Well, here it is. My computer is back up and running. I no longer have to live my life off of my laptop and this is a good thing!
I’ve been working on web-design lately and am trying to build professional websites now. Hopefully by the time I know what I’m doing there’s still a market for that sort of thing.
I still don’t have a job or any kind of income and am growing further and further in debt as time goes on. Hell, I can’t even get a job at McDonalds… I have no idea what’s so bad about my resume that I can’t land a job. I even got it professionally looked at and modified and still got nothing.
I’ve been working on creating a new and exciting Role Playing system when my brain is on fire from learning web coding. It’s coming along fantastically! I have a character generation system, an advancement system, a weapon and armor system, but no money system or combat system yet. Nor do I have a good way to assess challenges and award XPs.
I’m hoping to be able to launch my RPG with my first website available for free, and then hold monthly ransoms for adventures geared toward it. My fingers are crossed that this takes off and makes me a little bit of money… hopefully enough to sustain myself and the website. I’m hoping the launch date will be early in the New Year, if I can get it up by Jan 1, all the better (but I doubt that will happen).
If none of this works though, I might have to hunt down a red paperclip and pray that people will trade me a house for it.

I realize I haven’t written here for a long time, but I can explain. I’ve been struggling... alot. I haven’t been employed all year thus far, I haven’t been able to get on social assistance either. Hell, I even went out begging for change for 8 hours one day, and came home empty handed, hungry, and cold.

Which brings me to my next point: Having no money means I can’t pay rent, bills or buy food. I have a meagre amount of soups and rice I bought with the slim remainder of my credit card (which is now maxed out) and currently have no way of paying off my debt whatsoever.

Asking welfare for assistance was the last thing I ever wanted to do in my life. I remember being a “welfare kid” when I was young and how hard life was for everyone. I was also on welfare when I first moved to Ontario. I remember being able to pay rent with enough money left over for 1 box of rice, 2 packages of hot-dogs, 2 loafs of bread, 1 small bottle of ketchup, 1 bottle of soy sauce, and 1 bottle of tobacco sauce. That was it. I did live off of that for 6 months while going back to school to gain my grade 12, and let me tell you it was pure hell.

UPDATE: It turns out that I don’t qualify for welfare, so I’m stuck with no money, no job, no food, and a general in-ability to get around the city.

Anyway, that’s the general reason why I haven’t updated my blog as of late. I will try to keep it going, even if I’m not adding to it from a nice comfy warm home.

Computer problems

I realize it's been a while since my last post, but I'm restricted to my laptop and whatever internet I can find floating in the air at the moment. My PC needs a new power core and I really can't afford one at the moment.

So... whats new in the world of Lord Xtheth?
I picked up Halo Reach this past week. Now, the last halo game I played was the first Halo and I enjoyed it alot, but this one... Aside from the graphics upgrade it really felt like the exact same thing. I mean sure it's got a good plot, and some nice weapons but a few things strike me as odd.
Reach is supposed to happen before the first Halo game right? So why do these soldiers have access to guns that didn't exist in that game? Master Cheif was supposed to be some kind of cyborg-robot-supersoldier thing right? So why do these normal human guys have the same strength, or in some cases more than M.C.? These normal guys can kick tanks over when they flip, and they can tear guns off of turret mounts, this doesn't quite seem "human" to me.
Respawning also pisses me off. If Reach was supposed to be the firt planet destroyed by the Covenant and everyone on the planet is supposed to die, why do you respawn? I know from a game standpoint, its to allow you to play the game with minimal frustration, but seriously, why wouldn't all the guys who died on reach just respawn? Stupid suspention of disbelief breaking game logic!

I'm getting excited about Fable 3. I loved the first 2 Fable games, and I'm looking forward to anything new the 3rd title will bring to my platform.

The D&D essentials line just started. The books themselves are alot smaller than I expected. I thought they were going to be produced in the standard format, but WoTC decided to make them "pocket sized". The new character options presented in the books seem pretty good, and none of it is game breaking. I'm glad WoTC got away from the "Power creep" that older editions suffered from.
The essentials line does however update the classes and races to hapily co-exist with the new race and class format that they just recently learned to do (and people like). Humans STILL feel like they deserve a 2nd +2 to a stat though. I'd give them +2 to any stat, and +2 to Int, or Wis. as their options myself.

I've been taking care of kittens for the past 2 weeks. The mother gave birt to 5 kittens on September 12. One of the kittens was still-born, and 2 died over the next 2 days. I've been taking care of the other 2 personally since then. It's not hard work really, it just eats at my sleep. The kittens like to wake up crying in the middle of the night, only to fall asleep again by the time I finish mixing their milk replacement formula.
Both kittens love the formula, and they cry to have more forever every time I feed them. They eat it until their full, puke, then they want some more! I've learned how much to give them so they won't puke now... so no more of that!

I think thats all I have to share this post.
Here's hoping that I can get back to my regular updates!

A strange thing happened this weekend. A friend of mine came up with the idea that he wants to start producing games under his company. He asked me to help, which I’m grateful for, but also a little hesitant. I’ve been looking into game design and starting my own company for a couple of years now, and have come up short based entirely on my monetary situation.

This business idea does present me with at least the option to produce games, but it comes with a cost. Partnership is a scary concept to me. Especially when its not my company and someone else is MY partner. I would love to design a game, have it produced and make money off of it, but I’d much rather do that off of a loan so when I make a good amount of money I can pay the loan and get a good profit. A partnership would mean that no matter how much work I do, how much I put into things, how much of my personal sacrifice goes forward, I still only get 50% with no chance of “paying off” my “loan”.

Yes, getting a partner with an established company means that I don’t have to do THAT part of the company building, and yes I realize it’s his money going into things, but my fear is if I put forth 100% of the work toward a project, just because my partner funds it, he gets 50%.

If the cost of the project is say… $5000, and the finished product brings in say $10,000 after the cost, I would get $5k, and he would too, for doing nothing more than putting the money forward (that was paid off first, before the split). Now what if my product does REALY well? You know, that 1 in a million idea that everyone loves? If I make a million dollars off of what I put 100% of the effort toward, and only cost a fraction of that to produce, suddenly I’m paying him half a million dollars just for having money available?

But that’s just my “worst fear” scenario. I know I’m good at what I do, but not “million dollar project” good … yet.

After focusing on the negative for so long, I may as well look at a few of the positive potentials to this partnership plan. The idea that I will soon have the ability to get my name out there and recognized is an amazing thought. I would love to be able to go to a GenCon, or something along those lines, have people walk up and be like “Lord Xtheth? Can I have your autograph?” “I love that game of yours!” “Can I buy your book?” so on, and so forth.

The fact that I don’t have to have my own money to begin this venture is also a great opportunity, and I do strongly believe that I will make money in bundles with the right few ideas and support from my partner.

Well, that’s it for this week

As always, thank you for reading

Lord Xtheth

Today marks the launch of my podcasting career… It took way too long to set this up, but thankfully it has gotten off the ground. Some of the participants are from the Nerdbound podcast group. NBNeil, Ian M, and Ian B have been confirmed. Also a couple of my real life players have joined, and a completely new guy I found randomly on ENworld.

The 2 week celebration of my birthday starts tomorrow, The Calgary Stampede! I haven’t gone in several years… the last time was when I was 15 or 16, so more than 10 years ago. As I get older, my birthday means less and less, but I claim it gets longer and longer.

I finished reading the rules for Monsters and other childish things. It was a really entertaining read and it seems like an awesome system. I recommend checking it out.

As far as RPGs go, I’m working on a Star Wars Saga Edition game at the moment. It’s going to take place in a different dimension than the star wars universe, so no Darth Vader, no Luke Skywalker, and NO JAR JAR BINKS! Gun-Guns will still exist though, because the race isn’t that bad, just the one character.

I’ve been trying to come up with something to write professionally about. I’m good with fantasy, but it seems almost like there’s too much of that out already, and I might not be able to write anything new at all. I thought about trying my hand at script writing. I know I can write a better script than anything that’s coming out right now, it’s just difficult to come up with something fresh and new that nobody has seen before.

Well, that’s all I got for now, thank you for taking the time to read!

Lord Xtheth

Ramblings about gaming

I’ve officially started recruiting people for my soon-to-be famous podcast. It has proven to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. It seems that people on the internet who are looking to play more RPGs are way more picky than they lead me to believe. My first attempt was a game of Dogs in the Vineyard by Vincent Baker. Some people didn’t like the premise of how religious it felt so I scrapped that plan and went on to create a Mutants and Masterminds game based on their Hero High setting. That did draw a little interest but is going slowly. Right now I have 2 people committed, but need 2-4 more to have an actual game. Along with time restrictions and holidays, and my birth-2-weeks coming up it seems to be on hold for a little while at least.

As far as home games go, I’ve been slacking off a lot. I haven’t actually come up with anything new for my real life players in a long, long time. I started a Star Wars adventure up, but one of my friends started talking to me about making his own as well, so I sidelined that project until further notice. I want to run Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but the 3 player limit to pieces is kind of a turn off. My other options include New World of Darkness, or get back into writing 4E adventures again, but there aren’t enough constant people showing up to make for a good group for that at all.

I picked up that Magic: the gathering Duals of the Planeswalkers game from steam the other day. My advice: If you want to play Magic, get into the actual game. If you want to just spend $10 ever on magic… don’t buy this game, wait for it to hit $5 or less on steam or in bargain bins, it’s totally not worth it. Yes, you get to play Magic for a cheap price, but there’s little to no deck customization, the game itself is SLOW, and it forces you to watch every bloody animation or frantically click “continue” just to keep the game going. You are given little to no time to react to “the stack” You HAVE TO react to the stack at specific times to get abilities to work at all. Example: in order to counter a spell, you have to wait for the spell to be shown to you (this would trigger your “I’ll counter this” reflex, but it won’t work) you have to click continue, then have 2 seconds to respond (where you can counter the spell). Example 2: I block with a regenerating creature. My initial response is to regenerate after damage has been added to the stack… but no, you’re not allowed, you have 1 second after you declare your regenerator as a blocker to click the card, click “activate ability” then it has the “regeneration bubble” that I NEVER liked in the actual Magic game itself.

I think that’s good for this blog entry

Thank you for reading.

Lord Xtheth

Random thoughts upon the dawn of a new blog

I’ve been considering writing my own blog for quite some time now. It has crossed my mind many times over the past couple of years since I joined ENworld, I just never had the push to write one until now.

A thought occurred to me however: What should I blog about? The quick answer I guess would be “anything I want”.

I will try to make this blog something I do regularly, as I am also trying to train myself to write more often, to get myself into more of a writing mood and break my writer’s block I’ve been in for a few months.

One of the major ideas I had for this blog was to make it a design journal. I’ve been writing adventures for various Role Playing Games for years now, and have wanted to get into it professionally for a couple if years. Writer’s block and money issues have prevented me from publishing anything thus far, but hopefully in the future this will change.

I’ve recently begun trying to teach myself the fundamentals of web design, which is proving to be slightly harder than I originally thought it would be. I’ve been considering getting a “web design for dummies” book even though there are free websites out there that essentially tell you the same thing, though the Dummies series does make for good reference material.

The Podcasting bug has hit me lately. I’ve gone through the steps to set up an actual play podcast much like the ones presented by Nerdbound and RPPR. I’ve actually begun a sort of team up with Nerdbound, and will be an official unofficial NB-esque podcast. Neil has been helping me out a lot with the initial set up of things as well as giving me pointers as to how I can get people interested in a podcast-based game session (which I found out is slightly more difficult than starting a normal session).

On the subject of podcasts, this last Sunday I participated in a pickup game of Trail of Cthulhu Ran by Nerdbound Neil. It was a very interesting system, very simple, easy to learn and didn’t take anything away from the whole Cthulhu experience that I’ve known and loved in other Cthulhu based game systems.

Well… there it is, I finally got around to writing my first Blog entry. Hopefully this will make me popular on the internet, and then I can get all that internet money!

Thank you for taking the time to read!

Lord Xtheth