Alley Oop, Sleestaks, and "Pre-release" Printing

Besides getting together a BASHCon special edition of the forthcoming Glow rules, I broke in a new word processing program yesterday, some Abbie something or another instead of my usual WordPerfect, with reformulating some notes on something I call "Stone's Edge." I feel the need for a better name, but Sticks and Stones is already taken. This is decidedly prehistoric role-playing. "And why?" I hear you asking, "Why are you writing this?"

Besides an incredibly powerful urge to create RPG settings that most folks have neither the time nor the inclination to get into, I am not exactly certain. But yesterday it was fun remembering the difference between eras, periods, and epochs and placing critters into the right epoch-- I used to be something of  a prehistory historian back in the mid-90s. And then it was more fun explaining that it really depended on what type of campaign the GM wanted to run if he should even bother worrying about the nuances of natural history as we understand it. I mean a boatload of "Biblical Historians" that are putting Creationism in science classes and opening amusement parks, err "Jesus Museums," don't bother themselves with actual history anyway. And on that note, a spark popped into my head.

The rules system of Stone's Edge might be pretty cut and dry, but I came up with a story line for two scenarios that involved the birth of a Jesus around 12,000 BP (that's Before Present, for 52% of America that lives below Fort Wayne, Indiana). Before long, I had sleestaks and the Great Race of Yith worked in. Before long, I was wading through Charles De Paulo's thesis (dissertation?)Human Prehistory in Fiction. Most of this time wasted did not make it into note form, at least the typed notes.

It was with great reluctance before I got around to doing the rough draft of the Glow rules for the gaming convention next weekend. I actually let myself drift into George Seldes's Facts and Fascism for a couple chapters before getting into the serious work of a near-future drama about mutated humans and animals in a world gone awry.