To the Presses!

I just finished a project I’ve been working on for two weeks. Its a meta-setting for Monsters and Other Childish Things based on Nightmares and the dream world. It offers rules variants, and 13 familiar but still Nightmarish monsters for characters to face.
Next week I’ll start my play-testing and soon I hope it will be ready for submission to Arc Dream, the creators of Monsters and Other Childish Things.

I have 2 other projects on the back burner that are both moving back in to my main focus now that that is done. The first of which is designing my own RPG system. I’ve got the basics down, now all I need to do is flesh it out, make sure things make sense to potential players, and write it in such a way that it’s entertaining to read. I have no doubt in my mind that it’s a good system, because I think it’s pretty genius stuff myself. But then again, that’s just me.

The second project is the Written form of E6. Basically, its the first 6 levels of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 presented as its own book. A lot of people seem to enjoy this game variant, and hopefully, after I get my ass in gear and get it formatted and the layout done, it will be something people like and might give me money for.

Way in the back of my project list is still the novel I started for last years NaNoWriMo, and didn’t finish on time. I’m eventually going to get back to that and finish it, hopefully making it a publishable piece of fiction.

My currant monetary situation is dire. Here’s hoping something positive happens soon!

Thank you for reading

So, I’ve officially started two projects. I’m working on designing my own RPG from the ground up. Its slowly building up into Alpha stage and will soon be play tested for the first time by a select group of close friends and players. My guess is that the first write up will be done by the end of January.

Also I have taken on the project of creating a E6 based RPG rulebook (which will be accompanied by its own website... or a page on my future website). That shouldn’t take too much time either, because it essentially is just a bunch of editing and layout.

My web design learning have come along quickly, I still haven’t quite memorized each and every code, but I know exactly what to reference and look up when I want to do something specific, and can re-write it to do what I need it to. My website will be coming up in the very near future, pending money issues.
My plans include maybe writing a couple free websites for people so I can increase my portfolio, and eventually get paid for doing this sort of thing professionally.

That’s my update for this week, thanks for reading it.

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