Project Updates and General Rambles

Hey folks! After a few months picking at it like a fussy eater, I think I need to table my Ghostwalk work for now. It's not coming together quite like I'd hoped after multiple iterations, and long gulfs between when I can work on it are certainly contributing to its splotchy implementation. The perils of the day job, I fear.

Nevertheless, I am intent on doing more conversions, even if this one didn't pan out. After how well Birthright and Council of Wyrms went, I guess two out of three ain't bad. Unless you're being graded in American school systems, in which case that's still a D, depending on state.

For my next trick project, I am actually a bit adrift. I'm not sure what else is speaking to me, so I'll happily take suggestions. Something may spring out to me in the meantime, but really, the sky is the limit.

Recently I've also become enamored of Robert Schwalb's "Shadow of the Demon Lord" product line. To friends, I have likened it to Warhammer Fantasy without the heavy doses of self-parody and bombastic insanity that it enjoys. And well, as a child of the 80s and 90s, grimdark and edge are still part of my gamer DNA, and I don't know that modern sensibilities will ever really change that.

The fact that I enjoy it should not come as too much of a surprise to me, since I also loved his Song of Ice and Fire RPG that he did for Green Ronin. The games don't have much in common with one another, in terms of completely different focus and challenge resolution; in SIFRP you are navigating the political landscape of Westeros and spending most of your time in roleplay and intrigue, while in SotDL you start out as level zero commoners in a world on the brink of a demon invasion apocalypse.

I also find the system quite kitbashable into other things; I briefly fiddled with a Mass Effect RPG conversion over the course of a weekend, but one of those already exists using FATE. A canny traveler can still find it floating around in the archives of the internet in a post cease-and-desist world. I'm no fan of FATE, but the effort was sound before it got the hammer dropped on it. Let that be a warning to the enthusiast who uses the intellectual properties and copyrighted artwork of notoriously litigious companies. They don't care if you're doing it because you're a mega-fan, sadly.

Additional time investments of late include the Kickstarter for the Heroic Fantasy and Barbarian Conquerors handbooks for Autarch's Adventurer Conqueror King System. The teased content is rich and delightful, and though ACKS's adherence to ye olde systemes makes it challenging to rope groups into playing it, the expanded content offered by the new Kickstarter is going to be wonderful and I look forward to giving it a spin.

That's all I got for now. Since the day job is consuming most of my creative energies over the last month or so (and into the next one), it'll be a little light over here until, say, July. Not that it's been particularly busy or that I have a vast and demanding viewership or anything.