Projects Update

Here's a general update on what I'm working on and what stage it's at presently.

Author

Heroism and Other Lies

I honestly expected Episode 101 to be out by now. However, my editor has been held up due to unforeseen circumstances. I am hoping to have the edits before the end of the month, and then with my edits in hand it shouldn't be long before I can release the final product.

I have Episodes 2-4 written. Two will be sent to editing soon, but I'm still going to work to make some more revisions on 3 and 4 before sending them.

I have begun working on Episode 5.

Short Stories

I am working on two different short stories. The first is for an anthology that is being published in honor of Carrie Fisher. The proceeds of the sales will go to a charity supporting those with bipolar disorder.

Game Master

Toybox

By far my biggest creative focus right now is gearing up for my upcoming Toybox campaign. This campaign utilizes a tabletop game system of my own design and takes place in a setting heavily inspired by/based on Monte Cook Games' Numenera. While the setting is not directly the same as the Ninth World, it does have many of the same creatures and essential elements of it.

I'm hoping to post session summaries up here in story-form as the campaign progresses, but we'll see how that goes.

The first Toybox session will be January 26th-a little more than a week away-and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Looking Glass Moon

My surreal sci-fi setting for Cypher System isn't getting much attention at the moment. I've dropped the ball on this while focusing on other projects. I'm considering dropping this project altogether. However, if I do continue with it, I will probably roll out the setting incrementally, with various smaller books focusing on specific elements or parts of the setting rather than all at once in a huge volume. This way people can pick and choose the parts of Looking Glass Moon that they want to use, while choosing to overlook the rest.

Islands of Peril

I have recently been thinking about the Instant Adventures provided in Monte Cook Games' Weird Discoveries (Numenera) and Strange Revelations (The Strange), and I have to say that I like the format.

My first instinct was that the format of having the ability to pick up and play a session of Numenera (or really any RPG that I enjoy) without any prep seemed like an awesome idea with a lot of potential. Looking at some of the adventures, they seemed to flow nicely and have a format that played in with Node-based design, which I've mentioned in the past as something that makes interesting game sessions.

My second thought, after running one or two of these, was that these adventures are very short in comparison to what I normally think of when I think of running an RPG adventure. Not to mention that the ones I ran seemed pretty "easy" too.

This was disappointing to me, until I really thought about it. The intro to the adventures is pretty clear. They aren't trying to take the place of full RPG adventures. They're trying to fit, instead, into the slot that might be held by board games. To a degree, they're designed to be quicker and simpler. They're designed with the idea that the players may not be familiar with the system in mind.

This intrigued me as a way of introducing people who aren't familiar with tabletop RPGs to the hobby, which is something I think these sorts of adventures would do very well.

In my thinking about these sorts of adventures, I began to consider making one myself (and what that adventure might look like). One turned into more than one, and thus Islands of Peril was born.

Another thing that interested me was that the adventures in Weird Discoveries mention links to other adventures in the book, in a way that one story can lead to others. In this way, if you're playing with the same (or an overlapping) group of players, they can experience some interesting connections between their adventures. The problem that I had with it is that these adventures assume that the PCs never advance. They never gain new abilities (which sort of makes sense for the pick-up-and-play nature of the game.) In fact, in general it seems to me that there are very few cypher system adventures geared towards characters beyond Tier 1.

It is my hope to unveil 8 adventures in the Islands of Peril series which can be played stand-alone or as a linked campaign which takes the characters from Tier 1 all the way to Tier 6.

I have the skeleton of the first adventure completed, and look forward to working on the next seven.