Late, but here it is.

I got the Universal Boon sheets done and posted today. I had a couple more things I wanted to do, but with only five hours left before I have to get up and work with Sue on her meds, well, just not going to happen.

I have two more sheets I need to get converted for Tim. Those I will get done with spot work during the day. Should have done them already. Oh well, do what you can.

Next up I want to go through the comments on the Universal Betas, divide them into "P" and temporary cards. Should be 2-4 sheets. I would like to get them up Sunday night.

With those in hand we can go over a number of sets for players races, shifters, special abilities and professions and make them work with, enhance and expand the Universal cards.

I also want to get back to some GM cards. The last I checked almost every DS game has a GM. They appear to be very important, as any player without a game to play will tell you. I guess that is why, as players, we treat the GM's with respect and chocolate. (How do you give your Skype GM chocolate? I need to check into our selling Gift Certificates..)

Mark

Just a little DS Work

I am working on two sets of Universal Boon type cards for 2.0. Three of the eighteen did not pass early muster and others need a little tweaking.

A few of these are too complex for the standard card. I am going to lay them out as full text cards.

I managed to get a couple of hours in today, so I am through the first nine. I only have six right now for the second sheet, I thonk I will take a look through the Universal "P" type cards and see what fits in. I have an Herbalism card I like, but that would mean working on the herbs next, and I am not sure if Herb would like that.

I am really going to miss going to PentaCon, sigh.

Mark

Mother's, work and plans

My mother is in rehab to get ready to adjust for returning home. We have a "family" doctor visit scheduled for tuesday morning. We shall see. Sue's mom goes in at the end of the week for hip replacement surgery and then some recovery time. So we are in for more time consumption. What can you do. They are mothers.

As far as work, we have more to do than we can do. Therefore some work must end. Tomorrow I will be replacing the Dragon Storm site. It is shrinking and we are pulling the Deluxe cards entirely. I am also going to start dropping blogs and folding them together. The first blog to go will be the DS Beta blog. It takes too much time to track etc. I will be looking around for a place to make a combined game blog. Maybe "Game News from the Clanhold".

Plans, we making them. Step one is to assemble a complete core rules set for the new games.

OK, laundry is calling, must go.

Mom, Webpage and other thoughts

Since Friday I have been spending the first few hours of my day visiting my mother in the hospital. She has a blood Clot in her lung, and pneumonia. She is doing better, but the process has weakened her, she may be staying for rehab.

I keep finding "things" that I feel I have to have in the new DS website before I can delete the old site and put up the new site. Very soon I am going to say that is enough and put it up. I can then add a page a day for a couple of months and be set.

I need to spend some time on the phone to the printer today arranging and making sure the sets I have in will be here soon. I also need to prep the next batch of sets and get them posted.

I have been visiting the hospital my mother is in for several years now at different times. Maybe because I just see "slices" in time I can see the slow degeneration of the hospitals efficiency. Little things, getting the diabetic diet wrong, and having to boost insulin to compensate. Not being able to find anyone trained to do my mom's type of dialysis, apparently it is too new, even though she has been on it for three years (through another local hospital). After the kidney doctor was in and heard some thoughts about the care I found him outside at the empty nurses station on the phone. He was upset. He found the fact that he was phoning from an empty nurses station unsettling, to say the least. Yesterday my mother said "I can't understand what has happened to this place, it used to be so good." So even she has seen the changes. Not good, but we are not living in the middle of the slow decline, maybe we can see it better than if you are in the middle of the chaos. To be fair we encountered several efficient, friendly staff members and they deserve applause for continuing to do good in a declining system.

Sometimes seeing these incidents makes me look around to see if I can see a decline in other organizations around me. I believe I see it. I think our general standards are declining around us, but it is best if I shut up and get back to work. My paranoia is high today.

Yes, weight goes down and change is coming

The new "food Plan" is working so far. Sue and I have stuck on it three whole days. Both of us are on edge a little, but overall it is not bad. Dropping a pound a day, probably too fast, but it may be the only way. I have 10 pounds to lose to get down to average BMI.

With all of the changes in Dragon Storm brought on by converting to the Standard cards it will require a complete change to the website. I might just as well take the jump and replace the whole thing. For the past several years I have just hung more on the old framework. It is now so jumbled that I can not even find stuff. Time for a change. The plan is to start with just a few pages and then rebuild a page or two a day until it is all back. I am going to go ahead and pull all of the deluxe cards except for the few we will be keeping. I am also going to size the pages for the coming of the Ipad, and all of the tablets which will follow it. They will still run on computers just fine, so that will work as well.

I think the idea that a table top rpg gamer can get to the full web will have some very interesting results. It should be possible to create entire scenarios that can be played off of the pad with just dice and paper to track damage, cast attitudes etc. I am not sure how that will work, but I am looking at it very seriously. Being able to sit down and dial up a game for the night would be interesting. All you would have to do is modify it for your style on the fly and play.

Tomorrow work begins on reworking the kitchen. The kitchen sink water pipes blew in early january. They go out of the house to the sink. Rather than repair a system that will just blow again, we are moving the sink to the other end. Plumbing, counters and some electrical work is coming my way. I am certain that once it starts coming apart that I will find way more problems than I expect. It is always like that.

Far too much going on in my mind

I seem to have too many thoughts floating through the old brain bucket. I find myself following one string after another across my mindscape. Unfortunately my attention wanders and I become entranced by another fleeting thought. Well, the result is several dozen unfinished ideas. Far more than I can actually follow.

I will see what I can do about exposing a few of the ideas.

A subject I spent far too much time mulling over is: does one play a character in an alien world or are they playing the rules with a characterization? In one case a person is immersed in the world and they stretch themselves to see from a new viewpoint. In the second the player is surfing the world on top of the rules. Both are valid and fun. In reality the acting community acknowledges these styles as Method Acting and Classic Acting. There are, in both role-playing and acting, a blend of these in every session.

Why, you ask, do you consider such questions? I wandered into this one while I was working on a campaign background for the new game. The players and GM's need different information for different styles. If a player's character is played as if it was a real world, then specific rules references may interfere with there game. At the other end a person riding the rules with glee finds extensive descriptions and emotions a pain, they need the rule to go by. They question for us is how do we balance these demands in setting up everything from a single encounter to a campaign region. To be able to balance our output we need to understand the ways people are using that output.

So, there you go. If I had any sense I would actually review and rewrite these pieces, but I think I will just go on spitting out rough gems rather than carefully polishing them.

Working Steadily, it is still all uphill.

The only thing I dislike about pushing rocks up hill is that a few always roll right back down the hill. The positive part is that most of the rocks stay on top of the hill. I like to remember the positives.

Sue and I made progress on our internal organization and our ambitious plans for the future. Prioritizing tasks is not straight forward. It has to be balanced between the tasks with immediate results, those with long term value and those that are risky/uncertain.

We are going to arrange for two week periods of seclusion about four times a year so we can consider what has happened, is happening and will happen. It also gives us a chance to enjoy each other. What can I say, I really like my "Sue" time. I think t is the single most important thing in my life.

Here at the Clanhold our kitchen water pipes have finally burst. They have been freezing off and on for 20 years. It was just a matter of time. Right now I am running pans of water downstairs to do cooking etc. We are going to reconsider the kitchen carefully. The pipes go through an unheated, unprotected area currently. We would have to move the sinks to change that, but it is not a simple decision, so we will not be rushed into a bad choice.

Off to help my Mom. Pre-Order DS Standard Sets?

My Mom needs a vehicle for traveling to the Doctors Offices today. That is what I will be doing. Just routine check-ups for her Dialysis etc.

I have started putting together 9 card sets of Universal cards. We have a lot of Universal cards to do. I am hoping to finish setting them up late today and tomorrow. My plan is to make a PDF for each set like the Witchcraft Set, where one page has notes and the second page has the sample cards. It should make it a lot easier for people to decide how many of which sets you want.

We are really hoping that the printing costs of these can be covered by Pre-Orders. We already have a nice Pre-Order for the Witchcraft card set.

I am not sure how fast to release the sets. I have ten Universal sets done so far. How many should I list at a time? How many per month would be reasonable? At $12.00 per four sets on Pre-Order can we do four per month? That would be $48.00 per month to keep up with the Pre-Orders. How many of you would be willing to do that?

I am also wondering about setting up a list of people that would want to "subscribe" to the Pre-Orders. I could send out PayPal Invoices to you that could be paid on-line or by mailing in a check. It would help our cash flow to know what we were doing, and what you would be willing to do.

Thanks, Mark

After Christmas and still Talking

Sue and I are getting through a lot of soul searching about where we are going and what we can realistically get done.

We are having to break up our talks into hour long chunks, anything longer and we start veering off into worlds of fantasy, getting way off topic.

It is surprisingly hard work to craft long term reasonable goals and to work out the co-ordination we need to make it happen.

I feel truly blessed that Sue is able to deal with "touchy" subjects reasonably, however, both Sue and I have to watch a tendency to get defensive rather than constructive.

Are there any projects you folks out there would like to make sure we are looking at? Leave a comment, help us not to forget something important.

Snow, Talking, Planning, and a little more.

Well, we finally have some actual snow, maybe the grass will quit growing now. I disappointed the local shoveling kids by doing my own driveway and walk. I counted it as my first morning work out.

Starting Thursday Sue and I began looking back at last year and forward to next year. We have a good deal of organizational work to do. We have gotten better at coordinating our work, but we both need work in that area. We can look at our successes and, ummm, errors, and work out a better way. We get better at it every year.

We are also working out a DS production schedule. It is tricky because we have to carve out the art time way ahead so it fits into her commission schedule as well. We are looking over the card submissions from our players. Most of the years new cards will come from what you folks submitted to the DS Beta blog. The pickings are thin this year, but what can we do. In the next two weeks we will have the rough outlines of our years releases in place so we know how the time allocation works out.

We are also looking at doing a good number of the Deluxe cards in the new standard card sets. We will be looking them over and trying to divide them up, as best we can. We will need to add a few new cards into the mix to make 9 and 18 card sets that make sense.

We are thinking that with new cards we can do more mixing and matching as we release new sets. I am not sure how people will react to that, but this is all new for us, so we will be trying several different directions to see what works and what does not.

Pre-ordering upcoming standard card sets is going to need a system to maintain. I know what to do to make it work, but that will require new software. *sigh* Something new to remember how to use, and of course, it has changed just a little in the past 15 years. The theory is the same, but the tools have changed.

There are a number of projects we want to do and a number we have to do. The trick of balancing them will be fun to work out.

Strangely I am looking forward to some serious head banging with Sue over many issues. I am just glad that neither of us are terribly thin skinned, we work well together. She is just too cool!

OK, off to work, or play, or housework. We shall see.

Lovely Day, Just a dusting of Snow and all is a dirty white.

I went out this morning with Mocha and we pretended we were shoveling snow, but with an accumulation of an 1/8th of an inch it was just to do it.

North of here they got real snow. South, snow. East and West, snow. Even the snow stays away from Flint. It is, however, cold, so we did not miss everything. I guess it is time to put away the swim suits.

I am working on Blind Fighting rules for Crypt Crawl. They should also be useable in DS, although I will leave that for others to test. The players were just plain thrilled to be experimenting on these rules. OK, Little Harry was not so thrilled. He awoke in the Vat after his death. Luckily the other characters did grab his body with stuff on it as they ran from the scene. That means he keeps his stuff and they have a body to put in his second grave. The ceremonies were wonderful. Even Little Harry, there for his own burial, had a tear in his eye.

OK, shipping to do.

Morning Exercise, Routines and Depressions

I have spent most of the past week in a depression, you know, that feeling that nothing is going to work out. It tries to get you to sit on your butt, eat and do nothing. Which brings on the nothing works ending. I do not know why this is going on and I really do not care what causes it.

I have forced myself to get work done and move on. Still depressed. So, I have decided that this is the time to add an exercise routine at least twice a day. May as well have a reason for being depressed. As they say "The beatings will continue until moral improves."

Have a good Day!

New Wolf art is on the way.

Sue has just turned over a new wolf painting she has completed to me for scanning and prep for printing. I am liking what I see here. Scanning and assembling large paintings is something that I set aside a good deal of time for. If everything goes well the job is done in an hour, but if it turns weird on me it can take several hours and be a whole day job. I just never know. This one will start as four scans.

Yesterday was one of those days. A bunch of trifling "stuff" kept coming up and I let it get under my skin. I always waste a lot of time once I become agitated. I need to learn better self control. Oh well, too busy learning other new tricks.

I did get a new Crypt Crawl RPG item sheet completed. This one has several items that are used with the animals I have been putting up on the blog. Now that I have all of the pieces ready I can go through and do the Beastmaster cards. (Thought pops into head. Excuse me, but I need bandages on the next sheet.) OK, back, bandages they will be on item sheet 2015.

I have found that once I have 12 or more programs running, on 8 different desktops, my portable starts to slow down visibly. I suppose the two screens and two printers do not help any. I usually end up adding programs as I work, like working on this and skipping to bandages. Right now I am at 14 programs running. I am wondering if I can set up an old machine with skype/canary/chat. I will need to look into that.

I have started slow cooking some chicken. Sue will make chicken soup tomorrow. Then we can have chicken meals sunday and monday.

Enough of this, on to other work.

Friday at Pentacon, A day at the Convention

We arrived at PentaCon at about 1PM. Gaming had started at 9AM so there was a good number of people at the Con when we arrived. People were friendly and it was good to see familiar faces. Sometimes when working in solitaire in the hidden Clanhold makes me forget why I do all this work. Seeing our people makes me remember. Our patrons were good to us today, much cash was collected.

The air in the convention center is not having much of a negative effect on me, so I will be running Crypt Crawl at 2-5pm and 7:30 to 10:30. I plan on running for about an hour and a quarter, take a break and do another hour and a quarter on the session. It will run up the characters to, probably third circle.

Several people here at the con have already played in the Crypt. As usual I will forget most of the comments from people at the show. I am hoping they will follow up with e-mails from the Crypt site about there experiences in the Crypt.

The card sets are going well, but people are still having trouble adapting to them. Several times people have picked up 3-4 Deluxe Wizard or Valarian cards. I have had to point out it would be a better deal for them if they got the standard sets instead.

Right now it is 5 AM, I awoke and now I think I will go get some sleep.

Today's schedule is, well, goofed up

I am getting a good start here, but I am, as always, behind. I will have new DS cards and sets at PentaCon, but the restock is not going to happen. I'm afraid that the time to put up the Crypt Crawl beta has already worn me down, so I am not going to push. Life is too much fun to bury my head in work and miss what rally counts.

Had a fun game last night. Yeah, that is right, I played several hours of Crypt and did not work. Experimenting with some politics along with the normal smashing and bashing. The group found a Horror trapping a farm family. They, of course, stepped in and saved them. The family was in general poor condition. They talked and found out these people were tenent farmers on the local lords land. They get "survival" level food and goods, and that is all. Two of the players befriended and healed the farmers. Then one of the characters hired the farmers to look for herb ingrediants, paying in gold. They made friends, the word will spread.

Today I have to go shopping for PentaCon food, cut and corner cards, put prices on the card sets and stare at the wall and think. I have a long piece I am working on for the Crypt Blog, (What is Table Top Role Playing?) but it is taking time, not a simple question. I think I will work on starting animals for the crypt and put that up on the blog. I also need to do the web for the new deluxe cards and the Rogue card set.

OK, time to take this machine out of the bedroom, stop staring at the pretty Sue and get to my work station.

Monday Morning, not the song I want to hear.

OK, it is Monday Morning a way too early. Having gotten the Crypt Crawl Beta up I would really like to bury my tired head in a pillow for a few more hours and then get caught up on housework. Maybe listen to an audio book, maybe watch a couple of Babylon 5 episodes. I see that there is a Battle Star Movie - The Plan available. I wonder if it is any good. I liked the show, but I am not sure.

Anyway, I need to get DS cards/web done. Sue has sent me some artwork for cards I have not even looked at. I wonder what cards we will have by Friday? It will be interesting to see. Based on web orders the Universal Blood Surge is going to be very popular.

I am only going to make a few Deluxe Cards of the new cards in the sets. We will do them, but I really expect people to want the sets.

I think I will start with a web search and write up what I need to put up for pages. At least it will get me a handle on what I need to do for the web. Then a check of the art Sue has done that I need to make into cards. While I am doing the second I can begin printing cards that are ready.

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.