[Games] Necronomicon and What's Next

[jordangreywolf]

Truck Usage
The lease ran out officially on the Florida office by the end of September. I got a lot more use out of my pickup truck than I normally do, with all the moving and such -- a ladder from Home Depot, junk to the city landfill, various "home office" items to my house, more junk to Goodwill, assorted runs to the temporary storage unit where we've had the professional movers stow stuff and then we find out we need something-or-the-other to be shipped somewhere.

I maintain two vehicles -- the car is nominally Gwendel's, the truck is mine -- but Gwendel is such a recluse that she simply DOES NOT DRIVE ANYWHERE unless she absolutely has to. I often have to take a day off work to see to it that she gets to dentist or doctor appointments. But when I've talked of getting rid of the old truck and just maintaining one vehicle -- because, $$$ -- she's horrified. So since the truck is a gas-guzzler, it mostly just sits, though I try to drive it at least periodically just so the gas doesn't turn into crud in the tank. It also means that I have no idea when the air conditioning stopped working, but I really could have used it right about now -- and yet I haven't really had the opportunity to go take it in for repair. The weather's getting cooler now, though, and I'm tempted to procrastinate.

Home Office
A nice perk is that my workplace let me take home one of the office furniture sets that was otherwise going to be broken down and dumped. I got rid of Gwendel's old, horrible computer desk -- cracked particle board, with various wood-glue patches, flaking off faux wood-grain layer, missing keyboard drawer, sagging boards, and too small to house the monitor properly. Now, she's got a nice command-center occupying a wall and a corner of the computer room, supporting two monitors, a bookshelf/CD holder on one side (not yet fully filled), her Aerogarden on the other (currently growing peppers and grape tomatoes, and shedding dead leaves everywhere), and some drawers with space to spare.

I also got a couple of shelf units that I moved to the garage, and have started reorganizing some of my bins of stored materials (craft materials, old gaming stuff, not-so-old gaming stuff), and hauling out things that have been in the garage for over a DECADE. There's even more out there that needs to go. I hope I can get more done during the cool months, as I've gotten ill during some of my garage-outings due to the heat.

My own little "work-office" space, however, needs some work. I alternate between a "TV tray" arrangement in the computer room, and a small computer desk in the family room. I've got a laptop, so I can go to either place, but the family room (which affords me more room to work, and place for a second monitor) is right next to the bedroom, and Gwendel sleeps at whatever hours she pleases, so if I'm doing teleconferencing, or if someone calls me up, I'm going to wake her up with the noise and royally annoy her. Odd as it might sound, there's just not enough room remaining in the computer room for me to have a proper work setup. I'm still trying to puzzle out how to make best use of space available.

I selected a bunch of old game items from the computer room to donate to Necronomicon ... and yet that's only a drop in the bucket.

Officially, I DO have an office space now, in a corner office subleased from Schlesinger Associates. Trouble is, we don't yet have our own internet connection. Schlesinger was gracious enough to let me come into the office and use their wi-fi for an online project that desperately needed a stable connection (my neighborhood periodically suffers from brown-outs, or else the DNS goes down for no particular reason for hours), but they weren't planning on that being a long-term solution, and let me know so. So, until that gets sorted out, it looks like I'm working "home office" unless there's something that absolutely demands that I drive in there (and where I don't necessarily need the internet while I'm there), such as shipping equipment off to some project or another.

It's a weird sort of limbo, and it makes me nervous.

Smartphone
After much resistance, I finally got a smartphone, after much pressure from my workplace. No, my workplace didn't buy it for me. I already caused some friction by insisting that I ought to get compensated for the increase in my monthly cell phone bill by having to get a data plan -- I don't get a thing for the phone itself. I'm still a bit bitter over this point. Yes, the smartphone is a neat toy. Yes, there are lots of things I can do with it. But it's also very addictive, and I already have a problem with wasting around huge chunks of a day by haunting forums and web sites as part of my "daily routine," then going and checking again and again if things are slow. It's going to be all the worse if I can do that ANYWHERE I GO.

Anyway, I got an iPhone 8 Plus -- I opted to get the "last-gen" model, and only 64 GB storage (I was inclined to go higher, but everyone -- even the AT&T salesman, go figure -- talked me down from that), and an "Otterbox" shell (a bit of armor, though the downside is that the phone is now too big to work with iHome or any of the other handy little "plug in your iDevice here" gizmos).

Of course, this means that now, when I'm on vacation, I can get pelted with emails 24/7, and people can expect responses because, of course, YOU HAVE A SMARTPHONE NOW. Yay.

Necronomicon 2018
Necronomicon came and went. This year, for the first time, I officially saw ABSOLUTELY NO ONE from the old "Tampa crowd." (Occasionally, Gwendel and I would catch glimpses of the one formerly known as DistantStar, doing some panel or in the artist/writer alley, but not this year.)

I put a lot of work into my games, and still it wasn't exactly enough (from my point of view), and even so, that didn't really matter. My most heavily-playtested game (i.e., it was playtested ONCE) on Friday, the wild west game largely there because I wanted to show support for Dog House Rules, only got two players, so I had to run a very bare-bones version of the adventure. The two players seemed to have fun, and both of them showed up for my other Savage Worlds games over the weekend, so I'll call it a success, but I was still disappointed. (Also, I didn't get any good photos to turn out, so it's hardly "Facebook-able.")

For what it's worth, my main event game went spectacularly, but I largely owe that to the fact that I got some of the most dynamic players to frequent Necronomicon. We had a full table of 6 players to play my "Rooby-Doo and the Ghost of Dry Rock Gulch" adventure, and it was as close to perfect as I could hope for.

My only major regret is that our 6th player, who ended up with the "Mysterious Special Guest Star" role, was a little bit of a "wallflower" sort, and I don't think I gave him nearly enough attention compared to the rest. However, he still got to do some things, so I've had worse cases of "wallfloweritis" to contend with.

The other regret is that I never got a photo of the interim "Dry Rock Gulch" part of the game where I set up the Wild West town and settlers for the brief information-gathering (and goofing-off) part of the adventure. I guess it just went by too fast, as when the PCs moved on to the "haunt," I took all that down for the scene change.

My second Rooby-Doo adventure was weakly scripted, and relied a little too much upon an early combat encounter ... that the PCs too cleverly bypassed. (I mean, I could have been obstinate, but they played it out and it seemed a clever enough solution, and it just would have felt "cheaty" to force them to fight anyway.) The game ran just a little over 2 hours for what should have been a 4-hour slot, and I'm especially sad because PL (one of the players in our online Pathfinder campaign, and the only member of the "Digital_Rampage/Dr_Rhubarb" crew to show up this year) played, but wasn't terribly enthusiastic about how it played out. (When later I remarked, "I've wanted to run a Fallout campaign, Digital_Rampage doesn't want me to," he said (paraphrased), "Well, sorry, but I wouldn't want to play, either. It's just too silly. It's not bad, but it's just not my style.")

Sunday is the day I usually worry about, as occasionally I have a no-show, and it had my weakest adventure -- I was just going to have Ghostbusters in a wild-west tourist trap, and I had been so crushed for time and hurting for creative inspiration that I went into the weekend not really knowing what the "plot" would be. As it was, I decided that I'd use previous runs of my wild west scenario as the "past," and have the adventure be about the ghost of Big Bad Bart (the western scenario villain) returning from the grave to cause mayhem.

This actually worked out nicely, because a couple of players who showed up for my game had either played in the western scenario on Friday, or had been in my original play-test. I "only" had 4 players, but as far as I'm concerned, that was ideal. The combat was a bit rough, as I poorly designed the bad guy to have a "swallow" ability that was too easily triggered (upon a hit with raise), and not so easily evaded. (Once the PCs figured out it wasn't all THAT hard to just crawl out, though, especially if they used teamwork, the tide of battle turned back in their favor.)

...

Anyway, as hinted at, Digital_Rampage didn't attend -- nor did Dr_Rhubarb, Wookiee, or the rest of that gang. We also heard some sad news (rumor?) regarding the fate of Necronomicon: Apparently they've got a deal to be at the same hotel for the next two years, but after that, someone's talking as if it's up in the air whether there will even BE a Necronomicon past that point, due to dropping attendance, and various of the "old guard" drifting off, retiring, or even passing on, since a lot of things depended upon their generous donations.

...

Fannish highlight: Getting to talk to Timothy Zahn! But I started typing about that, and it went on REALLY LONG, so I think I'm going to put that in another post.

What Next?
I'm despairing of interesting my regular player group in playing Savage Worlds again. For one thing, there's a Kickstarter to come out with a NEW EDITION of Savage Worlds with a lot of rules changes. Until I see what all that is going to entail, maybe I should be content with putting any big Savage Worlds plans on hold, anyway.

Besides, a lot of my Savage Worlds convention gaming was motivated by a desire to plug and showcase various game settings that I was working on or involved with in some way. Now, I'm not really involved with Pinnacle at all. There was a project I was working on related to the "Monster Club," but communication about that has been frustratingly sparse. (Who is doing the layout? What do the actual rules look like? Is there a deadline on this?) I would work on something, then get a few replies (maybe), then dead silence. Suddenly having to move offices didn't really encourage me to keep the ball rolling much for that, and I haven't heard a peep since. (Not even a, "Hey, you done anything more on that yet?")

Pathfinder? Now there's some 2nd edition coming out and Digital_Rampage is all excited about it. I have enough trouble wrapping my head around 1st edition.

Goober_Chris's Kingmaker campaign is still chugging along, and could do so for quite some time. I may not be GMing anything at home for quite some while.

Not that I should assume. I also learned this weekend that Goober_Chris's job no longer exists. The company just rolled up and died -- poof. He got an email and a call telling him to not bother coming in to work, and the shops stopped operating -- no advance warning, no "Okay, we're operating until the end of the month," or any such thing -- just a sudden, hard stop. Not that this sort of thing never happens -- I can envision a number of reasons this could come about. I have no idea what Goober_Chris's prospects look like, but one thing I tend to associate with job hunting is the possibility of having to MOVE to pursue work.

As for online, I doubt I'll start anything there until Digital_Rampage's online campaign is done. But if I do start anything, it takes time to PLAN and even longer to CODE, so it's probably something to get started on. But what? I'm not quite settled on that. Also, it's a bit complicated by the matter that I simply do not right now have a computer capable of running it. When I got Fantasy Grounds, I installed it on Gwendel's computer, as at the time she was spending a lot more time on her laptop, while I wasted time playing Fallout on her PC. Now that she's back into World of Warcraft, that has changed, and if I'm on her computer ("I thought you were sleeping!") I'm likely to get booted off at any moment. My work computer is NOT FOR GAMES, of course. I'm reluctant to invest in a new computer right now, since I just shelled out a lot of $$$ for my pricey, fragile little smartphone.

Artwork
My mom has lamented that I hardly ever send a custom Christmas card like I used to, long ago. If I'm going to do that this year, I'd best get started. No ideas yet, though.

I scribbled a pencil doodle of Olik the Catfolk Bard while sitting in the "Survivors' Raffle" at convention-end, but it seemed to take a lot of mental effort to even draw that much. It just doesn't seem as easy as it used to -- or as fun. Once upon a time, I liked to draw. Now, it's more, "I like to HAVE DRAWN." I'm not sure how to change that. I'm not so sure it's a thing I CAN change.

I think a major factor was that, once upon a time, I was in an "environment" that encouraged me to draw. I.e., I was either around other artists, or those who appreciated art. Now, I can get instant gratification by posting some doodle or photo to Facebook or DeviantArt or whatever and ... get a few Likes. Maybe even a comment, like, "That's cool!" I still do that, with photos of minis, and the desire to have something to "put up on the fridge" is still addictive, but it feels somehow pointless by comparison.

Gwendel no longer draws, and she no longer takes any interest in what I draw or paint. Koogrr is off in Canada, looking for work again. Playful_Eye is gone forever, and along with her, any connection I had to her circle of friends. No art jams. No point.

I could institute some sort of arbitrary "rule" for myself -- maybe "a doodle a week" -- but there's only a point to it if there was someone to keep me honest about it. A project would be nice, but the Pinnacle pool of artists has gotten pretty talented, and there hasn't been any need for my "figure flats" or spot work for a long time.

The only art I do now is for work, and that's all covered by non-disclosure agreements, might be seen by a handful of people during a project, then -- well, it effectively disappears forever. I'm motivated enough to get the work DONE, thank goodness, but that's as far as it goes.

Not that I have no motivation at all. After all, I find the time to kit-bash silly minis and stuff like that. I guess that's because I convince myself that it has a USE.

Maybe if I got started on prep for an online Pathfinder dungeon, I could motivate myself to make some "loot card" illustrations, monster illustrations, pogs, etc. We'll see.

Comments

[tuftears]

*hugs*

Re: truck - I would compare/contrast the cost of maintaining a truck versus renting one when you need it... And maybe setting Gwendel up with a Lyft account so she can get places if she needs to?

Kinda-yay for new iPhone?

Ouch re: Necronomicon having issues, and the "usuals" not showing up so much anymore... I guess it does happen over time, but it's still a sad thing.

I know what you mean re: art and the inspiration (or lack thereof). I've been doing filler illos for Rafferty's games every now and then, but it's not like he releases books that often. It's much more inspiring to do art that will see publication though, as opposed to "just random" art.

Maybe you should do a cat-themed Kitsmeows card. };)

[jordangreywolf]

Re: Art:
Yes, definitely, there's more motivation to do art when I know it's for a purpose. It's especially disheartening to do artwork for a project and it only MIGHT get used. I've done a massive figure-flat set in the past (for token payment) and while I technically got "paid," a large part of my motivation was that it would be USED. (I went a bit over-and-above with some papercraft models for the set and so forth.) Nothing came of it, and it still bugs me today when I hear mention of the game setting/system in question.

[tuftears]

Yeah, that is definitely pretty annoying! Even though they say "You retain all rights to your own work, you can do whatever you want", it's not like there's a *lot* you can do with this kind of art, and the token payment isn't really a strong point of doing it.