An Update - Still Alive!

Looking around, I couldn't find where this comes
from. I like it, but if the owner wants me to
take it down, just let me know.

Wow, has it really been nearly a year? Last year wasn't much fun for me. Whatever, on to the post.

I'm not quite ready to be back fully yet, but I am around. I'm occasionally posting on the Traveller groups on G+, some stuff on Facebook, and occasional other groups. I do intend to return to the blog.

I'm still working on a MegaTraveller retroclone, based on the Mongoose OGL and incorporating elements of other editions. After discussions online and thinking about it, I want to really get back to the sandbox tools of CT LBB77, but with the rules influenced by some of the MT developments. One thing that I've learned about spaceships is that reaction drives are subject to the square-cube law, since thrust increases by the square while mass increases by the cube, speaking roughly. Building that into the ship design sequence should push designs toward smaller ships. I've been thinking about some other things, too.

I'm pretty certain that I am going to continue writing up the project I gave the working title "Flanaess Sector" as an AD&D 1E/OSRIC product. I'll import some of the alternatives to Illithids and other Product Identity races from sources like Adventures Dark and Deep, but otherwise it's mainly writing up tech items, a spaceship construction and combat system, and star system details. I am also trying to decide if it should be more science fantasy like Star Wars, Warhammer 40K, or White Star, or harder SF on the order of Traveller or even Orion's Arm. Maybe somewhere in the middle.

For fantasy gaming, I have changed my default setting a bit to include ideas from a guy named Scott, who was known for his settings such as the World of Thool but has since vanished from the internet as far as I can tell. He worked for a bit on a setting he called "Mandragora: The Mandrake March". It was to be based on Andrew Lang's Color Fairy Books (The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and so on), taking elements from the stories and placing them into an otherwise normal D&D-type game. I want to do that, except that I'll include one area which is based on those (removing the Arabian and Chinese ones), an area similarly based on Irish, Welsh, and Breton fairy stories plus some Arthuriana, and an area based on the Arabian Nights Entertainments (plus the other stories traditionally associated with them, such as Sindbad, 'Ala ad-Din, and 'Ali Baba, and a similar manuscript called "Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange"). I'll probably have a land further to the East which is based on Chinese fairy tales (and an island nation drawing on Japanese fairy stories), but that's not the default starting area so I won't bother with it until needed. Some of the setting elements that I had originally developed will remain, such as the dragon-riding peoples of the Northern dales, the bull-riding nomad barbarians, the Southern cities of the sorcerer-kings, the iron-age Aztec island kingdom across the ocean to the West, the pirate princes in a "Pirates of the Caribbean" mode, and the fantasy Egypt-like river kingdom.

I've still been working off and on toward a fantasy setting which draws inspiration from the Wild West instead of Medieval Europe. I've been playing around with ways to approach the rather subtle magic I want, and GURPS remains the best source to do those things. I have considered changing the Swords & Wizardry: White Box rules, especially the spell list, to handle the setting. It certainly helps that it is available in .rtf format to make building a rule set possible. I might put it together as a Lulu project, if I go that way. New classes (Gunslinger! Snake Oil Salesman/Mountebank! Cunning Folk! Preacher! probably more!), new spell list, and so on, all in support of the setting assumptions. The setting itself is also slow going, since I want to create certain effects but I also don't want to be too close to actual history. Plus, I'm trying to figure the best way to have a Wild West with less Eastern Cities, and still waffling on the matter of trains (trains are a major element of Western stories, but they also bring Civilization far too quickly). I also really love pirates, and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise comes close to overlapping with the Wild West - maybe they'll be in there somewhere, like a fantastic New Orleans. I haven't come to terms with the racial politics of the time relative to the setting either, so I am not sure how I want to handle the matters of Native Americans, Africans, and Chinese laborers.

Part of the reason that I haven't completed any of these things is that I still don't have a group to play them with. I still prefer face-to-face gaming, but my attempts to reconnect with the people I gamed with when I lived in this city years ago are running into the problem that a lot of people aren't really willing to change their lives to fit the time for gaming. Oh, I'm probably overstating matters. I'm just frustrated about still not being able to get a group together after such a long, long time. It almost makes me willing to spend time learning how to use Roll20.

How are you doing?