The Beginning of the Worlds

I've been meaning to start up this blog for some time now, but have been having trouble with beginnings.  So, I apologize if this seems a bit unfocused. Let's begin.

I am Douglas Miller.  I'm an independent writer of novels and game master of tabletop roleplaying games. I've been writing as far back as I can remember, and have years worth of work that I'm building upon.  I've been game mastering a shorter amount of time, but I've played and run roleplaying games in many different systems and for many different lengths of time, from one shots to short campaigns to longer wider-spanning ones.

It's my hope to use this blog to talk about my projects, but to also share my musings, advice, and thoughts on varying writing, roleplaying, gamemastering, and storytelling topics.

On the writer side of things, my main focus at present is Heroism and Other Lies, a series of short novels that I've been working on. I'll be posting more about this to come, but the basic concept is a superhero/comic book style story set in a cyberpunk type setting, exploring the good and bad of future technology.  I have the first two books of this series in draft form, going through varying levels of editing, and a third mostly written.  If I can make final decisions on cover work, I hope to have the first two books out before the end of the year. Fingers crossed.

I've got another novel idea that I'm working on developing, but I don't want to say too much about it just yet. I'm hoping to get a good chunk of that written during November, so I will probably talk more about that then.

On the GM/roleplaying game side, I've got a bit more going on.  Much of it is Cypher System based, but some of it isn't.

Using the Cypher Creator System, I'm working on putting together two adventures for publication. The first one is called The Machine God's Temple and is based on the first Numenera one shot that I developed and ran...probably almost three years ago.  I'm mostly done writing it all out and re-skinning it for Cypher System rather than for Numenera specifically, so I'm hoping to put that out really soon.  The next is called The Wonder Vault Heist and, as the name implies, is based on a heist, also in a science-fantasy setting.  It's largely in the idea-phase right now, but I'm hoping to put that out in the November/December time frame.  In addition to those two adventures, I've got an idea for a surreal sci-fi setting for the Cypher System inspired by (but not based on) Monte Cook Games' new game, Invisible Sun. I haven't decided if I'm going to follow up on the setting idea or not yet. I'd like to, but I'm not sure I'll have time with my other creative pursuits.

I've also been working on developing my own system, which I hope to publish in the future. I've got the basic framework down, but will need to develop a lot more in the way of abilities, creatures, setting, etc, not to mention playtesting to iron out the kinks. It's my intention to start a campaign with my system in the next few months, set in Ninth World (the setting of Numenera). This way I can test the mechanics while still working on the side on the more setting specific details that I'd need for publication.

In the meantime, while all that develops, are there any writing or roleplaying game topics that you'd be interested in me sharing my thoughts on?