Category Archives: RPG

20231030

[As usual, two weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]

Got a mild case of Mondays. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ came down with something and has the yucks, so I slept on the couch to let her have a quiet night. Need more coffee.

I will not say that I’m back, but I’m getting better. Wrote on Heather 2 last week, then took a side quest to write a silly story for the (way-distant) ‘First Contact’ issue of Boundary Shock Quarterly (out like a year and change).

Wardog Charlie and His Eminence Daniel, Duke of Los Angeles in Exile, make an appearance, though only across the parking lot of the burger stand. Had so much fun that I’m planning a small series of such tales. Just gotta figure out the overarching theme. And whether the Duke will actually send ninjas after me when he finds out.

Past that, I spent a lot of time thinking about the game for the first time in a while. Been mapbuilding as a driver to all other things, then history-building and letting that establish a context into which this setting will run.

D&D is basically an idealized 12th Century Anglo/French context, taking all of JRRT’s work from LotR and filing off enough serial numbers that his estate couldn’t actually sue them. (They reportedly tried.) Initially, I considered doing something East Asian (Fantasy China) in nature, and it has many of those elements to the rules and engine, but I settled on a geography vaguely like modern Poland, with swamps moved north and Plague Dragons running around.

Along the way, I occasionally encounter “things that need to be in the game” or “that’s a supplement” and I’m adding notes. Talking to a few artists about commissioning some basic line art to go in when it gets published. Probably grab Junior this week and actually build some characters and monsters and finally do some playtesting.

Was going to do it this summer, but the main gaming group disintegrated and we’ve only recently sort of put it back together. Still looking for 1-2 players. In person. Enumclaw, WA. 420 unwelcome (that was what broke it up before). If you know folks or are folks, reach out and we’ll have coffee.

Music: Got the first two Ward & Rogers songs up on the store. And English Paul has sent me a couple of versions of the latest instrumental track to review and comment on.

Backstory: I did a vocal solo in Junior High. Call it forty years ago. And about a year ago, the damned memory popped up and demanded I add it. So I found various versions, synthesized the lyrics I wanted (there are a LOT of versions) and we’ll release Skye when I can record final vocals (hopefully this week) and get everything produced.

Then, because Paul, he wants to lean in to something “sounding like” “Irish/Scottish/Celtic” music, without necessarily being the traditional folk, which tends to be a woman lamenting about a man that’s gone off to war and never coming back. Both of us are English by origin, so traditionalists will look down their noses at us, but that just makes the whole thing punker as far as I’m concerned, so I’m all in. Doing research on songs that we might record. Or write.

It’s nice when the mind kinda comes back, you know? Got time to actually do things. Think thinky thoughts.

Create, outside of the writing that is my livelihood. We’re never* going to get rich from the music (* – every time you hit publish, roll 10d6, target number 58.) but we have fun. It’s driven him to buy a violin and begin learning how to play. ANTI-STODGY!

Past that, end of the month and I’ve hit my word count, so I can goof off a bit today and tomorrow. Should be close to finishing Heather 2 by this time next week and moving on to…something. Not entirely sure. Don’t gotta know. Corsac Fox 5 maybe. Or more Holden and Riley.

Whatever, it will be fun. And that’s the difference. I’m having fun these days, instead of trudging and grinding.

Hope your Monday is a skip.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

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Thank you so much for being my patron and for funding these essays!

If you’re reading the free version (which is published two weeks after the Patreon version), please consider joining the ones who do pay at https://www.patreon.com/blazeward. It’s only a buck and helps keeps the lights on around here.

20230731

[As usual, two weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]

Got the Mondays. Behind me, the pantry is closed up with a couple of big fans and a dehumidifier that have been going like hell since Thursday, so I’m reasonably confident that the floor is dry on top. Spare fan blasting the other side of that same wall since Friday. More gear in the crawl space. Sometime in the next few hours, I expect a call or text from the gang letting me know that they are inbound to inspect and probably collect everything.

It would be nice to have peace and quiet again. And figure out how soon I can finally start rebuilding everything. I still have bits and pieces left over from the bathroom remodel that keep getting pushed out by circumstances, so the house is a mess.

Been newslettering this morning instead of anything else. Got the BW monthly newsletter on publishing. Got the quarterly BSQ newsletter reminding folks that we put out another issue. Got this little tidbit of things. Probably won’t actually write fiction today, on account of it’s the last day of the month and I’m at about 96k words with what I’m writing here.

Last week, I finished the fourth Corsac Fox novel: Warlord of the Spinward Reaches. I am having a tremendous amount of fun with these. At some point (TBD), Kickstarter will finally approve the campaign for Corsac #2: Mistaken Identity and I can launch that.

At this point, I’m planning to drop 3-5 as part of the regular schedule, then save up ideas for #6 (or 7, if it ends up running that far) and aim for a big KS with a lot of swag. Mostly, that’s folks really liking this series and giving me great sales and reviews of #1, so I don’t want to stretch them out as long as I had originally planned to by only doing 2 KS campaigns per year.

After that, I have been working on the rpg. Got a lot of notes, and am slowly expanding things as I come across bits and pieces I need. The game is going to be set in a mythical Tang Dynasty China where all that magic that you read about in those stories is real. Gods, demons, whatever. At the moment, I’m working my way through a magic system that is not European/Tolkien/D&D in nature or scope, because I honestly expect everyone coming out with a new rpg to be making variants of Dungeons and Dragons (whichever edition was most formative for them) as WOTC pissed off a lot of people, first with the OGL debacle, and now by announcing that there will be no rule books.

Instead, you apparently have to sign up for a monthly subscription that lets you access the books. And lets them turn the books off whenever they want to. Sure, they promise that they won’t, but they make a lot of promises, and unless you own the book, you don’t own anything.

“The Cloud” is just a fancy way of saying “Somebody elses computer you don’t control.”

F#$% you very much, WOTC. I still have my 1st Edition books. I don’t play them, but I have consulted them in the last month for certain details. And my 2nd. And 3rd. Etc.

So I’m deep into Tang history. Wrote the origin story for Wan-Xian and her sister. That’s pure Action/Adventure, so no magic, because these are for The Thrill Ride Magazine.

However… (and I get to blame the Fabulous Publisher Babe™ here)

We are training for a long walk in England next year. Hadrian’s Wall. 80+ miles in a week. We walk trails here to get into better shape. We also talk about something other than sportsball.

Saturday morning, we talked about the game, and Chinese history (she hitchhiked from Beijing to Hong Kong in the early 90s, after taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad across.)

She reads a lot of fantasy, both modern as well as historical/epic. She suggested that I look at some WuXia books and see what tropes they use and how they run them.

Writerbrain engaged. It’s all her fault.

So I have a plan for perhaps some short novels or novellas in a series, vaguely inspired by Hua Mu Lan (Disney did not invent Mulan. They merely made the 179th movie about her, and did it animated with a dragon. She’d Robin Hood or King Arthur to the Chinese. Maybe both.)

In this case, I will be writing directly into this new game world, to provide an expanded universe of world-building. Hell, I planted a seed in English Paul’s ear for a musical soundtrack, so I’m hoping I can convince him to write me a short symphony and theme music to game by.

Welcome to my Multimedia Publishing Empire.

Speaking of Paul, sometime in the next day or three, song #2 should go live everywhere. Time to Say Goodbye. I should have links by next week, and will add it under the music tab on my website. All I ask it that you buy it, because the 30 cents I make from you 99c purchase is the equivalent of you streaming it every day for the next decade or so. Seriously.

Next song is a Scottish folk tune. I sent him the melody and demo vocals and instrument list. He’s noodling with composition at this point, and then I’ll rerecord my vocals when we have something better. Hopefully, it won’t take a year this time. (He got sick, then moved to Los Angeles since last September when we recorded the final vocals for #2.)

More news soon. More silliness.

More Monday.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

—————————-

Thank you so much for being my patron and for funding these essays!

If you’re reading the free version (which is published two weeks after the Patreon version), please consider joining the ones who do pay at https://www.patreon.com/blazeward. It’s only a buck and helps keeps the lights on around here.

20230717

[As usual, two weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]

Monday, middle of summer.

Fabulous Publisher Babe™ wanted to get up early this morning to start a writing marathon. Half-marathon. Something. Lots of words this week. Got up at 6.

Krain Corner doesn’t open until 8, so I went down to The Kettle in Enumclaw instead. Under new ownership, so still sorting out their menu. I’m working my way through it finding things I like. Lots of food. A bit overcooked, which was odd as I was the only person in there at 7am. Granted, Monday morning, but eggs over easy are supposed to be runny. Barely, today. Chicken fried steak was decent. Reds were overdone.

Still, good breakfast. And their scrambles are both huge and pretty good.

It’s the muffins that rock. Cranberry/Orange this morning. I still prefer blueberry, but damned good.

Then home and writing. About 47k into Corsac Fox #4. And mostly set up on the kickstarter for Corsac Fox #2. Need to write and record my video, and finish a few things over the next few days, then I’ll share links everywhere for folks that want to sign up for the launch.

This one will run about 80k. Like the other three. Still not sure if this block ends after five, six, or seven. Got a lot of notes, and it’s not like the story ends there. I could keep telling stories about Uly and Dan for decades of their lives. Might, since I’ve been getting nice reviews and comments from folks.

Don’t want to burn out on Uly, like I did Lazarus and Jessica Keller. Hard to think about continuing those.

Also, my game-designer partner went shiny/squirrel on me last week. I kinda knew it was coming. He’d found this new fantasy rpg called Shadowdark, which, to hear him explain, is a lot like D&D 1st edition, with elements of 2nd and 5th.

Much more grim, dark, and gritty game play, as you have ten slots for equipment, and a torch takes up one of them. Go in, do your thing, get out before the lights go out. Go back to town, buy more torches.

Or something.

He’s distracted, and let me know he’d be distracted, so I’m not upset.

Instead, I took everything he and I had done and put it aside for now. Went back to the “other” original idea I’d been pursuing, and went from there.

Because Wizards of the Coast announced that they won’t be printing rule books for “6th Edition” when it comes out (whatever they call it), you’ll have to rent those books. Monthly. Until hell freezes over.

As in, you don’t own them, and they can turn off their server any time they want, leaving you no recourse. I’m not opposed to spending money for books that last. I still have my first edition rule books from 40+ years ago. A few second. Some third. MOST of fifth.

Not renting Sixth.

And I’m not alone, because a lot of folks are coming out with their own takes on OGL and other rules to replace D&D 5 and 6. Lots of them will be Tolkien based, because face it, D&D is LOTR with just enough serial numbers filed off that the estate couldn’t sue. (They tried, btw)

I’m taking a different tack entirely. Setting it in a 7th Century Tang Dynasty China with magic, like a good wire-fu WuXia movie. And using only d6 instead of the d20 stack.

I’m always surprised when people talk about how much better games have gotten. Compared to 1990, D&D is much better these days. Compared to what I was playing in 1990, D&D sucks. Even 5th edition, which I like.

There were other games doing things. They fell victim to the usual bankruptcy problems of expanding too big too soon, and then crashing when the market turned. Or getting onto the treadmill of content and and and…

I’m going to build this, finish it, and publish it as part of my larger, multimedia empire. And it is an engine with a context and a setting, so I can do other settings and then branch out into other contexts. (Setting = Tang Dynasty China. Context equals Fantasy RPG. Modern Thriller Espionage would be another context, with James Bond being a Setting. Make sense? Good.)

Because I’ve thought about this a lot, I’m making good progress. Will probably sit down with Rich later this week and have him poke holes in what I’ve got. He’s good at asking piercing questions that way.

Then he and I will do some dicing at some point. And work out numbers. And and and.

Do I know any artists that work reasonably cheap? I’m looking for a bunch of Chinese fantasy type pencil line drawings. Eventually one cover wrap, but I need line art for the interior mostly.

Reach out. Or forward me to your friends. I’ll have a budget when I get there, but not for $100 per piece when I need fifty or one hundred pieces. We’ll do a second edition or special edition or something if the game takes off like that, and get some serious cash into someone’s hands, but I’ve got to keep this cheap today.

Not much past that. Still doing Kung Fu (Tai Chi Chuan plus Hsing-i at this point with Bagua coming in the fall, I think) and weapon forms. Learning lots. Staying in shape. Having fun.

Working with English Paul on song #3, and need to see what’s holding up song #2 (Time To Say Goodbye) from release.

What’s your Monday shaping up like?

shade and sweet water,

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

—————————-

Thank you so much for being my patron and for funding these essays!

If you’re reading the free version (which is published two weeks after the Patreon version), please consider joining the ones who do pay at https://www.patreon.com/blazeward. It’s only a buck and helps keeps the lights on around here.