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Dispatches:
News from Atlas Games
Special Ops Quarterly Drawing
Atlas Games is pleased to announce that Craig Carf of Hobart, Indiana is the winner of this quarter's Special Ops prize drawing. Craig will get to choose a prize from among the rare and and one-of-a-kind Atlas Games items reserved for the Special Ops drawing.
Special Ops is Atlas Games' corps of loyal fans who organize and run demos and tournaments at retail stores and conventions across the country and around the world. At the end of each quarter, Special Ops demo team members who have run a game in the last three months are entered into a prize drawing for special Atlas items. The next drawing will be March 28th, and will feature a choice of prizes such as press sheets and original art from our popular Ars Magica, Feng Shui, Penumbra D20, and Unknown Armies RPGs, and from card game favorites like Dungeoneer, Lunch Money, and Once Upon a Time.
Atlas is also happy to announce that the following Special Ops members have gone up in rank this quarter:
Craig Carf (Magus 500 HP)
Roscoe Gibson (Avatar, 200 HP)
Sheila Thomas (Companion, 100 HP)
Congratulations to all of you, and keep up the great work!
Also, we'd like to welcome the following new recruits:
Mark Kopiwoda
Christopher Brady
Daniel Griffiths
David Simpson
Thanks for being a part of Special Ops!
If you're interested in joining Atlas Games' Special Ops demo team, just fill out and send in the application form at
www.atlas-games.com/specialops.
To request a demo at your convention or retail store, send in the demo request form located at
www.atlas-games.com/pdf_storage/SOdemorequestform.rtf.
A Gamer in Need
A few months ago, John and I learned that Robert "Roadkill" Aiken has an aggressive form of brain cancer. Roadkill is a fixture in the Twin Cities gaming community. He's been my GM year after year in the summer RPG campaigns hosted by the Source Comics & Games, and John remembers the first time he ever ran a demo in the Twin Cities for
Over the Edge -- which was held at a precursor to the Source about 15 years ago -- where Roadkill was one of his players.
The surgery and chemotherapy that Roadkill has undergone were only able to remove part of his brain tumor (
glioblastoma multiforme). At best, this will just slow its spread. The good people at the Source decided to give Roadkill and his wife a gift before it progresses too far, and took up a collection to send them to Disney World, where they had their honeymoon years ago ... you can see Roadkill's journal for the trip at
caringbridge.orgBut as you can imagine, the medical bills keep piling up, and he and his wife only have one income now to pay for basics like rent. If you're able, consider helping Roadkill with a donation, to make money one less thing he needs to worry about. Checks can be made out to "Robert or Susan Aiken" and mailed to: Roadkill, c/o Source Comics & Games, 1601 West Larpenteur Ave., Falcon Heights, MN 55113. Thanks for your help.
Last Minute Gift Idea
If you're doing any last-minute shopping for a gamer in your life, here's a suggestion you might consider:
40 Years of Gen Con. For the active gamer, it's a good read regardless of what RPG might be played in the new year; and for the lapsed gamer, it's a delightful trip down memory lane . . . and maybe just the nudge needed to bring someone back into the hobby.
ArM5 Analyzed!
We recently received an email from Ars Magica contributor Mark Shirley, analyzing the social network among our ArM5 writers, and thought the result might interest our fans.
Mark explains:
"Part of my work is to do with how social networks operate (in my case, to spread disease), but a common application of this field is to look at the links between authors through their collaborations on academic papers. I have all the tools at my fingertips, so I thought I'd have a look at the ArM world. I've collated all the current corpus of Ars Magica - both published and in progress - and created a social network. The attached picture is the result.
"For clarity, the network excludes those authors who have (so far) only been involved in a single work (principally Covenants vis sources and the Open Call) - things get too cluttered otherwise. This brings the authors down from 39 to 16. Each line between a pair of authors indicates one or more collaborations. The proximity of two authors in the main plot represents the number of collaborations; individuals who commonly collaborate will be close together (the maximum is 9 collaborations, between Timothy Ferguson and myself, and Timothy is the most prolific, with 13 titles to his name). There is clearly a big effect of multi-author books such as LatL and RoP:MR; given the prominence of Sheila Thomas, Paul Tevis, and Andrew Smith in the network when these three have low numbers of titles to their names.
"Anyway, just thought this might be of interest. I haven't done any rigorous analysis, such as seeing how many / which authors need to disappear to cause the network to collapse; I imagine that a car-wreck at the Grand Tribunal 2007 (Cheltenham) could have been pretty injurious, taking out 3 of the most prolific in one shot!"
Thanks, Mark!
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