Then Bathrobe

The rain has allowed us the excuse to slip into our own minds and game books.

 My lungs need some walking motion and non-air conditioned ventilation so I am pulling up maps now. All the makings of a Mothman Crawlspace project.

I don't wear slippers

What Is In a Border

From the partitions of 80s Germany to the seamless road trips from Colchester, England to Prackhow, Poland, in the 90s,  I draw a bit of energy from borders. I found this energy somewhat characterized by books like House on the Border Lands and Clive Barker's Weave World which I read in the 80s. Travel is how I look to find that energy these days, sometimes stumbling into a border every now and then.

On borders, the locals have more in common with their neighbors than the border makers off in the center of that particular namesake's capital. As the consummate outsider, I look for things like traffic patterns on Sunday because of local liquor laws in places in Toledo, Ohio, Point Pleasant West Virginia, and northwestern Arkansas. Sort of like "On the Seventh Day, they rested. That is unless they crossed the river where hooch was still legal." Back in the day in Europe, every day was Sunday east of Darmstadt so to speak. Jeans could indeed get a person a slightly used, about a hundred thousand miles, car if you had the right passport just as a Levi's ad in the 80s on TV advertised. Really adds to a visitor's experience to witness people working around arbitrary restrictions on this or that. For the locals, it was any given week of the year while knowing that some things outsiders just wouldn't understand, because of say State Sales taxes or international import restrictions.

This has resulted in my two worlds, reality and the fantastic spilling over into the other. Role-playing creations having a lot of detail, which I won't call realism, that are more prose than poem in the tradition of fantasy. It can also give some head-in-the-clouds whimsy while making my way through the real world which has me looking deeply into every thing I see a local person do or say-- this can be helpful as well as harmful on any given day. But for writing RPG material it always works.

When it comes to this trip there are many convergences. Not only do two states, of the American United States, meet; Columbus meets Charleston (WV); Detroit meets "the Old South;" and folklore meets pranksters speaking in terms of differing worlds. While it's all fun and games until a bridge collapses, a sense of humor is prevalent. Ins the right mindset, one can step from a mindset of strong, down to Earth industrial-mindedness into the other-worldly just by driving down a couple off-highway local roads.

This trip to east Ohio and northwest West Virginia has been anticipated since about 'o7. We just never made the time. Heck it took GenCon shutting its doors because of the arrival of the first Horseman marking the start of the End of Times, even, before my gaming clique got serious about coming here. Now in Point Pleasant, err Gallipolis, the gang is hearkening back to Middle Earth where the Shire ends blends into Bree-Land. We're even sneaking like a bunch little beings, goblins more so than hobbits, using too many "u"s and hyphens in our written language to be accepted as locals.

Near Space: Distancing Included.

On Sale Spacers!

I have been re-reading a lot Spacers(TM): Universe material for the last couple of weeks.  It seems multiple things have been going on during this creative impulse that sometimes bordered on a job, but always turns out to be as fresh and fun as decent party someplace interesting,  are coming into play. I am an optimist. Between news, literature, S-F, the Bible, porn, real books, and propaganda, I've been reading a wagon load of material and the viewpoints that come along with them. Luckily I haven't slipped into the trap of polarity and nihilism.

In Spacers (TM): Near Space,  90% of the clunky writing describing the future of a humanity that measures itself in terms of a solar system, is about representation. Since the late 90s, I have moved beyond equality in terms of race, sexual fixation, and political stance. I was at this space mentally, while in college and the US Army on two continents to begin with, in 1989. What has happened to the rest of the world is their own fault.  I wrote "While the world circa 350 years from now seems Utopian, that actually is not the case. People are still self-serving and often work against one another. Privilege and opportunity are meted out by location and family more often than by need or merit. Incorporated interests still strive to exploit the resources available to them and then deprive those not part of their franchise. But things are still a whole lot better for all the human population than ever before. Speaking of population, that population is bigger than ever and only getting bigger. This could explain why space exploration and colonization is bigger than military arms – overcrowding without starvation just gets people adventurous." long before Clinton was out of office, let alone before Jodie Whitacker was a Dr. Who, I was on about what is humanity and where is it going, I was optimistic about expansive endeavor.

The fantasy of electricity only obtained from fossil fuels for mundane tasks, like learning to read and heating shower water, always kind of bugged me. As we see these days it is easily proven wrong. While advocates of the Newt McGrimace blue-suits tell everyone how solar and winds can't do this or that, the impoverished world, according to the media, is doing just that. They just happen to be selling their successes to China to sell to the USA ascproducts for 400%+ profit. Since the start of the current plague times of Covid-19, we've all started noticing, "hey why don't we have solar panels and wind turbines everywhere since 35% of everybody is mostly unemployed these days?"

Still for all my griping, sales are up and the perfect time to release, Spacers (TM): Near Space.

The Incredible Heaviness of Randomness

As illustrated by the random dungeon generators at the back of AD&D DM's Guide and the need for an entire Monster Manual to create a quick run, effortlessly random scenarios are not an easy thing to achieve. But the work is worth it.

A little bit of structure

And while random charting has been a thing for at least a decade now, it was going on before. Still a level of detail prevents too much variation from session to session. This is especially helpful when the sit-downs may months or even a year apart from one another.

Making the sausage.

The product in hindsight.

Then when sitting down with the group that knows your every move and habit as a GM/author, from many, many, many times before; things don't have to be stressful. You aren't even certain where you're going. But the details line up, a suggestion of a plot gels with a roll of a couple dice, and the players have some ideas as to where they would like things to go as well. Things usually work out just fine.

A habit that I have as this sort of GM is to make notes keeping track of improved milieu from everybody at the table. This is both a good and bad thing. The continuity keeps the player's happy. When I have a change of mood, I still have to incorporate that pesky detail from earlier. The benefits though, PCs engaging in my universe using my own thoughts from three sessions ago, just means I can take my foot off the gas of cobbling stuff together and just worrying about the pacing.

Spacers: Really Big Space

I often ask myself, why am I doing Spacers(TM), then I find my loose notes somewhere. With my RSF (rocket-ship fantasy) where randomness was an important part of the exploration of new locales something about keeping things in denominators of six works in astronomical mapping.
Earth as 3.3.3 not Tri-Zero
"Zed Three" just couldn't happen, unless Earth was not the center of the universe. I didn't know back in the mid 90s if this was math, but for using 3D6 as D555 while doing your own take on Ken St Andre's Starfaring random sector generation, you get three dimensional areas where the PCs aren't looking down at a map.  I wasn't improving on his rules, I just didn't have access to the rules book I had received as a newsletter back in 1981. As a group we started referring to sectors as beach balls, and the star systems/powers within them as ping-pong balls to baseballs to basketballs. Bring the "6,6,6" results into the same place and that's where the Spacers ('OMG what a great name for delvers in a space-based SFRPG!' I thought) started.

1997- Don't want negative integers? Make the map a sphere.

With about eight different campaigns, the beach balls of the universe started to be filled out. Luckily two, then three, then four, then back down to three, then back up to four players would stick with me throughout these campaigns. So from rocketeers hunting down greys and space pirates, things would change into "Big Space" or "War Star" (Star Trek meets Battlestar Galactica), which as group was referred to "Really Big Space." We'd step back into the pre-Big days, and hang out in the solar system with a lot of cyber-punk elements, which is the "Near Space" stories from o8 'onward. Then I'd go nuts and bolts every now and then with Star Push but usually at conventions. We never had to do a Star Wars, that niche was filled by New Khazan  which was officially for T&T. 

Really Big Space. The really big beach ball that wrapped around six beach balls circa '06.

If you've got War Star as a title, you need navies right?

With a couple of artists helping me with species and ships, things are starting to come together. Just takes three decades to get things lined up.
 

Bursting at the Seams

In the bare and desolate world that is Plague Planet 2020, I sit and gaze upon my monument to human folly in the face of everyone's demise.  Like the oil companies having to spend money to barrel up product because of a lack of demand, my warehousing facilities are overwhelmed because I cannot attend conventions this summer. And with Weird Realms going into the ethereal realms of the Great On-Line, I can't think where to hawk them or give out at tabletop sessions. A pile of fifteen books. 15 books at one corner of our coffee table/ TV viewing banquet hall. Where will the Japanese tourist put their microwave dinners while touring the vast halls of Peryton Publishing International now?

Now I've sold almost five times that amount of product online since May. But OMG the storage crisis that I am enduring.