2024(-ish): More Than I Thought

A while back, I lamented that it had taken me nine years to write 55,000 (now closer to 60) words of The Nameless Way, and I still had a long way to go. I was thinking about how that happened. I don't much feel like recapping 2024, at least not in public, but the New Year seems to be a good time to look back on the stuff I've been doing since I started this novel in 2015.

I committed to the book as my main project in June of 2015, and started writing the draft (except for the prologue, which I wrote in 1999 or 2000 or so) in August or September. The first chapter was based on the adventure I started the original campaign with. Getting that down was the most fun I had had writing in a long time. I think the second chapter was pretty easy too, although it was an almost entirely new story to explain some stuff from a segment I couldn't use. That's a topic for another blog, though. 

I think it was 2016 when other stuff started eating into my progress. I don't mean the usual stuff. I don't mean the dayjob, or gaming, or conventions, or eBay, or even random crises like bouts of depression. Those are all issues, but not issues worth commenting on. That's just life. The delays I'm looking at now are the side projects. 

Some of those projects were things I felt committed to because I had already done most of the creative part and just never shared it. Some of them were things I thought would make me some money to keep me going while I finished The Nameless Way. On that second purpose, it's worth noting that none of them succeeded. In retrospect, it's almost like I was being scolded for straying from The Plan. 

So, the first thing was Qalidar. I had already given up on my original vision for a Qalidar Role-Playing Game, partly because my soul was crushed in mid-stream by personal shit, but also because I had been thinking for a while that designing games was never going to keep my demons fed. So I settled on a less ambitious way to finish what I started. I made a "basic" book with an adventure and introductory rules. This was before I started on The Nameless Way. Rather than making a book of complete rules or something like that, I decided that I would follow the basic book with supplements, which would eventually expand it to a more complete game. Less satisfying and, obviously, less marketable, but honest. 

I published Supplement 1: The Fire Within, in 2016. The original idea was that each supplement would highlight a particular culture/race/whatever. This got fudged right at the start, though, because my real goal for the first supplement was to make sure the game worked all the way to the standard d20 level cap of twenty, to finish the rules for organizations, and to cover any missing equipment and stuff like that from the basic book. Ultimately, it was obvious to even a casual reader that the cultural focus on the Stardust was just an afterthought. I already knew there would be no more culture-focused books when I finished this one. I was just paying lip service to that plan. 

In another year, there was Supplement 2, the Qalidar Qritter Qatalog. As before, this was something I felt I owed to the two or three people who had actually played or purchased Qalidar. Also, part of the main artist's pay was a cut of PDF sales, so, having already delivered some amazing work, he deserved at least a little effort on my part. By this time, I knew I was never going to go on with the culture-focused supplements. I did have a bunch of creatures I could share, though, and I knew the game wouldn't be complete without them. It was just a matter of formatting it all. And of course formatting takes time. 

Because of its weird production history, the Qalidar game is a little awkward if you want to put it all together and dive right in to the full game. It still works well, I think, if you play the intro scenario and move on to the rest from there. I still enjoy playing it. Well, running it. I'm the only GM, so that's all I can do. Every once in a while, I think I'd like to put it all together into one book like a normal RPG. I know I shouldn't. 

There was a little bit of ghostwriting. Four projects, scattered across the time I was doing this other work. That actually did pay, but not nearly enough to justify the time it ate. And yes, that's all I'm going to say about it.

HOGZILLA! HOGZILLA! HOGZILLA! Or TerrorHog. Whatever. The Hogzilla episode of The Last Drive-In was lots of fun. Not long after that, we had planned one of our "hoot" get-togethers. I started putting together a Hogzilla Crawlspace scenario to run at that event, complete with insanity rules and a drinking game. However, most of our gaming friends in Ohio had become unreliable, so that hoot never happened. 

Anyway, Tom convinced me that I should put it together for publication, because that would be easy. There's a big difference between my convention-event notes and an intelligible scenario that someone else could run. Like, seriously, I'll go to Gen Con with only some pre-gens, a vague idea, and some names scribbled down. If I had to actually prepare for the games I ran at conventions, I would never run games at conventions. 

Thinking I might reach a new audience, I dove into the rabbit hole and made TerrorHog, the Hogzilla game. Joe Bob Briggs held the book up on TV in his goofy Biedermeir/pimp costume, Shudder tweeted about it on their official account, and still nobody bought it. To paraphrase Joe Bob's introduction of the movie, I did all that work, only to find that the world was not clamoring for Hogzilla role-playing games. Another cosmic rebuke for my infidelity.  

The next thing was that Amazon announced this new feature for publishing serials in 2020. I immediately thought of Blackridge, which had originally been patterned after serial format stuff. I had just moved and, obviously, lost my job, so I thought this could help. It inspired me to start a second serial on a different platform, just to, you know, feel out the market. This stuff actually overlapped the Hogzilla thing, by the way.

The first one was the Blackridge serial on Amazon. I still feel that it's a great story. I like the characters and it had a great plot. Unfortunately, the episodes I published were some of the worst writing I've ever done. Well, the worst since college, anyway. It was more like the Cliff's Notes of a story than an actual story. 

At the same time, I also tried to serialize the Komar novel I had been outlining, the sort-of sequel to Losing Lanterns, starring Aradoc, with characters from my high school D&D group as the sociopathic treasure hunters he gets stuck in the desert with. The stuff I wrote for this was better, but also rushed. As before, I was cranking it out for all the wrong reasons. It was very much a story worth telling. It's still a story I want to tell, but it wasn't the right time. I also think the weird proprietary token buy-in thing Amazon and this other platform were pushing was stupid, but that doesn't redeem my infidelity. 

Part of the plan for TerrorHog was to make it a complete game, since we couldn't assume that the audience we were trying to reach would have any interest in investing in a new game on top of the pig monster book. To make it easier to get into, I made a customized version of Crawlspace, made only for the one-shot with the pre-generated characters. That being the case, we thought it might be nice to have a version of those rules that could stand on its own with character generation and stuff like that. So I put Crawlspace: 21 & Over together for that. 

I collaborated on a novella with a friend. She had already written most of it. All I did was go back through to insert some weird stuff about nephilim and write the end. As it happens, both of us had done much better work on our own projects. Her part was probably the better of the two, but I did enjoy sinking Columbus and a lot of southern Ohio into a giant magma pit. 

After all that, there's another edition of Stars, Specters, and Super-Powers. The first edition had a terrible cover, and I had omitted a story that should have been in it. I also added some background stuff and art Mike did for the comic book plot that led to "The Man Comes Around." Having this book and Losing Lanterns out there and looking good when The Nameless Way finally drops, has been part of The Plan for a long time, so that was unquestionably worth doing. 

So, why blather on about all this? Mostly as a reminder to myself. Memory plays tricks on you. I keep coming back to, "What have I been doing all this time? What's the point if this is all I've got after nine years?" I sometimes wonder if it was all like the past couple of weeks, during which I've hardly written anything because I've been buried in life garbage and it messes with my head even when it's not stealing my time. I can look at this, though, and remind myself that I wasn't just staring at the wall the whole time. 

And I guess it's also a reminder that the time side projects take up isn't free. 

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2019: Keep on Livin'

"There’s this emperor, and he asks the shepherd’s boy how many seconds in eternity. And the shepherd’s boy says, ‘There’s this mountain of pure diamond. It takes an hour to climb it and an hour to go around it, and every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain. And when the entire mountain is chiseled away, the first second of eternity will have passed.’ You may think that’s a hell of a long time. Personally, I think that’s a hell of a bird."

--The Twelfth Doctor

I've been feeling stronger this year. I'm not there yet. Is anybody ever really there? It's nice, though, to get to one of these self-indulgent little retrospectives and, instead of saying, "I think I might make some progress next year," actually saying, "I think I made some progress this year."

Starting off the year... ugh. January is like coming out of an amusement park and realizing that your car has been stolen. A big thing early on was trying to get a better hold on my time. Backing away from Facebook helped some. I also found new ways to sneak in writing time at work or wherever. Anything to turn that post-holiday slog into something better. It paid off in more progress on The Nameless Way and a brighter outlook in general.

The Scrap Pile campaign wrapped this year. I think Curtis and Tom might try picking it up, but this year Tom's prequel was the only move in that direction. I didn't set out to end the campaign. I love the Scrap Pile. I had plenty of ideas for more scrapventures, although the heroes and their antics were starting to feel a little stale. Stuff just came together, though. A long-running plot (not even mine, for the most part) ended in one character's death and a lot of post-betrayal bad feelings (in-character, not real world). It just felt right. At first it was just a hiatus to make way for a new team but eventually I decided it was over.

Partly, that was because of my new most bestest thing, Defenders. It was originally just going to be a one-shot for Carnage. Despite having re-watched everything and taken copious notes, I was a little nervous about doing justice to the shows and to a real-world setting I've never even visited, so I ran a playtest first for some friends. I had a great time. Charlie and Kyrinn were game to keep it running, so run we did.

Glasses: After years of slogging along with readers, I finally got prescription glasses with progressive lenses this year. It may not sound like the sort of thing that's worth mentioning, but it made a huge difference to me. I'd almost call it life-changing. Everything is so much easier.

Escape: City of Heroes is back! It's in the form of a bunch of quasi-legal third party servers, so I have no idea how long it'll last, but for now I can play the game again with a whole swarm of other people, and that's been great.

Facebook: Eventually I missed hearing what my benighted friends were up to so I created a new Facebook account and deleted the old one. I still refuse to use Its messenger or even keep the FB app on my phone. I'm not happy about feeding that monster, so I'm trying to limit my contributions. Apart from a comment here and there, I avoid adding content. I post a lot less on FB than on MeWe or Twitter. Anything substantial on Facebook appears only as a link to somewhere else (whereas I even post complete blog entries on my MeWe page). There's almost certainly an algorithm to make sure the posts of people who do this are never seen by anybody, and Facebook users are conditioned not to click external links anyway, but fuck it. And of course I avoid using Its peripheral services or liking anything from a page that doesn't belong to me or one of my friends. I'm under no illusion that anything I can do will impede Facebook in any way, but that doesn't mean I have to help It.

Conventions: I didn't go to Gen Con this year. That was really just because of dayjob bullshit and a long trip I had to take. I didn't want to cancel and I missed seeing all the people I usually hang out with there, but it turned out to be kind of nice skipping all the hassles, so I'm planning to skip next year too. I did go to Carnage and had a great time. The Defenders event went over well. The others were all right. And of course there were friends I hardly ever get to see and there was booze to drink. And I love that resort. I also went to BASHCon, which is always a laid-back good time.

Maggie's Farm: Oddly enough, there's a little bit of game publishing news. I'm slowly pecking away at a compiled edition of the three Qalidar books that organizes everything in a friendlier way and might include a few extra bits. My pace on this is very leisurely. I just pick it up whenever I can't decide what else to do. I might even finish it before I die, but if you're looking for odds, your money would probably be better invested in that flawless blackjack strategy your uncle told you about.

For next year? Keep waking up. I feel like I actually got somewhere this year and I mean to celebrate it, but I've still got a ways to go. Keep sneaking off to write at work. Stay aware of things that screw with my head and waste my time. Either manage them or dump them. Don't let people derail me and drag me into their agendas.

FINISH THAT BOOK AND START ANOTHER ONE!

And another one, and another one...

Maybe exercise more. 

Qalidar Qritter Qatalog

The Qalidar Qritter Qatalog has been released. It'll be in stores in a few months, but you can get it on DriveThru and Amazon now.

Anyway, once upon a time, there was the 2013 Pre-Release Edition of Qalidar: Resistance. It was somewhat hastily assembled, but it was the complete game as it existed at the time. All the character stuff, all the rules stuff, all the setting stuff, all the monster stuff. My original intent was to build the final release of the game on the same model, and put out a "quick-start" in the meantime, possibly with a Kickstarter once the additional writing was done. Part of this final project was that major sentient "monsters" would each have a profile section with technology, organizations, the whole deal, instead of just an entry under a stat block.

Other stuff happened and I needed to put it all on hold, so I took down the "quick-start" and replaced it with the Basic book. That book is limited to fifth level, but otherwise it's a full, playable game. I figured that would do for a while.

Time passed. I had another idea. I was, by then, certain that I would never want the crowd-funding chain around my ankle. I also had another project going which was much more important, and putting together a big ole game book would be too much of a distraction. The other thing was, I thought it would be nice if the people who bought Qalidar Basic could consider it a step towards the whole game, instead of just a disposable intro pamphlet.

That brings us up to The Fire Within. I figured I could use those species profile sections I was talking about to frame individual supplements. I was also thinking of using them to zero in on pieces of the setting. Anyway, for that one I went with the Stardust. Most of the book, to be honest, is taken up by character-building stuff and expanded rules for organizations. There was a lot of that crunchy stuff that didn't make it into Basic, but needed to be published. It still gave me a concept for the title and the cover, though, and the section that really is about fire people is pretty cool.

I'm not sure I'm ever going to write those other profiles. I don't spend anywhere near as much time on game design as I used to. I still have all the original monsters, though. I put a lot into them, before their book got pushed aside, and they've just been sitting here on my hard drive since then. Some of them weren't even in the preview edition. I always felt like, without all the weird creatures, Qalidar wasn't really Qalidar.

So I crammed all the old monsters and the new monsters into one book and that's what we've got now.

The Rise and Fall of Carnage Royale and the Spiders from Mars

Hey, at least I didn't call it "Carnage Royale with Cheese." But yeah, no. There's no reason this title should make any kind of sense. I just felt like doing it. And it only gets worse from here. I don't mean Carnage; that was awesome. Just my weird, rambly blog.

My brain hurt like a warehouse. It had no room to spare. I had to cram so many things to store everything in there. And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people, and all the nobody people, and all the somebody people. I never thought I'd need so many people.

I've almost had too much gaming lately. I was in a Crawlspace game the week before, then I ran my games at Carnage, then I was in this really awful LARP on Tuesday where we pretended to take part in our own government, and now I've got another one with strangers coming up at Weird Realms tomorrow. I guess it's today now. Damn. After that I think I'm playing in Curtis's D&D Hangouts game, and then the Icons game picks up again. But enough about cramming stuff into my brain. This is about Carnage.

When you climb to the top of the mountain, look out over the sea, think about the places perhaps, where a young man could be. Then you jump back down to the rooftops, look out over the town, think about all of the strange things circulating round.

We almost always take the trip in two days. We could handle doing it in one, but this way it's more of a vacation. On the way we listened to some Bowie albums and I worked on the private Conspiracy X game I had coming up Thursday night. Well, sort of Conspiracy X. I started there, then I changed the rules to the Vortex System and threw in stuff from Qalidar. Although I have a couple of minor gripes with Unisystem, the main reason I changed it is that I'm really comfortable with Vortex, and I'm getting to the point where switching around wears me out.

Anyway we eventually got to Killington. Once we had our luggage in the room, I sent out the number so everybody could get there for the game. Steve and Matt showed up before Tom had even parked the car. Tyler was there shortly after, so I smashed his beer on the floor. Matt left because he hates me and Ray joined us before too long, so we got to gaming.

I'm an alligator. I'm a mama-papa coming for you. I'm the space invader.

It started off as a UFO hunt, but the team stumbled across a cryptid (dubbed "the snakotter" by H.P. Marlowe after seeing it swim away) in the swamp and, with the help of some locals and a fan boat, they started tracking it. This led them to a confrontation with Grey aliens who were abducting cryptids for experimentation.

Also, the whole "Grey" thing turned out to be an illusion that concealed giant parasitic mantis-wasps with psychic powers and the UFOs were really moving portals.

Then the loud sound did seem to fade. Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase. That weren't no DJ; that was hazy cosmic jive.

Tyler gave us a couple of room numbers where the pre-con party might be, then went off to get some fresh glassware. We were advised to go to "whichever one is open and noisy" or something like that. We found one that was open and had a group chatting about Spider-Man. Tom pitched in the tribute of beers he had brought for this purpose and we started hanging out and drinking. Tyler seemed to be taking a long time to show up.

After some milling about, Tom said this was just a bunch of teachers and he was going somewhere else. Swimming, maybe. I don't remember. I didn't think much of it; Tom grousing isn't the sort of thing you stop the presses for. He had, in fact, already begun his weekend-long rant about our couch being too short. The party was kind of subdued, but I figured it would pick up eventually. Still no sign of Tyler, though.

Eventually, someone clued us in to the fact that we had wandered into an after-party for the teachers' convention that was just ending. I texted Tom to let him know and he insisted he had already told me this, but that wasn't what I heard. We threw some smoke bombs and ran for the other party, where a much wider selection of booze and boozers was available. We lost Ray in the escape. I was afraid for a while that he had been eaten by angry teachers, but I saw him again Friday or Saturday so I guess they didn't hurt him too badly.

I had to phone someone so I picked on you. Hey, that's far out! So you heard him too? Switch on the TV; we may pick him up on Channel Two.

Anyway, that party broke up, so Steve and I went to find Tom. Tom was sitting on the bed in his robe, talking to Matt. Tom said he was just about to retire when Matt showed up looking for the party. Seems plausible enough. I'm not sure what else we talked about.

Friday morning was still foggy.

Eventually I had breakfast, achieved a vaguely functional state of consciousness and shuffled off to get my badge. I also bought a tee shirt, a Carnage Royale pint glass, and a Fistful of Carnage shot glass. Just because. Grabbed a souvenir poker chip, too, but I didn't bother with the program. Seems like I always end up wondering what to do with those when I get home.

Tom did Tom stuff, and then I think he was trying to take a nap while I was sorting my game stuff into the optimal backpack arrangement. He didn't seem to get why that's important. Sometimes I wonder if he's really a gamer at all. Zach showed up at some point Friday, fueling Tom's smoldering couch envy with his last-minute room.

Keep your electric eye on me, babe. Put your ray gun to my head. Press your space face close to mine, love.

Wandered over to the Snowshed for the first of my official games, a Doctor Who adventure called "Claws from the Clouds." There were five people signed up and a couple of others interested, but I guess when I couldn't promise anything before the people who pre-registered got their chance, they decided to find something else. We ended up with three: the ninth Doctor, Jack Harkness (before he was immortal), and Rose.

And it was freakin' perfect. I usually get good players for Doctor Who and, for that matter, I rarely have complaints about convention players in general, but seriously. They got into character smoothly and did a great job investigating the mystery. They even picked up on a traitor thread I hadn't really expected to use. Maybe it's just a matter of everyone being on the same page. This kind of story usually leaves plotlines that aren't explored and wanders into major developments that I have to wing because the players go in wildly unexpected directions. And that's fine, but it was really nice that everything just fell together this time.

Ziggy played for time, jiving us that we were voodoo.

Steve was wrapping up a game nearby, so I went over to babble at him. He didn't seem to be feeling well. Tom was still running his game, I think. I knew several of the people at the convention desk, but they were all busy, you know, running the convention and stuff.

I went to the bar for a bit and talked to... I think his name was Gordon. I knew him as Jack Harkness from the game. My energy drink was wearing off, though, and I suddenly found my own backpack to be very confusing, so I wandered off. Not sure what else to do, I picked up a jagged piece of metal and shuffled back to the room to carve some goetic symbols onto my belly. I hadn't had much chance to indulge this hobby, lately, so it was actually kind of nice.

I think I ran into Zach when I went to the front desk for gauze, but he had young people stuff to do. Then later Tom texted me that he was watching a Woody Allen movie or something and was sending Matt in my direction. As promised, Matt showed up a bit later with bourbon. Before long, Tom and Zach were with us. Maybe Steve too, but I don't think he stayed long if so. It's possible my sense of time was less reliable than usual.

There's a star man waiting in the sky. He'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds.

The conversation turned to perceptual filters and UFOs and all sorts of awesome stuff that should always be talked about late at night with chemically-enhanced brains. Somehow we ended up outside, where Zach and Matt smoked beside the giant propane tank. It was drizzling, but I had a hood and nobody else cared. We all wandered off to bed after that.

So where were the spiders, while the fly tried to break our balls? Just the beer light to guide us.

I only found out about this later, but it turned out that Zach had some trouble getting back to his room. After the rest of us went upstairs, he misjudged the number of flights he needed to climb and found himself in a "basement" of sorts, with a concrete floor and pipes and weird, disturbingly capacious side-rooms. Rooms without doors. My understanding is that some "Greys" found him and spirited back to his room... eventually. His recollections on the subject are questionable, however. It's possible the real Zach is still down there.

So inviting, so enticing, to play the part.

There was a thing called daylight, but I only heard rumors of its passing. Well, okay, I think it was still daylight while I was getting ready and watching Dark City. Yeah, I wish I could take credit for that irony, but the movie really was playing.

Anyway, there was some last-minute prep I wanted to get done for the Archer scenario ("Something Something Danger Zone") so I scribbled out those notes and notes and... I guess just sort of waited. I was a little anxious. I mean, screw up a standard adventure and, sure, it's not great, but screw up something that's supposed to be funny and everybody's staring at you like you should never have been born.

As it happened, nobody did that. Not in the game, anyway. In addition to the usual stuff, I had appropriated some cards from an Archer board game with quotes from the show. As each player worked the quote in, I gave them a Determination Point (I called them Groovy Bears) and another card. That kept the gags coming even when the plot slowed down. I have to admit, I stole this idea from Beckett and it worked really well here.

After the game, I hung out with Tom and Steve and Matt and somebody else for a while. Angelia and another Steve came by and we talked with them for a bit. I went to the bathroom, thinking I was probably going to suggest taking off because -- Oh, I forgot to mention that Matt had left his expensive bourbon in our room. So I was going to suggest going back to get it for him, but he was gone when I came back. I was told he went thattaway, so I did that too, catching up to him just outside the main hotel.

Jamming good with Weird and Gilly, and The Spiders from Mars. He played it left hand, but made it too far.

Eventually it was me, Matt, Tom, and Zach back in the room. Zach told us about his experience in "the basement" and it led to a whole conversation about the reality-warping power of air quotes and the non-existence of the corridor he had wandered into. Then, just for the heck of it, Zach, Matt, and I all went down there.

As we went down the stairs, Zach pointed out the abundance of dead flies and the reddish-brown patterns on the floor that suggested something being dragged along the concrete. Down in the hole, we found "laundry" and other "side rooms" and even the possibility that "humans" might be down there at that very moment.

Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth. You pull on your finger, then another finger, then your cigarette. The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget.

Zach and Tom went to bed (not together, as far as I know). Matt and I tromped off to bug Steve, but he was trying to sleep too. We tried to "help" him wake up, but that just annoyed him for some reason. Then there was Scott & Petra's party and Andre's sinister contraption and that ended too and we were outside in the cold. Andre was briefly out in the cold too. I guess he was just passing through. Then there was the hotel lobby and the hallway. It's all kind of hazy, but I suppose it was "real."

I'm not even gonna talk about "morning." Tom also wrote some stuff about Carnage Royale. Don't believe his lies.

No, love, you're not alone, no matter what or who you've been, no matter when or where you've seen. All the knives seem to lacerate your brain...

Hooting with Strahd

Assorted Stuff:

• The novel is progressing slowly but, while that pace is frustrating, I realized the other night that I'm really enjoying seeing it take shape. It's nice to feel like I'm doing the right thing.
• I might be running a Halloween session of D&D. One of my friends asked me to because her boyfriend has never played and is eager to try it out. Of course, there's a more-than-fair chance it'll never happen. I found a cool low-level setting from Curse of Strahd to use for the Halloweeny stuff. I figure I should also make sure there's an opportunity for a little bit of dungeon crawling just so he'll know how that goes. I like how the book is useful for that kind of thing even if you don't run the whole campaign.
• We played another session of the Scrap Pile campaign last weekend and are supposed to play D&D this weekend. Gaming is good.
• I went to a fun David Bowie tribute concert and had a margarita with jalapenos in it. Okay, yeah, I actually had two.
• Our water heater crapped out and took forever to replace, but it's back now.
• I'm gonna try to get The Fire Within out to game stores for December. And that reminds me, another of my friends is opening his own game store in Cleveland. I'll post again with a link when there's more info available.
• I'm running some stuff at Carnage in November but I haven't worked on any of it. I'm not even sure when my events are, anymore. I didn't think to write down what I submitted because, usually, they send me an email. That didn't happen this year. I'm sure it'll come together somehow. There's still plenty of time.

And now here's Dazzler fighting Galactus:

Qalidar RPG: Supplement 1 and Fire

I had almost given up on this one. A while back, I decided that, instead of working towards a big "complete" Qalidar book, I was going to continue to expand on the Basic book. The first order of business, naturally, would be to add in the rules that had had been left out, most importantly the remaining level progressions, but also the complete chapter on organizations. I also wanted to give it a theme, because that stuff sounds kind of dry all by itself. Part of my plan for the complete Qalidar book was that the intelligent species would each have their own section instead of being mixed in with the miscellaneous critters section, so I decided to use one of those for the theme. I was always fond of the Stardust, so I picked them.

But, after an initial burst of progress, it kind of languished for a long time. Eventually, I stopped considering it a project I was working on and moved it off to a nebulous, "maybe someday" category.

Lately, I've been feeling a bit more energetic. I'm not sure why that is, or how long it will last, but I figure I'd better do what I can with it. Even so, I had been leaving this project on the back burner -- the way, way, way back burner. Last week, though, I ran into a bit of a block working on something else. Instead of watching TV or taking a walk or something, I dug up The Fire Within and started plugging away.

Eventually, this happened.

The next time I get writer's block, I'm thinking maybe I'll do a "monster" book. How bout Qalidar Qritters for the title? Maybe something less whimsical? We'll see.

Worlds Within Worlds

2015 mostly feels like a success.

Don't make too much of the picture. That scene came to mind because this season always raises Michael's shade. It's partly the family togetherness thing and partly because his birthday was New Year's Eve. So here's a flicker of a mood that you can stare right into. Of course, there's no evil robot for me to take revenge upon, but I've found something else.

Anyway, now that we're done with that, let's see how I did on the goals I set last time.

• Losing Lanterns -- YES!
• New Novel Underway -- YES! (more on that later)
• Qalidar Supplement 1 -- Meh.

Okay, so two out of three. I don't even talk about Qalidar as something I'm working on anymore, although it wouldn't take much to finish it. As I've said before, all that's left is grunt work. It's just that, whenever I commit to sitting down and working, I want to work on the novel. The novel feels like The Future. It feels like progress. It would be nice to have that game done, though, especially after I've come so far, so it stays on the list. Eventually, it'll magically finish itself, right?

And when I don't commit to sitting down and working? Two games have really been brightening my nights lately: Icons and Dungeons & Dragons (5th edition, for those who keep count). The Icons campaign that we started in 2014 is still going, and even inspired Tom to do a few spinoff scenarios. I've rambled on before about how much fun I'm having in that game, but I felt like any summary of the highlights of 2015 would be incomplete without saying again how much I love getting together with those guys to spin our offbeat superhero tales. The D&D campaign is run by my one of my oldest, dearest friends. It's only only a few sessions in, but I'm loving both the story and the game itself. And my desert nomad paladin. She rocks.

This time last year, I hadn't decided which of three projects I was going to focus on next. A few months later, I settled on one. By June, I had changed my mind. That second plan stuck, and I got the Bad Idea outlined well enough that I was able to start getting into the prose this September. I probably should have started sooner, but the first sentence is always so hard to write. I'm still moving along and still very excited about this book. I could be putting more time into it, though.

I've even got a working title, The Throne of Gorgudai, and a web page, although the web page is not quite finished because I can't get over being offended by the expectations people have regarding summaries and character descriptions. I want to just say, "read the damn book if you want to know about the characters!" but that's probably not great for buzz or engagement or whatever the hell I'm supposed to call it.

Blackridge hasn't been abandoned. It's just something I doodle with now and then instead of a specific book I'm working on. It could very well be the next main project. One of my scenarios at last year's Gen Con was set there, and I'm thinking of doing that again. Which reminds me that I'm behind on submitting my events for BASHCon and I also need to work out my schedule for the big one pretty soon. Yeah, Gen Con's still a long ways off, but, believe it or not, the frenzy begins in January. I love Gen Con, but I hate it, too.

For next year, my only serious goal is to keep working on Gorgudai. Finishing it would be great, and should be achievable, but I'll be happy if I can honestly say that I kept it moving and stepped up the pace a bit.

So... I guess I'd better get back to work.

Shadow of the Peryton

Qalidar: Resistance - Thursday, July 30, 8pm-Midnight
Promo Blurb: The quiet college town of Blackridge is being haunted by a soaring shadow, a dark, winged shape with antlers. On the ground, weird agents are looking for something, terrorizing people in their homes and then disappearing. Is it just a coincidence that there's a nuclear power plant nearby?

For this one, I had five players, taking the Ascendant, Fixer, Karcist, Mystic, and Scrapper characters. They were third level, high enough to have some cool powers, but low enough that they can't just rampage through the town. I opened with the statement that they had all done a little bit of Storm walking, but this was a familiar town on a familiar world. The Fixer was actually a student at the local college (University of Arkansas at Blackridge) and the Karcist was his dad.

As the blurb promises, there had been some weird sightings and some suspicious retractions, and the heroes were there to check it out. Also, there wasn't really a nuke plant in town, but several people had seen the ghostly image of one across the lake.

After finding out what they could from their senile motel manager, they headed out to the college to interview students. After stalking a few, they found their way to Matt, a zine publisher who was able to point them in the direction of Jim and Stacy, who had seen the creature, and to Doctor Morton, who had made a public statement and then retracted it. Also, there had been bigfoot sightings at the Cliffs overlooking the river, but not even Matt put much stock in those stories. The Mystic and the Fixer saw a cloud that looked like a steam plume from a nuclear plant.

Morton wasn't terribly helpful, but Jim and Stacy independently provided fairly consistent accounts of an encounter on a hiking trail on Chactas Mountain. The Ascendant had a strange, brief conversation with a man in a suit. They really did see Bigfoot at the Cliffs, much to the Fixer's delight. The Karcist nailed him with a magic feather and he floated off into the foliage below.

On a nocturnal trip to the lake, they encountered a pair of eyeless children whose psychic assault almost killed the Karcist. The Ascendant encountered another man in a suit hidden in the trees, but he (the man in black, not the Ascendant) disappeared during the fight with the other creatures. I was gratified by the level of creepedoutedness my players displayed in reaction to this encounter.

Finally, they made their way out to Chactas Mountain, where the Karcist's ghostly helper led them to the peryton, actually just a winged shadow-humanoid with smoky tendrils twisting up from its head. In the fight, it was destroyed fairly quickly, only to release a fiery wraith from its charcoal-coated skeleton. The wraith was eventually destroyed by the Scrapper's crystal knife as well, leaving a fine, iridescent dust which the Fixer collected in a canteen.

Renting a boat from Ray's 24-Hour Marine, they went out to the nuclear plant and confirmed the Mystic's intuition that the forces drawing it towards this reality (which would have been extremely disruptive) had been neutralized by the creature's destruction. There was other stuff that led them to all this information, but that's the general idea.

And, damn it, I forgot to tell them about interrupts, which is a pity, because interrupts are cool.

Back to the Gen Con Write-Up:
http://www.christinalea.com/2015/08/gencon15.html

This Is Not My Beautiful House

I got into game design with the Peryton Fantasy RPG. Its first incarnation was a booklet that I photocopied, folded over, and staple-bound early in the summer of 2005. Distribution? That consisted of giving it away to whoever still looked interested after I explained what I had done. Two more incarnations brought it to its current form and even put it onto the shelves of faraway game stores.

Before I jumped into this, I had never really thought of myself as a game designer, or even someone who wanted to be a game designer. I built my first game primarily out of frustration.

I had been playing Dungeons & Dragons off and on for a long time. When the third edition came along, I liked it. I thought it fixed a lot of things that were annoying about previous editions. Weird little subsets like thief abilities and tracking were condensed into a simple core mechanic. Armor class became a target number -- one of those ideas that was so good that it seems obvious in retrospect. Multiclassing made sense. Some other stuff, probably. They also built a bloated mass of feats and skills into it, though. They turned monster and NPC creation from creative recreation into a chore. Running the game started to feel more like work than fun.

I didn't think much about it. I just started playing other games or just doing other things. When Castles & Crusades came out, I thought it looked great at first, but then I realized that, for the sake of nostalgia, they were undoing a lot of the progress I admired. What I also realized was that anybody could do this d20-modification thing. So I downloaded the SRD, tried out some ideas, and made the game I wanted to play.

From there, I kind of got swept along. Fourth edition D&D came along and I didn't like it. Pathfinder came along and it was, if anything, worse than 3rd edition D&D. My own projects came and went. I continued to enjoy playing Peryton RPG and, eventually, I started working on Qalidar:Resistance.

Peryton RPG was never much more than a d20-fix, but Qalidar was really its own thing. Still d20-based, but with unique classes, a built-in world beyond the familiar heroic fantasy formula, and all sorts of other cool stuff that I had been dreaming up over the past 20 years or so. So, yeah... cool, I guess.

Recently, though, I added fiction to the list of things that I self-publish. Not anthologies with other writers -- those are a nightmare -- just my own stuff. For a variety of reasons, I'm loving that. One of them is that I've found a huge well of motivation and just plain joy in knowing that, once I finish a book, I can consider the job done. Sure, without promotional work, it might not sell much, but that's beside the point. It's out. And that got me thinking about why I was writing game stuff.

I no longer need to write my own game to get one I'm excited about playing. Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space is awesome. I have an Icons campaign that's going great. And, to be honest, I'd rather play 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons than Peryton Fantasy.

I also think that most of the fun of game design was in teaching myself to do new things -- not just the rules-wrangling, but layouts, graphic design, organization, all that stuff. It's not new anymore, though. It's just work. Tedious, plodding work. On the whole, I enjoy the work I do in my day job quite a bit more than that stuff.

I can't even remember when fiction-writing was new, and it's still immensely rewarding. Game design? Fuck that. Games are for playing.

Oh, I'm still gonna finish Qalidar. I might even support it, or get someone else to support it. I don't see me designing any more games for a long time, though, if ever. There's just no reason.

Eyes Open

Losing Lanterns was as good as Losing Lanterns could be, but there are things that nag me about it. Chief among them is that it's a novella made out of short stories. It was never really plotted out the way a novel should be, so it has a weird, lumpy, pacing and... other stuff... I guess. Yeah, boring topic. I only mentioned it because I'm excited to be doing this next one the right way.

Okay, technically, my next-up project is another Qalidar supplement, but I don't have a lot more to say about that. Okay, a little bit, but then we move on to novels. The Qalidar supplement is going to have the rules for taking characters up to 20th level, which is as high as I see it going. Beyond that, it's going to focus on a species of aliens called the stardust, including sections about their technology, organizations, goals, and methods. That's pretty much it. Mostly it's material I wrote a long time ago that just needs cleaning up.

One project that isn't next is a fantasy novel that's been slithering around the back of my head for the past 15 or 16 years. It's based on an our 1999-2000 D&D campaign, which is why I have been referring to it as my bad idea. A story like that -- even after I turn it into a coherent story -- is going to be full of nostalgic moments and other memories that mean nothing beyond a very small group of people. Naturally, I can write around that, but my own unreliable instincts would be something I'd have to constantly look out for. See? Bad idea, right? There's still a good chance I'll try it -- I came up with some great stuff just tinkering -- but not this time.

Another contender, one I haven't mentioned before, is a different fantasy novel. This one would feature Aradoc (from Losing Lanterns) on his own in a strange, dying land. The reason for this and for his jumbled memories is something that gets worked out as we go. No, it's not Hell or any other kind of dead people place. The other thing going on is a tense desert journey with a group of adventurers with loosely overlapping agendas and not much in the way of scruples. And lots of other stuff that I'm not prepared to go into here. Again, this is definitely still in the queue; it's just not next in line.

The winner? Welcome to Blackridge, a fictional college town in the Arkansas River valley. A diverse collection of characters plot and scheme in a vaguely soapish fashion. Also, some of them are conjuring spirits and making deals with dangerous alien intelligences. I'm hoping to combine some engaging characters with an area I know very well for a backdrop and some low-key but creepy paranormal/occult stuff to keep them hopping. There's an actual plot in there too, but I'm keeping that to myself for now. I don't have a title yet.

Imagine the perfect conclusion.

Losing Lanterns - Finished!

Hey, don't bother reading this long, meandering post! Just look at the cover, then run over to Amazon right now and grab the book in whichever format you prefer. It's pretty cheap, and better than anything you'll find in the ratty old blogosphere.

Still here? Hrm. Well... Okay, I guess I'll have to blather on about how I ended up writing this - as in history'n all that. Once upon a time, there was Eposic. They published my story, "Starshadows in Sideways Time" in The Book of Exodi (out of print).

After that book, the next one was scheduled to be Out of Order, in which the theme was, as you might have guessed, stories with a mixed-up temporal presentation. I don't remember if time travel was a requirement or if Faulknerizing would be allowed. My submission for that book was "As Always," the precursor to Part One of this novella.

Well, Eposic accepted "As Always," but went out of business before Out of Order was published, so I got the story back. I sent it to a couple of other places. I also sent the story that would become Part Three of Losing Lanterns around a bit. "As Always" actually got accepted by another outfit that went out of business before publication. I got a couple more rejections and got bored with the whole process. I know, I know, but it just occurred to me that I already knew how to get art and do layouts and all that, so maybe there was no reason to burn all those hours dealing with the ritual bullshit of submitting stories elsewhere.

I had intended all along for the two stories to mesh into a larger collection once they were done with their appearances in third party magazines, so I decided to just go ahead and re-shape them into a novel. Or a novella. Whatever.

Then I finished it, and everybody hated the end. Eventually, I agreed with them.

Then I finished it again, and here it is.

Another Year Over

In a lot of ways, 2014 was dominated by mourning. I don't mean to say that I spent the whole time shuffling around in goth gear, wailing for my dead brother, just that dealing with the loss influenced a lot of what I did and how I saw the world. I'm not done with that process - I'm not sure I ever will be - but I think 2015 might be something different.

Among the good parts of 2014 is that I've stayed in touch with some old friends  that I recently re-connected with, and even managed to drag one of them to Gen Con. Speaking of Gen Con, I made my usual round of conventions in 2014: BASHCon, Gen Con, Carnage... I missed the local Holiday Game Bash this year, and I'm not counting Cleveland ConCoction, but I still covered the main ones. I even started an Icons campaign. It's been a while since the last session, but I'm hoping to get it back on a semi-regular schedule now that we're past the holidays.

Despite lingering indifference to the whole game publishing thing, I managed to get Qalidar Basic out. I also put Stars, Specters, and Super Powers together in preparation for more fiction projects. All my projects have kind of drifted in a lazy, half-hearted morass, though. Being lazy and half-hearted isn't an unusual experience for me, but I'm wondering now if I could be ready to be something new. Probably still a lazy something, but maybe I can remember how I used to work around that.

Tom had an idea for new Qalidar stuff which led to a way that I can keep working on it without making it such a grind. To be clear, Qalidar never stopped being something I love - I just got bored with the task of turning it into a "product," and explaining it to convention players because none of them ever bother to find out anything about the games they've signed up for. Anyway, rather than focus on a big ole complete book, I'm going for a sequel to the Basic one next, with material for advancing to - I don't know - maybe 12th level, new abilities, new creatures, and at least one short adventure. Maybe more.

First, though, I've got to get Losing Lanterns, which is embarrassingly close to being finished, out there. By the way, that link goes to an old interview sort of thing which is outdated in many ways, but it's still the closest thing to a summary I've got.

Other projects? Well, there's the bad idea I had a couple of months ago. I've fleshed that out quite a bit since then, and it's shaping up into what I think will be a really good novel. I'm still not quite ready to say what it is or why it's a bad idea, though. Another idea for a novel I've been working on is, I think, quite a good idea, but I'm not going to share any details on that, either. I've been doing research and coordinating concepts, though.

So, projects for 2015:

• Losing Lanterns (almost done)
• Qalidar sequel to the Basic Book (mostly a matter of formatting and artist-wrangling)
• A Bad Idea for a Novel
• A Good Idea for a Novel

I'm not sure which of the last two will come first. I'd actually be really happy to get any three of these done. I think two done and a third well underway is a more reasonable goal, though.

Gen Con 2014: Totally Worth It

tl;dr - Shit happens, but Gen Con and my friends are still awesome.

In the Basement, Mixing Up the Medicine

For the weekend before Gen Con, we met Jerry in Columbus for a soccer game and some Stay Alive! Well, Tom and Jerry and the Boy went to a soccer game. I stayed in the room and watched a delightfully awful monster movie. They invited me, but... alone in a hotel with a monster movie! After work on Monday, despite that beautiful new Player's Handbook calling to me from above my desktop, Tom and I did a bunch of last-minute prepping and printing, including having a spiffy poster made for Crawlspace.

On the Pavement, Thinking About the Government
Tuesday, Tom didn't get off work until after 8PM, so I had plenty of time to pack before he got home. Once he did, we were off to Indy... or at least someplace close to Indy. A combination of fatigue and the need buy easels & a dolly before we hit the whirlwind of downtown Indianapolis, made us decide to stop for the night in a smallish town somewhere northwest of our destination. Wednesday morning, we bought our supplies and made our way into the heart of Indianapolis.

Don't Follow Leaders, Watch the Parking Meters
We've pretty much got this setup thing down. We couldn't check in to the hotel until four, so we picked up our badges and I transferred all our stuff to the booth space while Tom watched the car. It may sound like Tom's slacking here, but I actually volunteered for the loading job because I'd rather do something like this than have to stand around and stress out over car protocols. While I was going back and forth, I snapped a picture of the main hallway in the convention center. It's not that the scene itself was all that interesting; it's just that I was suddenly so happy to be there and wanted something I could use to recall the moment later.

That done, we called our local friend Jordan and had lunch at Acapulco Joe's, and hung out with him for a bit. From there we stowed the car, started putting the Peryton Publishing booth together, and eventually checked in at the hotel. Heard a few times from Curtis and Tim, who were making their way over from Tulsa. That's another thing I was happy about - Curtis has been a dear friend since childhood, one of the first people I played RPGs with, and I've been trying to get him out to Gen Con ever since I started going in 2004.

Jump Down a Manhole, Light Yourself a Candle
Thanks to Tom, our Wednesday night gathering has a name: Old Home Eve. This year, driven from our traditional spots so the Diana Jones folks could reserve a space big enough for their egos (okay, I actually have no idea what these people are like personally or even who's on the list - I just liked the sound of it), we ended up having to meet at the Tilted Kilt. It was noisy, but the food was good and the staff treated us well.

Over dinner and drinks, we presented Jerry with his "event uber-overlord" t-shirt to thank him for herding all the cats of the Peryton Gamers group and translating our rants and scrawls into something the Gen Con staff could use.

I bailed around 10 or 11, I think. I wanted to get at least a little bit of sleep and not be hung over for the game I was running in the morning, and I thought it might be a good idea for someone to be at the hotel whenever Curtis and Tim got there, since they were rooming with us. Besides, while I enjoy a good buzz as much as anyone, I think I've mostly outgrown getting staggering drunk and stumbling from bar to bar until I can't find one that will let me in. Mostly.

Curtis and Tim showed up not long before Tom, around 2:30 or 3:00 AM. We didn't talk a whole lot, although Curtis expressed some alarm at the presence of large numbers of weeping angels in the hotel. There were even a couple of smaller ones skulking around outside our window. A few hours later, I shoved Tom back out the door to go "open" the booth.

Try Hard, Get Barred
Thursday morning, I was all proud of myself because I got out the door in plenty of time to show up early for my game. Then I made the mistake of going through the convention center instead of around it to get to the Marriott. You see, some people go batshit insane over the official opening of the exhibit hall at 10AM on Thursday.

By "some," I mean enough to sack Rome, all ninety gazillion of whom were packed into one great shoggoth-like mass between me and my destination. Once they had closed off my retreat, many of them absolutely refused to budge, possibly for fear that I might get in front of them and snatch up some exclusive limited edition version of something they wouldn't otherwise be interested in. Maybe next year I should bring a machete.

While slogging my way through this liquescent horror, I ran into Jordan and we chatted for a while before splitting off on our separate missions. Eventually, I got a break. A small formation of Gen Con staffers in a hurry to get somewhere was pushing its way through the crowd, and I was able to jump in behind them and ride their wake past the worst of it.

Get Blessed, Try to Be a Success
Of course, I was still a few minutes late. I had been a little worried about the turnout of "Storms Over the Isle of Dread." When I came up with the idea back in January, I thought it would be a great way to draw people in. I didn't find out until later that the D&D Next playtest had already insured that anyone who ever cared about the Isle of Dread was already sick of hearing about it. Still, I needn't have worried, because I got a great group of players and had a lot of fun. I think both of the male/female pairs were couples, but in any case I'm pretty sure they all knew each other, and that tends to work out well. They came up with cool characters like a fixer who was raised by a crazy janitor who thought he was vampire and a karcist who grew up hearing voices and tended to enjoy following their darker impulses. They were also great schemers and plotters, which is the kind of group I like for Qalidar. They took control of the greeter robots and then used one to get into the cyber-tyrannosaur and bring down half the plateau with photosonic cannons. They also correctly worked out the nature of a plot element which I had been fairly sure everyone would ignore, so that was cool too.

Ring Bell, Hard to Tell if Anything is Going to Sell
I texted Curtis to let them know I was done, and headed over to the booth to see who I might run into and how things were going. Seems like things were going well. I wandered off before long to do some shopping.

I took Curtis around the convention center to find where he would be running his Cards Against Humanity game and generally give him a feel for the landmarks. I don't think I did a very good job, but Curtis managed to find his way around in spite of my help.

We hooked up with Tom for a late lunch at Champions and were pleased to find that the menu of our traditional meeting place had once again become a real menu instead of last year's index card with nothing but deviled eggs and sliders on it. I was overjoyed. I don't think anybody else much cared.

Duck Down the Alleyway, Looking for a New Friend
Thursday night's D&D5 game was a new thing for me. I had been to other peoples' off-the-books games and I had been to pickup games, but I had never arranged one myself. Luckily, Caed (the other Robin) was involved, and she scoped out a cool corner for us in the lobby at the Omni. We did have to steal the bench from the piano to have enough seats, but the last thing anybody there needed was some attention-whore trying to play piano, right?

The game itself was lots of fun. Familiar faces included Curtis, Brian, Todd, and Caed at first. Jerry showed up later on and I clumsily hurled his character into the action mid-stream. I also got to meet Caed's son, Dylan, and a friend of hers whose name I keep forgetting. The scenario was ostensibly "Danger at Darkshelf Quarry," a recent prequel adventure included with the Slavers series hardback. I hadn't prepared much, so I ended up winging a lot of it to cut down on page-turning. I didn't even have the Player's Handbook until the previous Friday, so I just used the basic characters from the Starter Set. Twice. The fact that I was able to DM this pretty much off the cuff and mostly follow the rules as written confirmed my impressions about the new D&D. Definitely a game I want to play more of.

The adventure itself pretty quickly turned from a stealthy investigation to a wild chase. Curtis and Todd took turns trying to drive me crazy, so I'm pretty sure at least the three of us had a good time. Sometimes it was hard to keep up with what everybody was doing because the group was so large and not everyone was willing to shout their actions across the lobby at me. All in all, I thought it was beautiful chaos.

Don't Wear Sandals, Try to Avoid the Scandals

By the time I got into circulation Friday morning, Tom and his new protege were already stressing about an upcoming game they had planned. Tom ran off to help with that while I held down the fort. Mostly that's what I did during the day. I was snagged on the way back from a bathroom run by Icons, having just found out that it actually does away with the things that annoy me about FATE/FUDGE/ETC, and still being in the market for a fast-playing, low-prep superhero game. Seriously, I was just minding my own business, conscientiously returning to my booth, when that game jumped out and tackled me. I still haven't given it a thorough read, but it looks promising.

Friday night at nine was Aqua Teen Hunger Force time. I ran with a setup that Michael had suggested to me last year, and I wish he could have seen it. The premise was that it was time for Carl's high school reunion. He was hoping to score, and the other characters were determined to tag along for various reasons. I added the fact that all of Carl's classmates had been replaced with Plutonian replicants determined to steal the Foreigner belt for Emory and Oglethorpe.

I handed out nametags and sharpies to provide extra opportunities for the characters to be demented. The reunion was, of course, a disaster. I always have trouble remembering everything that happens in these games. I guess it's because it's all so non-linear. Maybe too many endorphins fry my brain. I dunno. Anyway, Frylock made 2Wykyd sentient, the Mooninites (a new option this year) were Mooninitish, Meatwad cooked up some mustard gas in an effort to help with the party favors, and almost everybody died or was mutated.

All of that only got us halfway through, though, so everybody swapped characters and I ran a follow-up adventure for the second half. Somehow Love Mummy, Billy Witchdoctordotcom, and Travis of the Cosmos ended up fused into one monstrous entity and, again, lots of other characters died. That's generally how these things go.

As I was closing down, I noticed Tom's Crawlspace game getting started over in the corner. I thought about staying to watch, because those sessions can be almost as much fun as ATHF, but I decided to head back to the room for some swag-wallowing and sleep instead.

Twenty Years of Schooling and They Put You on the Day Shift
I had been planning to sleep in Saturday, since Tom was opening the booth, but when everybody got up and started talking about getting breakfast, I figured I might as well join them for a high-priced waffle or two at the hotel restaurant.

 The exhibit hall was swarming. I don't think I've ever seen it this full, and they had more space than ever to spread out over. Seems like I hung around there for most of the day. Folks were in and out. I think that's when YogPaul stopped by, which was a nice surprise. We met him on our second or third Gen Con at a Cthulhu rally.

Get Sick, Get Well, Hang Around the Inkwell
After the hall closed, Tom handed off his Qalidar game to Scott, whose event that morning had fallen through, and staggered off to the bar. I had been feeling progressively more cruddy all day and called off my own evening game, then made the mistake of sharing this information with Tom.

Tom: Come on, have a drink with me.
Me: Blurgh blargh yargle fargle.
Tom: Oh, you'll be all right. We won't stay out long.
Me: Bleahhhh.
Tom: We'll just have one drink, and then we'll go see how Curtis is doing. You want to support your friend, don't you?
Me: Poop.
Tom: That's the spirit! I'll see you downstairs in a couple of minutes!

So we had a couple of drinks and started wandering around. We did, in fact, check in on Curtis to see how he was doing. We also checked in on Scott. Both seemed to be getting along fine.

I started feeling quite a bit better, which of course made me feel guilty about dropping my game, but I got over it and bought one of those ridiculous plastic goblets they were selling in the Marriott lobby. I don't know why. Maybe some parts of my brain were still sick. It was kind of fun, though. Kind of like at a carnival where you know you're getting conned, but you try the game out anyway just for the hell of it.

Losers, Cheaters, Six-Time Users
We were on our way to pester Jerry at the auction when the guy who was supposed to be house-sitting called and said he just dropped by to discover that our apartment had been ransacked. We lost both our main computers (leaving only the netbook I had brought with me), our laser printer, DVDs, jewelry, and whatever other stuff they thought looked valuable (some of which was comically not valuable, but that wasn't very comforting). Tom took off to deal with stuff at home and make sure the cats were okay (they were) while I stayed to work the last day at the booth and catch a ride back to the Rustbelt with Jerry.

Walk on Your Tiptoes, Don't Tie No Bows
Sunday, I was lucky enough to have a lot of help. Friends provided moral support, helped run the booth, and even hung around later to help me box everything up and get Jerry's car loaded. And of course there was Jerry with the car. Ken St. Andre came by and helped sell stuff. I don't even think he knew anything had happened, but I think several of our sales were entirely due to his efforts.

And, sales-wise, it was a really good day, probably the best we've had since we started doing the exhibitor thing in 2012. Christopher Helton from Dorkland and Bleeding Cool stopped by and we chatted for a bit, too. Still, it was kind of hard to enjoy that particular day. No post-con victory celebration this year. Well, not immediately post-con, anyway. I still count the time we had at Gen Con as a victory.

The Pump Don't Work 'Cause the Vandals Took the Handles

I had taken Monday off because we originally planned to stay Sunday night in Indy, and Tuesday to decompress. As it happened, Monday and Tuesday were mostly dedicated to getting things up and running the best we could at home. Over the past week, though, I have been able to find a fair bit of time to enjoy the haul I brought home, and it looks like it's all pretty great.

We're thinking about moving. If our neighbors didn't do the job themselves, they had to have known about and not had a problem with it. And they were always douchebags even if somehow they're squeaky clean this time. I guess I'll never know either way. They'd best not try it again, though. This place is tricked out like the Tomb of Horrors, now.

Tom's write-up, as usual, is all over the place. There's a summary of the games he ran on one blog and then there's part one, part two, and part three of the general-purpose travel log on another. Whichever one you read, don't believe his lies. Jerry's is here. We're collecting a list of others in this thread.