Not much to write. I'm recovering from shingles and scheduling oral surgery. I'm also looking at retraining my dog who is turning into a real SOB these past few days.

That's all trivia I guess.

I'm pondering whether to take time off from RPs entirely or throwing myself into writing them full force. The question remains, if I do quit the habit what will replace it? drawing and model building are logical candidates. I could get more into writing my novel. Anyway that's where I am these days.

So after getting engaged I found a little time for writing. this is the result. Any comments would be appreciated.
 

No title for the WIP yet.
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I was going to post some stuff about gaming but....

I Got Engaged!!

What else can I say? The days of lying and sneaking around are over. Of course I only did that stuff for a month to surprise her with a ring.

Well so far my Pay Pal account has shown no increase for October so I guess that means no HFGSSS .pdfs were sold last month. That means I sold 20 total. So much for fame and fortune doing this.

On the other hand that means 20 people liked my stuff and bought it out of all the RPGNow offerings. Pretty good. I also have a friend who wants to run the game for me using my setting. That never happened before!

On my ow I am working on a system that's slightly more complicated than the 1PG engine. I don't think you need much more than that to run a campaign of decent length. The crux of the system will be determining degree of success for actions and you can fine tune it to be as crunchy as you want.

It'll probably be for supers simly because if you can scale those characters in you can apply a system to darn near anything.

The MEGS system was sort of ike that except it had failings dealing with vigilantes but I don't intend on scaling the game for uer characters like Superman.

Work... what can I say about work?


Work sucks.

Work continues to suck. The Department of Education is obviously  trying to move beyond micro managing  and into nano managing. I've pretty much decided to ride the current  administration out.  eventually al these corporate types will lose interest and go to other jobs and indulge their thirst for power elsewhere.

I finished the second Hero Force expansion, no title as yet. I'm firmly back in writing and even playing a game! I ran Hero Force for my old gang last night and it went all right. I feel terribly rusty as a GM though. Another session might change that.

( Read more... )

Well my balloon is coming in for a landing. HFGSSS has dropped steadily and is now number 20 at RPGNow.com. Of course that means it still spent a week in the top ten. I'm perfectly satisfied with that and busily planning the next supplement. I'm going to strike while the iron is hot and produce another Hero Force expansion and pitch the Pulp era stuff after that.

It's a good feeling to have people want your work. It's also odd to have people ask me how to rule on this or that. My usual reaction is to say, "Do whatever works for you and is fun." At least it would be if anyone had ever asked me before I wrote this.

The Hero Force Giant Size Super Special was #11 of the top hundred games on RPGNow on Friday. By Saturday it was seven and today it is number four. Woot!

The Hero Force Giant Size Super Special is up at RPGNOW.com. There will be no living with me for at  least a week. I'm back in the (rp) game baby!

Kudos to James for a beautiful comicy layout and cover. I hope it meets with your approval or at least gets 3.5 stars.

Someone review it now, please?

 So the Supers thing is in the pipe. James Stubbs is doing an awesome job on the layout. Please check out Heyoka Studios. James does good stuff.

Next up the Pulp Era. I could do a Victory City variant. But I pitched another idea.

Remember all those movies with an evil doctor hiding on a remote island? Remember all those lost worlds and ruins of Atlantis and R'lyeh? All those islands are part of the same chain.

It's called the Burroughs Islands in the South Pacific. See all those mad scientists needed somewhere to go after the Great War. Governments were less preoccupied and could now ask just WTF you were doing with that radium and the really good hiding spots in the New York subways and Himalayas were already filled or reserved by more cuatious guys in the Nazi Party.

Oh yes, there is going to be a lot of humor in this.

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 The supplement I've worked on is being laid out now. The title is Hero Force Giant Sized Super Special. Whee! I can't believe it.

I am now in the most enjpyable period of writing, pondering my next project. It will probably be Pulp/WW2 era since I've dropped a lot of hints abouyt it in this project. Those of you who have read the Victory City encyclopedia ;) know I wrote a whole history. I stuck bits of it through out the setting description. It's an old trick I learned DMing. Anyway it will probably be written up here before I do the supplement and pitch it. 

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I heard from James Stubbs at Heyoka Studios and wonder of wonder he is interested in me doing a Hero Force supplement. That was part of the reason I've not posted in so long. The other reason was that I was taking accelerated grad courses this summer. I loved them. I got a lot of external validation about things I felt I was doing right in teaching and I'm going to work ready to fix the things I could do better.

I've spent the last three days trying to get my classroom together. So I'm starting my work year already tired, I guess I can sleep a little during the staff development workshops they give tomorrow. Sorry if I sound cynical. I learned more about my profession this past summer than I did in 11 years of workshops.

How does the Department of Education manage to do so much that is so wrong?

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The writing project is not going well. It is going however. To make a long story short I decided to scrap the setting sections and character descriptions and use the space for alternate characters and optional rules to reflect different genres. With my grad course starting next week and work soon after I don't know when I can have this finished.

On the other hand there is no deadline and I feel I will do a better job now that I reassessed this supplement.

In other news Happy 84th Birthday to my mom (August 8). Happy Anniversary Milo, this marks one year since I took my dog home!

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The writing project is going well. Milo is also well if his appetite, house training, napping and ability to get int trouble are any meters.

I have about 6000 words done out of 10,000 expected. I may go over and just start cutting stuff down. I have too many damned ideas. :)

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First apologies to all those I've been spamming. thanks to BobP who taught me the use and responsibilities of the LJ Cut button.

There is going to be much super hero stuff for a while as I found someone who wants to help me e-publish it! So I'll be working up a (cut down) version of Vic. Glee!

In other news, while I was trying to train Milo a cute little Chihuahua pup came over and began playing with him. When we left she followed us home. Not wanting another dog for practical reasons (i.e. the one I have is enough work!) I spent an hour carrying the pup around the neighborhood until I found her owner and the owner returned home. Milo wound up the winner because I got the pup's owner to let me bring Milo over for a play date!

I went home feeling good for about a half hour before I realized that was a young puppy and young puppies sometimes carry Parvo virus. I'm pretty sure there's little chance of Milo contracting it but I'm going to wiki now.

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I'm also getting set to run an online Space Opera game next week. The basic premise is that an egghead discovered a way to generate unlimited energy in 1939. Using this power source mankind explored the solar system and found it... inhabited. It seems your enigmatic aliens set up a huge cloaking device to make Mars, Venus and Earth appear like dead worlds to each other. Anyway this a campaign background sheet in the form of a dictionary of space flight.

 

 

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I finished my grad course and received an 'A' which felt kind of funny because a good part of my grade was based on a fact sheet I had to compose on a topic I chose. My topic was 'Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences'. For those of you who don't know the theory, Gardner said that humans had 7-8 different core intelligences that were discrete defining areas such as mathematics, linguistics etc (go Wiki it if you need to know more). Well in short I did an excellent short summary of the system and then spent the bulk of the paper explaining why it was not verified and probably wrong even though MANY educators still believe it You never expect to get an 'A' when you buck the status quo.

For my part Gardner's ideas make a great theory of learning and I still use it to prepare assignments and address children's learning needs. I just call it Multiple Modalities of Learning which IMHO is more accurate.

Still sick with this stupid cold and cough. Now I finally went to the doc and got some meds.

I was corresponding with Hegeyokai Studios about writing a Hero Force supplement. I think I came across as a noob  because I asked a lot of questions to find out exactly what they were looking for. I border on OCD in this regard because the supplement I tried to write wound up in the trashcan because of failure to communicate. While I cannot control the other person's behavior, I can be as thorough as possible in finding out what they want.

Anyway my rough idea of the supplement goes like this:
13 pages total
1page new equipment  including Universal Equipment (gear every super gets his hands on)
1 pages  new  powers for Vigilantes, Blasters and Gadgeteers.
3 pages of new characters
3 Pages on the Victory City Setting
5 one page adventures possibly a story arc

Obviously this written in gelatin at the moment. If anyone (especially from the Deep7 Forums) reads this I'd like your opinions on what you'd like to see in a Hero force supplement.

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I am pretty pleased with my stunts and Vigilante gadgets and such. I did have a problem with AV and power damage ratings in that 2 levels of Invulnerability or Gadgeteer Armor can hold off three levels of Elemental or Blaster attack and damned near allVigilante weapons. this led to me tweaking the values for all the above. On reflection all I had to do was change the way Invulnerability and Gadgeteer Armor worked. At present each level of Invulnerability/GA gives 10 points of protection. I changed it in my setting to the following:

Invulnerability Level 1 10 AV (A weapon doing 16 damage does six damage)
Invulnerability Level 2 Damage that exceeds AV is halved (A weapon doing 16 damage does three damage)
Invulnerability Level 3 Damage that exceeds AV is halved and taken off UMPH! (A weapon doing 16 damage does three damage and it is taken as UMPH! I.e. a character with this level of Invulnerability can spring back after a brutal fight with some reduction in abilities).

You might want to consider awarding an Invulnerable character who bounced back after a fight only 1D3 Character Improvement points.

I would also consider super powers the equivalent of Era  8 when supers deal with  vehicles and giant robots. In other words they get +2 AV or DMG depending on the power vs. vehicles. Super powers regularly blast cars and tanks but don't slay humans on the first attack. Movement powers use their level as MAN. A super with Level 3 Flight acts as a +3 MAN aircraft..

Next week I start an accelerated grad class to get a pay increase.... errrr better myself as an educator. I doubt I'll have time to pursue this LJ until 7/28. You have earned a reprieve.

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