So, apologies while this site was a dead wasteland with barely anything over the last half a dozen or so years and not being used at one point there was a security breach. Funny enough I was able to track it explicitly to a My Fitness Pal security breach in which the associated Email for the Vanguard Account via twitter username and password were breached, which happened to also be the same password as the email (pro-tip don’t do this). It didn’t really matter as the site wasn’t doing anything but I first received a notice last year from the webhost that the Vanguard @ guild1042 email was spamming massive amounts of people as an FYI. I shut that down changed the password, two-factor authentication on the webhost controller and thought I was done with it. And promptly went back to ignoring the site. Fast forward and apparently I forgot that the Vanguard account was also an admin on the dreamhost site with posting and editing rights and that same password which hadn’t been changed. So apparently this past fall someone logged in with that account and made a bunch of posts as Vanguard of just spammy stuff and also edited a few of the more recent posts of other people ever so slightly to include a spammy sentence and link.

Needless to say I went in and deleted all those posts, changed the Vanguard password and access rights and restored the edited posts. I don’t think anything else was effected too much and I had most of the posts on this site saved for posterity anyway. Just putting this apology/warning in case I missed anything else. And I may blow the site away until I figure out what to do with it. It was a short-lived fun idea at the time but like so many things online went to the forgotten internet idea graveyard. Which is kind of funny that those posts was more activity in those few months in the last 7 years or more. So if I do decide to do something umm well I guess thanks Spam Hacker for Search Engine Optimization?????

TLDR: Was Hacked, Missed Stuff, Think Fixed, Mind your Passwords even on insignificant projects. Big company data breeches are annoying.

Alright, I’m upping the ante. $2 dollars to the first person to reply to this post by the end of the month. Unless your initials are KVH. No monies for KVHs

First person to reply to this gets a dollar(only if you reply by the end of the month. current date it (9/19/17)).

Happy 2015 everyone, cleaned up my office and I am planning on cleaning up this space here.  

So I saw something really cool the other day and it made me have to brush the dust off this website to share, TLDR: Scroll Down for Links (and perhaps this will light the fire to get me to start this site back up).  The fine folks of dead gentlemen productions, some of the creative force behind such films as “The Gamers” “The Gamers: Dorkness Rising” “The Gamers: Hands of Fate”, “JourneyQuest (Seasons 1 and 2) have brought new supernatural life to one of their earlier projects Demon Hunters.

Now I first became familiar with Dead Gentleman at my first GenCon in 2009 when i saw a showing of The Gamers: Dorkness Rising.  The successor to the first Gamers film.  (I had seen the first Gamers film at a game store once and thought it looked interesting but didn’t pick it up at the time due to low college funds, I am disappointed in my lack of foresight.)  Dorkness Rising was a love letter to a hobby I started in College and I was laughing and enjoying the heck out if it. It still is one of the few movies I can watch over and over again, and have listened to most if not all the commentary tracks.  I picked up the DVD either at that gencon or another convention shortly after.

Fast forward to 2012 when I made my next pilgrimage to GenCon and it was a dead gentlemen (and associated group Zombie Orpheus Entertainment) doozy.  They were filming the next installment in the gamer’s franchise at GenCon.  Not only that, I had tickets to Gamer’s Live and was killed onstage in their improv show.  After that I and some of my friends were able to be in the audience for the climactic finally of the Gamer’s Hands of Fate movie.  It was an awesome experience, in the literal translation of the word.  I became a kickstarter backer of that movie in which I was able to create a card for their fictional card game Romance of the Nine Empires in Gamers: Hands of Fate which was displayed on screen during the credits.  In honor of this group here the guard was named “Vanguard of Guild 1042” and looked amazing.  Now that I think of it, I will post a picture later. Being a good consumer I picked up the other Dead Gentlemen Movies I didn’t have.

So it was at GenCon I was introduced to that earlier Dead Gentlemen (or DG) property Demon Hunters.  The movies are college budget cheese, but still really fun and showcases a larger world.  Watched both of them in our hotel room while at GenCon and liked it so much I picked up a book they created for Demon Hunters.  This book was a RPG system created with Margaret Weis Productions.  Beautiful looking book (that I got signed by one of the main characters Steve Wolbrecht as Chris and “Damn!” he was a nice fellow.

Sadly I didn’t get a chance to play it but the book was great and they included a Demon Hunter’s Orientation Video which while recasting some of the earlier characters with familiar actor’s from the  DG Stock was still great and higher production value too.

But what sticks with me the most is just the awesomeness of the people involved.  So far I have been lucky enough in person to meet a fair amount of the DG and ZOE cast and crew at that GenCon 2012 and this past GenCon 2014 (even got a bunch of them to sign their respective Ro9E Cards).  I even got to play a Journeyquest pathfinder game with Christian Doyle (Gary, Perf and Albrecht) and Nathan Rice (Lodge, Gargoyle, Gabriel) along with my wife and Simpol from the website and we all agree it was the highlight of the con (If they ever read  this they should no they were a delight to game with), well that and Gamer’s Live 2014 when I got killed onstage again…and called out a game changing action point at the very end.

I don’t want to miss anybody (although I am sure I might) but meeting a lot of the other cast and crew at those Gen Cons was a real treat and despite being really busy a lot of the time (Ben Dobyns) they were always great with fans.  So additional shout outs to Andy Dopieralski, Scott C. Brown, Brian Lewis, Jen Page Trin Miller, Conner Marx and Matt Vancil for pictures and signatures at those GenCons  (Even got many of them to sign a skull dicebag for website writer Helios’ birthday present one year…Brian Lewis thought it was a loincloth at first but still signed it!)

Everyone I have met has been cool and very passionate about their projects and that has driven me to kickstart several of them.

Which brings me to this one… it is short notice and I wish I would have done this earlier as it ends tonight in just a few hours.  But there is a kickstarter for a new Demon Hunters RPG edition based loosely on the FATE system which plays up roll playing and antics and sounds to be awesome.  You can find more here… http://kck.st/1o0uXxT

As part of the re-awakening of Demon Hunters there is also a new webcomic that is bringing more depth (and some retcons) to life at www.demon-hunters.com the art is fun and makes me wish I had kept drawing more since college (ahh time…) and the writings is clever.  Kudos to Jimmy McMichael and Ben Honeycutt.

Also check out their youtube channel here http://www.youtube.com/user/DeadGentlemen

If you want to get a taste of the game be sure and check out the monthly live stream of a Demon Hunters game DM’ed by Don Early (Silent Jim, Mort Agrippa) with a rotating group of many cast and crew.  The recordings are fun and Don has been really kind in running the kickstarter as well with responding to people, keeping them informed and overall like everyone else just a really fun/nice guy.  This is also where I found out about one of the coolest things is that they have an obsidian portal (think wiki) page for the game, located here: https://demon-hunters-rpg.obsidianportal.com/ and under the wiki tab is the fillable PDF that I modified out of their character sheet for them a while back when they did a large callout for one.  I never realized they used mine, which is once again Awesome.

So I had to become a backer and get the pleasure of creating a New Brotherhood of theCelestial Torch (good guys) NPC for the book…and I think I have one in mind.

So Onward!, Waffles!, Let’s Ride! and any other catchphrase over to the kickstarter, their patreon or even their youtube pages and check them out.  You won’t be sorry.  So until next time…

-KVH (Vanguard)

I know most of you on here don’t really play much minecraft anymore or come to this site, but I have a server running now. the address is minecraft.vilhjalmr.com. If you want to see a map of it you can go to http://minecraft.vilhjalmr.com:8123. This is a dynamic map and will show anyone that is currently on the server. You can even speak to them!

I know this has been circling the web for a little bit but I thought this was an appropriate place for it. Somebody took the time to make a scaled list of hundreds of different starships. Click on the picture to expand( It is very large, click on the x in the bottom right corner to close the picture)

There is something coming, watch this space….

Possible Character art for Sylph Artificer drawn by Wayne Reynolds

http://www.amazon.com/One-Single-IronDie-Die-Cast-Six-Sided/dp/B004VEKWRW/ref=pd_sim_sbs_t_5

Ok this has to be one of the weirdest d6’s I have ever seen. And it is not the only one. A crazy search of dice on amazon will produce the most bizarre sets of dice any gamer could bring to the table. Hell, I’m pretty sure you might even find one in klingon or something.

So I saw one of the members of Dead Gentlemen asking about a fillable PDF for the Demon Hunters RPG sheet so I took some time and made one up.  It allows for writing in the info as well as check boxes for wounds/stuns and plot points/Die Steps.  The initial character sheet and design of course belongs to Dead Gentlemen.

The file can be found here,

Demon Hunters Fillable Char Sheet

and as the person that asked was Don Early (Silent Jim from the movie) here is a character sheet for Silent Jim based on the stats in the book.

DH Silent Jim

Enjoy

I just wonder if when you get married you can use this to roll for starting treasure…

I found this too funny to not share. I only know 4.0 but anyone who has been with D&D for a while may get a kick out of this.

So while I have been watching the Gamers: Hands of Fate Kickstarter  over at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zombieorpheus/the-gamers-hands-of-fate  (which has 30 hours to go as of this posting) I felt like fooling around with some photoshop.  As such, here’s a design I made up, enjoy.

If you look up Karma in the dictionary, it says “A spiritual sounding way of telling someone not to be a dick”. If your dictionary doesn’t say that, throw it out because that is EXACTLY what Karma means. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun to say “Don’t be a dick”, but it’s much easier to say “Well, that’s just bad Karma” in front of your grandmother without needing an explanation.

Today I read THIS ARTICLE about a man in Uganda that probably could have benefited from someone reminding him not to be a dick. He stole a phone from a patient at the local hospital and began making phone calls with it. The real problem was that the patient was hospitalized for his Hemorrhagic Fever due to his Ebola infection. The thief checked himself into the hospital after he began to show Ebola symptoms, and admitted to stealing the infected patients phone.

There you have it, folks. Doing stupid things like this are almost always going to end badly. Maybe not today, but someday. So when you are tempted to do something stupid like this man did, just think of me and these words I leave you with: “Don’t be a dick”.

Greetings Folks, I know we have had a lull here at the site but with today being Labor Day, I figured I should put some labor into getting the site freshened up.  It will be a bit of a process as I gather our writers together and update the site but hey I am happy to start us back up.  Speaking of start up. I would like to bring your attention to a Kickstart campaign that is extremely close and I hope succeeds.

This year a few of us went to Gen Con and had a blast.  One of my favorite things was getting to meet a bunch of the cast of the Gamers: Dorkness Rising including Gamer’s Live an improv show. I was happy to say that I was killed on stage during the improv. ThankfullyI got better and was able to be in the audience for the filming of Dun Dun Dun!!! Gamers: Hand of Fate ,which was taking place at Gen Con.  They were able to film about 25% of the movie at Gen Con, however needed to finish funding the movie with Kickstarter in order to succeed.

This movie NEEDS to get made.  Not only is Dorkness Rising one of my favorite movies but also the plot for this continuation of the cast sounds great.  Don’t just take my word for it, check out the information here (Don’t worry I’ll wait) http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zombieorpheus/the-gamers-hands-of-fate

After hearing about the game it also prompted me to try out the game Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) that is the muse for the in movie card game Romance of the Nine Kingdoms. This is a fun game and I look forward to seeing its version in the movie.

The community for Dead Gentlemen has been great and full of passion and I am glad to call myself a Kickstarter.  So please do what you can, and if you haven’t already check out their work at http://deadgentlemen.com/ and http://zombieorpheus.com/ and even find them on youtube.  There are a few days left and if they surpass their goal there will be even more rewards.  At least watch the movies, enjoy and laugh your d20’s off.  In closing I thought why not make a little meme and with some of the nail biting of the kickstarter campaign I thought this was appropriate.

I had started this idea on my pen name’s facebook page first anyway, so I’m going to take it there for now. When I get 20 Likes, I’m going to start a weekly story where the readers decide what happens next. I’m only 1 Like away! So if you’d like to see this story happen, “Like” my pen name’s page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Maia-Jacomus/109541852471802

I might be able to get something for this Monday!

Some stories are just so astonishing that it is virtually impossible to write something funny about them. THIS STORY is one of them. That’s right folks, the zombie apocalypse is coming, and it’s starting in Florida (As if Florida weren’t already filled with enough mindless zombies). The story is almost an identical scenario to the beginning of the first Resident Evil game. You walk around the corner and find someone eating the face off of another person. He refuses to stop, so you shoot him. Zombies never go down in one shot, so you shoot him 5 more times until he drops. If the autopsy reveals traces of the T-Virus in their systems, I am going to shout “I told you so” as I load up on ammo. Stay safe out there, and don’t get bitten!

I work with the studio that made this online arcade game. You pilot a shuttle across landscapes in an attempt to land it without crashing it. It’s really challenging (ihaven’tmadeitpastthefirstlevelyet -_-;) and I thought some of you might be interested in testing your skills.

After you play, post here to brag about how many levels you conquered!

How much overtime does the character Flo from those insurence commercials put in in a week?