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The end of 2009 brings some sadness for me. Yet again, DPnP is not released, and still has much development to do. It also means another new year without any significant Sagas releases. I am hoping that 2010 is the year of Ironwood’s big coming up, but that all remains to be seen. (more…)

I know I have been a poor blogger. I have not kept up these past weeks as I should. There are some good reasons for it, but the main reason is not important at all. You see, I found twitter not long ago, and I have been updating very frequently through there. This leaves me with very little to actually blog about. Not much of an excuse, but there it is. Anyways, onto thing you really want to know.

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So, last week’s game did not happen. However, a week has gone by and things are looking great for today. So far, the weather is good, we have 4 players and one GM (me), and the possibility of two campaigns going to be happening. So, I think that although disappointing, last week’s loss may have been helpful.

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…but that is what happened. There was a serious hiccup in skill selection when it came to selecting racial skill affinities for your character. It seems simple enough: you have skill affinities for a race, therefore you automatically get that skill at that level. Everything worked fine except for my dwarf. My dwarf has a skill called Craft (Type). The character maker allows you to use these skills by filling in the text for (Type), replacing it. This function was the cause of a seemingly infinite amount of problems. I will spare you the details of the fix (which finally occurred today) and ramble about some new things that have been happening. Some are about development, one is not.

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I can’t say this week was very productive. In fact, by design and purpose it was not (though some things did get done). Instead, this week was an exercise in frustration. I quite smoking, so for almost a full week now I have been trying to survive through the week without my crutch. I have succeeded at something I thought would be a monumental task with very little true effort.  My wife spilled coffee all over my keyboard, thus killing it. I have to settle for a cheap $20 crapper with very poor ergonomic support until some sales bump the good $70 ones down in price. My wife and I shared a cold this week as well. Only one real positive, my wife’s birthday, was fun at all. However, it carried its own stress. All of this made for a poor week to not be smoking. But, then again, there would not have been a good week for it either. So now that its over, it is time to sum it up as a good week for accomplishment personally. I must say, success is a good feeling. With that, lets push on to the next week with some plans.

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It is Sunday, and that usually means a blog post, then some early morning gaming with my father (we play Battlefield 2 at least once a week online) and then work. However, today, a fierce rainstorm looms on the horizon and being that I lost one motherboard to these wonderful Florida storms, I am playing it safe and shutting things down soon. However, I have just enough time, I think, to post about this week.

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This post is a two parter. First is a quick update on the CRM. I have to completely rewrite one of the DLL files to better handle management of data and reduce load on the system created by the current structure. This is more of a pre-emptive move as the current setup doesn’t hurt on its own, but in more complicated programs the elements created through the DLL are way too large and thus may prove to difficult to manage. It is a product of being inexperienced when I created them. Though I don’t consider myself experienced at this point, I have learned enough to know that this needs to be fixed. Therefore it is. 

What I really want to talk about is a thought that brews in my head from time to time. That is creating an official Fantasy Sagas campaign world. This is something I have toyed with for some time. However, I have had some serious dilemmas when creating it.

First of all, unlike most publishers, I am not going to release my campaign world. It isn’t one of those things wherein I just think my world is so cool that it should be published and thus it will be the next Forgotten Realms or whatever. Truth is, I don’t have a fixed campaign world I play in. I steal a lot in my private games from other companies and material. I usually play in existing campaign worlds but expand on them. This will not be a pet project wherein I release my Oh So Cool Campaign. This, if I do it, will be specifically designed.

I thought first and long about a campaign world where it is pseudo historic. I wrestled with this for a long time, thinking it would be fun. Truth is, it probably would, but they already exist. Lets face it, almost all campaign worlds are in some way pseudo historic. So eventually, I will probably create pseudo historic campaign source books, but they will not be based in a specific campaign. I know, sounds odd, but that is where I eventually landed in my thought process and I will expand on that when the time comes.

My next thought was one of my favorites, and may be developed later. The setting is low fantasy on another world entirely. It is an alien world, not a version of like most other fantasy campaigns. Firearms exist in very barbaric and primitive ways. Magic exists only in  the natural magic sense. There is no real Human race, all races fit along a specific territorial evolution. Therefore, there are races such as these mantis like creatures which live in the humid swamp like regions, and these rock flecked skinned people from the mountainous areas. There are other races as well, all fitting within a specific region. The world itself is apocalyptic, but not in the post-apocalypse. This is the actual end of days of this world that people are living through. Campaigns exist in surviving through the death of an entire world, or maybe on quest to try and save every0one from utter ruin.

Again, I like this idea, but there are too many sci-fi elements to really consider it fantasy so it is getting pushed to the corner of my desk.

Another is a near future modern setting. By near future I mean five to ten years from today. Dates are not specific for a good reason. Nothing else you will get from me on this as it is actually under production in a very small form. However, it is modern sagas material so not relevant to this article.

So that bring us to what will I do. Here are some things I notice in just about every fantasy setting.

1. There is a once mighty empire now on the decline (like Rome). It is both evil and good in varying respects and has a large, but dwindling influence on the world.
2. There is a group of wizards that are enigmatic. We don’t know if they are good or evil but they usually take the form of a villain.
3. There is a group of hero like people akin to Jedi. They are always lame but someone in the design thought they were cool. They meddle in the world either behind the scenes or openly trying to bind the world together in peace and love. However, people often resent them for whatever reason making their job more difficult.
4. There was some great cataclysm in the past (usually a few thousand years ago) that results in wastelands and ruins for your adventuring fun.
5. For some reason everyone speaks a common language. Also, though writing and libraries are few, every Jack the Farmer knows the names of heroes and villains and strikingly large specifics on things that happen thousands of years ago, even though in our modern world our history over the past few hundred years is vague and error prone to even scholars with access to huge electronic data bases and mass communication methods.
6. The near past was a silver or golden age, usually ended by the cataclysm mentioned above, now the remnants of great magical weapons and other wonders that can no longer be made are littered around the world and the current world is on the decline because said magical advances no longer xist.
7. At least two races (usually elves and dwarves) are bitter enemies because of some vague historical footnote usually having root in some war or conflict. Occasionally this actually may be something more realistic like a slight grievance like refusal of gift between kings. However, there is usually some element there so that a party can have an “interesting” dynamic with two of its members being of these opposed races and how they have to settle their differences and come together for the sake of the group.
8. Thieves guilds and assassins groups operate like medieval versions of the Mafia and so are underground crime syndicates that run everything from brothels to slave trades, even though the world is set in a period of time were slavery and prostitution were commonly legal in our own historical timeline.
9. Just about everyone can read, swing a sword, or cast a spell except the innkeeper, the local lord, or some other insignificant NPC.
10. There is monster races that are evil for the single point of being the evil race. This is a throwback from JRR Tolkien LotR so we all seem to have a race of Orks that will constantly plague the world with faceless monsters to slay without regard. They are the RPG version of Nazis in that they can and should be killed without thought or remorse, even though in our real world many German Soldiers in WWII were not Nazis and were likely conscripted again their world (the SS being the exception that proves the rule).

It is a term mostly applied to movies, but believe it or not, it is a huge part of game development. Director cuts are a big deal in all media facets. Movies, books, TV shows, and games all have this period where they have to look at the project as a whole and cut out elements for various reasons. For me, one of the most infamous directors cut in gaming came with the Knights of the Old Republic 2 video game published by Obsidian, as well as the original Fable. Both of these, being video games, had a more glaring reflection of their cuts. The video game industry and PnP game industry may not seem to have a lot in common, but that is not true. In our industry director’s cuts exist, though you may not see them. So, what are they, why do we have them, and why am I talking about them?

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Last year at this time I posted a 2008 plan that I was not able to hold up to. This was partly due to the overwhelming changes that occurred in 2008 to both my personal life and my professional one. 2008 did bring about one decisive an monumental path to fulfillment of ambitious plans. However, it came a bit late to help my goals for that year. So, while I am willing to admit that 2008 was a bad year for Ironwood and its goals, there is a decisive victory that promises to make 2009 a much better year. So what happened in 2008 and how does it affect 2009? Read more to find out.

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I know, I missed last week’s post and I am a loser for it. However, I have a good excuse: I was busily developing the final pieces of the Content Creator. If you are a member of the community, and have stayed up to date with the posts, you will be aware that the CC is actually getting promoted to release status soon. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to come clean on what the Campaign Resource Manager (CRM) is all about.

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