PATHFINDER DICE ARENA

Last night while checking my email I noticed a very exciting message labeled “Be the First to Try Pathfinder Dice Arena!” .

What I received in this email was a link to the

Print and Play

version of the game, along with information stating the game will be available on Kickstarter later this week.

I can’t wait to print out the documentation and give this gave a quick look over.

CHESS ANYONE?

Four Player Chess Board , the only way to play Chess at the office.

As you can can see, we have just recently started a 4 player chess match at my office. The game is loads of fun, but is certainly a twist on the standard chess match.

DUNGEON TILES

Awhile back I created some Dungeon titles using Photoshop, and thought this would be a perfect spot to share them.

I even made a few example maps using these designs.

ELDER SIGN AND HOMEBREW

Last night the wife and I played Elder Sign, and sampled the Homebrew we started a few weeks back.

The Homebrew is starting to come along quite nicely, A few friends said it seems a bit to bitter for an Oktoberfest, but other than that has nice flavors.

As for the the game, we were up against the Ancient One Ithaqua . Online Ithaqua is ranked as hard . We were able to seal off this Ancient One, but by the skin of our teeth (there was only one Doom Tracker spot left for him to awaken).

PATHFINDER BLANK SPELL CARDS

First, I absolutely love the spell cards being created over at rpgbooster , the only issue I have is they do not appear to provide blank spell cards.

In order to allow the creation of special spells, or alter the appearance of existing cards I’ve went ahead and cleared a few out. This will allow them to be used as a template in the editor or your choice.

USING TOR WITH PYTHON

Using tor with python’s urllib2 is pretty easy, you just need to setup a few things before hand.

First off what is tor? Tor stands for " The Onion Router " and allows you to anonymously browse the internet by bouncing your request through multiple tor nodes.

I’m going to be using a Fedora 17 machine to demonstrate, and show output.

First lets install two packages from our package manager:

PATHFINDER EQUIPMENT IN JSON FORM

While reading through the Pathfinder Core Rule book I notice there is a specific way to randomly generate magic items for town shops.

I thought about possibly creating some code to generate magic items. However, to start I needed the basic data found in the rule book for equipment.

Below I give you a JSON file I created of the SRD 3.5 equipment:

• https://nessy.info/equipment.json

In [1]: from urllib2 import urlopen

In [2]: from json import loads

In [3]: data = urlopen('https://nessy.info/equipment.json')

In [4]: equipment = loads(data.read())

This JSON if a list of multiple equipment items, each item has attribute keys for stuff like cost, reference, and name:

SANDPOINT AT A GLANCE

I’m still relatively new to Pathfinder and tabletop RPGs in general, but being as I’ve just started running The Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path Anniversary edition I’ve created a few handy helper files.

One of this files is the Sandpoint at a glance document .

This document has been exported as a easy to print PDF, and includes all locations of shops and key points in the town of Sandpoint.

Enjoy and let me know if you’ve found this useful for your Rise of the Runelords sessions.

MAGTEK USB CARD READER HACKING 2

So back at it, now with some code to decode the common financial card:

Let start out by showing the end results of scanning my Freebirds card:

# ./main.py
Please swipe your card now:

Raw String: %B???????????^FANATIC/FREEBIRDS^4211?;????????????=????????????

Card Holder: FANATIC/FREEBIRDS
Card Number: ????-????-????-????
Expiration Date: 11/42

As you can see we still have our raw string, this is being decoded from the code I used last time. However now I have the Card Holder’s name, Card Number, and Expiration date, this format was all outlined quite well on Wikipedia .

MAGTEK USB CARD READER HACKING

So just the other day I received my MagTek MSR100 in the mail, this unit only cost me about $20 and I have to say I’m very satisfied with it. After opening the box it was delivered in I quickly noticed no documentation was provided. No worries I figured, this will make hacking at it that much more fun.

I started out by connecting the USB device to my Gentoo Linux laptop and swiped a card, I noticed on my console prompt the card data was spewed out. That is because this device acts like a HID Keyboard: