sillier), but we'd never actually been out dancing together, not once in all that time. Until yesterday. And man o man is Sandra even more beautiful when she dances!

So, a very heartfelt thank you to our friends for pulling us out the door and into another language we can share together (and for those who follow the font releases, you just might be able to guess the identity of one of the friends involved). Thank you for making January 28th a day worth remembering, again.

20-Sided Planets

1/18/10: While fiddling around with some space-gaming stuff, I had need of a nice clean old-school icosahedral blank map, and couldn't find one that exactly suited my needs, so I hashed one together and here it is, just in case you might need one, too.

Godless Bus Font v2.0

9/28/09: New at the Free Stuff of the Moment page is the long-overdue version 2.0 of Dirty Headline, the most experienced world-wanderer from the stress-font stable at the Cumberland Fontworks.

New in bookstores nowish (to the extent that October 1st is "nowish") is one of my favorite new uses of Dirty Headline, which decorates the cover of The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, edited by the lovely-and-talented Ariane Sherine and written by a roundtable of well-regarded rational-thinker types. If I know Ariane (and happily, these days, I do a bit) her editorial hand will have guided it to be warm, friendly, funny and insightful.

Not Quite A Mountain

9/9/09: Just out of curiosity I took stock of the Cumberland master archives this afternoon. This isn't my production archives (which are vast and scary), but the archive of every finished file I've published in some way - to the Web (mostly) - or on things like the Phasic Cyaborg CD.

I've been building this archive without really paying much attention to its growth over the years. But, here goes: the archive currently contains about 160 PDF files and 250 fonts (in addition to hundreds of ReadMe files, JPEGs, MP3 files, ZIPs, z-code and other oddities ... nearly 1,500 files in all). There is some redundancy (I archive the original version of a font and its most current revision, for instance) but even with that: holy crap.

Approximately 50 of the files are less than a year old. Most of them are freebies because I have this problem - some folks say, anyway - where I give away too much and sell too little. Ah well.

And the latest one: submission guidelines for Risus, as promised last entry (see the Risus page). And less than an hour after posting it I already have a proposal from someone interested in making the archive a little bigger. Man o man.

Not quite a mountain (yet), but we're way past molehill.

Submit to Uresia! Mwahaha!

8/31/09: Mainly of interest to Uresia fans: Cumberland Games is now accepting freelance proposal submissions for new Grave of Heaven material. Click here to download the guidelines. Of interest to other kinds of fans: Risus: The Anything RPG will be opening up to proposals soon; Uresia gets the "shakedown cruise" to see how things go.

One Sheet to the Wind

8/16/09: And sometimes, strange things from my gaming table just fall into the Blue Room where they can be prodded, sniffed, and carried off into the recesses of your own collection of miscellaneous gaming files. This new GURPS character sheet (I know; I didn't see that coming, either!) is such a file. The good news is, it'll make more sense to Blue Room readers than anyone else, 'cause it's an odd duck.

Marking Up Temphis

7/27/09: For those keeping track of the Temphis Runes, I've got a new one available for members of the Uresia Mailing List, listed over at the Free Stuff of the Moment page, and is this really my fifth update this month? Yikes! Knock on wood; don't want to jinx it!

It's Easy If You Try

7/23/09: I like to keep an eye on the world around me to see how my fonts are getting used (sometimes legitimately, with a license, sometimes in a more piratey way) and every day there's more to see. Hand-drawn Cumberland fonts like Apple Butter, Yank and Arvigo can be found, respectively, on Judy Blume book-covers, the Beatles Bar in Las Vegas, and carved into blades by a swordmaker. Stressed-type fonts like Dirty Headline and Nicotine Stains and Struck Dead can be found on posters and movie-trailers and Twix and Outback Steakhouse commercials. I can also see my fonts on wine labels, Barbie-doll boxes, state lottery tickets for at least two states, and packaging for schlocky horror movies. Being a fontmaker means putting a big, gentle, anonymous fingerprint on the world, and that's … a strangely peaceful feeling.

Last night I learned of a new and interesting use of Dirty Headline. It is the "Atheist Bus" font, being plastered on buses throughout the United Kingdom. There are now followup versions popping up globally, so I can easily Google up pictures of buses labeled in German or Finnish, for example. I can also find parodies and political cartoons about it, or news stories about bus drivers refusing to drive one, and there in the background is my font. Huh.

Plus, it's nice to see Dirty Headline used in light colors; that's uncommon.

Me, I'm not exactly an atheist. I'm more of a no-harm-no-foul Semi-Agnostic Discordian Humanist, at least on most days. I believe love and empathy are the most important things, followed by a second-place stew of expression, eroticism, playfulness and the perfect hamburger (hot dogs on Friday). But the thing about the atheists is that they tend to be moral and humanistic, and that makes them close enough for me to consider them family. So: drive on, controversial buses. Proud to be there.

Whither Erthe?

7/14/09: Back in my AD&D hardcore days, we never had much use for the official character sheets. We used homebrew sheets made on typewriters, or plain notebook paper, or whatever oddball third-party sheets were laying around. Round about '85 or '86, one of those third-party sheets captured my permanent affections, and it became "my" AD&D sheet from that day forward, and has remained so. Whenever I'm paging through my old campaign archives, every sheet for every PC is on that sheet: the Erthe Gaming Systems sheet, an unlicensed AD&D product from the days when Open Gaming License was spelled "For Use With any Fantasy Role-Playing Game."

It recently occurred to me to look Erthe up, to see what scraps of their memory have survived into the modern hobby consciousness. Given that there's apparently an old-school movement growing right now, it seemed a sure bet that, at the very least, I'd find a thread or two on message-boards praising the old Erthe sheet and it's eye-friendly curves, unusually-large Experience Point box (a session-by-session record) and general audacity ... the Erthe sheet, you see, wasn't sold in tablets or booklets, but individually, printed on parchment-style paper and three-hole-punched, for the modest sum of 25 cents apiece. We sold them at the little comic shop where I worked in Havelock, North Carolina. They came to us from Diamond Distributors, and we had a small stack of them right next to the Armory paints and supplies, right near the front door.

Of course, very few gamers bought more than one ... we practically shared a parking lot with the tiny public library, and they had a photocopier where copies (strange, overly-slick copies) cost a nickel, so everyone bought a single Erthe sheet, and copied it (anyone who thinks gaming piracy was invented by the Internet is too young to be reading the Blue Room). This preserved some quarters for our regular jaunts to the convenience store at the end of the strip mall, where we'd pour change into the Gauntlet machine whenever we needed to stretch our legs for a few minutes. I don't even have my original sheets anymore; just dozens and dozens of second and third-generation photocopies, filled with characters (both mine, and those of my campaign players through the years).

My online search for Erthe Gaming Systems did, indeed, find a couple of message-board comments ... both of them by me, at RPGnet. It also netted a single reference to Loren/Lorin P. Martens of Jackson County, Oregon, who (maybe) is or was the alpha-omega of Erthe. Did they publish anything other than this one character sheet? I've always assumed so, but I've no idea. Did they even still exist in 1985, or were we just picking from leftover stock (the sheet is dated 1981)?

The thing is, it's still one of my favorite character sheet designs, for all its quirks and limitations (it's pre-Unearthed Arcana, so we had to pencil in our own "Comeliness" box in the gap to the right of the Dexterity stats, and it has no space for encumbrance at all). To amuse myself, I've been digitally reconstructing it, creating a "perfect" vector version which preserves, as closely as I can manage, every oddity of line-spacing, every curious case of kerning, and every friendly curve. I've got the front mostly done; I'm working on the back right now.

Which is, really, just the latest iteration of a lifetime of re-pirating that same 25 cent purchases I made years ago (I actually bought four, but since I worked for store credit, it wasn't even really a purchase). These days I can call it "preservation," and really mean it. But I'd love to learn more about them (or him, or her), find out what happened, if there were any more products, if the sheet did well for the time, or just (really, especially) if anyone else remembers their design as fondly as I do. You out there, Erthe? I remember you. Drop me a line, anyone, who knows anything.

And no, this is not another Battle Star Games. I did that gag already.