Madness Cards for Out of the Abyss

By Erik Ogan on May 9, 2018 11:20 PM | 2 Comments
I recently started a new campaign with the Dungeons & Dragons group for which I am DM’ing. It is one I had been planning for months. When polled about where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do, players immediately said “The Upside-Down!”

I thought to myself: “You want to play in a shadow-world with a heavy emphasis on madness where Demogorgon features prominently? I think we can make that happen!” I am using Out of the Abyss as the spine for this campaign, adding elements of the Shadowfell, and leaning heavily on madness as a theme.

Rather than adding a Sanity ability score, or the monotonic short-term, long-term, indefinite madness cycle in the DMG, I came across John Scott's Madness Card Deck and that inspired me to reedit, reformat, and reimagine them.

I had a set printed, and I am pretty happy with the results (here is a representative sample):

Seeing them in person shows that they print darker than I realized they would, but it’s far from fatal.

It’s all built with XSLT & FOP. The sources to build the deck (and add your own cards, or tweak mine) can be found on Github, and you can download the PDF, or a tarball of the PNGs at 300dpi. I’ve been toying with the idea of adding a textured background in place of the flat black. But for now I am going to call this run done.

I would love feedback on them, and suggestions for improvements!

Finally, I would like to give a big thank you to the artists whose works made this possible: CylionDraw, Skyrawathi, and M-Delcambre.

Partial Availability of Passenger 3.0.19-1 RPMs

By Erik Ogan on January 19, 2013 6:55 PM
TL;DR: Packages are now available, untested, for 3.0.19 on Fedora 17 and RHEL 6. Fedora 18 and RHEL 5 will have to wait until I am on a more stable network connection again.

Fedora Core 17 posed a serious challenge to the packaging of Passenger. One that, frankly, I had neither the time nor the energy to undertake. I toyed with it a few times in the vain hope of a quick solution, but one never came.

This past week I have been on vacation and I decided to dive back in with FC17 & 3.0.19. On Tuesday FC18 was announced, crystalizing exactly how far behind I've gotten.

I have had some good succes with FC17 & RHEL6. I can't download FC18 DVDs on this Mexican resort network. The RHEL5 build is also behaving badly, but may yet be due to this flakey network. Both of those will have to wait for me to return.

In the future I should be much more timely with the updates.

Passenger 3.0.11-1 RPMs Available

By Erik Ogan on November 28, 2011 11:54 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I just released Passenger 3.0.11-1 RPMs. (3.0.10 was skipped upstream)

Anyone using the passenger-release package can yum update to get the new packages. Otherwise, they're available in the repository: http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/ (and soon its mirrors)

Anyone else should note that the instructions on the Phusion blog are wrong. Yum will refuse to install the passenger-release package if you do not yet have the GPG key. The instructions on the repository include the step necessary to install the key.

Please note that this is almost certainly the last release that will support Fedora 14 (official support for which ends December 8, 2011)

Notable changes:
  • Bump Passenger to 3.0.11
  • Bump nginx to 1.0.10
Thanks!

Passenger 3.0.9-2 RPMs Available

By Erik Ogan on November 13, 2011 2:31 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I just released Passenger 3.0.9-2 RPMs.

Anyone using the passenger-release package can yum update to get the new packages. Otherwise, they're available in the repository: http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/ (and soon its mirrors)

Notable changes:
  • Fedora 16 support
  • Explicit "provides" declaration including the release tag, to avoid incorrect package dependencies. (Thanks to Viliam Pucik)
Questions, comments, and reports are best directed to the Github repository, but are welcome anywhere.

Working on Fedora 16 Packages

By Erik Ogan on November 12, 2011 9:25 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I have an ISO and with luck I'll have packages in the next few hours. Of course, whenever I say that there are unforeseen complications.

Sorry for the delay, I appear to have been accidentally unsubscribed from the fedora-announce list.

Passenger 3.0.9-1 RPMs Available

By Erik Ogan on September 6, 2011 9:15 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I just released Passenger 3.0.9-1 RPMs.

Anyone using the passenger-release package can yum update to get the new packages. Otherwise, they're available in the repository: http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/ (and soon its mirrors)

Notable changes:
  • Bump Passenger to 3.0.9
  • Bump nginx to 1.0.6
  • SELinux changes:
    • Added a new SELinux boolean (httpd_passenger_use_shared_libs) to allow applications to load gems with native code. It is off by default. (Thanks to Darrell for this patch!)
    • Moved Apache's PassengerTempDir to /var/run/passenger. This is a better solution than the policy module changes we had previously. (see RedHat Bug #730837 for more information)

EL 6 packages are still being built by hand, I've had some field reports of earlier packages working, but would feel a whole lot better with more reports. Thanks!

Questions, comments, and reports are best directed to the Github repository, but are welcome anywhere.

(This entry is dated the time of the release, but I didn't notice it was not published until early November)

Passenger 3.0.8-1 RPMs Available

By Erik Ogan on August 4, 2011 12:07 AM
I just released Passenger 3.0.8-1 RPMs.

Anyone using the passenger-release package can yum update to get the new packages. Otherwise, they're available in the repository: http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/ (and soon its mirrors)

Notable changes:
  • Bump Passenger to 3.0.8
  • Bump nginx to 1.0.5
Also note that, as of this writing, the official Phusion blog post is wrong on a few key points:
  1. Packages are available for EL 6 distributions (RHEL/CentOS/ScientificLinux). They are still being built by hand, but have been tested and are working in the field.
  2. Fedora 15 support has supplanted Fedora 13, as the Fedora Project lifecycle only supports two releases at a time.
  3. The passenger-release package should be installed using yum install... rather than rpm -Uvh...(The exception to this rule is EL5, whose yum does not support this). This is most important on Fedora distributions, which complain forever once packages are installed outside of yum.

EL 6 packages are still being built by hand, I've had some field reports of earlier packages working, but would feel a whole lot better with more reports. Thanks!

Questions, comments, and reports are best directed to the Github repository, but are welcome anywhere.

Sorry for the delay these were held up by up-stream changes to the invocation of asciidoc that I had already fixed, but commented out because 3.0.7 wasn't affected. Sometimes it takes longer when you're sure you've already fixed that bug.

Passenger 3.0.7-5 RPMs

By Erik Ogan on July 31, 2011 11:45 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I just released Passenger 3.0.7-5 RPMs.

Anyone using the passenger-release package can yum update to get the new packages. Otherwise, they’re available in the repository: http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/ (and soon its mirrors)

Notable changes:
  • Fixes a crash (segmentation fault) on start up when SELinux is disabled (introduced in 3.0.7-4)
  • Fixes mod_passenger’s rubygem-passenger-native-libs dependency, which will prevent any further unnecessary compilation on servers which may or may not have the necessary components installed. (For a while it has also been easy to create rubygem-passenger-native-libs packages for other ruby interpreters. A forthcoming post will explain that in detail.)
  • Adds httpd to mod_passenger’s dependencies. Obviously the former cannot be run without the latter.
RHEL/CentOS 6 packages are still being built by hand, I’ve had some field reports of them working, but would feel a whole lot better with more reports. Thanks!

Questions, comments, and reports are best directed to the Github repository, but are welcome anywhere.

Passenger 3.0.7-4 with EL6 & Fedora 15 Support!

By Erik Ogan on July 11, 2011 6:36 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Yesterday CentOS finally opened the floodgates and released 6.0 into the wild. After spending most of the day downloading new ISOs[*], I set about making passenger packages for EL6.

Anyone using the passenger-release package can yum update to get the new packages. Otherwise, they're available in the repository: http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/ (and soon its mirrors)

The notable changes:
  1. The biggest news for this release: Support for EL6 (RHEL, CentOS, and SL) an Fedora 15!
  2. The PassengerHelperAgent used by mod_passenger and nginx-passenger has been moved to its own SELinux domain, and the httpd_use_ps boolean has been removed. It has always bothered me that installing mod_passenger could open up /bin/ps to other httpd_t code (like mod_php & mod_perl for example). This solution much better separates the concerns. (Thanks to Darrell Fuhriman for doing the research and prodding me into implementing the correct solution!)
  3. mod_passenger and nginx-passenger files are now correctly labeled after install. (Thanks to Viliam Pucik for this patch!)
  4. A few of the helper scripts in passenger-standalone were being installed with the wrong permissions. This has been corrected.
  5. The packages should now build cleanly on Amazon Linux AMI. (Thanks to Jordi for the heads-up!)
Mock's build images still point at the beta, and probably will for a little while so I grabbed both ISO images and did a simple build on two installed VMs. I'll feel better when these come out of a consistent environment like mock's, but for now they should be fine.

[*] The aforementioned images I had acquired on Friday turned out to not be final ISOs. They were probably close enough, but in the interest of prudence I downloaded them again.

CentOS ISOs!

By Erik Ogan on July 8, 2011 9:02 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

This afternoon I got my grubby, little hands on x86_64 ISOs for CentOS 6. Since I lost at MUNI-roulette on the way home this evening, I took the opportunity to try installing them into a VM. At first glance, there is no "mock" package, which is rather troubling, but I am holding out hope that will be available when I reach connectivity.

If it's not, I'll have to spend the time to download the i686 ISOs to complete a Passenger build cycle. It would be a royal pain to do it that way, But I'm itching to get it out the door, so we'll wait and see.

Update: Very interesting: the mirror from which I grabbed my ISOs no longer has a 6 tree, so I guess this will have to wait until tomorrow or whenever they finally open the floodgates.

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