Plumbing the depths of G+

With the pending end of Google+ (G+), I thought I'd spend a day grabbing all the various RPG things I'd tossed into a private circle. Which for those down the road: when G+ started, it had Circles which were custom mini friends lists, that also had -IIRC- some weirdly arbitrarily small number allowed in each. I think the idea was to offset the mega friends lists people have on FB. Anyways a tip I'd been given, because it was hard to "save something for later", was to create a private circle and share it there. Then you just go and pull up the private circle to find them. Google did away with limit on circle sizes, and then circles pretty much altogether. But it was still a decent way to squirrel away others post to -maybe- look at later.

That being said, its been an interesting trip. Some of the blogs that were linked to the posts are still around, some haven't updated in years. A few only posted for a brief time, and some -like this one- have starts and stops. Sadly, some of the posts were from people on G+ and they've taken down all of their work because the hassle of moving it wasn't worth it.

Things I'll miss from G+:

• The sense of actual community each of the Communities had. You had people like me rubbing virtual elbows with authors, artists, and who ever. Popular peeps and niche peeps too. You never knew who you'd bump into in some communities. The Star Wars D6 RPG Community even had some of the guys who wrote the original D6 RPG as active members.
• The level of civility that existed in those communities, which in some cases wasn't much. That said, the worst I ever saw on G+, was higher then most groups on FB. 
• Being able to find things! Having used Myspace, FB, and G+, G+ was hands down the best to use. You could actually sort by date, and its wasn't messed with by an algorithm. Finding your comments where a little touchy, but doable. Try that one on FB.
• The integration between G+, Drive, and Gmail. So useful.
• Tripping over fun little snippets of things. Like funny memes, gaming advice, odd stories people would share. 

Things I won't miss:

• Blogs spamming multiple communities. You know who you were!
• Umm... The fact that its closing???

Anyways, the point of this post isn't just a bit of rumination, its also a quick "Hey, heres somethings you might have never found other wise." kinda of thing. So keep scrolling for links.

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The Signe of the Frothing Mug - "Making it at Home", 4 Aug 2014; A post talking about how medieval towns worked, and some idea for lodgings within that knowledge.

Mythlands of Erce - "Dragonlance was a Unique Sandbox", 3 Aug 2017; Its Dragonlance and a sandbox. Why wouldn't you love this? ;P I kid, but it looks at one of the other products in DL. Most people -as far as I've noticed- only seem to know about the DL1-16. Which is the prototype for all adventure paths that came later.

High Level Games - "Eight Unusual Ways to Enter Ravenloft", 13 June 2017; When fog becomes too dull to use. I had at one point thought of using Ravenloft as a good segue within a campaign between major arcs of things. It was also going to be a good way to move the characters huge distances for now reason.

Elfmaids and Octipis - "d100 Wasteland Compound Structures", 27 Sep 2016; I'm a sucker for random tables and such. And this whole post was right up my alley.

Another post from above - "Self Aware Dungeon Generation", 19 November 2015; More 13th Age, but it does go in the Interesting Ideas mental folder.

Notes of the Wandering Alchemist - "Reskinning: Lizardfolk from Around the World", April 12, 2016; This article influenced me to include lizardmen in my Kowloon City (link), with an idea of making them cave lizards. Blind albinos are always fun when they show up in fiction.

Fantastic Maps - Their tutorials and how tos are awesome. Like drop what your doing, head over there and read some of these. I'll wait...

Done? Great right?! Continuing on...

Red Blob Games - In their own words: "I make interactive visual explanations of math and algorithms, using motivating examples from computer games." The Polygon map generator, a later version, and the article their based on "Polygonal Map Generation for Games", are worth a look if you enjoy playing with mapping software.

Burn After Running - "Tenra Bansho Zero One-Shots", 1 May 2018; Tenra Bansho Zero is a JRPG, that is built for one shots, but there is some wiggle room for long adventures, but not for long running characters. This is a great resource for getting it started. Its a system that drips anime crazy, but you need to read the rules first. Or just use the sourcebook (you get a rulebook and a sourcebook in a set) and your own favorite rules and have fun. 

Another for TBZ is: Deeper in the Game - "GMing Tenra Bansho Zero", 16 Jan 2014; Its goes into more thoughts on running TBZ. They also have several other articles of related material.

Inkarnate showed up multiple times in my stream, so if you haven't poked at it, do give it a whirl. It'll take some practice (or paying for the Pro version) to knock out some nice maps.

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Well, I figure I've gone on for a bit now. While there was quite a bit more "saved" in my stream, mostly odd die drop tables, charts and tables, and various humorous images, most of it wasn't something share worthy.

Till next time.

*Miniupdate from like ten minutes later: I need to go through my Starred blog post on Inoreader too. Its not going anywhere, but there are 150+ of them...