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Hi.


A lot has happened since last time we talked.


I can remember telling you that I wasn't dead, nor was I dying, and now I've vanished for like two months. It's not very honest of me. Hopefully I'll do better, but I'm not sure what I can promise. It's often hard for me to know what to give.

The Toybox Closes

Last night, the Toybox closed for good. The campaign ended. The Toybox crew had found a portal to the realm from which Vinka had been assembling her universe-altering efforts. They were accompanied by knights riding Xi-Drakes, Aeon Priests, WRENCHes, and reality-bending flying entities from another planet.


As they traveled Vinka's realm, each ally was necessary against a particular challenge. The Xi-Drakes took on some flying monsters that acted in Vinka's defense. The Aeon Priests battled members of the Convergence and kept their esoteries from taking effect. The WRENCHes worked on a mechanical machine that was producing numerous automaton warriors. The aviators used their powers to hold back the Iron Wind itself.




In confronting Vinka, she revealed that she also had her own Toybox, which she utilized to begin her universe-altering process. The Toybox crew worked to disrupt her efforts. In doing so, there was a burst of light and Vinka vanished. In the wake of the reality explosion, the Toybox crew could see and sense the nanites throughout the air and saturating the worlds. They could access and manipulate them.


However, the Shadow took advantage of the opening as well, pouring up through the void and disrupting the nanites, separating connections and threatening to divide up all of existence. The Toybox crew worked together to hold the shadow at bay and to use their new-found nanotech power and understanding to sift the shadow out and cast it away.


They returned to the world, having saved it from the existential threat and being no longer tied to the Toybox.

Dragons, Wolves, and Shadows

I have written 56,000 or so words for what I'm hoping is to be my next novel. I'm only about 1/3rd-1/2 done with the draft, so I'm hoping that I'll continue to be motivated to finish it.


When I'd tried to plan what I would write for my next novel, I kept wanting to do something that could be written quickly and in short segments, sort of like Heroism and Other Lies. However, as I thought about it, and as I prayerfully considered what would be best to write, I kept coming back to this idea.


So, like I said, I have more than 50,000 words of a draft of this novel. It's a big sci-fi epic story with numerous point-of-view characters and multiple anachronistic worlds and all sorts of stuff going on. I'm really excited about it, but I'm also just hoping that I can manage it all and that I can keep myself motivated to finish it.

Heroism and Other Lies: Season 1

I am working on putting together a volume that contains all of the season 1 episodes of Heroism and Other Lies in one book. I actually wanted to have this done by part way through last month, but I'm still moving forward.

Cypher System One Shots

I'm working on two different one shot adventures for cypher system. Both of which will be run, hopefully, in January. Consistent with my "the book I ended up writing met the opposite of the criteria I started out with," I'm not sure either of the adventures is turning out the way I'd planned.


One of the adventures is being planned primarily based on having two new players that are getting introduced to tabletop RPGs in general. So, I thought that I'd go with something pretty straightforward. Except that the idea I ended up with ended up being relatively complex and a little twisty. Not to the point that I think it'll be problematic for new players, just that it wasn't really what I set out to do.


The only fictions that I know of that one of the players like are Doctor Who and Star Wars. So, with that, I decided to go for a space opera type adventure where the players are the crew of a space ship on one side of a galactic conflict.


The other adventure is being planned based on introducing an RPG player whose experience is mostly with Pathfinder to the Cypher System. I'd talked to them about settings, and they decided that a futuristic science fantasy setting (similar to that of Numenera or that which I used for the Toybox) would be what they're most interested in. So, I started planning based on that.


I wanted to go with a dungeon crawl type adventure, something exploring ancient high-tech ruins probably, since Numenera is pretty rife with that. However, the idea that I came up with ended up being an urban noir mystery suspense thing.


So...we'll see if either of the adventures end up like I'm planning or what ends up happening.


I would like to be able to format both adventures so that I can put them out with the Cypher Creator System, making them available to people in the world to purchase. Whether or not I can do that will likely end up depending on what adventures I end up with and how those end up running.

Caerwent Down

There's a bit of a gap until the start of the next campaign that I'll be running-about two months, till February. However, the plans are already in motion.


The next campaign will be using Numenera and will be based on the players attempting to find the remains of a once great (and space/dimension traveling) city-state and to raise it up once again. I probably won't post updates for it, like I tried to do with Toybox, especially since I won't have the issue of a rotating group, but we'll see what happens.

This Blog

I want to do a better job of updating this blog. When I first started it, I was updating twice a week. I would like to get back to that (or at least to once a week). I just need to figure out what to post. When I have thoughts on writing and RPG topics, I want to try to write about them, but I'm not convinced that I have cohesive thoughts on new topics often enough.


So, we'll see...