I am eye-balls deep in a new project and I am not 100% ready to share it all with you yet.
But I am having a lot more fun with it than I expected.
This is also my first realyl big project since moving over to Affinity Publisher and Photo from Indesign and Photoshop. Bit of a learning curve for somethings, but I am enjoying the results.
Hope to let you all know very, very soon.
Well, something fun happened just a bit ago, and it was totally unexpected.
Well, maybe not "fans" as much as I'd love to claim, but certainly, 10 M hits is nothing to sneeze at.
I am pleased that so many people still enjoy my insane ramblings here.
I hope the next 10,000,000 hits are just as good as the first or even better.
Slept through the night last night.
Yesterday I got up after only a couple of hours of sleep. Voted and my wife said "Hey it is beautiful outside, lets go on a hike."
So six miles later I crashed.
Slept now, will resume tonight.
This one is very easy, and hard. In fact I am sitting here drinking a Mt. Dew (though now a Zero sugar one) in his honor.
My friend and old DM Michael Grenda, died last year. It was a rather sudden and unexpected death. We had not talked in years (jobs, marriages, kids), but we had met up about this time last year, and we fell right into old patterns.
I was very happy that his life had turned out happy. Maybe not exactly like we used to talk about in High School, but really who can say that. I still feel sorrow for his wife and daughter.
I have been working on an adventure that I want to get out dedicated to him and based on his version of the "Mad Archmage" archetype. No, it's not a mega-dungeon, but it's certainly closer to a funhouse dungeon. He, his wife, and his daughter all used to work at this haunted house, one of the largest in the state of Illinois. I was comforted in seeing that there were so many of these "Boo Crew" folks at his funeral. It seems right that the adventure should be a large haunted house-like deal.
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| Me and Grenda at Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket on Rt. 66 in July 2023 |
Yeah. I wore that Radio Shack shirt on purpose. We bonded over our love of the TRS-80 Color Computer. I still have his old computer.
It was his birthday a couple of days ago. To be perfectly honest I am still coming to terms with the fact that he is gone. Weird.
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And that is all for Dave Chapman's #RPGaDAY2024 for August, 2024!
I picked these up last week but forgot to mention them here.
These are the first class "Forever" stamps and there are 20 stamps of 10 designs. At 73¢ each this sheet costs $14.60.
Given the amount of letters I send, this might last me till D&D's 60th anniversary!
Still a crazy time here with the day job and trying to get Darker Stars done.
I have been getting a bunch of behind the scenes updates done here as well. Getting my #RPGaDay posts sorted. Getting my October posts figured out, not just for my horror movies, but also various reviews and posts for the RPG Blog Carnival.
When I have some free time (which is never) I am also poking around trying to update and modernize this old TRS-80 computer.
As you can see I have not gotten very far. But I think everything I need is there. It is an upgrade from 64k to 16g. That is an increase in memory of 250,000 times. Not too bad, really.
A few other projects I still have going.
My Forgotten Realms exploration continues. My oldest is currently running what we are calling "It's Always Sunny in Waterdeep." The PCs have gained the deed to a bar and are in the process of building it up and going on side quests to fund it. Of course, this isn't "Cheers," so the side quests usually involve something illegal.
I am helping update the classic "A Paladin in Hell" to be a sequel to "Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus" and calling it "A Barbarian in Hell." Everyone in his group has played Baldur's Gate 3, so they are all very eager to go to Hell and rescue Karlach.
Under 5e A Barbarian in Hell is a killer adventure. I am expecting more than one death here.
I'll have to let you know how it all goes.
Instead of freezing my ass off, I am poking at my Deities & Demigods II. I have all the text in the layout, but I am in a quandary. I love the work I have done on it, but I can't in good conscience sell it anymore or even give it away for free using AI-generated art.
I am going still play around AI art for personal fun, but not for publishing this particular project.
This is an issue since the Black Forest Mythos has two dozen gods and a dozen or so monsters. I need to find some art. I really don't want to spend a ton on art and not see a return on it. I am fine not making a profit for this sine I was doing it for fun (and potentially for free) but I would like to recoup any money spent on art now.
So. Trying to figure out my next steps.
I have mentioned him here many times, usually not by name, I don't name people unless they have explicitly said it was fine. But we began playing in my early high school days. We met via our school's theatre group. Yeah, we were both theatre kids. We bonded over our shared love of D&D and the fact that we both owned TRS-80 Color Computers.
He had his world, based mainly on the World of Greyhawk and I had mine, based on the Known World, or what would later be known as Mystara. And we would go back and forth between these worlds. Eventually, we would merge them and he made a map for it that I would eventually lose and then much, much later find the Mystoerth map I still use today. We played chess together often, had similar tastes in fiction, and discovered computer games together.
When I left town to go to University, he eventually followed me there. He was a computer science major and would eventually end up working with databases for the State of Illinois (which is as much archaeology as it is computer science) and met his future wife while we were all at school together. His wife (then his girlfriend) introduced me to Gopher sites and even this new thing called the World Wide Web.
Much of what happened in our games lives on in my work here. The "Big Bad" of my Buffy campaign "The Dragon and the Phoenix" was Yoln Shadowreaper, one of his NPCs. The entire background of TDaTP was my big War of the Dragons, which was our world-ending battle before college.
Our "D&D on the Computer" game BARDD was largely written by him. When I6 Ravenloft came out I bought it and then made him run it. Back in college, we even did the "Dreams of Barovia" campaign where the characters shifted from one reality to the next, with him running House on Gryphon Hill and me running the original I6. I ran my first test of my witch class with him and we tried out his Riddle Master, Beastmaster, and Shadowmaster classes.
We had met up recently, back in July, and that was great. We had not seen each other in a long time. Family, jobs, kids. You know the story. I hate to say it, but when his wife called me last night, I was not 100% surprised. I thought he looked a little unwell. But hell, we are all in our 50s now. None of us look "great."
I have not quite processed it all yet, to be honest. I owe a lot of my my current writing to him and the games we played. Thought we might roll some dice one more time, but I guess not.
I'll end with him flipping me off at a party a bunch of us were at in college. He would have found it funny.
I interrupt my regularly scheduled Monstrous Monday post for our monster harvest we worked on over the weekend.
Long-time readers will know that my wife has a huge garden. She has over 115 tomato plants and somewhere north of 120 peppers from sweet to super hot.
We brought in tomatoes, peppers, carrots, garlic, some onions, okra, beans, basil, and even some potatoes.
We spent Sunday processing them all.
I processed about 3 gallons of Tomato sauce and we also made tomato soup to freeze.
This was our third harvest this year so far and we have least two more. With all the picking (and you have to do the weeding then too), processing, and freezing, we hit the couch last night, and both of us crashed. This was all a lot easier 25 years ago when she started her garden.
Honestly, I should have made a "Tomato Monster" but was too beat.
Now to convince my chef son to make me something will all this garden fresh produce!
Got a special delivery the other day!
Our NIGHT SHIFT Twilight's Queen mead from Apis mead and wine is in.
I have three bottles and I am saving them for Halloween night. Certainly a great night for it!
You can order yours from Vino Shipper.
Now for something a little different.
Reposted from The Official Night Shift: VSW MEAD!
From Jason Vey creator and co-author of NIGHT SHIFT:
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| Twilight Queen, the official mead of Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars |
This mead, a collaboration with Apis Mead & Winery in Carnegie, PA, is a buckwheat mead with black cherries, vanilla, allspice, and cinnamon. The release party will be at Apis on Saturday, October 8, from 2:00 PM until whenever. We will have gaming events and giveaways, and both the mead and the game will be on sale! Our friends from Drawbridge Games will be on site as well!
Please save the date and stop down! And if you can't make it, Apis can ship to any state that is allowed, through Vinoshipper!
You can find more information about Apis at their website here:
Tim here now.
I don't do a lot of drinking anymore, save for coffee (I did enough in college for myself, my kids, you, your kids...) but this is fun.
Will it help the sales of NIGHT SHIFT? No, and I would be surprised if it did, but that is not the point is it. This is a fun thing to have and I'll happily pick up a few bottles.
Can you say your RPG has its own mead? No.
NOW, what would be totally on-brand for me? A "From the Editor's Cup" Weirdly World News coffee roast. Dark, imposing, and each cup is the LD50 of caffeine for a grown adult!
This is fairly damning, to be honest. The book is pretty much Nazi "fan fiction" by those familiar with it. While this might not be enough for others there is more. It does seem that the Tekumel Foundation has known about this, and kept it quiet, for years. Now you might ask how is a "Nazi fan fiction" any different than say Philip K. Dick's "Man in the High Castle?" I guess the back cover of the book tells the whole story. It was written as fulfillment fantasy of a group of S.S. officers' descendants "correcting the the wrongs" of the end of W.W. II.
Ok that is pretty bad. Then to make matters worse, Prof. Barker sat on the board of editors for anti-Sementic, Holocaust-denial journal, "The Journal of Historical Review," as psuedo-scientific and psuedo-academic journal. It has been described as anti-Sementic by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Journal is much like others of it's ilk; not peer-reviewed, pushing an agenda. There was some uncertainty online about who this particular "Philip Barker, Ph.D." was, but honestly combined with the publication of the other book I don't feel that he gets any benefit of the doubt.
What does that mean for me?
Well. Everyone has to draw their own lines somewhere. Like Lovecraft, Orson Scott Card, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and J.K. Rolwing, Barker has left a pretty dark mark on his legacy.
For me, Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are steps way too far.
There is no evidence of this, as far as I can tell, within the pages of Tékumel. But the shine on the books is gone for me. I know he is dead and won't benefit from anything I do or don't do. I am not looking to boycott or raise a campaign about it, plenty of others will do that. It is just sad of course that such an obviously brilliant man also has such vile and repugnant beliefs.
Anyway, here are the relevant links. No I am not linking to the books. You can find them on your own.
Seriously. It is.
Like Old-School D&D was a pioneer of gaming, Run-DMC was a pioneer of old-school rap and hip hop. Many hip-hop groups cite Run-DMC as their primary influence and for many of us Run-DMC was out first exposure to the wider world of rap and hip-hop. Could there have been a Public Enemy without Run-DMC? Wu-Tang Clan? NWA? Snoop-Dogg? Outkast? Salt-n-Peppa, De La Soul? Cypress Hill? US3? Digable Planets? TLC? (damn, I still love TLC).
We owe it all to Run-DMC.
Silly? Yeah, a little. But my love of Run-DMC is pure and true. And yeah I know all the words to these songs.
But making a claim, any claim, about the OSR is pointless. While there are trends, there are no main drivers here. No one setting policy or dictating terms save for collective memory of a time when you could turn on your radio and hear "It's Tricky."
Consequently, the claim that OSR is conservative only track because the OSR is as has been often pointed out, full of old fucks.
I am pretty far left and get more liberal and more left and more blue with each passing year.
I shouldn't need to say this, but here it is.
Like THAC0 BLOG and The Elf Game, I don't just reject Nazis and White Supremacists, I utterly reject them and condemn them, and they are not welcome in any part of the games I play, write or enjoy. They can take their orange shitgibbon Trump with them.
Oh.
And Black Lives Matter.
And fuck Trump.
Don't like it? Get the fuck out of the OSR.
