Where Have I Been

So it's been a LONG time since I got a chance to write for The GM's Table and honestly I hate that and I'm sorry to all of my readers.  For those of you who know I actually tried to shift gears a bit and started a second blog. I thought writing about being a dad on top of writing about gaming would be a better fit. The thing is life decided that I shouldn't have time to write about anything after like a month. Because of this I have a second page with less than a handful of articles and just as much time without anything written.

Rather than have the uphill fight of getting back into a writing groove for a page that never even learned to walk I think I need to accept that starting a second page was just a bad idea. That DOES mean sometimes I might write about things beyond rules hacks and game reviews, but honestly that stuff is always swirling in my brain so I doubt it won't bleed in to all of my writing anyways.

Now that the apologies and groveling of being a crap blogger who doesn't blog are done I do think it would be worth talking about what I've been up to while I've been gone.

1. Being a Dad
Like I said, I originally wanted to have a second blog to focus on the things having to do with being a dad and a GM at the same time. So it should come to no surprise I've been busy just doing dad crap as a stay at home dad. I know it's not the focus of this blog, but it is 99% of my time so it makes the top of my list.

2. Savage Worlds Products
The other BIG project I've been working on is a modern horror / modern fantasy product for the Savage Worlds system. The thing is getting a publisher's license isn't a fast or easy task (as I don't think it should be for quality reasons) and getting things in order to the standard I feel will give me the best shot at getting a license on my first request have taken a lot of my time. I can't talk too much about the details of the book as this will be an even bigger project than my D&D book Ultimate Urban Fantasy.

What I can say is it will include:

• Balanced rules for becoming a vampire, werewolf, or undead that can happen at character gen or in game and not leave anyone feeling like someone has an unfair advantage or disadvantage
• Rules for holding onto humanity both from becoming inhuman or using black magic that have real mechanical effects that guide players into making tough choices rather than just say "role play it" and assuming it will be covered.
• Rules for Headquarters and other bases of operations to run monster hunting businesses or detective agencies from that grow and evolve with your campaign.
• World building tools that let you dial in the horror and fantasy to allow a single book to handle anything from Scooby Doo to Ghostbusters to Supernatural to Angle Investigations.
• New rules for magical artifacts and supernatural tech.

3. A New Type of Gaming

So the last thing I've been working on is a way to having a living world in a game where players can get involved at their leisure. This is a "Play by Post" forum in the West Marches style. What this means is players just exist in a world filled with quests and story hooks, but it's up to them to decide what threads to follow and what friends or allies they get to go with them on an adventure. My hope is to eventually grow this into a community with multiple GMs that can be a massive game and community. Currently it's only about 12 members strong with a single GM, but that's to get a groove going and iron out issues before we go completely public. I hope by the end of the year I can open the floodgates and let it grow, but we still have work to do before that's even possible.