Philosophy, writing, and reviews!
Since beginning a voyage of self-improvement in March, I’ve read 200 articles and at least 10 books just for the sake of reading more.
I spend at least one hour every day dedicated solely to reading, and I spend a fair amount of time reading stuff written by people who are wrong disagree with the beliefs that I hold.
And I’ve noticed a few positive trends in my life.
Still been keeping up on steemit. Got a Curie upvote last week, which meant a huge boost in reputation and Loreshaper Games is almost to 100 followers over there.
Hammercalled entered playtesting last week, which means two things:
A) There’s no time like the present to finish the GM section.
B) There will be a moment to finish up the velotha’s flock advanced play guide that I’ve been working on for like two months now and continuously procrastinating.
With that said, here’s the list of stuff to do:
This past week, First Lady Barbara Bush passed away. Her passing has left a major impact on the news cycle, but also in the hearts and minds of many Americans and even people overseas who have come to realize what a legacy one woman had on the nation and the world.
I’m not someone who writes about politics very often. I’m pretty apolitical, at least in public, so I don’t want this to stand as a striking endorsement or condemnation of any policy. In any case, I have no living memory of the Bush (senior) Administration. What I am writing about is based strictly on my reflections on the accounts of people who knew Barbara Bush during her life.
What I write is based on what I have heard her character described as, but the reports are so consistent and so broad that I have no doubt in their veracity.
I was reading an article on Vox this morning about the advent of realistic and easily accessible “fake” tools, which allow for the creation of altered video and images with relatively high rates of accuracy, relatively low resources required, and the vast expanse of the internet with which to spread them.
This is a very real concern as we head into the 21st century. Our lives have become controlled by society (whether we like it or not), and if society is controlled by deception, what chance do we have to really have to live our own lives in a good way?
I got Audioshield on sale, and I was pleasantly surprised by how different it was from the other VR experiences I’ve tried. I’m generally quite pleased with VR in general, but I noticed a few things that really stood out about how Audioshield was using its design in a much more efficient and smooth method than other games.
One of the things that’s been entering my mind recently as I work on Hammercalled and playtesting is how differently I approach the topics of writing for a game versus writing for a published product. With a handful of exceptions, I’ve never published a setting that I’ve been playing in at the time of publication. That’s not because I’m against sharing my work (like this, the campaign I’m going to start running Hammercalled in in a couple days), it’s just that I don’t think it works as well.
And I have a few reasons why I choose to work on settings devoid of running a game in them, since I know this goes against the prevailing industry wisdom.
Continue reading “Writing for Games versus Writing for a Game”
While I was drinking my tea today (apple, if anyone’s interested), I had an interesting realization.
I have been happier in the final weeks of March and April than I have been at any other time in my adult life. Probably more so than at any point in my adolescent life, either.
Some of this has to do with a spiritual re-awakening, since I’ve been more involved in my church and the Scriptures, but a lot of it has to do with simple changes to my life.
I write about two to three thousand words a day on average. I’m more or less equally productive on my previous projects, but I have taken up blogging regularly.
I’ve been reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (affiliate link) recently and I’ve been struck by how powerful his account is. I was turned off by the foreword of my edition, which I found fairly stuffy and difficult to process.
Once you get into Frankl’s work, however, the power of it is incredible. He is honest, open, and incredibly transparent in what he felt. He does nothing to diminish his own guilt or paint himself as a hero, but instead acknowledges with clinical precision how he acted and felt during the Holocaust and the horrors that had enveloped him. Although a prisoner, he refuses to be a victim.
As with last week, I’ve been keeping up my output over on steemit. I’ve also made some good progress on things, which I’d like to quickly highlight.
First, an early WIP version of the Hammercalled Character Sheet is now available to help facilitate playtesting. There are a couple small issues, but making major changes to the sheet is non-trivial.
I really need to get the velotha’s flock advanced guide done. That’s my main priority this week. I didn’t really do anything significant on it last week because the notion that Hammercalled would be ready for playtesting sort of overwhelmed my creativity and everything I had was devoted that direction.
I just need to finish the character examples. That shouldn’t be too hard, right?
Uuuuuuuuugh. Why do I do this? I’ll probably knock them all out in thirty minutes, come back the next day and say they’re really quite good, then kick myself for not getting over this stupid block.
The Rules Reference is out now, and there are still things that need to be tweaked, changed, and expanded. For now, however, my first goals are two-fold.
So if I say I didn’t get anything done for Segira, I’m understating things, but there’s nothing new in the Segira document. Rather, a lot of the changes I was making in Segira wound up back in Hammercalled.
So we’re closer. The PDF just isn’t rolling along quicker yet.
I’m going to start using WorldAnvil for The Ashen King sometime this week. I found out that my .odt I was using for it lost a lot of progress during a crash (why), so I’m really on a back foot here. We’re probably on track for an end-of-the month reveal of the setting, though it’s not going to be like Segira.
Life does not exist in a vacuum. Every living organism is the product of complex chemical and biological mechanisms that we are just beginning to truly understand.
Minds, likewise, do not exist in a vacuum. Our days do not unfold in a vacuum: they are not sequences of events disconnected and disengaged from each other.
Yet we live, for the most part, like our actions do not connect to reality. We pretend that the events that unfold around us are something that we have no control over.
We pretend that we have no history and no past, because it lets us shape our future according to our whims and our fantasies.