12 Years of Blogging

Another blog anniversary passed. Why I decided to start this blog on 9/11 I still don't know. I know it wasn't a conscious decision to do so. And obviously, I'm a couple days late posting this this year. 

Well, real life is a big downer. And it's really not covid life. Or not much. I've pretty much gotten used to teaching via Zoom, gaming via Roll20 and Google Meet (formerly Hangouts), mask wearing, occasional upticks in cases that make us hesitate to visit restaurants, all that. I've gotten my first shot of Pfizer, and will get the second soon. Korea's vaccination rates are chugging along, with about 1,000,000 shots given (first and second doses) on a good day. About 2/3 of the population have had at least one shot. 

The downer is pretty personal. My father-in-law's lung cancer has finally caught up with him. He went six years from diagnosis to today, but his condition is deteriorating. And my wife is pretty busy helping her mother take care of him (he doesn't want hospice care, long story). So our family is under extra pressure right now. But we're managing. 

I'm still gaming, and tinkering with my rules. I'm also starting to develop the locations for East Marches, something that a year ago I thought I'd never get around to doing. But here we are. I'm firmly on the way back to race-as-class for my house rules, with the TSR-East Marches rules (better name than simple TSR-East) using that paradigm. I bet I'll be modifying my more "standard" TSR rules to suit that as well. I've pretty much decided I don't like the plethora of dual-class classes that I made, and most aren't getting any play anyway. I still want to give TSR-East Marches another simplification pass, but pretty much I think it's good to go. And with the PC options, spells, monsters, and treasure stuff done, I'm able to work on East Marches the (mega)module. 

My West Marches campaign and Star Wars campaign are still ongoing. We just had a pretty good session of West Marches this past weekend. The party managed to take out Onyx/Khisanth, the dragon of Xak Tsaroth, with a potion of luck and an arrow of teleportation (and a failed save on the arrow). The treasure was looted, and the dragon, if they ever encounter it again, is gonna be pissed! 

I made an adventure for Star Wars that I thought would be cool and different (and fast) but it's taken two sessions and at least one more. But I'm going to try and get that done this upcoming holiday week (Chuseok, lunar thanksgiving) so we can move back to more traditional bounty hunter/criminal underworld shenanigans with occasional Imperial incursions. The one good thing I did with this kinda boring adventure is set the PCs up to potentially be in conflict with the Pyke species. And that's most likely to be the case at the end of this thing. So that's something fun to work with. 

As for blogging, I've actually got quite a few topics I'd like to discuss, but honestly it's hard to find the time. Several are reactions or reflections based on other bloggers' recent(ish) works, but the more I put them off, the longer it's been since the original posts, the more I think I should just forget them. Still, I expect at least one or two of them to eventually find their way into pixels. 

Anyway, hoping the end of the year picks up. I've got Dune, The Eternals, and Spider-Man to look forward to in the theater, The Book of Boba Fett on TV, and plenty of gaming.