Author Archives: Tim Hall

Lawrence Simon of Amish Tech Support is claiming he’s now reached 9th level, and wonders if anyone’s created a Blogger DnD class. As far as I know, nobody has, but that doesn’t stop fools like me trying. After all, I once wrote a Spammer template for GURPS

So here it is – The Blogger Prestige class.

Unlike most adventuring classes, Bloggers spend their time in the plane of existance known as the Blogosphere, a sub-plane of Cyberspace.

Alignment

Blogger alignment does not follow the usual Law/Chaos or Good/Evil axes. Instead, blogger alignment is on a Left/Right axis.

Favoured Enemy

Every blogger must choose one favourite enemy at 1st level, and gain an existing enemy for every four subsequent levels. Bloggers gain +1 to all blog attacks against their favoured enemy. A favoured enemy might be an individual, a group, an ideology or even an inanimate object. Examples of favoured enemies of bloggers are George W Bush, the Palestinian Authority, Robert Fisk, The RIAA, Music Journalists,and Virgin Voyagers.

Hit Points

Bloggers are assumed not to be much good at hand-to-hand combat, so Bloggers only get 1d4 hit points per level.

Blogosphere Reputation

As wells as hit points, Bloggers (and other public figures) have Blogosphere Reputation Points. Bloggers get 1d8 of these per level, other public figures (politicians, sportsmen, writers, rock stars etc.) get 1d6 per level.

Experience

Bloggers don’t spend much time wandering around in dungeons, killing things, and taking their stuff. Therefore bloggers gain experience by blogging. Of course, it’s not enough to blog, somebody out there has got to read the stuff. Therefore you get one XP for each person that reads each post. So if you post ten posts a day, and get one hundred hits, that’s 10×100 = 1000 XP.

Feats

Since most Bloggers are human (do you know any half-elves?), Bloggers get the standard two feats at 1st level, and one for each additional three levels. The following feats are specific to Bloggers:

Fisk: You are a master of the rhetorical attack form known as the Fisk. This does 1d6 damage to the Blogosphere Reputation of your chosen target. You may only blog one Fisk per day.

Improved Fisk: As Fisk, except this one is named after you, and does 2d6 damage.

Google Fu: Your blog is ranked so high in Google that for any site you reference, your own site comes up higher in a Google search than the site you referenced.

Domain: Your blog has it’s own domain, to distinguish it from the riff-raff on Blogspot

Moveable Type: Your blog uses Moveable Type rather than mere Blogger. This means your archives can be guaranteed to work properly.

Instapundit: Your blog has made it onto Glenn Reynolds’ blogroll.

I once spent a lot of time making up languages for the World of Kalyr. Unlike the master of invented languages, JRR Tolkein, I didn’t pay much attention to phonoaesthetics. Caveat Lector examines the concept, and proposes Dorothea’s Law of Velar Villainy

The more villainous you are, the more velars and postvelars in your name or your language. Corollary: the more villainous you are, the more likely your name or language is to contain velars or postvelars in syllable-final and word-final positions.

Velar consonants are pronounced by pulling the back of the tongue up against the velum, the soft area at the back of the mouth. The ‘k’ in ‘kite’ is velar. So are the ‘g’ in ‘go’ and the ‘ng’ in ‘sing’

Doesn’t seem to apply to many of my Kalyr NPC villains, but it does apply to some of my player characters – Should I consider Dharak, Jorlak and Jaldaric to be bad guys?