Happy equinox, everyone.
Posting frequency is likely to slow down for the next few months. Work has entered one of our busier seasons, so I’m not going to be running many game sessions in the autumn. I’ve also all but exhausted my backlog of pre-written and re-posted material, which has been a majority of the content here when I haven’t been actively blogging Kaserne on the Borderlands session reports.
The Girl and I moved into our current house just under a year ago. Some of our initial choices in where to put things have never been fully satisfactory. Yesterday, we began implementing a plan we’ve been discussing over the past couple of weeks.
The RPG library – which occupies approximately 60 shelf-feet of space – was previously sorted alphabetically. As part of a larger furniture rearrangement, it is now arranged by genre. This is still not entirely what I’d like, but three-dimensional bookshelves only support usable organizational schemes in two dimensions and are wholly unsuited to a rapidly-searchable multi-attribute tagging system.
Still, it’s probably more rational than sorting 40 years of RPG accumulation autobiographically.
I made some tweaks to the blog style package (mainly to remove an irritant involving the placement of the comment functions). All content should remain intact.
As an experiment, I’ve enabled commenting. This is primarily to enable my players to add their own thoughts to my session logs, but other readers (assuming I have any) are welcome to engage.
At present, all comments require admin approval. If the spam bucket gets too full, I’ll shut it down again.
Because I’m always in search of a better taxonomy, the cluttering of my post tag cloud in the right sidebar has become an annoyance. Accordingly, I’ve gone through the post histories for both of my currently-documented campaigns, Kaserne on the Borderlands and Somewhere West of Light, and removed, respectively, the Twilight: 2000/Twilight: 2000 4e and Shadowdark tags from most of them. Going forward, campaign log posts will only be tagged with the game system in question if the post:
My vague hope is that this change will make the blog incrementally more usable for readers who come here in search of material for a specific game line and don’t want to have to sift through the (currently) 106 Kaserne posts trying to find my NM-116 writeup or something like that.
I realized not all of my post tags were showing in the tag cloud, so I replaced the default WordPress widget with a free custom one. Hopefully, this will show all the tags, even the ones I’ve only used once or twice. It’s a bit more colorful, too – my apologies if it looks like ass to my readers with restricted color perception.
Let me know if y’all can’t see anything, or if what you can see is blatantly unreadable.
It’s hard to believe I’ve kept this blog active for a year with at least one post per week. That’s largely attributable to two things:
First, I’ve been using this platform as a means of recycling old material from my defunct LiveJournal account and various forum posts. All of those will eventually go the way of all bits, and while there’s no guarantee my hosting provider here will stay afloat, it’s a centralized repository under my administrative control.
Second, the Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign log generated a ridiculous amount of material (and was a ridiculous amount of work to maintain). The campaign has been on hiatus since late August, but my current intent is to restart it in the spring.
Because I’ve been relying on recycled material, my actual “new” content creation here has definitely not been in the once-a-week model, with the exception of the aforementioned campaign log. I currently have (pause, count) 14 recycled posts scheduled after this one. Once that well is dry, I don’t know that I’ll be able to maintain the once-a-week schedule. I also have some major life changes coming up in the next couple of months that are outside the blog’s scope but which definitely will affect the amount of creative energy I can invest here. The result of all of this is that I expect my posting frequency here to drop off sometime in April.
Because I have comments disabled (all the better to not be spammed with), I can’t tell whether anyone is actually reading this thing on a regular basis. This is strictly a hobby thing, not a revenue-generation attempt, so I’m not advertising the blog. But I hope I have a few semi-regular visitors who are getting some use out of it.
My three regular readers will note that I haven’t posted anything for Kaserne on the Borderlands for a while and my overall posting rate has dropped. I’m still here, and have a number of things I’d like to write, but life away from the virtual gaming table has had other priorities. The campaign is currently on pause while I deal with those items. Coincident with this, I’m also running low on archived or published-elsewhere material to release/re-release here. So, while I’m not going anywhere, content here will likely be more sparse going forward.
Tonight, I ran the first session of a Twilight: 2000 fourth edition one-shot for my college gaming group… yes, “first session” and “one-shot” don’t go together well, but we ran long, so we’ll be picking up the plot next week. This was basically a shakedown cruise for the combat system, as it was everyone’s first time tinkering with it. Four PCs took down six marauders with only one PC taking hits (though he almost bled out from a brachial artery critical).
I’m getting more comfortable with the 4e engine, but this also was my first experience playing with the Foundry VTT, so there were some hiccups. Still, my feelings toward Foundry are mostly positive. We ran into a couple of UI idiosyncrasies but nothing we couldn’t overcome, and the visual design and automation are far beyond what I can wring from Roll20.
The other interesting thing that came out of tonight’s session was some group interest in a West Marches-style campaign of Twilight: 2000. I think the 4e engine lends itself well to this, though I’ll need to figure out a few things – first and foremost some community management and improvement rules beyond the core book’s base management skeleton. I may also want to mine Jarkman’s B-Troop campaign start concept for ideas.
This is not actually why I started this blog, but the timing is fortuitous. My hope is that I’ll be able to maintain enough focus to chronicle this campaign here. We have some other plot to get through first and I have some ongoing personal life stuff that may interfere, but… watch this space.
New blog, who dis?
I’ve been having some gaming-related thoughts lately that aren’t worthy of articles or forum threads themselves, but which I nevertheless want to get out there in case anyone else finds them useful. This blog will likely remain specific to gaming – I have another place for thoughts related to my day job and most of my gaming audience doesn’t care about my personal life.
I’ll also be reposting some older material from other places to ensure I don’t lose it when sites or forums outside my control go down.
Let’s see how long I can maintain focus.