Bring it on, 2020!
Wow, it's the new year already, and I haven't posted for months. Figured it's high time I dial in with an update and a roundup of 2019 to bring in 2020.
2019 was a busy and eventful year, to say the least:
In the spring, I helped my good friend Aurelién Lainé launch a Kickstarter for his RPG book Koryo Hall of Adventures. It's a D&D 5e campaign setting with a great fantasy Korea theme. He pulled in over $50 thousand, and it's looking like he'll have some really beautiful art for his book. Excited to get my cloth-bound special edition once it finally prints early this year.
I also helped Aurelién with some game design this summer. I edited a good part of the primary mechanics for Koryo Hall of Adventures, and I wrote mechanics for some key parts of the game system. Specifically, I designed a detailed shaman class called the Mudang that involved creating an entirely new magical system for calling on spirits. It's a huge chapter, and I'm quite proud of how well it turned out. I also fleshed out a few other variant classes, as well as designing a brand new Reputation system that allows for dynamic Reputation changes in-game without too much of a hassle for anybody. I'll dive more into them once the game book is released!
The end of summer and the entire last half of the year was kind of a let-down with some illnesses in the family. It was a stressful time, hence the long lull in my blog posts. We pulled through OK, but now I'm laid up at home with a herniated disc in my neck. Should hopefully be healed soon (fingers crossed). Hurts like hell if I move around too much, but I can't really complain — it's the price I have to pay for being a lazy couch potato for the greater part of my life. And I'm actually grateful, as the injury has served as a real wakeup call to start taking better care of my body.
Which leads me to my newest obsession: I'm getting back into fitness and bodybuilding again, and I fully intend to go gung-ho and keep at it permanently this time. I may even include the odd post about bodybuilding on this blog to keep myself accountable. Bodybuilding is totally epic, so it fits fine with the theme of my site anyway. ^^
What else happened in 2019? We lost the great actor René Auberjonois in December, sadly. In honor of my favorite character of his, Odo from Deep Space Nine, I've started up a Star Trek-themed Traveller campaign set on a space station, in which the PCs are security officers that maintain the peace and do detective shit. I've hacked in a bit of my Cthulhu Guard mechanics to handle investigation scenes, and I'm actually running it with an Ashen Stars module from Pelgrane's Dead Rock Seven adventure book, converted to Star Trek on the fly. We're two sessions in so far, and it's fun! Maybe once this gets a bit more playtesting, I can use it to write up a Deep Space Nine <> Traveller <> Gumshoe mashup rules system, we'll see.
On the game design side of things, I have just recently entered into a co-writing pact with a friend of mine to design an epic D&D module together. I'm pretty excited about it, but we're still in the early stages. I'll give more information later, once we have the skeleton of the module fleshed out and I'm reasonably assured that this crazy idea will actually be carried out to publication.
And we finally got a new Tool album in 2019! How mind-blowing is that? Fear Inoculum is such a great album too, some really fantastic songs. One of my favorite bands of all time. Even though this autumn kind of sucked for me, I was just happy I could listen to Tool again, haha. Especially Pneuma and Invincible...wow, just wow. What're your favorite tracks?
Gotta say, I'm looking forward to 2020. I feel some great things are coming up, and I've got so many fun things I want to do. Will post again soon. Rock on!
In the spring, I helped my good friend Aurelién Lainé launch a Kickstarter for his RPG book Koryo Hall of Adventures. It's a D&D 5e campaign setting with a great fantasy Korea theme. He pulled in over $50 thousand, and it's looking like he'll have some really beautiful art for his book. Excited to get my cloth-bound special edition once it finally prints early this year.
I also helped Aurelién with some game design this summer. I edited a good part of the primary mechanics for Koryo Hall of Adventures, and I wrote mechanics for some key parts of the game system. Specifically, I designed a detailed shaman class called the Mudang that involved creating an entirely new magical system for calling on spirits. It's a huge chapter, and I'm quite proud of how well it turned out. I also fleshed out a few other variant classes, as well as designing a brand new Reputation system that allows for dynamic Reputation changes in-game without too much of a hassle for anybody. I'll dive more into them once the game book is released!
The end of summer and the entire last half of the year was kind of a let-down with some illnesses in the family. It was a stressful time, hence the long lull in my blog posts. We pulled through OK, but now I'm laid up at home with a herniated disc in my neck. Should hopefully be healed soon (fingers crossed). Hurts like hell if I move around too much, but I can't really complain — it's the price I have to pay for being a lazy couch potato for the greater part of my life. And I'm actually grateful, as the injury has served as a real wakeup call to start taking better care of my body.
Which leads me to my newest obsession: I'm getting back into fitness and bodybuilding again, and I fully intend to go gung-ho and keep at it permanently this time. I may even include the odd post about bodybuilding on this blog to keep myself accountable. Bodybuilding is totally epic, so it fits fine with the theme of my site anyway. ^^
What else happened in 2019? We lost the great actor René Auberjonois in December, sadly. In honor of my favorite character of his, Odo from Deep Space Nine, I've started up a Star Trek-themed Traveller campaign set on a space station, in which the PCs are security officers that maintain the peace and do detective shit. I've hacked in a bit of my Cthulhu Guard mechanics to handle investigation scenes, and I'm actually running it with an Ashen Stars module from Pelgrane's Dead Rock Seven adventure book, converted to Star Trek on the fly. We're two sessions in so far, and it's fun! Maybe once this gets a bit more playtesting, I can use it to write up a Deep Space Nine <> Traveller <> Gumshoe mashup rules system, we'll see.
On the game design side of things, I have just recently entered into a co-writing pact with a friend of mine to design an epic D&D module together. I'm pretty excited about it, but we're still in the early stages. I'll give more information later, once we have the skeleton of the module fleshed out and I'm reasonably assured that this crazy idea will actually be carried out to publication.
And we finally got a new Tool album in 2019! How mind-blowing is that? Fear Inoculum is such a great album too, some really fantastic songs. One of my favorite bands of all time. Even though this autumn kind of sucked for me, I was just happy I could listen to Tool again, haha. Especially Pneuma and Invincible...wow, just wow. What're your favorite tracks?
Gotta say, I'm looking forward to 2020. I feel some great things are coming up, and I've got so many fun things I want to do. Will post again soon. Rock on!
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