So, what are we doing Right Now?

[Lejonel]

After a few months of boardgaming and doing not very much useful at all, I have finally started having a look at my rpg side of life again. I have put my previous project on hold for awhile due to lack of enthusiasm on my behalf and have started looking into writing together a little (and quite simple) game engine which I will test play in a science-fantasy environment in the near future. Hopefully I can convince my gaming group to give me feedback and push me into actually finishing something this summer...

Edit #1:
The game is SET in a FAR future, but I hope to PLAY it in the NEAR future. Sentence looked funny to me, might be my Swedish side.

[Onix]

Coming to this a touch late, I've been on an internet diet for the last month. I finished third edition for The Artifact! Huzzah! It took me a month to get it all together and thus the diet.

An old friend came back into our gaming group and brought his wife! Added to that, our kids are starting to game with us, my son is particularly into it. This means that our gaming group has gone from a respectable 4 to and unwieldy 8-10! (dependent on who's there) It's fun at the moment but we'll have to see if I can keep it up.

I've been writing more adventures, I'm not good at it yet but I'm making advances. I took part in an adventure competition over on RPGGeek. I have a few more in the works but that all got shelved for working on 3rd ed.

I'm making a foray into board games. My son and I have been working on a Godzilla inspired board game called Monster's Field. We got our prototype from The Game Crafter but I need to do some art for the rules and there's a capture rule that I'm having a hard time expressing properly. Players can be scientists, defense forces (army) or aliens. There are five monsters and players can control their pieces and the monsters on their turn. It's mostly like a very paired down wargame with a few board gamey components to it. There are a lot of moving parts though so it's a bit hard to explain verbally, it's almost better to have someone just read the rules. I have to work on the presentation.

[Rob Lang]

[Onix]

Yes that does feel better, thanks!

[kumakami]

still trying to make my self finish the basic rules for Bard so I can consider the compo....slowly at least

[Chris Johnstone]

It has been quiet about. Although I'm a low frequency poster I tend to check in and read things others post quite a bit.

Mostly I've been lecturing what feels like endless endless volumes of stuff at university and running around like mad doing research and conference prep. I have another couple weeks of craziness, then things will be easier.

I'm working on a novel in my spare time and have been committed to the old 'write every day' advice. Sometimes I only manage a hundred words or so before collapsing into bed, but I still count that as a victory. Very slowly chipping away at Chargen in Spellwoven. The only game I've been playing is the Old School Call of Cthulhu Masks of Nyarlathotep. I've never player the campaign before and don't know anything about it, so no spoilers...

I'm still working on the Spellwoven Map, too, though that's largely just for my own relaxation.

It's nice to read about the various projects and games and things that people are getting into

Chris

[Groffa]

GM:ing an ongoing play-by-post game called "There and back again" with a friend over Google Drive. Been at it for almost a year now (map can be found on the blog: http://acornafloat.blogspot.se/2013/12/carta-mundi.html).
It's fun but hard to be consistent with any types of rules, so I guess it's more dice less (even though we use stats and rolls and all).

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Playing 1st Ed. D&D or Star Frontiers on Sundays, running Dead and Back on Saturdays, board games on Fridays, and another writing class Tuesday/Thursday. For once, its a fairly full schedule.

[Onix]

I'm working on several things.

I came up with a new system that I'm writing into a setting that I've had popping around in my head for a while. I'm calling it Skree and Thrum. It's about an earth that has been devastated by aliens, they've engineered the sun to belch out plasma every ten years that scorches the planet. The only known survivors were some researchers in a spent salt mine in Canada. The game takes place about a hundred years after the initial devastation. The Skree are flying snake like things that move at the speed of sound, and the Thrum are these bundles of razor sharp prehensile fibers that like to camouflage themselves as things like trees, large rocks or streams of water.

It needs some playtesting that I haven't gotten around to. It also needs art.

I'm also working on a game called Whisperers based on Fudge. It's about monsters that are quietly making their way through the population, causing people to disappear. The players are either regular citizens that have seen some evidence of the monsters and are hunting them down and warn the unwary public, or Agents that know what the monsters are and are trying to secretly eliminate them without anyone noticing. It's strongly reliant on mystery which I've had trouble with in the past, so I'm working on a structure for the mysteries called anomalies to help a GM think more flexibly about the mystery while still establishing the main events.

I should kick my own butt and get the writing done. I'm thinking about using photographs for the art, but black and white and heavily stylized with photoshop filters. Yeah, I need to actually do it.

I'm collecting my thoughts on role playing advice that I've put in my blogs into a book that I'm calling The Heart of Role Playing Games. I'm aiming for something about 40 pages that someone interested in RPGs can pick up and get an idea of how to think about playing.

I'm working on possibly the last sourcebook for The Artifact. It was the first one I wrote but there's one part that I was never able to get right. There's a technology called warping that deals with altering matter. It's taken nearly two decades of thinking about it and the 3rd edition rules to get things to where I like them. Now I have a basic structure for how things should work but describing it accurately is still taking time. The really cool part is how the abilities combine, but I need to figure out how to describe all the combinations that are possible. It also needs playtesting because there are some really potentially game breaking possibilities that I've been trying to anticipate, but players tend to find very quickly.

Other than that, I've been playing way too many video games which has distracted me from all this. My discipline has been lacking lately.

[catty_big]

I'm playing in not one but two games of Victoriana, plus a weekly game of Space 1889. In addition, I'm writing three new games; however, what I'm mostly doing is desperately looking for paid employment, so that I can stop sleeping on my Mum's floor and get my own place again .