#pocket digital monster hunter pro plus

[fantasyfantasygames]

Monster Wranglers

Monster Wranglers, Pamphlet Play Press, 2009

It's Pokémon X Monster Rancher, with a standard 2d6+skill roll-over system. You know this setup. Most of you could write it yourself. Let me get to the interesting parts.

The corebook for Monster Wrangler is a 24-page center-staple production, at 5.5x8.5 size. Layout is nice. Short, compact, no wasted space but doesn't entirely eschew whitespace. Monsters peek in from the margins rather than taking up a lot of the page. It lays out the premise, gives you some stats, provides a map of your monster caravan loop, gives you some rules for monster catching, breeding, and battling, and provides 8 monsters.

Only 8 monsters? Well, only 8 in the corebook. There are about 300 total. Because there are 163 supplements for this game.

One hundred and sixty three. Across fifteen authors.

Each of them is a single-page tri-fold pamphlet. There are usually two monsters, one on the outside and one on the inside. Each one gets an illustration, base stats, leveling formulas, a few techniques, and notes about where they can be found. The techniques are all keyworded, so your older monsters can often use techs from later supplements.

Some of the pamphlets are just one monster - a jumbo-sized behemoth with more techniques and a piece of microfiction to go with them. These were generally my favorites. They just drip flavor.

Naturally, just like in most of these games, the monsters are not particularly well-balanced against each other. You'll see this issue show up again in an upcoming review about a game with 150 classes - only about 20 of these monsters are really viable, and you're going to spend your time catching them and ditching your old pals. They clearly tried to tweak the leveling formulas to account for this, but they didn't succeed. That goes double for multi-monster interactions, when one player's monster can buff another's in a repeating loop while a third shields them all.

The supplements got weirder and worse as time went on. The layout kind of degenerated, and there were too many variants on the same techniques. Occasionally you'd get one where it was clear that one author hadn't read another's pamphlet and there was no central database, because two techniques would end up with the same name and keywords but different effects. The original four artists moved on, and the ones they got to fill in had totally different styles. Still, each supplement was only a dollar, so you can't complain about the price. At least on an individual level. If you want to catch 'em all it starts looking a little steep, but if you just want to pick up the few that were good fighters and cool-looking, you could throw down ten dollars and get exactly what you want.

Notorious tongue-twister Pamphlet Play Press eventually got bought up by would-be gaming conglomerate Megagame, who went bankrupt in 2011 after finding out that there are dozens of dollars to be made in the TTRPG industry. All their stuff is out of print now.

[leemdixon]

New media added to my tablet and phone to listen, read and watch over the next month or so…

Tv Shows.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: Although bellhop Todd Brotzman doesn’t have a lot going on in his life, the worst awaits him. It begins when he arrives at work one day and is sent up to the hotel’s penthouse, where he discovers millionaire Patrick Spring has been murdered. An odd chain of events that unfolds leads to Todd becoming a person of interest in the crime and losing his job. That is when he meets Dirk Gently, a fast-talking, eccentric detective who has been hired to investigate the murder. He believes that he and Todd are destined to solve the mystery together. Once Dirk is able to convince Todd to work with him, the latter is visited by wild, dangerous characters — all associated with Dirk — who complicate his life further. Dirk, meanwhile, is being hunted by seemingly deranged assassin Bart, who almost kills a man she mistakenly believes to be the detective.

Van Helsing: In this reimagining of the classic Dracula story, the world is dominated by vampires, requiring humans to work together to survive. The series centers on Vanessa Helsing, daughter of famed vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, who wakes up after a five-year coma to discover a vampire-controlled world. She soon learns that she possesses a unique blood composition that makes her immune to vampires and able to turn the creatures into humans. That power puts humanity’s last hope to return the world to how it once was before the vampires took over in Vanessa’s hands.

Films.

Assassin’s Creed: Cal Lynch travels back in time to 15th-century Spain through a revolutionary technology that unlocks the genetic memories contained in his DNA. There, he lives out the experiences of Aguilar de Nerha, a distant relative who’s also a member of the Assassins, a secret society that fights to protect free will from the power-hungry Templar Order. Transformed by the past, Cal begins to gain the knowledge and physical skills necessary to battle the oppressive organization in the present.

Justice League Dark: Batman forms Justice League Dark, a new team of dark arts specialists that is led by John Constantine. The team must unravel the mystery of a supernatural plague and contend with the rising, powerful villainous forces behind the siege.

    Teen Titans: The Judas Contract: The young super groups get a new member who seems to have ulterior motives as they take on the mercenary Deathstroke.

      Resident Evil: The Final Chapter: The T-virus unleashed by the evil Umbrella Corp. has spread to every corner of the globe, infesting the planet with zombies, demons and monsters. Alice (Milla Jovovich), a former Umbrella employee turned rogue warrior, joins her friends on a last-chance mission to storm the company’s headquarters located deep underneath what used to be Raccoon City. But the Red Queen (Ever Anderson) knows that Alice is coming, and the final battle will determine if the rest of mankind lives or dies.

  MASH: Based on the novel by Richard Hooker, “M*A*S*H” follows a group of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital officers at they perform surgery and pass the time just miles from the front lines of the Korean Conflict. Led by Captains Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), they add to the chaos and hilarity of the situation.

Audiobooks.

The Gods Themselves Novel by Isaac Asimov The main plot-line is a project by aliens who inhabit a parallel universe (the para-Universe) with different physical laws from this one. By exchanging matter with Earth, they seek to exploit these differences in physical laws. The exchange of matter provides an alternative source of energy in their dying Universe. However, the exchange of physical laws will have the ultimate result of turning the Earth’s Sun into a supernova, and possibly even turning a large part of the Milky Way into a quasar. This is the alien’s ultimate goal, as it would provide more energy for the para-Universe.

  Red Mars Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson From the first pioneers who looked back at Earth and saw a small blue star, to the first colonists – hand-picked scientists with the skills necessary to create life from cold desert – ‘Red Mars’ is the story of a new genesis. It is also the story of how Man must struggle against his own self-destructive mechanisms to achieve his dreams; before he even sets foot on the red planet, factions are forming, tensions are rising and violence is brewing – for civilization can be very uncivilized.

  Altered Carbon Novel by Richard Morgan In the novel’s somewhat dystopian world, human personalities can be stored digitally and downloaded into new bodies, called sleeves. Most people have cortical stacks in their spinal columns that store their memories. If their body dies, their stack can be stored indefinitely. Catholics have arranged that they will not be resleeved as they believe that the soul goes to Heaven when they die, and so would not pass on to the new sleeve. This makes Catholics targets for murder, since killers know their victim will not be resleeved to testify. A UN resolution to alter this legal position forms one strand of the novel’s plot, to allow the authorities to sleeve a deceased Catholic woman temporarily to testify in a murder trial.

Mogworld Novel by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw In a world full to bursting with would-be heroes, Jim couldn’t be less interested in saving the day. His fireballs fizzle. He’s awfully grumpy. Plus, he’s been dead for about sixty years. When a renegade necromancer wrenches him from eternal slumber and into a world gone terribly, bizarrely wrong, all Jim wants is to find a way to die properly, once and for all. On his side, he’s got a few shambling corpses, an inept thief, and a powerful death wish. But he’s up against tough odds: angry mobs of adventurers, a body falling apart at the seams — and a team of programmers racing a deadline to hammer out the last few bugs in their AI.

  Graphic Novels.

Blackest Night: “Blackest Night” involves Nekron, a personified force of death who reanimates deceased superheroes and seeks to eliminate all life and emotion from the universe.

    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

THE BOOK THAT INSPIRED THE FILM BLADE RUNNER COMES TO COMICS! Worldwide best-selling sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick’s award-winning DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? has been called “a masterpiece ahead of its time, even today” and served as the basis for the film BLADE RUNNER. BOOM! Studios is honored to present the complete novel transplanted into the comic book medium, mixing all new panel-to-panel continuity with the actual text from the novel in an innovative, ground-breaking 24-issue maxi-series experiment.

  Alias- Jessica Jones:

Alias is a comic book series created by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos. It was published by Marvel Comics under Marvel’s MAX imprint for a total of 28 issues from 2001 to 2004. The protagonist of Alias is Jessica Jones, a former costumed superhero named Jewel who left that life behind to become a private investigator. The running thread is Jessica’s character development, as the layers of her past and personality are revealed to the reader while, simultaneously, she tries to come to terms with them herself. The Dark Tower: The Dark Tower comics follow the adventures and trials of Roland Deschain, son of Steven Deschain, dinh of Gilead. At the outset of our tale, Roland is a fourteen-year-old gunslinger apprentice, goaded by his father’s treacherous sorcerer into taking his test of manhood years too early. Roland thinks that he is fighting for his father’s honor, but in truth Marten Broadcloak is in league with Gilead’s enemy, John Farson, and wants nothing less than to have Roland—the final descendant of Arthur Eld, the ancient King of All-World—sent west in disgrace. Roland wins his guns, but the price is high. With Farson’s assassins haunting the streets of Gilead, Roland and his tet-mates Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns must leave the city. Steven Deschain sends the boys to the Outer Arc town of Hambry, but Roland and his tet-mates soon discover that Hambry is not a quiet backwater but the heart of Farson’s war-machine—a obliterating juggernaut which has its sights set on Gilead. So begins the epic war between Roland’s gunslingers and John Farson’s forces, a conflict whose battlefield moves from the Outer Arc to In-World and finally to the gunslingers’ heroic but doomed last stand at the Battle of Jericho Hill. Over the course of the story, Roland transforms from the dinh of a faithful ka-tet to a war-hardened loner, searching for the Dark Tower and for his ultimate enemies—a many-faced sorcerer and his master, an immortal were-spider who wants nothing less than to destroy the Tower and swallow the wreckage of the multiverse.

How do I consume my media?

Tablet:

Sony Z1 10inch.

16gb with a 64gb sd

Android 5.1.1

  Phone:

Huawei P9

32gb with a 32gb sd

Android 6.0

Video app:

Mizuu for organizing.

MX Player Pro.   

VLC just incase I need another.  

AudioBooks:

Smart Audiobooks.   

Podcasts:

Pocket Casts.  

Ebooks:

Moon+ reader Pro.

Play Books.

Comics/Graphic Novels:

ComicRack.

  New blog post is up-New Media Added To Watch, Listen and Read-May 2017 New media added to my tablet and phone to listen, read and watch over the next month or so...