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This is testing and i will delete it.

When a GM is plotting a campaign, one of the things she or he wants to do is identify points of conflict that will directly affect the player characters.

Published adventures will have all sorts of thrilling moments and engaging encounters. But making the story personal can often be what makes it memorable — what brings it home.

You want to hit them where it hurts.

When the authors of Gnome Stew created Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters in 2010, we used Georges Polti’s list of 36 dramatic situations as a guide. Thirteen of the dramatic situations involve family or loved ones. Who the character loves and is loved by is essential to establishing those dramatic beats.

It’s Your Life

Over the holiday I caught up with some game-related reading, including digging into D&D’s Xanathar’s Guide to Everything (so I’m a year behind, shoot me).

Included in the book is a list of tables designed to generate a background for PCs. Tables such as this can be helpful because they provide additional material that a player might not have considered when coming up with a backstory. (Or, if the player isn’t inclined to do a backstory, at least it can provide the GM with an item or two that can be used as a personal hook).

Tables such as this should never be used slavishly. I think they work best when they serve as a menu that a player can select from.

As an exercise, I rolled up two character backgrounds using the Xanathar tables, then for comparison’s sake, did the same with two other tables I have found useful — one from the Hero Builder’s Guidebook (Wizards of the Coast, c. 2000) and the other from Pathfinder’s Ultimate Campaign (Paizo, c. 2013).

Xanathar’s

First: Dragonborn sailor/bard.

The dice produced a couple of interesting points: 1) The dragonborn came from a wealthy family that resided in a palace or castle, but whose mother is missing because she was imprisoned, enslaved or for some other reason was taken away. 2) The character is a gifted performer whose love of knowledge and stories was awakened by spending time in an old library, and who learned his craft from a master bard who was a human aristocrat, someone alive and famous.

Both of those things work well, and could even be combined together. The missing mom could be a victim of palace or imperial conflicts. She could be like Eleanor of Aquitaine, who spent close to 16 years in prison for siding with one of her sons over their claim to the crown. And perhaps this aristocrat is her keeper, by some arrangement with the father, but the PC can still visit and learn from them.

Second: Gnome fighter.

My favorite part of this random generation was the 11 siblings the chart produced. Big families produce lots of conflict, reasons to do things, reasons to NOT do things, and frankly, every time a character needs a brother or sister to this that or the other, you’ve got one. (“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”)

The other part of the conflict is built into the origin; the family lived on the frontier, on the edges of civilization, and that pop died and got eaten by monsters. Whatever that monster is — picking one is always fun — gives the gnome a built-in enmity for the rest of its career.

A life event that provides fertile ground for a revenge storyline is that the gnome was knocked out and left for dead in a feud with a rival adventurer over shares of a treasure. This adventurer is now an enemy.

Hero Builder

This generator provided me with a human from a family of refugees who established a homestead along the mountainous frontier. This character was raised in adventure territory, combat was a part of their lives.  Of her or his immediate family, only an older sister survives. However, there is a large extended family of uncles and cousins.

Why was the family on the run? Well, the generator said the family held dissident political views; they supported a rebellion. In fact, an ancestor achieved folk hero status as a failed rebel. That’s a legacy the character might wish to embrace or discard. Either approach can be interesting.

Pathfinder’s Ultimate Campaign

This generator produced a half-elf cleric who was raised among forest-dwelling elves as an only child.

Two events are pivotal for the character: 1) The PC was a convert to the faith, a decision that was heavily influenced by a current love interest. 2) The PC twice has had run-ins with the law, once imprisoned for smuggling and later for assaulting a close friend for religious reasons. Does this make the PC a zealot? Are they someone under the sway of another (the lover)? Does the newfound religion jive with the folks back in the forest home?

This character has the makings of a pariah, which is interesting. Maybe the only way they’ll find themselves is within a party of adventurers.

Takeaway

Obviously, different background generators do different things, emphasizing different aspects of lives. What I like about each:

Xanathar: It creates a conflict that is fresh and immediate, often familial, often involving a patron or teacher. The PC has to fill in the blanks a little bit more than in the others.  On its own, there are gaps. But if a PC pairs it up with the Backgrounds, Boons and Traits section of the character development, a more cohesive picture of their past takes shape.

Hero Builder: Family legacy is very important. Where you are from and who your parents were are key to your development. The apple does not fall far from the tree.  The ethics charts can be useful. I also found that religion and political beliefs factor in more strongly here than in the others.

Ultimate Campaign: Everything is driven by the PC’s character class, and secondarily, by their race. There is a darker tone to the background material; in all likelihood, something traumatic happened that spurred an adventuring career.

 

Fuzzy games.

Podcasts is a module that aims to create a Podcast feed for your site using Views.

This week's highlights include a detailed look at what 2019 may bring in terms of business trends & games - as well as a whole host of other leftover 2018 highlights, daily 'meditations' on games, a Chinese indie megahit, and lots more. ...

2018 was a big year for Webform CiviCRM module. I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the new features that were added in 2018 (with some examples/screenshots) and take a look at what's to come in 2019!

Webform CiviCRM Integration - what is this?

Webform CiviCRM is a Drupal module that in a nutshell exposes CiviCRM APIs (with which you can create CiviCRM contacts, contributions, memberships, participant registrations, activities - just about any CiviCRM Entity programmatically) to the powerful Drupal Webform module - a very popular (over 450,000 Drupal sites are using it) and highly configurable drag and drop form builder. Webform CiviCRM itself is a popular module - over 3,000 CiviCRM projects are using it. That's more users/sites than the Mosaico Extension has! Webform CiviCRM was invented by Coleman Watts (of the CiviCRM Core Team) and is supported by the CiviCRM community:  https://www.drupal.org/project/webform_civicrm

2018 - highlights is:pr is:closed updated:>2018-01-01 -> 88 closed! Some highlights include:

• enhancements to recurring contributions via Webform CiviCRM (thanks to Biodynamics Association (USA) for co-funding this) - you can now configure your webform such that you can pay any amount (Event, Membership) in instalments as well as start a regular recurring open-ended Donation. An example of this would be swim club fees -> a full season is 10 months and costs $3,000 for the entire year. You can now configure your webform such that parents can sign up their child(ren) for Memberships/Events -> and select to pay all at once or in e.g. 10 instalments of $300/month.
• Stripe support (thanks to contributions by Matthew Wire from MJW Consulting) - Matt has been doing a lot of work on the Stripe Extension and we've been supportive of changes he has PR-ed to Webform Civicrm module.  This means that Webform CiviCRM is now compatible with all major in-line Payment Processors: Stripe, iATS Payments and PayPal Pro.
• being able to configure financial types (thanks to PEMAC (Canada) for funding this) - it is now possible to e.g. charge the correct Sales Tax [which is defined per Financial Type] based on a member's Province/location.




• added line item support (thanks to Wilderness Committee (Canada) for funding this) - it is now possible to add up to 5 additional lineItems for one Contribution. So you can now do things like: make a donation, purchase a calendar, pay for postage - all on the same webform - and in combination with the financial type improvements - you can control the financial types for every line item, ensuring that (in our example) - the donation becomes eligible for Charitable Tax Receipting but the calendar purchase and the postage do not. 
• numerous improvements re: cases, activities, memberships (thanks to people at Compucorp and Fuzion, and many others)
• many other improvements - I apologize for missing anything/anyone!
• Coleman and I ran a 2h sold-out Workshop on Webform CiviCRM at CiviCamp Calgary 2018. We covered lots of features and in-hindsight wished we had recorded it. Next time! Amongst many other items we covered how the Registration form for CiviCamp Calgary 2018 was built (allowing multiple participants to be signed up for multiple events and also including a Partner discount code field).

Also filed under 2018 highlights: Jacob Rockowitz officially released his Drupal 8 version of Drupal webform module - it includes wicked new features that make webforms more portable than ever and new fields like signature fields and my favourite: automated country flags for phone numbers (see screenshot further down).

Looking ahead at 2019

• formula field enhancements - very powerful to be able to do calculations on the fly in your webform to e.g. calculate credit card fees or variable discounts and being able to add these as line items to a contribution. If you're interested check out this PR: https://github.com/colemanw/webform_civicrm/tree/webform_calculator_works - I've got it in production on two sites at the moment.







• recognizing price sets that are enabled on a specific Contribution form. If you're interested in this - follow along here: https://github.com/colemanw/webform_civicrm/pull/58 
• Drupal 8 port! The D8WFC project kicked off in August 2018 and we've already got Contacts, Memberships and ... Contributions working. Yes! We're transacting through live pathways. Try out the dev version: https://www.drupal.org/project/webform_civicrm/releases/8.x-5.x-dev if you feel adventurous: it currently contains Contacts and Membership functionality. If you want to try Contributions you'll need to check our GitHub repo:  https://github.com/colemanw/webform_civicrm/tree/8.x-5.x - and keep an eye on PRs against that branch. Many thanks to Matt Glaman (Commerce Guys, USA) for being the Drupal Ninja that he is and to David Snopek (MyDropWizard, USA) for all his oversight/expertise/management on this. Of course: many thanks to our 13 CiviCRM Partner co-sponsors that help me (Semper IT, Canada) co-sponsor Matt's time on the D8WFC project: your Canada Buff swag to commemorate this D8WFC project/partnership are in envelope and en-route to: Skvare (USA), CiviCoop (The Netherlands), Northbridge Digital (UK), Compucorp (UK), Veda Consulting (UK), CiviDesk (USA), MJW Consulting (UK), Joinery (USA), Blackfly Solutions (Canada), Megaphone Technology Consulting (USA), Fuzion (New Zealand), Nubay (USA) and Agileware (Australia). 

How can user organizations Contribute?

• If you're not already using Webform CiviCRM module and are on Drupal try it out!
• Already using Webform CiviCRM module? Show us your use cases in detail on https://civicrm.stackexchange.com - use the tag webform-civicrm - add plenty of screenshots to help other users. Let's build a library of examples!
• Help us with Testing - either Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 - give us your feedback - here's how you can help test PRs: https://civicrm.stackexchange.com/questions/24432/how-can-i-help-review-... and bugs/issues can be reported here: https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search/webform_civicrm
• Contribute financially: thank you to Wildsight (Canada) for becoming the first user organization to co-sponsor our D8WFC effort! If you're interested in Sponsoring our D8WFC efforts, I have more swag in stock (while quantities last). Want to know more? Ready to sponsor? Contact me: https://www.semper-it.com/contact
  • $300 will get you one Buff;
  • $600 will get you two Buffs;
  • $900 will get you three Buffs!

 

                                    DrupalExtensions

8: Compound (bundled) fields - your new best friend j ayen green Sun, 01/06/2019 - 12:15

This is for Ubercart. If you are using Ubercart to sell tickets or entries to an event or perhaps a race, it's very helpful to have a list, per item, of who bought what. For a competition, this will become an entry list. For a performance, this may become your will-call attendance list.

You may simply want to know who bought what! Who are the purchasers of a given item can be useful in any of a number of instances... recalls, promotions, and the like.

This week's highlights include a detailed look at what 2019 may bring in terms of business trends & games - as well as a whole host of other leftover 2018 highlights, daily 'meditations' on games, a Chinese indie megahit, and lots more.

Drupal Bringing Justice to Your Law Firm Website Vasundhra Sun, 01/06/2019 - 17:45

Unequivocally, 21st century is considered as an innovative era, and there is no doubt to the fact that having a website contributes largely to the innovation. 

Owning a website is like owning a business card, it is an essential segment that shouts “I am a professional, who is open for business”. So, if you have a website, it would typically be the very first interaction for an individual that would create an impression for your potential client. 

When it comes to a law firm website, these potential clients always look for reliability and confidentiality. They need a strong shoulder to lean on, and nothing works better than Drupal. 

If you ask - Why Drupal? 

Well, mainly because a law firm website would always wish for safety against hackers and smooth performance over high load. Drupal creates a solid and reliable impression when it comes to both these sectors. 

Drupal is a Good Option for Your Law Firm Website

According to a survey conducted by “Legal Trend Reports”, nearly 37 percent of the population search for a lawyer online. Which means that for succeeding in an industry it is important to have an attractive, robust and secure website.

And this is how Drupal does the task. 

Builds Togetherness with the Community 

Drupal is a free and open source content management system with an active community constantly creating free elements for the website in the form of modules, themes, and distributions.

The large community grinds Drupal like a valuable gem to absolute perfection by constantly keeping its hand on modern innovations.

The open source platform is supported by an active community of more than 1 million members who are constantly trying to make it more flexible than other platforms in the market. The CMS has been providing immense support to its users by presenting a helping hand in form of creating documentation, sharing networking opportunities, granting them with valuable modules etc.

Headless Drupal awarding you with user interaction 

Whether you call it “Decoupled” or “Headless” content management system, using Drupal as your central content service can power up your entire application and device ecosystem.

The mantra of the web development strategy “Write once and publish everywhere” has been grabbing the eyes of several law firm website owners.

The concept of decoupling also implies the managing of different content layers separately, with an agnostic presentation layer. To be precise, it is the communication between backend and the frontend via API.

Rocky mountain victim law center (RMVLC) is a great example of this methodology. The website houses a program which is known as the Legal Information Network of Colorado (LINC). On the basis of a series of questions, this web app provided people with exact legal information and resources. The goal of this program was to empower victims of crime. A better way to make them understand their legal options in the aftermath of victimization. The victims were presented with the advantage to answer a series of questions about the mishap which resulted in a custom list of actionable resources.

Although Drupal gave the power to the application to manage content on the backend. Ember.js (an open source, free JavaScript client-side framework used for developing web applications) was also used in the front end to provide the user with a highly interactive experience.

The Decoupled Approach allowed LINC to leverage the strengths of both - frontend as well as backend 

Access your website anywhere 

When we talk about “better user experience” - mobile compatible websites has turned out to be an important factor for marketers, organizations, corporates, and advertisers

This is because according to FindLaw studies, nearly 72 percent of mobile users say that it is important for a website to be fully optimized for mobile use. That means that the website should be accessible to people in any device. 

Drupal is the CMS which provides the users with multiple themes that are mobile responsive and layout centric. The platform has replaced PHP template with all new Twig template in its latest update which not only makes it easy and flexible for the users to use but also provides them with fast, secure, and manageable website. 

Thereby, Drupal's responsive designs have helped websites to respond to each visitor’s needs by adapting its presentation based on the size and capabilities of the device which is being used. 

The website of JCWI, which aims to provide justice to all the immigrants, is built on DrupalMastering Multiple sites 

Large law firm websites consist of many committees and promoting any desired initiative on the main website for an individual attorney could be a big hassle. Therefore, the only solution to the whole scenario is to have an individual website or a blog that is separate from the main website yet a part of it. 

Therefore, Drupal contributes largely to simplify the management of the websites with the help of the multisite feature. It allows you to serve multiple sites with the help of single codebase. The requirement is only to maintain one copy of Drupal core and, of course, the contributed modules. In other words, it brings about a manageable code across multiple sites and brings agility while launching new sites. 

A great example of the multisite feature is the Legal services corporation which provides legal assistance to low-income citizens. The website is a collection of six other sites with the main agenda of providing easy maintenance to the LCS staff while they update the website. Therefore, Drupal was chosen based on the fact that it powers multisite functionality and consisted of one Drupal installation. Not only this but the site also leveraged multilingual support and was compliant with Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act. 

Decoding Multiple Languages 

As an attorney, it is possible that you might practice in an area where your client speaks different languages. A translator in such a situation becomes an important factor in the whole journey of communication. 

Similar is the case with the audiences that are surfing online. It is necessary to add a multilingual capability to your law firm website due to the fact there is a diverse audience that does not have English as their preferred language. The multilingual feature here not only makes it easy for those users to understand your website content, but it also doubles your chance of being spotted in the Google search result.

Drupal is one of those CMSes that emerges out as a sword for all the website owners with a power of multilingual feature. It grants them with a striking number of over 90 languages that has a built-in translation core.

Apart from translating your content, Drupal also translates all the fields, forms and error messages. The new version of Drupal consists of 4 inbuilt multilingual modules.

Managing Language

This module lets the user pick the choice in which they desire to change the website. It consists of 96 languages in its bar. The language configuration has been streamlined to the user. It assigns languages to everything, from taxonomy terms to administrative language. 

Interface Translation 

It provides the user with a central directory to manage the interface. It has a built-in translation UI for simplifying the content. By allowing the automated downloads and updates, the users easily translate the interface. 

Content Translation 

This module is applicable to all the contents. It allows the user to translate everything, from taxonomy to pages. Like the translation in the interface, the default language of the content can be configured flexibly.

Configuration translation

The things that come with a configuration of the website can be translated with the help of this module. These things include views, blocks, panels, field panels or the text for that matter that can be formatted and be easily translated.

New York County District Attorney’s Office website is built on this multilingual feature of Drupal. The district attorney CY Vance Jr. is the leader in the criminal justice reform who proposed a compelling vision for moving the Manhattan District Attorney's Office with the main agenda of prevention of crime. His objective of the project was to easily reach people with the continuous publication of the content that served as an information portal for the District Attorney.

Drupal was an ideal CMS as it provided with a great platform to build complex websites and was helpful in integrating interactive web services. The key agenda was to reach as many people as possible.

How Can We Forget Security?

In 2016, Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca faced a leak of over 2.6 terabytes of data highlighting the risk around data security and the need of companies to protect their client's information.

This clearly indicates that security plays a crucial role for all law firm websites. Visitors want assurance over their data. They want that it should be secured and private. 

Drupal is the CMS that is well known for its security. It presents its users with careful testing of all modules which is done by the Drupal experts. The password is encrypted and the community reviews the modules on go. With security modules like security review, two-factor authentication, paranoia etc, the vulnerabilities or loopholes that compromises a website, are largely taken care off. Not only this but, Drupal also meets the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) standards which are actively screened to prevent continuous future risks. With the selection of Drupal as your platform, your website is continuously reviewed by the Drupal Security Team. The CMS makes sure that the security vulnerability is reported to them.

Module, Themes, and Distribution 

Drupal has special modules, themes, and distributions which are specifically created for the law firms. 

The law firm creates and shares attorney profiles with potential client quite frequently. This might be a time-consuming and might also slow down the entire process as there can be a number of attorneys lined up for your firm. Thus, to improve the performance and save time for the same, Drupal comes with a module known as profile generator that allows you to find profiles quickly.

The law theme is a free professional mobile-friendly theme for the law website. It is a responsive, mobile first theme for Drupal 8. It consists of features like configurable slideshow, 13 block regions, social media integration, clean HTML5, and so on.

The law firm distribution, which is also known as pre-configured Drupal version containing the core of the entire system, is a set of modules, themes, and libraries. They make the site creation easy and swift. 

This is also a fully responsive distribution that features a homepage with a slider, a section for legal industry events, a photo gallery, a section with YouTube videos rendered in a structured way, and much more.

Give full attention to the page load time 

Having a faster page load speed isn’t only increasing your Google ranking, but it is also contributing to customer satisfaction. Faster page navigation means that users may see more page views each time they visit your law firm website.

Conducted on the behalf of Akamai, Forrester Consulting found out that, 47% of the customer expect to wait no longer than 3 seconds for a web page to load.  With the usage of specific modules and methods, Drupal manages to reach marketing goal faster. Modules and methods like:

Caching your pages

Drupal 8 is such an understanding CMS that it enables caching by default for anonymous visitors. The user has the ability to select the maximum limit of the page caching based on how quickly the content of the website changes.

Compress images (CSS and Javascript files)

Google is really fond of fast loading sites. Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation module aggregates and compresses the CSS and Javascript files to make the site run faster.

Content Distribution Network (CDN) 

The role of a CDN is to store websites on a server, and the CDN module in Drupal provides easy CDN integration to all the Drupal sites. It changes the file URLs so that the file is downloaded from a CDN instead of the server.

Google Analytics

Drupal also provides its users with web statistics tracking system called Google Analytics. The module allows the users to add statistics features like single/multi/cross domain tracking, monitoring the links that have to be tracked, monitoring the files that are downloaded, supporting site search, Drupal message tracking etc

Content is the King 

Note that if your website content does not engage the user then it might not be serving the purpose even if your website consists of great web design. Poor content tends to lose the audience. 

Drupal allows its user to edit and customize content without the need of modifying the entire website. With the help of intuitive modules like ctools, field group, paragraphs, entity API etc, the user can build their own content types that have their own set of fields. 

According to content marketing institute, 89% of B2B organizations are using content marketing as their strategy of marketing business. 

Source: Content Marketing Institute

And Drupal is the platform which lets you deliver personalized content and contributes vividly as a content manager. 

Drupal would not only contribute to the editing and deleting part of the content but it would also help you to future-proof it. Machines are able to read the content by reviewing the metadata of a website. The metadata structure which is also called as the schemes provide context to the content of a page. Which means that when the search engine views the page they are not only repeating the content but also serve with additional guidance. Drupal 8 uses Schema.org for tagging. Not only this but Drupal has also changed its migration path to provide its user with semi-annual updates which save time, money and a lot of energy 

You just can’t ignore the cost factor 

If you are choosing the best CMS for your law firm website then it should be 100% free and should have the ability where the user can easily install it without the hassle of purchasing any license or recurring fees. 

Drupal comes with the option of choosing from the variety of open source modules that can be used for developing a website adhering to your preference. 

In the Nutshell

It is evident that Drupal has become a very popular platform for lawyers and law firms, especially among related marketing professionals, and for a good reason, this powerful and versatile CMS offers exactly the right tools and visibility potential to both the existing audience as well as to the new ones. 

Opensense Labs has sound experience in building such websites and provide services that help you modify your website. It would be our honor to help you develop a dream site that would not only benefit you in every aspect but would also bring about a planned and systematic architecture for your law firm. 

Ping us on hello@opensenselabs.com. Now. 

blog banner blog image Drupal Drupal 8 Law Firm Website Legal website Drupal community Decoupled Drupal User Experience Multisite Multilingual Site Security Drupal Modules Performance Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On

This module is a collection of useful drush commands for cloning/creating/copying fields in the node entity type bundle and in the profile entity type bundle of Drupal 8 from other node entity type bundle.

This module provides 2 useful commands for drupal 8 fields:--

Module to speed up failed image style requests.

Instead of serving a html 404 page, it serves a 1x1 transparent image with some headers.

If you have a lot of failing image style requests, this can save you server time and money!

Disclaimer: I have not tested this on a large scale yet.

Publisher: R. Talsorian Games Inc.
Rating: 5
Although this is a collection of eight ready-to-run adventures, this book is a bit more than that. Whatever backgrounds your party has, it's assumed they like to hang out at a bar called The Forlorn Hope, which is owned and operated by veterans of the Central American Wars. They have gravitated to the life of a Solo, and it's a good place for rumours and job opportunities for anyone able to prove their worth in the shady world of the cyberpunk. Your party probably fits right in.

To that end, the book opens with extensive details of the Forlorn Hope itself, and a whole bunch of NPCs found there. Most of it (apart from game mechanical bits) is presented as an article about the place: you might even want to share that with your players. There are even interviews with the NPCs that help bring them to life. Floorplans and notes on setting up your game - this is intended for fairly new if not beginning characters, but you might have a more experienced party so there are notes on how to accommodate them - are also provided.

It's not all 'local colour', though. Now for the neat bit. Each adventure is linked to at least one of the NPCs. This helps the party develop a feeling of investment, the fellow at the centre of whatever's going on right now is someone they drink with regularly. The adventures are designed to be run in a single session, but of course could be expanded on if you wish. Reading the first adventure - Agency Job - it all sounds very familiar: I think I played it many years ago. It involves raiding a consulate to get information on some foreign government's clandestine activities, and then putting paid to them by sinking a boat that's pivotal to their operations. When I played it we attacked by swimming underwater, and my character enjoyed it so much she kept the skill chips and SCUBA equipment in lieu of her fee!

Other adventures follow thick and fast. Each comes with ideas for both expanding the actual scenario and for follow-up adventures. There's A Hard Road to Go, which takes the party on a simple convoy escort job (yeah, right!). The Impalers involves a trip to Europe to find one of the regulars' missing brother. Girls' Night Out is an extraction mission. Colombian Cookout is a mercenary mission in South America (but there's scope for non-combat-oriented characters as well). Fall of the Axeman is a detective job, the party needs to find out who killed one of the Forlorn Hope regulars, and why. Street smarts and a spot of netrunning will come in useful for this one, but there's brawling as well. Tough as Nails involves helping a Federal Marshal clear a friend's name in a battle against corruption in law enforcement, and finally The Last Long Rider sends the party after a cyberpsychotic veteran. Each adventure is packed with detail, maps, believable NPCs, and more.

This gets to the core of *Cyberpunk*. Characters living in a gig economy, picking up dangerous jobs where they can, and living a life that's fast and exciting... but perhaps not very long. A good way to get started, especially if you don't have a grand campaign arc in mind right away.

Publisher: R. Talsorian Games Inc.
Rating: 5
Although this is a collection of eight ready-to-run adventures, this book is a bit more than that. Whatever backgrounds your party has, it's assumed they like to hang out at a bar called The Forlorn Hope, which is owned and operated by veterans of the Central American Wars. They have gravitated to the life of a Solo, and it's a good place for rumours and job opportunities for anyone able to prove their worth in the shady world of the cyberpunk. Your party probably fits right in.

To that end, the book opens with extensive details of the Forlorn Hope itself, and a whole bunch of NPCs found there. Most of it (apart from game mechanical bits) is presented as an article about the place: you might even want to share that with your players. There are even interviews with the NPCs that help bring them to life. Floorplans and notes on setting up your game - this is intended for fairly new if not beginning characters, but you might have a more experienced party so there are notes on how to accommodate them - are also provided.

It's not all 'local colour', though. Now for the neat bit. Each adventure is linked to at least one of the NPCs. This helps the party develop a feeling of investment, the fellow at the centre of whatever's going on right now is someone they drink with regularly. The adventures are designed to be run in a single session, but of course could be expanded on if you wish. Reading the first adventure - Agency Job - it all sounds very familiar: I think I played it many years ago. It involves raiding a consulate to get information on some foreign government's clandestine activities, and then putting paid to them by sinking a boat that's pivotal to their operations. When I played it we attacked by swimming underwater, and my character enjoyed it so much she kept the skill chips and SCUBA equipment in lieu of her fee!

Other adventures follow thick and fast. Each comes with ideas for both expanding the actual scenario and for follow-up adventures. There's A Hard Road to Go, which takes the party on a simple convoy escort job (yeah, right!). The Impalers involves a trip to Europe to find one of the regulars' missing brother. Girls' Night Out is an extraction mission. Colombian Cookout is a mercenary mission in South America (but there's scope for non-combat-oriented characters as well). Fall of the Axeman is a detective job, the party needs to find out who killed one of the Forlorn Hope regulars, and why. Street smarts and a spot of netrunning will come in useful for this one, but there's brawling as well. Tough as Nails involves helping a Federal Marshal clear a friend's name in a battle against corruption in law enforcement, and finally The Last Long Rider sends the party after a cyberpsychotic veteran. Each adventure is packed with detail, maps, believable NPCs, and more.

This gets to the core of *Cyberpunk*. Characters living in a gig economy, picking up dangerous jobs where they can, and living a life that's fast and exciting... but perhaps not very long. A good way to get started, especially if you don't have a grand campaign arc in mind right away.

The Drupal Community Working Group is pleased to announce that nominations for the 2019 Aaron Winborn Award are now open. This annual award recognizes an individual who demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community. It will include a scholarship and stipend to attend DrupalCon and recognition in a plenary session at the event.

Nominations are open to not only well-known Drupal contributors, but also people who have made a big impact in their local or regional community. If you know of someone who has made a big difference to any number of people in our community, we want to hear about it. The winner of the award will receive a $1200 USD DrupalCon travel stipend as well as a ticket to DrupalCon. 

This award was created in honor of long-time Drupal contributor Aaron Winborn, whose battle with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) (also referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease) came to an end on March 24, 2015. Based on a suggestion by Hans Riemenschneider, the Community Working Group, with the support of the Drupal Association, launched the Aaron Winborn Award.

Nominations are open until March 1, 2019. A committee consisting of the Community Working Group members and past award winners will select a winner from the nominations. Current members of the CWG and previous winners are exempt from winning the award.

Previous winners of the award are:

2015: Cathy Theys
2016: Gábor Hojtsy
2017: Nikki Stevens
2018: Kevin Thull

If you know someone amazing who should benefit from this award you can make your nomination here.
 

I want to share observations on why most projects from novice developers do not look very stylish. And the main problem that we noticed is the use of ready-made game assets.

Timeout Notification is a module for Drupal 8, utilizing Drupal's session lifetime settings found in the services.yml file. This will provide the users a simple notification of an upcoming session expiration, allowing them to renew their current session without losing any critical data due to unknown loss of session.

Installation

1. Place the timeout-notification directory in your modules directory.
2. Enable the Timeout Notification module at admin/modules.

Customization

This will be an experiment in permission handling. Do not use yet, it might screw your site.