Friday 1 March 2019

Current Thoughts and Projects



So I have been on this gamma kick for a while now and have more ides to go. 
d100 Bunker entrances
d100 Small buildings in ruined city
d100 Robots
d100 Locations for Broken Hill
d100 Desert road encounters
Map of Silver Town and South Broken Hill ruins
More building and bunker silhouettes
Possibly some geomorphs

The above image features 3 buildings for small to mid size. The middle one has a billboard or monitor for advertising on the roof.

This massive sandbox as a campaign I would run as Gamma Wold if a few Sessions or as my Emo dnd clone if a longer game. The players start as teens in a small town who explore local ruins, get the explorer bug and take the long journey possibly by foot to Broken Hill. They may go to Silver Town and meet some factions and possibly look at the safer south ruins around the settlement or go straight to the hellscape of the big ruin. Hopefully they will ally with factions, get missions, get a stronghold and explore like crazy.

A compilation of all this I will make for Patreon eventually but I'm pretty quiet there as my mutant book editing broke my spirit. I kinda write my stuff like Jack Keroac sitting on the toilet with a typewriter onto a huge toilet roll mostly stream of consciousness and some of my own stuff I find unreadable let alone editable. Life is just busy enough and ok enough i can be creative but not so much for fantasy settings right now. Thankfully the Gamma Oz stuff has been well received. Thanks to Frothcast podcast for saying nice things about me and stuff like this definitely helps motivate me. Thoughtful comments like this are invaluable and make me feel appreciated. I welcome offers to contribute to RPG products and if any big or mid size companies want to help me get my shit together I may well say yes because for every thing I edit i could write 10-20 more broken trainwrecks of goodness.

I spoke once how d100 tables are made here at Elfmaids & Octopi.

A few things to add to that and the Frothcast comments:

The RuneQuest 3 Glorantha Crucible of the Hero Wars set showed me how to write encounters that help explore the setting. Each territory described had common and uncommon encounters that painted a picture of a setting sometimes better than blocks of text. I once said my attitude to d100 tables is kind of like haiku or chinease portraits of oldschool game design that paint a picture stoke by stroke of  a setting without blocks of text. Another product I love is the tables in the Thieves World Box Set or the Runequest Cities book  which gave me my first taste of running a game from tables. Although the DnD geomorphs and Monster & Treasure Assortment book (yes I would accept a gift of this  book) was a earlier taste. The Runequest books offered complex on the fly urban adventures with twists that were just as entertaining and surprising for the GM. Traveller Patrons book did the same for SF.

An earlier version of this still was as a child while alone alot in a house of books and pre literate I would flip through picture books and later comics and make up stories connecting them as a form of escapism. Some books of 20s Pulp SF covers especially was a favorite and several Don Laurence books - on of Pirates one about some kids and a Wizard with a awesome alchemy lab. I didn't know Don did both then even later when I got into Look & Learn magazine with amazing illustrations of history kind of sweat mags for British boys. Trigan Empire was another Don Laurence book I loved and his military history stuff was awesome too. So I digested the atomics of genre and history at a young age. I worked with comic/pinup artists as a researcher and would find stuff like "a nuclear power plant that looks like tits and a dick" as one writer instructed or wrote lists of what would be in a restaurant waiters store room for the "my worst Fuck" letters page in a Australian Men's magazine.

I worked as art director and editor of several publications and a large team of editors helped me look way more competent at writing. I could easily write several thousand words a day on different topics.

Anyway now Im in hiding from the culture industry and taking a long break from art and actually gaming more this year than the last few this is my main creative outlet.

Stupid Pipedream Projects
Short Term

I hope to put all this Gamma stuff in a book when finished.
Finish my mutant book even though I have come to hate it.
Do a couple of small one sheet adventures on Patreon.
I put a few up occasionally when I don't do anything deserving of pay for a few months.
Working on thing about what elves dislike

Mid Term

Update my murder hobo book and do final stage maps of the site as a castle
Revise my goblin adventure because even I can see it is full of typos and add some pages because it needs more pages to be a book - perhaps a sewer geomorph page
Finish my second EMO rulebook and put both in one hardback on LuLu
Put Psychon and Shadelport on LuLu as hard covers maybe more
Update my treasure and gothic books
Xor Book and Finish first Monster Book
EXOCOM book - Australian special forces vs dungeon dimension book

Long Term

Work on Hell Project more
Abhuman book
Compilation of war zones with simple narrative battle system
Exilon and Roadwar book
Possibly get back to my dungeon zone books
-sunken city
-dream manour
-ancient temple

Planet Psychon Kickstarter

-use money to pay editors and artists and proper system reference legal stuff
-stretch goals to add revisions with art and editing of other books

Actually my things to do list is shrinking and I hope to win before I die. It is getting harder to be inspired by fantasy at moment as It feels I have covered lots of tropes. My collection is doing well with only a few things left Im hankering for - im hunting the Lost City right now, Cult of the Reptile God is probably high priority.

This year is improving in general. Hope to have home and be solvent and graduate this year still....

So thanks to my readers and everyone who comments because they keep me going and make me more prolific. Yes I am a needy creative at times.

6 comments:

  1. I loved reading about your process and inspiration. I would love to help you in any way I can. I certainly will continue to promote your work.

    I think you are in a great position to realize many of your goals. Most Kickstarters seem to fail when people basically dont have their product written, something that would obviously never be the case with you. There are many good editors in the OSR, so when you decide on going forward, maybe I could help connect you. Your artwork is fantastic and idiosyncratic...not sure why you would want anyone else to do it! Also, you may want to take some of your free stuff and add it as pay what you want on Drivethru. Thinking specifically about the short zine dungeon things. It might at least bring you some extra cash.

    Anyway, you can reach out to me anytime at frothsof @ gmail and I can try to help with anything I can. You are an amazing talent!

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  2. You've probably heard of it, but EXOCOM is very similar to Project Long Stair, another modern-day Dungeon Dimension thing.

    I'm very excited to see your take on the subgenre.

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    Replies
    1. if you go back to my earlier work on this it was a long stairs game but i didnt get into minutae especial ignorance of australia and the nuke test sites here

      whole book in my downloads section

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  3. All I can say is, congratulations on creating over 3000 awesome tables so far! (It's closer to 3100 tables though.)

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