What's Next?

I sometimes find myself thinking about what I'll do after The Nameless Way. I'm still not sure. It's not that I don't have any ideas I'm excited about; it's that I have too many. And I talked a little in 2025 about what happens when I fail to keep my imps in line.

One candidate is Ghosts of Blackridge, the one I actually started before I switched to Nameless Way. It's kind of a soap-ish horror thing based loosely on my college years. We didn't have quite so many demons running around then -- not literal ones, anyway -- but adaptations are never perfect. 

The pitch: An inhuman spirit preys on students in a fictional late-80s college town in the Arkansas River Valley. No one knows where it came from or who to trust. Or maybe some of them do. There's another newcomer to Blackridge, someone with plans to put the demon to use in his own schemes. 

I wrote quite a bit of this when Amazon introduced its now-defunct serial fiction platform. It's some of the worst writing I've ever done. I like the plot. I like the characters. I'm even proud of the way I made the setting my own. The actual prose, though, is bland garbage. It reads more like an outline than a finished story, or even a good draft. I think it's worth fixing, though. 

Forgotten Cities of the Komaran Sea is another one I tried to serialize. Like The Nameless Way, this one was inspired by some D&D adventures. Unlike Nameless Way, "inspired by" is pretty much where the relationship ends. 

The pitch: A traveler plunges through a misty otherworld to an abandoned underground temple, where he meets a group of ruthless treasure-hunters and learns that he is in a desert in an unfamiliar, dying, land. Even though he knows he can't trust them, he doesn't see any other way to survive the hostile environment, so he joins the strangers and helps them search for the relics of the lost civilization. 

This one is actually a sequel to Losing Lanterns (for those who've read it, the protagonist is Aradoc), but it stands alone. It digs into a lot of things I've wanted to explore for a while. As far as having emotional patterns I want to infect you with and a vision of life I need to share, this is the best of the three. I'm not sure I'm ready to grow it into what it needs to be, though. 

If I were getting started today, I'd probably be working on one I've been calling "Dogstar" in my head. There is an absolute zero chance of this being the actual title, by the way. The name comes from -- well, let's back up a bit. 

A little while back, I talked about this thing that's been percolating in my head for a long time. Imagine telling stories as a sort of Plato's Cave scenario. There's the story being told now, but, somewhere outside, there's the pure story, the story everyone is trying to tell. No story we tell is the real story; it's just what we've put together from the bits we can see. It's impossible for any medium to convey the pure story. Our stories are only shadows. 

The idea of a pure story behind the story was the foundation of The Nameless Way. I've been digging into a chaotic mess of scenarios and, not just mechanically translating them into a coherent story, but dissolving and distilling and reconstituting them to taste what I can of the truer story they came from. 

So anyway, there was this space opera comic strip I did when I was eleven or so years old, just a grid on sheets of notebook paper. It starred a rocket-powered talking dog (based on Mike's favorite bean bag toy) who gets sucked through a black hole into another universe, where he has a series of outer space adventures. That's why my placeholder name is "Dogstar." 

There's a stack of those comic strips that I've somehow managed not to lose over the years. As I suggested earlier, I'm studying the whole pile like it's a bad translation of a great story, a transmission I was trying to relay, but couldn't get right. 

While I've resisted the urge to actually start writing it, I did build a Scrivener file for it and I poke at the details every now and then. I've already uncovered a promising narrative and a bunch of characters with interesting conflicts and story arcs. There's even a little romance. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. It always looks easier in this phase. I haven't even made up my mind how I'm going to portray the dog. 

Of course, I've got to finish the one I'm on, first. My New Year's Resolution was to publish at least part of it (maybe I'll explain what I mean later) this year, and that still looks like a plausible goal. I got a lot done before I had to go full time on the money-grubbing and, now that I'm adapting to the situation (and the new manager helped me get a schedule that doesn't completely crush my soul), it's picking up again. 

You can also find this on my Substack, Whiskey and Fire. 

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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Words, Words, Words

55,000 words done on The Nameless Way. Not that impressive, considering it's taken me nine years and I'm not even halfway finished, but it's something.

 

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2021: Year of the Cat

Funny year, both creatively and just, whatever. I started off by moving from Cleveland to Northwest Arkansas, where I worked my old job from home for a while and then, predictably enough, got laid off. I didn't get a lot of writing done after that, because job-hunting is at least as time-consuming and more emotionally draining than having a job. 

I had a fairly productive trip to Devil's Den early in the year, though. That place always revives me.  

I wrote a bunch of material for a couple of serials and then decided, as much fun as it was, I needed to get back to The Nameless Way. I wouldn't say I've abandoned the serials, but they're on hold. Gotta get that book done.

While we're talking about the book, I also found a way to do a map I like. It's already changed a bit from the picture up there, but that's pretty close to what I'm going to publish. In other map-related news, I finally got around to putting my venerable World of Greyhawk maps in poster frames so maybe they'll be a little bit better protected.

I finished Hogz-- errr, TerrorHog, as well. I'm not going back to Peryton Publishing in any other capacity, but that's another project like the serials that I drifted into because I thought it would be quick and easy. You'd think I'd have learned by now that it's never quick and easy. Anyway, I'm proud of the result, and now it's done so I can move on and get back to serious writing.  

So where am I with this book I keep saying I'm focusing on? Bgrargh. I mean, I guess I shouldn't put it that way, because I'm enjoying working on the center brain-stage again. I just now started doing that, though, and a few leftover TerrorHog tasks are still nipping at my ankles now and then. We'll see. Seems like this is taking a lot longer than it should. 

I'm kinda burned out on gaming. Like, even as a player. Partly it's the teleconferencing stuff, but this just happens occasionally. You could probably scroll back on my blog and find several other times I said the same thing. I'm sure I'll be a fanatic again after a little break. I mean, just look at that Greyhawk map. How could you not get ideas? Also, I'll probably run TerrorHog at least once. 

Here's a picture of my friend, Charlie, who died of COVID early in the year. I don't really have anything else to say about that. And then there's some cat pictures. The cats aren't dead or anything. I just like sharing their pictures.

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Whiplash

Yeah, never mind that other stuff. They're both great projects, but I never should have let myself get sidetracked. I'm working now on the thing I need to be working on. After that I can come back to the serials. 

 

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Devil's Den

Well, I didn't get as far as I'd hoped but, considering that I really wanted to get some hiking in, finishing the whole draft was a little unrealistic. I'm not unhappy with the progress I did make, and the time alone in one of my favorite places was reinvigorating. 

So anyway, here's a clip from last week's work. There's a bunch more pictures after the jump break. You'll probably have to click a link if you're reading this through some kind of feed manager thing.

Ezren woke up in the dark. After some fumbling and tracing of runes with his fingers, he found one of the charms he had made at Ash's house. A few whispered names and the little wooden token lit up. Blood, viscera, and stunted limbs were all around him. Iczifractas was sitting nearby, cleaning herself.

It wasn't the same corridor he had been in when he was knocked out. This one was sloped and unfinished, with a deep thrum pulsing through the stone. On the lower, rougher, side, someone had been liberating a metallic apparatus from solid rock. Stiff brushes and small, precise chisels testified to the care they had been taking. The thing stretched from wall to wall and probably beyond. A crude metal staircase wound through a hole in the ceiling on the other side. 

Iczifractas picked up something in her teeth and trotted to Ezren. With a proud "mmrow," she dropped a huge opalescent eyeball at Ezren's feet. 

Ezren looked around at all the dero parts scattered about and scratched the cat on the cheek. "Somebody's been a very good girl," he said. Iczifractas rubbed against him and purred. Ezren wondered how long Iczifractas had been able to murder a room full of people on her own.

More pictures & stuff below:

Go For It

I haven't really had much to say lately. I did manage to get a fragmentary trilobite article out yesterday, but I wrote most of that closer to New Year's. Since then I've been focusing mostly on moving out and settling in, with a little bit of real writing thrown in here and there, but not much. 

And that's the thing. I've been writing this one book since... what? 2015? People are starting to snicker when they say, "Oh, that's right, you're working on a novel." At least, snickering is what I hear. Sure, I'm making steady progress, but it's slowwww progress. I need to try something different if I'm going to finish this before I'm seventy.

Well, here's something I've never done: the writing retreat thing. It's expensive, and the idea seems to have made some of the humans close to me and one of the cats think I don't love them, but we can sort all that when I get back. Truth is, they enjoy being outraged. I just need to lock up all my stuff so nobody pees on it.

I'm gonna spend a whole week alone in a cabin in my favorite park (although it won't be all green like in the picture). That area is what the wilderness in the first half of the book was based on so, y'know, bonus.  

The goal is to finish the draft. It won't mean the end of the job, but it'll get me to a point where my constant prodding and patching will be a good thing. I have no idea how this is going to go. I might come shuffling back with nothing but a few trail pictures and an embarrassed shrug, but at least I gave it a shot.

A Little More

Here's a little bit of work I got done while hiding in the basement today.

As they neared the middle of the city, the webs became more prominent. Up ahead, a huge spire towered over a circular plaza. A round symbol was painted on its lower reaches in red and gold. The swirling, self-mirroring yin-yang symbol stood out starkly against the otherwise featureless black stone. She had seen the symbol with less garish colors on several occasions before, but most recently in Timber, on Shao Tsang's tunic. The other buildings in the circle were all covered in webs.

Kala and Oeklor were checking every corner now, starting at every echo. They drew their swords. Kala absent-mindedly traced tiny circles with the point of her blade while Oeklor kept switching his grip back and forth from forward to backward. Looking more closely at the webbed-over buildings around the circle, they found human-shaped bulges in the fabric. Each of these had one or two smaller, rounder bulges near it.

Speaking barely above a whisper, Kala said, "I think you were right. This was a--"

Oeklor poked his sword into one of the little round bundles and wiggled the blade.

"--Bad idea." Kala grimaced and backed away. Little black shapes squirmed around the blade and the cut began to widen on its own.

Out of Order

I was suddenly hit by the inspiration to do a couple of chapters from the perspective of one of the villains (well, a sort-of-villain, anyway -- it's complicated) so now I've got this thing going on where I'm writing stuff out of order and I have three chapters-in-progress instead of one. Thank Grodd for Scrivener.

Getting Better All the Time

I've been feeling and generally functioning better lately. Maybe it's the longer days, maybe it's City of Heroes, maybe it's something I'm eating, or maybe it's a combination or something else entirely. Whatever it is, I've been getting up more cheerfully, getting to work earlier, getting more stuff done, and even drinking less. I mean, I still love my bourbon; I just don't go quite as far with it.

One thing that's made life a lot better is that I finally went out and got the prescription glasses I've been needing for the last few years. It's sooo much better than getting by on reading glasses. I sometimes just walk around looking at all the textures and little details of things that I hadn't noticed before. I wear them all the time. I want to have them welded to my skull.

Operation: Faceblock is still in effect, and probably will stay that way. One of these days I might even delete that account instead of just deactivating it. Socializing online is a lot more fun without Facebook trying to sink its sticky, slimy claws into me every time I try to check on my friends. I'm enjoying MeWe as a substitute but, even if I didn't like MeWe, I don't think I'd want to go back to Facebook. Some of my friends are probably mad because they have to click away from the blue god to reach me, but they'll live.

I've been writing a lot more too. I started taking two or three breaks at my dayjob in which I just go down to the bottom of the stairs by the basement door with my tablet and plug away. It's amazing how well it flows in that quiet little cell with nobody looking over my shoulder. I guess it's the real world equivalent of that mythical cabin where writers in movies go to finish their novels. Rich and/or imaginary people get quaint hideaways in the mountains; poor people get the bottom of a disused stairwell in Cleveland. Oh well, as long as it works.

What's really funny about it is that I'm actually more productive at the dayjob since I started doing this.

We haven't played D&D since the last blog, but it's supposed to happen this Sunday. Last weekend we played Wobble. I patched up my old character, Daisy, for the new rules and had a blast hamming it up with an over-the-top transatlantic accent and a plucky attitude. Tom wrote about what happened and how it went on his blog. There's another game scheduled for Friday night.

I think I've discovered my spirit animal. Check out the red-legged seriema. This bird stuns or kills its prey by picking it up and smashing it on a rock as many times as necessary. There's a video, too, of course.

e lb:d{ :ctkit: ai.z;; ·-btf tt tb :d

Here's hoping it all keeps on rolling for a while.

Mostly Games

The Nameless Way had been in a bit of a slump, but picked up quite a bit last month. I've gotten up to the part based on When a Star Falls, which is something I've really been looking forward to writing. That adventure leads into their first time travel jaunt in the novel, even though When a Star Falls came after that in the original campaign.

I think I already mentioned that our Icons game is on hold and I'm running the Goodman Games update of Isle of Dread for a change of pace. It's going... slowly. We've only had one session. There was supposed to be a second last weekend... and a few weeks before that, but those didn't happen. They didn't make it to the island last session. I had originally intended to play all the pre-island stuff out, but I've since decided to fast forward through most of it. I don't want this to take all year.

While Tom and I were down with a delightful cold/sinus infection combo, I tried out Audible. Audiobooks are great when it hurts to focus your eyes. It's also something two pathetic sick people can do together. We got through most of Ringworld that way. I'm totally hooked on the service now. Sometimes I even "read" on slow days at work. I'm listening to The Mothman Prophesies right now.

I stumbled across the Kickstarter for Old-School Essentials and was surprised that it was so tempting. I like 5th Edition D&D. I've got a bunch of stuff for it. Do I really want to go back to Basic/Expert, however well it's organized? So I dug up my old books and went through them, kind of ran through stuff in my head. My group didn't really play much B/X before we started on AD&D. Anyway, I decided that yes, I really do want to play this again and I backed the Kickstarter.

Schedule permitting, I intend to go to Carnage this year and run a B/X adventure (OSE if I have it in hand by then), but I didn't have any particular inspiration, so I went back to the DM'ing section and rolled some stuff. For the scenario, I rolled, "Escaping from Enemies," which I've done a bunch of times before and... I dunno. For the setting I got, "abandoned mine," which... okay... I guess. I even rolled the special monsters part using the random encounter tables. I'm planning on using 5th level characters, so I rolled once on the 6-7 table, and three times on the 4-5 table. I got Giant Scorpion, Blink Dog, Hellhound, and Caecilia. It'll be fun to try and make something out of all that.

Not sure what else I'll run. Maybe just Dungeon. Maybe Doctor Who. Still thinking.

Hey, City of Heroes is back! At least for now. Somebody got ahold of the server code and has released it to the public, where these people and probably others are running the game for anybody who wants to play. They've added several servers and it seems to keep running more and more smoothly. I was on last night and didn't get kicked off once. Of course, you never know where this kind of thing will end up. For now, though, it sure is great to be back in Paragon City.

2018: Travel Hopefully

GIF & Caption (the one in the picture, smartass) by Swear Trek

Some stuff comes to mind. Two of my cats died this year. Apart from the obvious unpleasantness, I spent a ton of money trying to save them. I also spent a ton of money on an assortment of car repairs. I didn't actually have two tons of money, or even one, so the great taste goes on and on.

I continue to stumble forward in my work on The Nameless Way. I'm still not as productive as I should be, at least not consistently, but apparently it's the best I can do for now. I'll keep trying to do better, of course. Apart wanting to see this one complete, I have other things I need to write afterwards. Oh, also, I got rid of that Wordpress site I had for it because I don't know why I made that in the first place. Anyway, the book is gonna be awesome if I can finish it before I get hit by a super-tornado or something.

Some things got a little out of control in 2018. I'm leaving this vague because I'd like you to imagine a bunch of awesome "crazy artist" stuff and pretend that's what I did. The reality was boring. I think I've got stuff patched together well enough, now. It's not like I had a magical epiphany and solved everything, but if you want to tack that onto the end of the crazy artist breakdown in our little narrative, feel free.

Back in 2017, Julian May died. While this is, of course, sad, the event indirectly did something good for me. I read her Saga of Pliocene Exile back in the 80s. She was a huge influence on me. When I first got serious about being a writer, Julian May was the writer I wanted to be.

The funny thing is, I had forgotten that. After she died, I decided that I needed to reconnect with my literary roots, so I re-read the Pliocene books and now I'm re-reading the Intervention ones. I'm especially looking forward to getting to the Milieu series because, criminally, I never got around to reading those. And it's all been kaleidoscopic.

I've got a new wallpaper/color scheme thingie for this blog. Relatively new, anyway. I'm still trying it on, but it'll probably be here for a bit.

Also this year, I dropped out as a partner of Peryton Publishing. I had been thinking about it for a while. There's not any personal drama behind it or anything like that. I lost interest in game design a while back. Since I realized this and stopped, I've become more and more certain that it isn't just a mood. I don't miss it at all. It goes back to that "don't find your bliss; find what you're willing to suffer for" meme. Some of the stuff associated with game design can be fun, but I'm not willing to suffer for it. Now that I'm done suffering for it, I don't even want to touch the fun parts. I just don't care enough about games to do anything special with them. That being the case, there didn't seem to be much point in keeping my name on a game design company. I still help out with it, though, and the stuff I did is still there. Also, of course, I still play games.

Happy New Year!

Three Mirages

Like most people who GM a lot of RPGs, I sit around thinking about campaigns I might run sometimes. Right now I've got an Icons campaign going that I love (although I still haven't written up the most recent session and the holidays have, as always, slowed it down), so the thing I pine for is D&D. Despite the picture, it would be 5th edition. I just really like that old Erol Otus cover. Anyway, these are the main ideas that keep surfacing.

World of Greyhawk
I had this one going for a while, and had to drop it because I was gaming all the time and had to cut a few things. It started off with a weird vegepygmy adventure which led to Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and then off into the Hool Marshes where they stumbled into the Feywild and then Castle Amber. I could easily pick this up again. While the time-sink was unfortunate, I was having a blast. This is probably the one I'd be mostly likely to do, because, even if I started a spinoff instead of resuming with the same characters, a lot of the set-up is already done.

Xarkis or Sarkis or Something
I think it might also be fun to run something in the world of The Nameless Way. I wouldn't try to follow the plot of the novel, because that feels a little too railroady. There are plenty of places to explore that I don't even go in this book, and of course the ones the book does visit still have other adventures to offer.

Middle Earth
Ever since Adventures in Middle Earth was announced, I've been turning the thought of a campaign over and over in my head. I've been thinking that, deviating from the official line, I'd run an alternate history where Isildur destroyed the Ring instead of keeping it, but there's still other stuff going on which I'm not going to get into right now. Some of that stuff helps explain why the present-day world (right after the events in The Hobbit) isn't really all that different. A drawback of this one is that I'd have to get the players to acquire and understand their own copies of the Player's Guide. The classes and the way characters are created deviate so much from standard D&D that, otherwise, I would go crazy, constantly trying to explain how everything works.

But of course I probably won't be doing any of these any time soon. Maybe after I catch up on some other stuff. I dunno.

This is Not the Title

Work on The Nameless Way has picked up again after creeping forward for a few months. I also had a great gaming weekend a couple of weeks ago.

I finally figured out how to work in the future party's contribution to "The Beginning of the End" without overshadowing the current one. I had been planning to mostly gloss over it, but instead I'm using it now as a dream sequence everybody got pulled into because the telepath is having fits. And of course, that guy having fits leads into the developments that lead to this freaky time-trip anway, so it's also useful foreshadowing. It has, consequently, become really fun to write again. I'm cramming in writing time all over the place now, above and beyond the schedule I set for myself.

The gaming bit was neat, too. We didn't call it a hoot, but it kind of was. Tom set up a slot to run Spacers at the game store and several friends from out of town joined in. For the after-party, Saharrah volunteered to run an off-the-cuff game of Crawlspace called "Eat Me" in which we made our way through the jungle, starting fires and switching sides, while pursued by magic furry cannibals. The next day, after seeing the other friends off, I ran a session of my Icons campaign for the usual suspects, concluding the long-running backup story of Landshark's possessed dog.

I still need to work out what I'm going to do for Carnage, though.

Gen Con & Writing Stuff

I've only submitted one event for Gen Con. I didn't really even want to do that one, but I felt like I should make some token effort to contribute to my group in exchange for the badge (and yeah, I'm entitled to a few of their extra hours after all I've contributed over the years). In some ways it's a little sad because I always have fun running games and it's a chance to do creative stuff that I wouldn't otherwise do. I even picked up one of those newfangled cooperative board games that all the kids are playing, thinking it might be a prep-free alternative to RPGs. From my one play-through, it looks like fun, but not this time.

For all the fun I have playing those games, there are hours of stress that come first. There's time I could be writing that goes into bringing ideas together. There's time I could be packing, squaring things away with cats, or just relaxing, that goes into making those goddamn pre-generated characters. There's psyching myself up to perform in front of a bunch of strangers. In the case of the board game, I'd have to get the rules down well enough to teach it to strangers, just like I would with a new RPG. And, when that's all done, there's always teaching, which I hate even more than cleaning out litter boxes.

I don't need it this year. Hell, I still haven't started my D&D campaign back up because I'm still not sure what to do about the bloated roster. Sure, the hiatus may very well have solved that problem for me already, but I'd still have to start the process, and the thought of more organizing makes me tired.

Those are issues I've always dealt with, of course. I've probably nattered on about them in this blog, even. The reason they're not worth my time this year is the good news. If I need to run a game, my Icons campaign is back in action and doing great. More importantly, work on The Nameless Way is really picking up again. Now I'm just hoping I can finish it and see it in print before the last orange straw breaks some camel's back and this whole country turns into Ferguson.

I don't want to end on that note, though. I'm excited to be doing the stuff I'm doing. Maybe I can share some more information about what's going on, later. That's always harder than actually writing the story, partly because it feels so silly and pretentious, but I thought the last attempt came out all right.

2017: Remember That It’s All in Your Head

Where to start?

Here's a TV moment that kind of sums up 2017: Tom and I were watching Crisis on Earth X. Sara walks up to Alex at the rehearsal dinner and starts tossing back drinks. When asked what she's looking to make go away, her response is, "Nothing. I just like the taste of scotch." Back in the (sort of) real world, Tom said, "She drinks like you."

So here's to making that fucked-up outside world go away, and to loving the taste of scotch. Or whatever.

Writing... well, it's been going much slower than it should, but it's getting better. I'm now calling the book The Nameless Way. I started the year off strong, then things began to taper off in the summer and really fell apart during Gen Con month. I tried backing away from gaming for a while, I tried silly resolutions, I tried, you know, stuff. I think what finally got me back on track was when I took a week's vacation around Thanksgiving, escaping not just conventions and all that structured gaming stuff, but the constant brain-killing drum of my day job.

There were so many games, though. We started the year off with a clump of 'em at Weird Realms for Tom's birthday. My D&D campaign there drifted off early. I never had more than two players and, after a couple of cancellations for illness and something else I think, I never much felt like trying to schedule another one. The Scrap Pile had been on hiatus since late last year for other reasons.

In March, though, my World of Greyhawk campaign started up. I did this partly because my friend Curtis's D&D campaign had gone on hiatus to wait for a missing player. This one has been lots of fun. We were running along every couple of weeks, tromping through old modules and stuff. It had a bunch of long-distance friends in it so that was cool too. After a couple of months, Curtis decided he needed to start his campaign back up without waiting for the other guy, so hey, double the D&D! We even had a brief Icons reunion for Giant Size Scrap Pile #3.

In the fall, we were finally able to stir the Scrap Pile back into action. Aaaand Curtis started an Icons campaign of his own. That put the count up to four. I was running an Icons game and a D&D one, plus playing in, well, same. Sometimes we were playing twice in one weekend.

Also, the Greyhawk campaign was huge. I was wrangling five to seven players every time. That's about as many as I can handle at a real table. On Hangouts I'm more comfortable with three or four.

October came around and, on top of all that, I needed to get ready for the games I was running at Carnage. I told everyone I needed time off from gaming stuff so I could do more gaming stuff. Carnage came and went. It was awesome as usual, but didn't do much to clear my head. Curtis has run one out-of-continuity romp-type game since then and I had a blast running the Scrap Pile Christmas Special, but I still haven't started my campaigns back up. I guess I will eventually, on a less crazy schedule... assuming anybody still wants to.

I love both of my campaigns, and I love my friends, but I can't function with humans flitting around in all my spare time. If this year has taught me anything, it's that talking to or even thinking about other people too much is like sleep deprivation. I can handle some overload, but the toxins build up quickly and take a long time to clear out.

Like I said before, the vacation helped a lot. Before that, I was too fried, even with the restored spare time, to even catch my breath. Now I'm starting to pull it together. The shorter break for my Christmas trip helped, too, even the part where I got stuck along the way for some surprise auto maintenance. I'm a little concerned about where it goes from here. Multiple week-long getaways are a privilege for the wealthy. Maybe spacing out the game sessions will do it, or at least get me close enough that some carefully planned shorter breaks will work. My day job didn't use to require measures like this but, since we got sold to Jabba, it's been generating too much psychic garbage for me to shovel out.

I've also been backing away from social media a little, especially Facebook. I still use the blather sites quite a bit, but I had gotten into some bad habits, like using them to look for distraction when I was in a bad mood, or using them to vent. It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize that both of those are more likely to make things worse. On a somewhat related note, the site that did the syndication or whatever you call it for this blog appears to have imploded. While it was nice to get the extra hits, having to come up with something to blog about every month was annoying, so... good riddance, I guess.

I put out the last major piece of the Qalidar RPG, the Qritter Qatalog, this summer. There could, theoretically, be other books later, because I've still got some material I could run through the grinder and release. I suppose I could also do a compiled edition, but I probably won't. With the monster book out, I've done pretty much everything I felt obligated to do. If anybody wanted to actually play the game, they could do it and not feel like pieces are missing. Well, they might feel that way, but they'd be wrong.

Other stuff: Hey, in February, we moved! Not far -- just across the expressway. It was a grueling slog of a move, but I'm really happy with the new place. It's a house instead of an apartment, it's quieter, the way it's arranged is more conducive to the way Tom & I like to do stuff, and when things break, they get fixed. Plus, balcony!

Anyway, my goals & plans for 2018 are pretty much the same as last time, because I'm still not there and I still haven't quit. I'll try to find some practical ways to stay on track.

I'm thinking of backing away from conventions a bit. I'm already committed to go to Gen Con next year, and I'm not sure I could give it up anyway. It's a painfully expensive rampaging stress-monster, but it's also a freakin' amazing five-day party. I could, however, GM less and play more. Carnage, of course, is exempt. I could go to BASHCon and not run any games, or just run one off the books for my friends. It's a low-pressure shindig that doesn't even require time off from work. And maybe that's it. Tom's going to GaryCon with Monk, but I was already thinking of staying home to save up my vacation days... and bank some extra alone time.

I guess that's the end. Happy New Year!

New Goal

Complete rough draft by the end of the year. Preferably sooner. Normally I write very deliberately and don't have to do a lot of revision. I think I need to take a different approach to really get going again.

I can do this.

Thus Says the Tao

One of the challenges of adapting a role-playing game campaign to a novel is getting the characters, settings, and events as close to the original as possible without bringing in details that are meaningless, contradictory, or just plain ridiculous. A lot of this is stuff I worked out before I even started the first draft, but since I had some dead time at the day job that won’t work for art writing, I thought it would be fun to talk about the process. I’m going to start with Shao Tsang instead of the story as a whole, because there were some additional labyrinths to thread surrounding his history.

Shao Tsang was my brother’s character in the game. His original thought was to create a monk but, after some unusually good attribute rolls, he decided to go with a psionicist. Monks in Second Edition AD&D were watered-down fighter or cleric characters, while psionicists had high requirements and much more interesting abilities. 

Originally, he had telepathic powers similar to the ones we see in The Nameless Way. Not much later on, though, he wanted to switch to psychoportation and psychometabolism, which would, among other things, allow him to do more kung fu-ish stuff. This may have been driven partly by a new supplement purchase. I can’t remember. In any case, I indulged him with a quick diversion to work the change into the story and it was all settled. 

Mike would later sell a couple of stories featuring this time-manipulating martial arts version of Shao Tsang. He also wrote a longer one which I don’t think has ever been published. This set of abilities presented some problems for my Shao Tsang, though. For one thing, I was bringing in Seisha, who also has martial arts skills and psionic abilities, earlier. I’ve downplayed the psychic abilities in my version, but that makes her talents more like martial arts Shao Tsang, not less. Sure, she’s sneaky too, but the stuff she does in a fight wouldn’t be nearly as impressive if Shao Tsang did it too.

Another problem is Mogdar. As a wizard specializing in time manipulation, a lot of the stuff that would be fun to develop for Mogdar would already be in Shao Tsang’s playbook. Mogdar won’t be doing silly Hong Kong movie stunts with it, but that barely helps. We would, again, have a character learning and showing off tricks that Shao Tsang was already doing.

Finally, the whole kung fu aesthetic is boring to me, especially as an element of sword and sorcery stories. The fact that "monks" weren’t too impressive in the version of D&D we were playing didn’t bother me at all. I even scrubbed a few of the far eastern trappings from Seisha. You won’t see the word "ninja" in this book, for example. That’s a minor obstacle, though. I probably would have left it in and found ways to make it fun if not for the issues with Seisha and Mogdar.

So my Shao Tsang isn’t much of a fighter, and he doesn’t distort time. Instead of being a "monk" he’s just a monk. He’ll keep the psionic tricks, Seisha will keep the martial arts tricks (plus a few other surprises), and Mogdar will keep the temporal tricks. None of this affects their personalities, though. I kept almost all of that. 

There’s another issue connected to one of Mike’s stories and one of mine, but it’s more about a particular set of events than about the character. I’ll talk about that in another post.

Argle Bargle

Work on The Nameless Way has been sluggish lately. I'm still putting in my time every day, but I seem to spend a lot of it staring at the screen. Maybe I'm stressed about Gen Con, which promises to be a zoo this year. Maybe I'm stressed about other stuff. Maybe stress has nothing to do with it. I'll keep plugging away. I am still creeping forward, after all, and I need this book.

Scrap On!

The writing is going well. I've got the heroes crammed into an underground labyrinth loosely based on a real cave, and further developments are revealing more about why Ezren acts the way he does and what he's up to.

The reason I'm posting this, though, is that, after a long hiatus, there's another Scrap Pile event in my schedule. It's likely to be followed by yet another hiatus, so I want to make it special. Luckily, I was already planning to present this as Giant Size Scrap Pile #3 because it would have been a sort of "welcome back" kinda thing. I've already written down a lot of what I wanted to do, so the adventure just has a few kinks to work out and a few more details to write down.

Looks like I'll also be running a game of Timewatch at some point.

Also, the Greyhawk campaign is still going strong. We're playing that next week, too.