So… yeah… a grand total of one single post so far this year, and that was back in February. (To be fair, there have been a few items added to the map sources page, but I don’t count those as actual posts.) The reasons for this are many and varied, ranging from family and personal health issues (all now dealt with or under control at the moment) to work-related emergencies (fingers crossed there won’t be any more lost weekends or late nights in the near future, but who knows?). Admittedly, a mild re-addiction to Lord of the Rings Online might have sucked away a bit of my time as well.
And then there’s been the time spent playing TTRPGs – lots of it. I’m running a weekly PF2e game, plus occasional one-shots in other systems; just the other night I ran my Wild Sheep Chase EZD6 conversion for a new group and it seemed to go very well. Playing in a weekly Traveller campaign, bi-weekly OSRIC, and a bi-weekly Fallout-themed game in a system called Ultraverse, run by the creator of that system. In addition, I participate in a group that runs once-or-twice-a-month sessions across Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Dr. Who, Delta Green, and Paranoia – the latter four of which I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. (I already knew I liked Traveller, and playing with a referee who is literally an astrophysicist rocket scientist makes it even more interesting). I even got to participate in early rounds of play-testing for a new game in development.
I have been doing some crafting still. In spite of my gaming still being entirely online, there’ve been a couple of projects built looking ahead to getting back to at least some in-person stuff in the not-too-distant future. Beyond that, I’ve been doing a bit of mini painting, and one mini sort of accidentally evolved into a full-blown diorama.
There are gaming-related programming projects underway as well, though they’ve been the most sporadically-worked-on of all. Even when there’s time to work on them and my brain is in enough of a non-frazzled state to make some progress on them, I often jump to the new idea that I’m excited about at that moment instead of finishing work in progress. Or if it’s been a while since I last worked on a given task, I have to spend part of the available time figuring out where I left off (or, occasionally, figuring out what the hell was I thinking in doing it the way I did). But progress is being made.
So, with all that being said, on to the actual point of this post: I’m going to make a concerted effort over the next couple of weeks to a) create a lot of “new” posts – the quotes around “new” are because some of them were created as far back as early 2023 as a post title and maybe an opening paragraph, then set aside), and b) get at least one of those programming projects to the point where I can release a new version of it and talk about it a little here. Partly as a reminder to myself and partly to spark the interest of anyone who happens to wander their way to this page, I’m going to post a list of what (has happened)/(is happening)/(will hopefully happen) that I plan to post about. As the actual individual posts are added, I’ll link to them from here for easy reference.
Coming Soon… or Last Year. Or eventually.
- Another home-made battle mat. For outdoor scenes I had a sheet of foam with some of that textured green paper from model railroading glued on. I wanted more detail, more portability, less fragility.
- Traveller Starships. One of them spontaneously mutated into a diorama!
- A terrain… cover… shield… hidey… thing. Still having the intention of running some games at local stores, this is a sort of portable tabletop hut to hide terrain from the players until it’s ready to unveil (to a chorus of ooos and aaahs, one would assume).
- RPG Writer Workshop’s “Write Your First Encounter” review – I signed up for an online course that walks participants through the process of building a single-page encounter with an eye toward publication. This is how it went.
- My first published encounter! Spoiler for the item above: It went well enough that I now have a published encounter!
- I created a HomeBrewery template for OpenEZD6 material! See the template here.
- Traveller trading plugin for Foundry VTT. Trading goods and hauling passengers between star systems is part and parcel in many Traveller campaigns. But there are separate rolls for freight, mail, passengers, and speculative training (which can get into many dozens of rolls if you’re on a high-population industrial world!) The aim of this Foundry module is to automate all of that, right up to the point of loading and unloading cargo from your starship. An early version of this for the TwodSix system with speculative trading not yet implemented is available here.
- Traveller data loader macros. Just a proof-of-concept at this point, but promising: A user on the Mongoose forums has built a standalone utility to extract tables from your (legally purchased) PDF manuals into data files. I was able to create a method to read those files into Foundry and create items based on some of the weapon and armor tables. The output tool is still evolving and the import macros will probably need to have at least a little bit of dedicated code for most individual tables, but it’s feasible that in the absence of official support from Mongoose, there will be a way to build compendiums of items, vehicles, ships, skills, etc. from the books.
- Mighty Protectors Foundry VTT updates. There are a few bits of old functionality from earlier versions of Foundry that will need to be replaced to work using new methods under future updates. Additionally, Jeff Dee is working on a new supplement centered around monsters as characters (read about it on the Monkey House Games discord) so it’s possible there will need to be some tweaks to support that.
- EZD6 for Foundry updates. Similar to the MP system above, there are minor changes that will need to be made for future Foundry version compatibility. In addition, though, a number of new EZD6-based games (including DM Scotty’s own Wasted World, plus available or in-progress spy, SF, horror, and historical themes) introduce new mechanics. I want to eventually rework the current system to allow GMs to set up new stats or rename existing ones for flavor and have them show up on the character and “mini” sheets.