Jens Alfke's page

I dunno … shouldn't they be a little more non-Euclidean?

I know roleplaying isn't about realism, and the coins are very pretty, but for some reason it bugs me that they come in denominations of the same metal. Doodz, there is no such thing as a "20gp" coin. Money wasn't backed by government guarantees, it was backed by the intrinsic value of the metal. To have a value of 20gp, the coin would have to contain 20 times as much gold as a gp, and have 20 times the volume, which would make it absurdly large. So 20gp was represented by, yes, 20 pieces of gold.

(Yes, you might be able to make, say, a normal-sized 20cp coin out of silver, if silver were 20 times as valuable as copper. But in that case it would just be a silver piece. And the values of metals fluctuate depending on supply, so if nearby miners struck a vein of silver, the value of your 20cp coin might go down to 15cp. Way too confusing.)

Face it, using "20gp coins" is about as silly as claiming your fighter can wear two sets of plate armor on top of each other...

But yeah, the coins are pretty, so don't make fun of me if I end up buying some anyway. :-)

It's all the flimsiest of cardboard, according to the folks at BoardGameGeek. Sounds like the worst edition so far ... like a Cheapass game, at five times the price.

The two books I've bought individually ("Elak Of Atlantis" and "Black God's Kiss") have been excellent — I love Kuttner & Moore but had never read their early sword-and-sorcery stuff.

Most of the other books look great too (how can you go wrong with Leigh Brackett and Michael Moorcock?) ... but WTF is Gary Gygax doing in that list? Reprinting unjustly-neglected fantasy classics that inspired the original RPG inventors is a brilliant idea, but it seems the publishers felt obligated to include books written _by_ RPG designers as well, which is pointless. Being a game designer does not make one a good novelist (any more than being a good novelist makes one a good basketball player), and all the fiction I've read that's based on or inspired by RPG games has been fanfic-level junk, the sort of thing that's given the genre a bad name.

So Paizo, please offer us a "just the good old stuff" subscription to Planet Stories, and I'll go for it.

I have an iBook running OS X.3. Does anyone know if there's anything else I'd need to run these programs?

The PDF would be useable on any computer. But it sounds like most of the files are documents for their mapping apps, which only run on Windows .

If you do buy another computer, note that you can buy any current Mac model and run Windows on it, using either Apple's included Boot Camp or 3rd party software like Parallels or VMWare. Then you have the best of both worlds.