Hurricane Harvey

I've been looking at the website http://earth.nullschool.net, taking note of the Hurricane Harvey as it was forming and moving across the Gulf of Mexico.  Just from interest.

Here is a screenshot of what Hurricane Harvey looked like on August 24th, when we were told it was developing into a category 4 storm, the largest in 12 years:

Note the date and time on the left hand side.

And here is what Harvey looked like, 36 hours before, at midnight on August 23rd:

Harvey formed in the southeast corner of the Gulf of Mexico, which happens ~ but category 4 storms do not come from here.  The Gulf of Mexico tends to form tropical storms, not all out hurricanes. Big hurricanes usually form like Irma, right now in the mid-Atlantic.  But this is not the only confusing thing about Harvey.  Have a look at the Gulf of Mexico, just 12 hours before the picture above, at noon on August 22nd:

No hurricane.  There's a Low sitting over the Yucatan peninsula, which in the afternoon of the 22nd moves over the west coast of the peninsula.  By evening, it's evident that the Low is strengthening into a hurricane and by midnight on the 23rd, there's Harvey.  Just 66 hours later, at 6pm on the 25th, it hits the coast of East Texas for the first time.

And it has played hell with the region, as it didn't just make landfall and break up, because there was a tremendous weather system inland that kept Harvey trapped on the coast.

As I write this, on August 31, here's a view of Harvey as it pours rain on the states of Arkansas and Mississippi:

Interesting stuff.  I had seen that there was a report of another hurricane forming the same way by the 4th of September.  This morning, as I was looking at these maps, that was the forecast.

However, as I look now, that hurricane is no longer expected to happen.  Good news.  But from what I see and hear, it could take three weeks for the water to drain off East Texas.  I also hear this is in great part from the failing of East Texan communities to spend a proper budget on drains, not to mention an irrational attitude towards zoning, that prohibits the sort of urban planning that would make it possible to shake off a storm like this when it happens.

I don't know what people are thinking where it comes to this sort of thing.

A Rant Unfair to Readers

I feel I'm doing a disservice to my readers, working on monsters as I have done the last couple of weeks ~ and not new monsters, but very old monsters.  I don't suppose there's much interesting that is left in these old beasts.

Was passed a monster chart the other day that had a lot of monsters that, I will admit, were utterly unfamiliar to me: drakainias, vemeraks, thulgants, bzastras and so on ... no doubt these are all terribly familiar to the reader.  Yes, well.  I never investigated the Monster Manual II, or the Monster Compendiums 1, 2 and 3, nor any of those monster books that were associated with realms or splatbooks, nor anything published having to do with monsters dating from the rise of 3e. I just didn't care.  I remember flipping through such books a the game store with a vague interest, seeing quickly that these new monsters didn't seem to have much "new" about them.  Just a shifting around and reconfiguring of the same old abilities, with new pictures and new unfamiliar names.  I might have looked at a myconid or a decapus at some point, but I wouldn't remember now.

I'm an old man, I guess.  When I went through the monster manual back in '79, I had at least heard of a chimera or a hydra.  I knew imps and minotaurs from stories.  Yes, there were some odd names, but they grew familiar over a lot of time.  Some I just never used.  I have never thrown a morkoth at a party or a thought eater (and I don't use psionics, at any rate).  I can count the number of times I've used a remorhaz, a groaning spirit or a mind flayer on one finger.  Most monsters, I have always thought, were a bit of a waste.

I went through the Fiend Folio when it came out, still a young feller, but I ditched more than half the monsters almost at once.  We played with flail snails but what a joke, along with flumphs, cifals and tweens.  Revenants were clearly set up to fuck with parties and I did not include them in my campaign.  The few monsters in the Deities & Demigods were better, particularly those from Melnibone and Cthulhu, the two parts of the book that were ripped out after the initial release (of which my original copy was stolen, so that I lost those pages until the internet happened).

But more monsters?  I had enough by then.  I was constantly having to adjust them, too, to make them more tougher or less silly or whatever ~ and that got to be a job that was too big to manage, as it still is.  Back in the mid-80s, I plowed through a description of every monster I used on my Commodore 64, 650 printed pages ... and kept the binder full of those pages on hand until about '91.  By then I was thinking that I should put it into Mac Word.  I would start, but it bored me.  I lost the binder in '97 to a nutjob roommate who destroyed a bunch of my things while I was out of town, so I had to start again from scratch in 98 when I got my Pentium.  Again, did not get far.

The wiki is just the end of a lot of tries to sort out the exact details of the monsters, to explain how the Beholder's eyes actually work or build proper rules for dozens of little details.  How does trample actually work?  When are people actually trampled?  The book makes it sound like characters thoughtfully lay down in front of cattle whenever.  I've always tried to clear that sort of thing up.

More monsters just means more misunderstandings, more work.  For what?  A different monster that also drains blood?  Yet another dragon or demon?  Yet another small creature that exists as a annoyance to play tricks and steal the parties things?  How is the game made better than there are fourteen different creatures that all serve the same purpose?

Humanoid races have always been useful.  We need lots of enemies to fight one another.  But if it is another humanoid race, what is the good of it being just another elf or another dwarf?  How many different kinds of goblin do we need?  Can't we just use goblins?

BUT . . . I know.  The tide is here and I'm underwater.  I'm carping about a world that is never going to change.  And I'm working on a monster list that can barely get a 'meh' out of the reader.  I apologize for that.

Still, the list I'm creating is very good for my game and my world.  These insights into old monsters, how they should have worked and how they can work, are worth a thousand ill-considered add-ons that seem to have been created more to give bored game designers something to do.  When drawing lines to make megadungeons go sour, let's throw five old ideas together into a blender and make a monster.

My daughter feels that I should write a book called the "Blender Monster Handbook," featuring monsters made by random dice and other poor decision-making processes.  She says it will sell.  I think it would be boring as hell to write.

I am sorry.  I am.  None of you readers have asked for this very boring rant.  You don't deserve it. This is just an excuse for me not to start working on making the centaur monster relevant.

The Film Industry's Grievance

I watched the film Birdman last night. Two years late and after two previous attempts to get past the first ten, very pretentious minutes. I would never have watched it at all, except that in the last two weeks I have seen Michael Keaton, an actor who might as well have been dead to me, turn up in two good films: Spiderman: Homecoming and The Founder. And so, I felt I should give Birdman another chance.

I was in just the right mood to watch a bad film to the end. Sometimes, I'm more interested in ...

Continue reading

Scary

This is only the bugbear and I wouldn't say I made a big change to the monster.  The rest of it can be read on the wiki.  I'm only posting it here because I had a thought during its writing that led to a good idea.

I was reworking the details about bugbear leaders, shaping it to my own world, adding bugbear shamans, clerics and mages, and finding the whole description increasing in clumsiness.  That's how I always felt about humanoid races from the books.  Unless I was prepared to do a lot ahead of time, it wasn't practical to have the party come across a large number of a particular kind of humanoid.  It is easy to roll hit points for two or three giants.  It is annoying as hell to create leaders, stats and hit points for 30 bugbears.

That is why, I suppose, so many just make them exactly the same.  And I have done that.  But it occurs to me, why not just attach a bugbear clan generator to the wiki page?  Then it can roll the classes, the followers, even give them detailed character stats and ready made hit points.

The reader can find an excel file on the wiki page, that can be downloaded and observed.  It covers both kinds of bugbear: what I call the Nissi An type, or homeland bugbears, who are more primitive, and the outworlder bugbears, who live among goblins, hobgoblins and norkers.

It's cute and helpful and not the end all and be all of generators.

However, why not a generator in the same format for every monster?  On its wiki page, waiting to be opened, downloaded in a couple of seconds and boom, stats and details, good to go?  Sounds good to me.

Then, as I move forward, I can make those tables more and more detailed.  I can make them more helpful.  As someone who heard this idea just told me, "Scary."

Making Choices in Player Creation

Enough of this negativity.  Let's get down to unsolicited advice.  Before we can get our characters going, we have to pick spells, abilities and gear.  Here's a run-down of what we want to keep in mind.

Spells

We can break these into five different categories, based on what the spells do for us and for others. I'll discuss them in order of importance ~ that is, what spells do we want to take first and from the beginning.

Offensive: whatever our conception of the character, however we feel about what a spellcaster does or doesn't do, we're acting the fool if we don't take at least one attack spell, right off the top.  The best spells are undeniably those that cause damage.  Influential spells, such as those that charm, hold or physically affect creatures are nice, but most of those are designed for use with humanoids.  During the crunch against a creature without intelligence or with eyes, as is often the case, a strong illusion or light-driven spell is going to prove useless, as are spells that change the environment or the creature's emotional state.  On the other hand, pure damage spells are universal.  They work against everything.

As well, we and our party are going to get into a situation where some creature just won't die, though it must be in the neighborhood of five hit points or less.  This is just the time we need a magic missile or a low-damage chromatic orb.  It doesn't matter if it only does 2-5 or less.  Save it up and use it at that crucial moment that will end this thing, finally.

Protection of Others: there are many spells that provide aid to others in times of distress.  Bless or the cleric's Prayer spell is like that.  Protection from evil (or malevolence).  A wall of fog.  Any spell that will make things easier for as many fellow party members as possible.  I don't recommend that all our spells fall into this category, but we should be sure to take at least one if we can.  Obviously, the most important are healing spells, mostly because they can be the last ditch saving grace when a party member is slipping into the grave.  Take one of them first, then consider the others.

Protection of Self:  these are fine, but they are of secondary importance to any spell that can protect more than one person.  Yes, we want to survive and yes, it helps others if we are still around to cast spells.  But if the others don't survive, we're alone.  We should think about that.  So while eventually we will be taking a good, solid protection of self spell, like sanctuary or jump, we should make sure we're a strong protector of others.

Everyday Spells: these won't keep us alive in combat, but they're useful enough to be of value all the time.  A magical mount that enables us to travel, a familiar that we can find, a hut that protects us at night, something unseen that can serve us continuously or cast a light so we can see in the dark.  These are all good ~ but understand, they are really the 4th most valuable things we should be thinking of.  These are luxuries, not necessities, and too many luxuries will take up magic slots that could have saved the lives of our friends and ourselves.  So limit the number of luxuries to a minimum.

Spells that Solve Problems:  many of the spells available are tremendously useful ~ but only in rare, obscure situations.  Sometimes, the situation might be common enough to consider the spell: the need to climb something or not fall to our deaths.  But really, how often do things need mending, when we can't just do without?  How often does a small rainfall help?  Isn't that remove fear spell just going to sit useless in our pocket most of the time?  Before taking spells that do nothing but solve unlikely problems, we should really, really think.  Perhaps we should be taking a spell we will use, rather than a spell we might use.

Skills

Here I am thinking of my sage abilities, but the advice above that applies to spells should, in some degree, apply to skills as well.

Skills can rarely be applied to causing damage or even to direct physical offense, unless it augments some power we already possess.  We can take advantage of that, yes, but it risks our becoming a one trick pony.  What value has the pony got if it can't do a second trick?  So while hitting really hard is better than just hitting hard, maybe hitting hard is enough for now and it might be a good idea if we can jump the gorge instead of dying in it.

The same applies with regards to skills that help everyone and skills that just help me.  That latter may matter as regards to our self-image, but as skills are in short supply, being that we can only choose so many, we get a better capitalization of those skills if they can be applied to more people.  If they can help the whole party find something or protect themselves against something, we're getting more bang for our buck.  After we make everyone else a little safer, then we should think about ourselves and what we want.

That sounds a bit preachy, I know.  I'm really just talking about the better chance of survival for everyone.  If we are there to help our party, our strong and living party will be there to help us when we need it.  It is a change from an overt dependence on self-reliance to mutually assured survival ~ and yes, it means trusting other people.  For many, that is a damn hard thing to learn.

Armor & Weapons

How I have watched party after party equip themselves!  Armor, then weapons, then maybe they start thinking about clothes, very often forgetting their boots ... and then we begin the selection of tools, toys and, finally, just general stuff.

I don't have much to say about armor.  Players depend on it a lot, are very uncomfortable without it and would rather move slowly and be armored than enjoy the freedom of living without it.  I suppose that we must defend ourselves like a turtle if we have the capacity, so I won't fault players here for taking that route.

With regards to weapons, I have a few suggestions.  Pick one solid hand-to-hand weapon up front.  One-handed weapons leave us open for using a shield, but a two handed weapon is fine.  This first weapon shouldn't be too long, we are going to want to use it in close quarters.  A sword, a battle axe, a mace, a spear, a club or a quarterstaff is best, depending on our class.  Clubs and quarterstaffs break but can be easily, and cheaply, replaced.  Spears can also be thrown, if need be.  If we don't have a strength bonus at all, a mace is better than a sword because it won't roll 1s for damage.  Battle axes are good for breaking in doors and other things and swords are just a good, all-around sturdy weapon, with the benefit that none if it is made of wood.

Most of the time mages and illusionists will take daggers rather than a quarterstaff.  The dagger doesn't do much damage but it can be thrown and hey, the two classes only get one proficiency to start.  My one contention is that daggers thrown by a mage class that start by needing a 21 to hit AC zero makes for a lot of missing and very little damage done when a hit does happen.  How many times have I see a mage throw three daggers, hitting only once, and then for 1 damage!  Might just as well wade in and try with a quarterstaff.  At least if the goblin hits us for 1d6 damage, that's meaningful damage the fighter hasn't taken and it makes a bigger difference to the overall fight than standing to the side tossing metal pieces at walls.  But of course, that would demand our thinking of others ~ which, as I said, is hard to learn.

Okay, second weapon:  take something that can be thrown without loading.  A dagger is fine for a second weapon, a hand axe, a warhammer, a javelin perhaps and, of course, a spear.  We should then get into the habit that the first weapon we pull is not our main weapon, but our secondary weapon, which we're going to start by throwing.  Then we can draw the main weapon while we wade in.

Third weapon: now that we have something we can throw right off, pick something we can load and fire.  A crossbow is fine, but plan on using it once and then throwing it away in favor of our main weapon, because it won't be worth the time it takes to reload it.  If we want to use it twice, we'll hire a servant to reload our crossbow for us, while we kill things.  Nothing is more useless than a fighter standing around loading things.

If we want to fire something more than once, then we should go with a sling or a bow. The benefit of a sling is that stones are cheap and plentiful and the tool weighs nothing.  We never have to worry about having a bow strung over our shoulder while we're climbing through some hole in the ground.  The bow, on the other hand, does more damage and has a slightly better range.  Still, most of the time we're going to be shooting at things within 50 feet.  Range for either will be the same, most of the time.

Finally, a last weapon.  Here we can think about getting a specialty device.  A bludgeoning weapon for things that can't be cut.  A polearm for its reach.  A spear versus charge.  Something that hooks or disarms, if our DM allows that sort of thing.

Gear

Thinking about it, I believe this is going to require a post of its own.  I'll work up a list of ten or twelve things that we always ought to have with us and write that out.

The Entitled Who Want

Let's settle that we've rolled the bare bones of our character and that we've settled on the stats, the general appearance, age, race, gender and other particulars that satisfy us, including a back story if that is what we want.  The next stage would be equipping the character, both in terms of the character's unique abilities and then in what actual gear the character will be carrying.

Without devolving into particulars of the present state of D&D or other RPGs, it is my feeling that player characters shouldn't be able to do much, particularly at the beginning.  The choice of what might be done should be of a good size, enough to promote discontent when the player understands that making this choice will preclude the benefits of that choice.  Choice can be paralyzing.  Players can easily spend hours struggling between choices ~ and can feel distress when they realize, or feel, that they've made the wrong choice, even if they really haven't.  The aftermath of choice is often the wherewithal to accept one's limitations and play inside those ... while many players are simply incapable of accepting their limitations in real life.  Naturally, if Johnny can't deal with his not being the guitar player he so badly wants to be, he won't do well with not being able to jump across this gorge now because sometime in the past he wanted a better bonus on his weapon.

Yet part of the game is that players must learn to play to their choices.  If Johnny's skills don't include gorge-jumping, then why is he here on the lip of this gorge in the first place?  I'm an extraordinarily clumsy person in real life.  I'd guess my dexterity at a 7, give or take a point depending on the day.  As such, I don't go rock-climbing.  I just don't.  I am a good writer, so I play to that strength and stay home.  I don't moan about my lack of dexterity; I cope with it and enjoy the fact that writing doesn't take much.

Players, I have found, don't think like this.  When asking what they'd like to do first in the campaign, they don't look at their character sheets and think, "What would a guy with a 17 wisdom and an 8 dexterity want to do?"  They think, "I can do anything if I try."  And so it begins.  Next thing, there's Johnny on the edge, about to die.

The control we have over our character's success depends on settling upon a set of abilities (spells, proficiencies, feats, skills, whatever we want to call them) that we like and then playing to those strengths.  In the bigger sense, it is having a party with a wide variety of abilities and then playing to all of them as a team.  Matt is a better first baseman than I am, while I'm a better hitter, so I'll play outfield while he plays infield. Grant is better with his glove than I am so he can play left field and I'll play right.  Does it mean I'll have less to do as a fielder?  Yes.  But the chances of our winning is improved.

Johnny, on the other hand, wants to play first base because he wants to.  Period.  And no one will play first base instead because Johnny will make a racket, or he'll take his ball and go home.  This is what we're seeing all over.  I don't want to be a fighter that protects a mage because that's not as much fun as ignoring the mage's needs and feeding my own.  I don't care that we're going to go into a dungeon, I'm going to take polearms and morning stars as my proficiencies because, well, because.  Those weapons are cool.  And so on.

Then we can bitch and moan until the DM fixes the dungeon that allows us to do what we want. Because that's what its all about.  Doing what we want, and to hell with everything else.  The DM must change, the rules must change, the arbitrary limitations on what I can do must change, I deserve to be able to trade something I have for something I don't according to what I think is right, and if you won't let me, then you're being unfair.

This thinking has become pervasive.  As my daughter tells me, there are endless parents now who won't make their young children lose at board games.  These parents see their five-year-olds get upset when they can't succeed at Operation so they make concessions.  "It's okay if you touch the sides once," they say.  And so the kid never learns that skill, or the need to learn that skill, or indeed the value of skills.  They learn that rewards are given to the most upset ... and then a company comes along to ask game-players how they think the game should be played, and dutifully write down the opinions of a people who have no idea how a game works.

And here is where we are.

Stuff, Then Some Game Design

Part of my nature is to work on a particular project for a time, so long as it remains interesting, then ultimately set that project down to work on something else.  I'll work on maps for a bit, then the trade system, then the wiki and the sage abilities, followed by some project like rules for ship combat, then ~ and I'm doing now ~ I'll work on monsters, until finally after six or eights months, I'll start working on maps again.

I've actually been like this since I was seven or eight ~ though my projects were less ambitious then.  At eight, I would write some stories, then I would copy all the cities out of my atlas that had more than 25,000 people into a list, then I would draw some maps out of the atlas, then I would use my almanac to make some diagrams depicting how much natural resources one country was making compared with another country, then I'd make a list of the largest countries in the world, to compare them, and then I would get the urge to start writing stories again.  This was all long, long before I ever discovered D&D.

So, the reader can see, I was always crazy.

This round of monsters, I had promised myself I would do at least fifty.  So far, I've done 30.  In about a week, so not bad.  It would be nice if I could sustain this for two more weeks, that would get a fair bit done, but I could feel with the beholder yesterday and the black pudding today that I'm already beginning to tire of it.  It is a lot of writing and most of it doesn't have an immediate application for anything.  Still, I do intend to do that 50 and if I can push myself to keep going after that, all the better.

I was going to work on the bonesnapper tonight before going to bed, but instead I thought it might be good if I wrote a post.  A post not about monsters.  I can see that some of you are enjoying the monster posts, so I'm going to continue to put those up for a while.  If I'm working on the wiki, it's still content of a kind.  Just different.

But more than a week ago I wrote a post where I left a hanging promise to explain why minimum stats for classes are important.  I never did explain that, did I?

This is going to sound crazy for some people, but in truth the model for making characters ought to include disappointment. You want to be a paladin, an illusionist or a monk, and you have your heart set on it.  In your mind, you think its logical: this is just a game, right?  And in a game, you ought to be able to be the Top Hat, the Racecar or the Thimble, if you want to be.  That's only fair.  And then someone comes along and explains that no, sorry, you just don't have the stats. Sorry.  Better luck next time.

How is that possibly a good thing?

To begin with, the classes are not just pieces.  An RPG can use them as pieces, and still work as a game, but there is very definitely something lost by making that decision.  See, the classes, like rolling an 18 and not a 17 for your stats, are also a prize.  If you roll sufficiently well, then you have the option to open different features of the game ~ and I know that you readers understand this because you've all played video games. How many times has it been that you've played a game for endless hours before discovering that Easter Egg in the game that lets you do something totally different?  Why do game makers provide those options as Easter Eggs?  Why don't they just tell you?

Human beings are hardwired to make discoveries.  It is one of the best things about being human. The internet itself is the best video game in existence, given that despite the thousands of hours we've spent playing the game, we're still looking for something new.  Something different.  Something we've never experienced before.  We keep looking because the net is vast and we know that there is something out there that will blow our socks off.  Eventually.  And we are always right about that.

The worst element of RPGs, and any activity that draws us, is the eventual boredom we know we are going to feel when we've ultimately destroyed any sense of "new" in a thing.  The monster layout I came up with was new and the wiki pages looked better when I finished them, which gave me a shot of endorphins and/or dopamine each time I wrapped a page up and went to the new one. But that shot is getting thin now and I know that soon it won't be enough to keep me interested. The maps give me a shot because I'm finding a new way to make them look or I'm doing new, different places in the world, like Tibet or Sinkiang, but eventually that shot, too, begins to thin out and I want something else.  This is how we work.  This is why jobs become deathly dull until we can get promoted or find some other way to keep ourselves jacked while plodding through the day. This is why marriages sour and end.  This is why the one thing I really did learn in kindergarten was that kindergarten is really, really boring when you're a year older.

If I let you, the player, try all the classes any time you want, because I play a different campaign every week, so you can get the feel of having a mage, cleric or assassin long enough to find out it's really not that different from a fighter, just more stuff, you're going to quickly get bored with the concept of classes.  If I dispense with minimum stats, so you can be a paladin with whatever, then the prize and novelty of the paladin quickly diminishes to those ribbons they still give in school for "participation."  It kills the character making process.  It kills the sense of "I have a monk and I waited two years in this campaign to finally get one."  It reduces every class to the color of gray.

But this, of course, is what everyone is doing now.  This is standard practice.  Basically, because the game is being managed and promoted like the substitute teacher that just wants all the kids in the class to be happy because "Fuck them, as long as I get through today, their usual teacher can deal with this shit."  The WOTC took the stance of giving the players everything they wanted, because the players wanted it really, really badly, and now that they have it they're bored of it.

So we sit down at the table and the DM, who doesn't have any reason to particularly care, hands out a bunch of pre-made character sheets that are probably fudged or "balanced," so that no one feels they've been shafted with a bad character, and the character-making mini-game is gone.  I don't care about this character sheet.  I didn't make it.  I have as much emotional feeling for it as I'd have for a public bicycle or being forced to accept the last rent-available car on the lot.  I don't care if this sheet lives or dies ~ because it is a sheet, and not something that I witnessed being formed.  I had nothing invested in the numbers.  There might have been hope in my heart for rolling well, but now I feel nothing.  Who cares.  I'll run incautiously into the fray and just get this over with.

Every step below the pre-made character sheet is the same principle. Oh, I can be any class I want, no matter what I roll?  Great. Then who cares?  It's not like the mage is better, not in this age of "balance."  It's not even different, not really, because I've run every class by now and the magic is, well, gone.  But sure.  I'll be a cleric.  Whatever.

The guys who invented the game, I'm quite sure, were not thinking about human nature when they came up with the concept of class minimums.  I'm sure it was no different than a lot of other games in their minds, card games where you're lucky if you draw four aces or you throw a seven.  Disappointment turns up in successful games the way that some fruit flies breed and others don't.  There have been hundreds of thousands of games that have been made since neolithic times, but most of those are gone because they didn't have that sense of ... imminent failure that makes a game interesting.

And here we are, having made the best game in the history of the planet, killing it because a bunch of babies want their bottle now now now now now.  And they're getting it, because the people making the decisions, the DMs, are just bad parents.  They don't know what they're doing.

The New Eye-Pod

... and I think this one is worth posting as well.  I worked long and hard on it both yesterday and today.

Continue reading.

Kicking Jimmy Awake

Detailing the Beholder's ability to put people to sleep, I felt a compulsion to reworking some rules. This makes some changes to notes found on the action points page.

Continue reading.

I Am So Sad

I have now made two attempts to watch the new Netflix show, the Defenders.  The first time I lasted until the credits.  The second time, 22 minutes in.

Oh, gawd, I have super-powers and I am just so sad and so miserable, I can hardly bother to stagger down this hallway to my office and act so bored in front of these strangers, I am dying and I am so miserable and there is nothing I can do, I'm blind and you're in a wheelchair and life is just so bad, so awful, and these dreams, these dreams of dead people, oh, oh, it is so awful and terrible and pointless and angst, oh so much angst, angst pouring over everything, tons of angst, because we are the writers and we have the shit pile right here, the feces have been delivered, and we have shovels, so here it is, let's just start shoveling, shoveling and shoveling, and oh, aren't you excited now to watch these four mediocre series come together for the triumph of angst we're promising in the first twenty minutes ...

No. No thank you.

For the Juvenis Boys

I thought the players in the Juvenis campaign might be interested in this entry.  It can be read in full on the wiki.  It might stir a few memories and explain some of the details the party never did fully interpret.

Working on the Bestiary

The usual classic issue.  I start working steadily on the wiki and not much gets written on the blog.  I suspect that many of you are not bothered, however, since as soon as I start posting there, the stats show an immediate interest:

Starting just before the 15th, I started cleaning up the Bestiary page on the wiki.  As the reader can see, the number of unique visitors, around 100, is steady up until that time, though it is only averaging about 2 pages per visitor.  As soon as I start working on the wiki, making edits, adding new pages, the number of visitors increases (that's from links on the blog) and the number of pages viewed jumps to 7 to 10 per visitor.

I am enormously proud of the wiki.  It has been a long time project, of the sort that many people start on the internet, work on for about 18 months and then abandon.  I can remember many such webpages that were very interesting, but after reading through about fifty to a hundred pages, I would run out of content and no new content would ever appear.

At present, Tao at Wikispaces has more than 1,200 pages and the process continues.  I will go for a month or two without adding anything, for various reasons, but I love that thing.  I love the flexibility, the opportunity to start fleshing out a set of rules or mass of data ... and most of all, I love that I can start a template, leave it, and then pick it again 10 months later without much trouble at all.

I want to make a shout out to Tim of the Great Code and Ozymandias of Crossing the Verse, both of whom have started helping me with the monster project.  Thanks to both of you!