Hello Again

 It's been a while since my last post. I wasn't nearly as active as I'd have liked, at least not with gaming. 

Some background: 

I almost lost my grandfather to cancer. He's had his leg amputated while battling cancer, & he went from my family's man of steel to begging for God to kill him. This sent a ripple effect through my family. 

I've been thinking of moving, to help take care of him, my grandmother (now wheelchair bound), and my godmother (now the oldest living member of my family. Wifey & family are largely on-board with the idea (except my kid ... sometimes). Work, however is moving at a glacial pace. I'm applying for jobs to transfer so I don't lose my seniority & abandon my career outright.

Future Plans, Revisited: 

I'm going to review some bullet points in my last post, and give some updates to those ideas. 

• I would like to get the podcast going again, & want to work out a schedule with my partner to get some regular gaming in.  

Yeah ... we never really have been able to get things together again, with all the uncertainty of Covid-19 & the additional burdens of work-at-home, lack of childcare, uncertain schedules. I think I'm going to try to do a solo thing for a while instead. Just to get my creative juices flowing, I might be using a hack of D&D again just to get a bit more of my Wacken setting out there. 

• I want to do a Romeo & Juliet inspired game using Green Ronin's Chronicle System, used in the Song of Ice & Fire rpg ("SIFRP"). One of the themes I discussed in the podcast was using the "wrong" system to sometimes play a game. SIFRP seemed like a largely ignored & much maligned system. I enjoyed the heck out of the quickstart, and I've gotten a copy of the Pocket Edition recently. I can see where people are saying the flaws in the system are ... and I've been coming up with ways to houserule around them.  We won't be using Westeros, but more of Shakespeare's weird "Sorta Italy" from the play, with some fantasy elements because I like that low magic fantasy feeling from ASoIaF.This is made difficult by the fact that SIFRP has seemingly disappeared entirely from Drivethru & Green Ronin's store.  

This is still really high in my list of things to do. I'm really glad Green Ronin got out their own version of the Chronicle system with Sword Chronicle. I have the pdf, & I'm going to get a copy of the hardcover as soon as I'm reasonably certain my wife won't throw something heavy at me for buying it. I honestly love some things about this system. 

I'll probably spend the next few weeks cobbling together a solid core of setting material, while I wrap my head fully around the new rules. I'm glad I printed out some advice from the old SIFRP forum, before that shut down.

• I also want to start gaming in D&D 5e with my kid.  That will be a challenge in itself, but I might not podcast that.  It'll be more of a blog thing.  The challenge there will be more how to handle the issue of miniatures & my ideas of "set design" for representing dungeons & rooms.  

I'm not the only one who has been slipping into depression & not getting my gaming going, even while being stuck at home. My daughter has been struggling as well, trying to find ways to keep herself from just being miserable & vegging out. I've talked it over with her mom & she's reluctantly agreed to try gaming maybe once a month or so to keep kiddo's spirits up. We'll see.

• I want to start sculpting again. 
• I want to do some art for these games & for the blog again.  

I'm going to do some of this with the solo project I'm going to be doing. I may not have a lot of formal training - more classes in photography than anything else, but when digital was still a new thing. But, I'm going to try to get a physical version of some of the ideas in my head out into the world. 

• My AD&D 2e pseudo Wacken (more Fantasy Wacken Inspired Post Apocalypse Inspired game set as an excuse to let me read up on the region & attempt to learn German), is put on hold while we jump to other systems & campaigns.  

This hasn't been abandoned. I'm going to make this setting more of the focus of my solo game over the next couple months, while I learn new systems & flesh out some other setting material for projects this year.  

Future Plans, Updated: 

• My solo game will be a Dwarven character who will have adventures in my weird Fantasy Wacken where I set my AD&D 2e Keep on the Borderlands campaign. I think I'm going to use a hack of B/X because it's a much slimmer system without so many clunky parts as AD&D 2e. AD&D 2e may be a beautiful mess of a game, which I love deeply & which inspires a huge amount of nostalgia for me but ... I don't so much enjoy the idea of running that directly again. 
• I'm waiting on the Savage Pathfinder kickstarter to buy into that idea. I want to see how changing the system out will change the ability to game out Golarion as a setting. This is a very "me" thing to do & I'm really happy someone else will do the heavy lifting. I probably wouldn't have gotten into Savage Worlds on its own without something like this kickstarter driving me into that system.
  
• Since Savage Pathfinder won't be available until late 2021 at the earliest, I'll the shifting from my B/X hack into the Romeo & Juliet inspired Sword Chronicle game sometime in the early Spring this year. I'll post as I flesh out my campaign ideas for this setting. I'm re-reading R&J right now. I'll post more about this over the next few weeks.
  
• I still want to do a Vampire 5th Edition game, but this appears to be another thing I'll have to do solo as well, and there's already a lot on my plate. I'll probably keep collecting my 1st Edition & V5 material, and keep a secret vault of V5 Chicago campaign notes as I do other projects. This might be something I pull out once in a while just to do something different & refresh my creativity.