Wednesday, August 5, 2009

What happening in the Attic, August 2009

Currently I am working on a product for the Old School Renaissance. Those of you who have been following this blog have seen snippets of various parts. It been exciting to write but also a struggle as I find I had a lot more to say than I originally thought. It one thing to write up notes for your weekly game quite another to put it in a form to be usable by total strangers. In short what I thought I would be able to release in July is now stretching into late August.

I won't know how Points of Light II did until late August. Points of Lights sold OK but not as well as the other items in Goodman Game's line. Just go to RPGNow and click on Goodman Games. You can get a good idea of relative sales. I appreciate all the kind words and reviews that were given for both products. I can say that I own the rights to the text of Points of Light so if the line doesn't get picked up again by Goodman Games I will continue it under a different name.

My house has a nice over the garage apartment. Well it nice except for the fact its water pipes are too exposed and I have continue issues with freezing. When I first moved here my RPG stuff was somewhat disorganized. It remained that way when I got married and had to move a lot of stuff into the garage to make room for Kelly Anne and more still when the kids were born. When I quit renting the apartment I never really took advantage of the space until this summer.

I went on a rampage through both of my garage getting rid of a lot of junk and crap. When I did that I finally had the room to sort all my personal stuff. The first of course was my RPG games. For the first time in 15 years I have everything properly sorted and organized. Fortunately there were only a few casualties the bulk of my stuff was still intact including all my notes for various games.

I collected pretty heavily from junior high (age 14) until I got married. After I got married I still bought on a regular basis but I much more discerning. The only things I will go for automatically is GURPS and Harn. Traveller should be on the automatic list but Mongoose's has persistent editing and presentation problems. Combined with their slightly higher prices often it is not worth buying despite being the latest incarnation of traveller. As far as I am concerned SJ Game sets the gold standard in editing their products.

Having all my stuff organizing means I can go through my older notes and get them into the computer for backup. By having them both on paper and computer I have a better chance of preserving them for the next 30 years. This is why you been seeing the Traveller stuff here.

Of course the moment I wanted something specific, namely the actual house rules I used to award XP when I ran AD&D I can't find it. :(. I saw during the reorganization but it was in a spot with a bunch of other papers that wasn't related to AD&D.

When I was DMing AD&D I had a 3 inch white binder filled with house rules, aides, and campaign logs. At some point I disassembled it and scattered the pieces. I already knew I did this prior the reorganization and I still kick myself for doing it. It represented a great source of memories and I had it was damn useful. The 12 pages of house rules and addenum are gone except for two pages. Some cleric rules and the AD&D XP rules that I can't find now.

I had a similar binder for GURPS 3rd Edition and that been preserved. Instead of breaking it up when I moved to GURPS 4th, I created another one for 4th edition and photocopied anything I wanted out of the older one.

Also all three of my GM Binders have more than just system material. They have material from other system that I found that works well with the games I run. For example I used the Harnmaster Treasure Tables in my GURPS games as well as the list of Herbs. My AD&D binder had Judges Guild Ready ref sheets three hole punched in them.

When I get my first project done, one of the things I will be doing is applying my post about creating Traveller Sandboxes. As much as I like the Third Imperium part of Traveller's genius was adaptability to create nearly any sci-fi setting. I want to explore this side of Traveller in a form similar to Points of Light but using the principles I wrote about in the Traveller Sandbox Post. This will be likely be the third project I will be doing.

The second? After I make the announcement about the first project I will explain what that will be. They are related.

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