Breaking the Ice

This will come as no surprise to anybody: I haven't blogged in a long time. I haven't realized exactly how long until I got an email on my Salvador Dali post stating simply, "Wake up and blog, dude."

Fuckin' A! I'm on it!

See, it's really not so much that I haven't had the time as I hadn't had the inclination. Role-playing games have always been an on-again, off-again sort of pursuit, especially when I'm not actively playing them. I moved away from the group I was playing them with, and then I moved again.

Nary a die has been rolled for an unusually long while in my household. There's not even a particularly good reason for it.

So in order to motivate myself to doing something and putting it out into the nebulous silliness that is the interwebs, I'm gonna make a list of things that I've started and stopped recently.

1) Dark Skies Above Us: I'd been working on this since the release of my diseased orcs killfest, Servants of Plague. The reason it stopped? Well, it wasn't based on a session I'd played. Everything I made was more or less intentionally designed and, well, my mind just doesn't work like that. It works best on the crazy juices that flow when you sit down with a couple of your buddies and shoot the shit about going underground and stealing gold out from the noses of some sort of elder evil. Not because you want to save the world, mind you, but because that shit-head's got a mountain of the stuff and he's not even using it. In my D&D world, adventurers are three parts mercenary, two parts Thomas Covenant, and one part Frodo Baggins: They're out looking for money, and any good they do is going to be because greatness is thrust upon them accidentally.

2) Mailed Fist: The what, fifth rename of my system, and this time it's lighter than ever. I wrote it one night when I was bored out of my gourd, and it's actually a pretty slick system. See, there's a sweet spot between the arduous complexity of AD&D by the book, and FUDGE, and it's different for every single person. Some people get off on calculating bonuses for positioning and weapon length vs foe size, and that sure as hell isn't me. Some people really love their characters being 99% idea and 1% character, with character sheets that list their three favorite foods and what they're wearing and that's that. That also isn't me. My ideal is like Dead Meat meets Labyrinth Lord. I want about ten pages of dungeoneering, and that's that.

3) Aremorican Addendum Volume Two: I don't even know what's going to be in this fucker, but I named the first one, so I'm stuck to it. Maybe I'll add a thing about the world itself, so people can play in my world. Why would anybody want to? Fuck, I dunno, I thought it'd be an interesting experiment (like everything else I do) and if anybody likes it they can have it to use as they like. That's what I'm all about, you know.

Anyways, that's me. Look near this space for more juicy, opinionated text.