Friday, January 8, 2010

A Bunch of Random Stuff

Wow...I've got so many thoughts blazing through my head right now I'm a little overwhelmed with where to begin. For having "a day off," I sure have expended a lot of mental energy this morning!

No writing yet, though. Ugh...I am NOT putting stuff off, I'm just getting all my other ducks in a row, answering emails and such, while eating a big, traditional English Breakfast at the Four Spoons. I am a great believer in Lincoln's philosophy, "if you only have eight hours to chop down the tree, spend the first seven sharpening your axe!"

[of course, this is sometimes at odds with my loved ones. My wife would say, "if you start chopping now you'll probably get finished in six hours!" while my brother would spend NINE hours sharpening the axe, bargaining for more time by saying he'll do the cut job for free]

Point is, I'm not actively TRYING to procrastinate, folks. Though I did get a little side-tracked by Jim Mora's firing as the Seahawks head coach. Ugh...the play-offs start this weekend! I've got work to do!

The box place turned out to be a dud (they had nothing in the dimensions I want)...at this point it appears I will be making my own. Heading out to a supply shop today, and will be deriving a template from my old TSR boxes (yes, I still have some for whatever reason...God knows I'm a packrat and these poor things are crushed to death at the bottom of a large box of papers and whatnot...no B/X boxes, though, unfortunately). Something to do while watching football.

First art submissions received...o boy o boy o boy. So far so awesome. Will be working on lay-out today as well, and will also be turning my "reading .pdf" into a printable mock-up.

Speaking of the .pdf...have received feedback from the Doctor, and he thinks it's great, though he seems to have missed the point as he tells me, "dude, I think you should publish this!" Dude, what the hell do you think I'm doing? He does not read my blog, so he seems to have missed this little detail.

Interesting side benefit...the Doc appears to be an excellent target sample for feedback. As his only reference to B/X is through Labyrinth Lord, he is able to address the game in how it works with LL. He asks why I bothered to duplicate many of the spell lists from LL, for example (because the early level spell lists of both are based on B/X...I don't bother describing the effects of these low level spells, but I include the entire B/X list). He likes the monsters and magic items included. I am hoping for more feedback on some of the system stuff as he gets deeper in his perusal. He likes the lay-out...yay!

Talked to Joel, last night...he's going to send me some artwork. He's doing the World of Warcraft thing these days, god help him. Oh, well. We'll see if he's up to some painting.

Oh...and a new interested party wants to submit art, and may have been wrangled into doing stuff for my module. Better get that done.

Figured out how to configure my scanner/printer and download the necessary software onto my computer last night...made my first run at scanning and it worked great! I am so excited! My wife will be so proud that I did something technical all by myself!
: )

Yesterday, I posted some thoughts on adventure design, which in analysis seems to be an overall negative critique of the length of the design. Sorry for the negativity; doesn't mean I don't love and continue to use these adventure modules...just think maybe they need to be used in a slightly different way. I want to address this more at length later, and in addition want to post about something from this awesome article on Prokopius. The awesomeness is NOT the lambasting of the thief class...it is the adventure design implications that are worth the read. Check it out.

Picked up Wormwood a couple days ago. Damn you Palladium! As with Rifts Russia, in re-reading this gem, I see so much squandered potential. I don't think I will ever play another Rifts game again, but damn if I'm not going to riff on their ideas for my own private games (due to Palladium's policies, I will probably NOT be posting anything to this blog in the near future). However, let me just say that Wormwood makes an EXCELLENT setting for B/X or OD&D and I fully intend to use it as such. So there!

All right, I got quite a bit to do today (including cleaning the yard of my dogs' leavings...man, this is the one time when Seattle rain makes life suck!). I'll be checking in later!

Have a great Friday everyone!

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