Balin Babbage's
Legendary Calculating Engine
Legendary Calculating Engine
Zetacron is two things. First, it is a new campaign world that will be the basis for adventures with my group for (hopefully) a long time.
However, it is more than that. In some ways, it's a chance for me to finally accomplish something big -- something larger than myself. I've already accomplished this. At the time of this writing (July 25, 2004), I've been working on this world for months, continuously: something I've never managed before.
You see, I have a very short attention span. Most times when I work on a campaign world, I do about a week or two of work, design a religion or three, maybe draw a map, and then decide to start playing. The results are predictable: homogenous worlds, flat storylines, and a lack of depth that has always bothered me. However, I've never been able to accomplish more than this.
Then I met Lisa Wilder (who I've since married). I could go on for hours about all the things that Lisa has done for me, and how wonderful she is, but that's not relevant here. ;-) Lisa has made it possible to make this world. She helps me through all the parts that I can't do myself: sticking to a project long-term, keeping it fun so I don't give up, organizing my process so that things are managable, helping me come up with organization tactics for my notes so that I can make sense of all the content that's developed, and finally (and possibly most significantly) coming up with some of the best ideas in the world. Lisa comes to roleplaying with a fresh outsider's perspective, and her ideas are some of the most exciting and entertaining ones I've ever seen.
Later on, once the core content for the world has been published, I'm going to publish the process that Lisa and I have developed for creating a world. Like all good processes, it's simple and robust, and has helped me create something of unique value: a world that's richer and more entertaining than any I've ever been able to create before, on my own.
Watch this space for details!
Most everything you might ever want to know about me, Shawn Vincent, you can find out from my web site. If there's anything that's not there, or if you want to tell me about some problem, you have questions or concerns, or are just interested in me, you can mail me. Hope to hear from you!
The Zetacron website runs in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with hosting generously provided by MedHunters, the company I work for. Check out the website: it's pretty cool: it merges fun stories and content with medical job postings in a way that I think is truly unique. If you know of any healthcare professionals looking for work, let them know about the site: it truly is a fantastic way to get a job.
The entire website is hand-coded HTML and CSS, because I don't really trust anything else to have longevity. I hope to maintain this site for years, and I don't want to have to redo it entirely every time some new technology comes along, or if I have to transfer it to another server. Simplicity == godliness.
I have a curious stance on browser support. There is nothing on these pages that should cause any browser grief: I hardly ever use any HTML tags other than anchors, images, tables, headings, and paragraphs. However, I do make massive use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to style everything, I use tables, which some older browsers don't support, I don't specify image sizes for people with old browsers that are incapable of rerendering the page while the image gets downloaded...
The fact is that I don't particularly care about supporting old browsers. My main concern is one of asthetics and elegance. Clean HTML and CSS is elegant, above all else.
Thus, bugs in old or wierd browsers that some people work around, I ignore. I believe that you should browse the Internet with a browser that supports relatively recent standards, and has had most glaring bugs fixed. Commenting out (<-- -->) blocks of script code so that old versions of Netscape Navigator ignore them may work, but it's ugly beyond belief. Users should upgrade their browsers appropriately.
On the other hand, I'm always careful to support Lynx. I don't believe people should be using latest versions of one of the Big Two browsers: I just think that browser developers should support recent standards, and users should ensure that the browsers that they're using are modern and well written. Lynx is a fine idea: the Web is meant to be multi-platform, working well on text-based mediums: CSS has tons of support for that. But Lynx should be upgraded to support the standards it can support: like CSS support (where it can), etc.
This policy is not for everybody. Corporations, for example, that want to allow everybody to see their web pages need to bend over backwards to make everybody happy. I have the advantage that if I lose 30% of my visitors because they can't see tables, I don't have to worry about it: this is a personal endeavor.
I am not creating Zetacron for money. I'm creating it for the joy of creating it, and so that I can play in it.
In addition, I believe in giving back to the community. I'm a big supporter of open-source software, I'm concerned about the current trends in copyright and patent law, and I'd like to see more creative endeavors create material that is widely usable by people.
To accomplish this, all the content on this site (artwork, text, whatever) is released under the terms and conditions of the Open Gaming Licence (henceforth OGL), version 1.0a. See the license page for more details.
I would release the content under a less restrictive license (even public domain), but I intend to have content from the System Reference Document on the site, and cannot do so with a less restrictive license. However, I'm not adverse to releases under variant licenses. If you'd like this, contact me.