Friday, and what a start it is.

I got up, started the chicken slow cooking, took care of the dog, got Sue her morning coffee, emptied the water barrel and started to assemble my morning work set-up. Then *bang* pain in the back/shoulder. Stopped me cold. After half an hour on the vibration seat, it is moving again. On the up side, Sue has started making Sausage and eggs for breakfast, yum.

I did not get as much done on Crypt Crawl as I wanted. After the last couple of days my mind bogged down. I got pics of the dog, the new DS cards and started the mechanical work on getting the new DS card pages on the web.

Sooo, today, Crypt Crawl Monsters. I have a layout for the stats that will allow me to do cut and paste for the mundane enemies in encounters and adventures. I am probably going to be behind on the first adventure and the first village for the Beta release. I will get the monsters done today. Think the adventure and village will take about a day each to finish, and I'm not working Halloween. I am just not sure which to get up and finish Sunday. Maybe I can get both, but do not put any money on it.

Well now, looks like another day ahead

No matter what a day is about to bring, I am always glad to be seeing it.

Sitting here in the morning, cat watching the birds, dreaming of dinner. Sue to my left, her computer working for her. Rex Stout playing in the background. Coffee and smokes to my right. My weight slowly dropping. Yes, bring on the day. The morning is top notch.

Had an organic buffalo roast yesterday. Sue made up some gravy, used a bed of bread and butter. Unbelievably good.

Last night we finished up 25 Crypt Crawl pages of history, background, religion and monster making. I just need to hear back that the files work for my reliable testers.

Today I edit the monster codification and information. After that comes the specific monsters and a good useable layout for the stats. While I'm doing that I can work on putting together the first Crypt Crawl for the beta GM's.

Looking good for the launch, but it sure does use a lot of time.

OK, time to get Sue and I more coffee and a ginger swirlee.

Long days followed by short nights.

That is what life is this week. Long work days with short respites for sleep. Boy am I going to fall down once we get past the Crypt Crawl Beta release and PentaCon.

Right now I am polishing up all the pages for the "Make Your Own Monster" section of the rules. The idea is to create worksheets and guidelines for GM's to be able to bring in their favorite Demons, races etc. into their games. Crypt Crawl is designed to be open and let the GM's see how it works. Starting with this as a concept has allowed us to design the system to be open, and it will be easier to make your own adventures.

I have the first adventure roughed out and now I just need to edit it and get it into PDF form for play. I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will get this finished today, we will see.

Assembly of Susan's Religious Pantheon should also occur as soon as possible. She is upstairs editing the pieces of the world background as I type this.

I should be creating pages for the new DS Rogue cards, but that will have to wait until we get this Beta out there.

We had a great game last night. The new Demon gave the characters fits trying to chase it down. By the time they ran him out of Power who had trapped whom became a reasonable question.

I love Pain. Pain says I am Alive!

There you go. Just a little morning philosophy.

I am making good progress in setting up the Crypt Crawl game, and so far I am happy with the output. This is a lot of material to digest in a short period. I appreciate the help of the testers. I am asking for a lot from them, and they are responding.

This morning I have the dishes and laundry working. I have an idea for changing my office layout. I can always use more efficiency, and a work out. More CC editing on menu. I have the Monster stats in shape to do the adventures. So I need to clean up a couple of dungeons. I can also do a few very short random outdoor encounters. I think I will start with them to get the encounter format cleaned up.

All right, long enough on here. Time to work.

Ah, Saturday is here!

Dishes, scrub hall, wash clothes, basically catch up on cleaning. More CC Beta card sheets completed and posted for testing. May try to sneak some in today.

Tomorrow I will try to assemble the pieces of the rules. They are done, they just need assembly and tweaking. I will do a separate FAQ PDF. That way as people ask questions I can add to the FAQ and do a new version from time to time.

Trying to think out best communication to use for our gamers. Must research doing a Crypt Crawl Newsletter.

I am Pampering Sue.

Most of my time right now is being spent pampering the exhausted Sue. Baths, foot rubs, home made pizza (she liked it!), home made donuts (They are getting better) and whatever else I can think of.

I am carefully going over each sheet of cards for Crypt Crawl, getting the words right and having them checked. The second batch is up and should be working.

We have a Crypt Crawl blog for announcing specific Crypt Crawl news. You can visit the Crypt Crawl blog here. I will also continue to mention what I am doing with Crypt Crawl here and on Twitter, although the Twitter followers I am getting are almost all art fans. *sigh*

Sue is Home

Sue is here. I am going to go pamper her now.

Heliot speaks. Words from an Elder Dragon.

Heliot, old, grey and cranky was overheard bemoaning the Universes fate. "I can always tell a world the Blackwind Dragons visited. Orcs, everywhere, Orcs. How could they do such a thing?"

Monday, Sue is due back today!

I talked to Sue last night. The Con went very well. She will try for a table there again next year. She is tired and I plan on treating her well when she gets back.

It took me all day sunday to get the new pages done for the new card sets. The Tigrean Werecat character set page is here. and the GM feature set is here. The biggest problem with the sets is how to let people know what cards are in the sets. I think these new pages will make it clear what is in the set. The character set should be here tomorrow and the GM set should be a week away.

For Crypt Crawl I put together some more common monsters this morning. I am up to 41 common monsters so far. I need to create some common animals for using in villages and farms. I have the basic villagers done and lots of undead. Brain eating is popular among zombies, but others find it to be a problem. Zombie Bears, nasty, brains taste like honey, just ask them.

I also need to make progress on getting more DS cards into sets. Rogue and Wizard are up next. I also need to make pages for all the sets like the new set pages. It will go faster now that I have a template I like.

I have some deep thinking to do on life style. I have run out of milk and eggs. It is about a mile to a decent store and two miles to a good store. The question is, do I start getting off my butt and walk to the store, or wait for Sue and the car. It is really a question that we all face in small ways. Now that I am in front of such a simple question I am seeing all the issues behind the question. Health, exercise, and world view. Why does the mind ask all these questions, and how do you shut it up? Of course, I have a perfect excuse, I am too busy to consider either the issues or take the time it would take to walk to the store.

Well, breakfast is over, time to walk a dog.

Sunday morning and the cat has given me back my lap

I woke up to a call from Sue. She was getting ready for the opening of the dealers room. The con is going well. She has done a pile of commissions at the show and is getting tired. Sleep is for the weak and Sue is not weak.

After the call I sat down to get some coffee in me. I got me three big cups of coffee and sat down to wake up. Mocha jumped into my lap and decided that I should sit and pet a cat for a while, so I did.

Yesterday (Saturday) I did the layouts for the DS Feature set. Our new Standard card sets have to be re-laid out on new sheets so I have to get them all copied, edited (the layout change is causing some shifts I do not like), and positioned on the new sheet. As long as I am in there I am tweaking the cards to try to get larger type on the card text. Anyway, last night I sent out the sheet for printing. Now I need to consider what sheet to do next. I have two in mind. Several people have asked for the Wizardry cards in a set plus I should build the sheet for the Rogue cards. The problem with the Rogue sheet getting done is that the artist has been really busy and I do not know if she can get it done right now.

Better. I just got me two more big mugs of coffee. I am having some trouble prioritizing my jobs. I think I need to start with doing the web pages for the new Standard sets. The starter set (5) should be in my hands this week. We put in some new potions in the set. They will come in very useful in giving a counter to some of the new upcoming Features, like the progressive poison. The whole progressive poison concept in DS has to be squeezed in because we did not make room for it in the original design. With Crypt Crawl we are building it right into the system. Hindsight works good.

It took me about an hour and a quarter for me to make pizza yesterday. I found a good recipe for a single crust. It took a lot longer to bake the pizza than the recipe said. I will need to figure out the specifics, then I will have a good recipe. I am thinking that if Sue can give me an hours notice tomorrow I will make a chicken pizza for her arrival home Monday night.

OK, I'm off to work. I think I had best start with the web pages for the new sets.

Evening is here, the mind is slipping away.

I heard from Sue. The first day at FurFright was good. She will be up most of the night doing commissions.

I suppose that means I have to keep working, but the mind is slipping away from me, so I need a break first. Those layout numbers and letters are starting to have serious switching problems.

I am up to 33 monsters laid out from the notes here on Crypt Crawl. I am planning on having about 60 in the first Parade of Monsters. The actual Demons and Horrors will have Individual stats and they will be included in the modules at first. I guess the monster parade can be considered the "regular" monsters.

I have heard that I should be careful about using the word Zombie. I am told that "Life Impaired" is the PC phrase for Zombies and that something will stop in to eat my brains later. Hah! Fooled them, I gots no brains left! They are too late.

Second Session

Having taken a nap, eating a small late lunch and walking and feeding of the pets, I am ready for a second session of work.

I heard from Sue this morning. The dealers room at FurFright had just opened and she was girding herself for the day. I missed getting her that first cup of coffee this morning.

I have finished the standard "civilians" as monsters. That will help with the final layouts for the villages, shops and other fun encounters. I go a few of the web pages done. Dodging has had a lot of questions so I got a special Dodge FAQ done for the rules. It seems like these writing pieces take me forever, even though each is quite small. Oh well.

In this second session I need to start writing up the different Zombie types. We have a lot of different brain eaters wandering the world. I need to start finalizing the Item sheets and get them ready for the big upload, along with the pages for these sheets. We are going to have a nice long list of items. I am wondering about doing and publishing some of these early. Many of them would work as is for DS and could be done as Universal RPG item cards, even with the Crypt Crawl stats on them.

Well, back to work for me, I will sip down this coffee and compose my mind.

24 hours without my Sue

I am up and moving. Dog and cat walked, fed and talked to. Spoke with Sue last night. She is at the FurFright Hotel and doing fine. The drive was straight forward.

My cookies turned out really good, but I think they are too sweet. At 150 calories each I ate a pile and froze half for when Sue gets home. I need to look into some changes in the recipe, maybe some milk instead of a cup of butter, and more cinamon. I will work on it.

Continued work on the Crypt Crawl RPG game. I have opened a Blog for the new game. This is a link to it and on the Crypt Crawl Page the Crypt Crawl Updates link leads to the blog. I have also started filing in some of the specific sheet pages on the download page. What is added are Info Links. These pages talk about the specific sheets. I need to have these in place for the grand November 1st uploading.

Next up I will be going to our in house wiki and updating some of the FAQ's. These will be poured into a pdf for the downloads.

More later.

Sue is on her way to FurFright.

OK, I am here at home, alone, ready for some partying. Oh, wait, she took the car. Oh, well, I'll just. But wait some more, I like partying with Sue... what is the sense of a party without Sue?

I guess I will get some Crypt Crawl work done, in fact, I just finished laying out the first 20 monsters for the Crypt Crawl Monster Parade One.

I also started some chicken in the slow cooker. I am having sandwiches and more with chicken. I have a hankering for cookies. Can't work now, time to bake!

More done, more enjoyed.

Saturday and then Sunday evening I spent with my Sue. Fun. Sunday night we watched a couple of old Farscape episodes. The best part was doing it with Sue. Well plotted show. I wonder what it would take to run an rpg campaign with the fun and wonder of some of these shows. The closest I have come so far is podcasting.

I have actually finished the web site layout for Crypt Crawl. It will probably still have a few tweeks, but the format is there. You can look over the place by using this link.

At this time there are about 240 player cards for Crypt Crawl. The original DS had 270 cards, but they were both GM and player cards. So, at 240 rpg player cards we are closing in on as many player cards as DS and Kanchaka combined. It should be a good start.

Sleepy me.

I am not sure why I am sleeping so much, but I am feeling better, just tired. *sigh* Such is life.

Had a lot of fun Tuesday night running the Crypt Crawl game. The holes in the game are closing up nicely. We are working on the presentation and wrap up for the rules. Among those thoughts is finding memorable name for important rules features.

The Terrible Two's. Not good to roll a "2" on 2d6. You are stunned, surprised, or just bemused. You will use your actions to "Recover", then you are back to normal.

Streaks. Rolling a 10, 11, or 12 is good. You are on a streak. You will roll another 2d6 and add it to the result. Oh, 10, 11, 12 again? Keep the streak going! An initiative roll of 29 really happens. 50 plus damage in a swing? yup. A defense roll of 34, sure, why not.

The Defensive part of combat has changed in Crypt Crawl. Every time you get physically hit you get a 2d6 Defense Roll. No set number. A Terrible Two equals no (zero) defense... Armor has to be Activated by using an Action. If you have an Active Armor number, it is added to the 2d6 roll... If you use an Action to Parry you get to add the Parry adding the Parry Values of your equipment.

And finally, the third pic from our last game.

Hmmm, no wonder I have been feeling out of it.

I appear to be trying to turn this chilly, damp, drizzly weather into a lung infection. Getting congestion etc. I have been taking nutmeg for the past few hours and it has the congestion on the run.

My mind has been going over this weeks Crypt Crawl game with a smile. Our outdoor tabletop adventuring worked just fine. The players finished off Mordig's Labyrinth and killed the demon, earning them a Demon Heart Gem. You don't really gain anything from the Gem, but it is a good trophy. Now I need to write up the entire adventure so I can post it on November first with the Beta release.

I just finished the first draft of the next dungeon. I am also drafting a series of "bad guys" to release for the GM. I am going to put each one on an individual page so a notebook can be made. In the adventures and encounters I can put in just the stats for the bad guys, knowing the full work-up is available to the GM. It is even easier to create monsters in Crypt Crawl than it is in DS. I have written up the point guidelines for monster creation and those will go up with the Beta. It will help the GM to create unique monsters of their own.

Well, today I will be slowly working on several projects, including putting up the three new DS cards. I am thinking I will carve out some cuddle time with Sue while I'm at it. Hey, feeling poorly has to have some benefits!