I had a busy winter writing-wise and now my blog is full of bugs. I currently find myself between freelance projects, so it’s time to sweep the place out and keep the words coming. I also have to rebuild my daughter’s YZ85’s engine before the riding season starts, and I have my own design projects that I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time, so there’s lots to do. I’ll be using ktrey of d4 Caltrops’s d100 Table of Topics to Blog About to make this bit of life easier on myself.

But Where Was I? Well, home, mostly. I was laid off from Elderwood in August or September and transitioned to hustling full time. It’s just as well, things were headed in an odd direction there. The product that I had made for most of my tenure was determined to be unprofitable, so I spent the summer making a nine month supply of dice vaults for another company. Clearly, when you’re six months ahead of production needs, you eventually run out of things to do, and so it was.

My time at Elderwood was always an experiment. There were certainly good points, and I enjoyed the convention management I did. I’m not sure what the future holds for the company. As for me, I’m writing, among other things.

What Have I Been Writing? There was the dungeon project I did in September that I previously mentioned, and I’m curious if that’s going to be part of an upcoming crowdfunding project. Fortunately, after finishing that, I was asked to write a Special (multi-table adventure) for the Legends of Greyhawk D&D organized play campaign. I got to delve into the Temple of Elemental Evil! That was definitely something I couldn’t have possibly expected when I bought the original T1-4 module when I was a kid. I’m happy I still have that one and didn’t sell it during college. My Special, All For the Paladin Prince, premiered at Winter Fantasy and seems to have been well received. Some people may not have liked the hard choice at the end, but that’s Greyhawk!

Winter Fantasy. Speaking of, we went down to Fort Wayne to catch a couple days of the convention. We were mostly there to see friends, but we got in a couple of Greyhawk games and I ran a session of Dolmenwood. Good times were had.

Back to Work! I fit in a Tales of the Valiant adventure project that will be announced later, but my main thing for the last few months was writing the opening act for MCDM’s flagship campaign adventure for Draw Steel, Crack the Sun. It was a big challenge but I’m deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute to the project. I had to learn the system from the ground up including monster creation and encounter design. Fortunately, the game provides a robust and fairly simple system for building encounters. Monsters take a bit more creative reach, as the more complex ones can do a lot of things, but it was fascinating to dig deep into them. I’m really looking forward to hearing how the playtesting goes. Above all, I want the adventure to be really good, especially as the first big adventure book for the system. The team was great to work with and it’s in good hands there, so we’ll see the results in the coming months.

Blogging! Alright, on to the d100 prompts. Today’s is, 01 – Are Phones/Devices permitted at your Table? How do you handle Distractions? Yeah, they are, for better or worse. I’m pretty tolerant of the various quirks people bring to the table. You’ll thin your player base down if you aren’t, but I also hope that as a bit of an outsider hobby, we can be tolerant of each other’s differences, as long as they don’t tread on others.

I’d like to aspire to the deeply immersive sort of game where everyone is in character all the time and highly invested, but I’m also doing silly goblin voices and making meta jokes, so what can you do. One of the secret strengths of D&D is that it offers different games to different people, and they can all be playing them at the same time together. You can have optimizers and character actors and someone who’s just there for the snacks and jokes, and somehow it can all gel. That’s what we have in our Sunday morning game, so I’m not going to begrudge the guy who’s drawing on his iPad. Or at least I won’t begrudge him much. I’ll play the game with the other four people and we’ll nudge him when we need a die roll. Everyone’s there to do their thing, so as long as it works well enough, it’s ok with me.