What I'm Up To

 I'm sure it has been missed by no one that I have been having trouble finding time for this blog. And it's anniversary has just rolled past. So I wanted to take some time to let you know what has been keeping me busy, as it is mostly RPG-adjacent.

Gaming!

Death in Space

I'm coming up on one year of an intense campaign in Death in Space. My players have managed to survive long enough to salvage a handful of functional ships, hired a crew of salvage and mining experts and built a network of laser communication satellites; they are trying to become a force for hope in the Tenebris system.

The game started as a one-shot pallette cleanser, and just kept going. So I didn't start posting play reports until it is too late.

The Weirth Campaign 

I've also been participating in a long-running campaign run by Stephen Smith that attempts to reconstruct the early 1970s Wargaming D&D experience. We've shifted systems a couple of times, including playing awhile using the 1973 D&D play test rules that were recreated in The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg, fueled with and eventually replaced by Blueholme, and after a few years shifting to a highly home-brewed iteration of Tales of Argosa.

This game uses domain rules that start for fighters at level 2, one-to-one time, patron players, mass combat played in Chainmail and other retro wargames, and a ton of classic modules including the aforementioned Tonisborg, The Tower of Xenopus, Keep on the Borderlands, The Isle of Dread, Temple of Elemental Evil, Empire of the East, Mask of Nyarlathotep, Into the Depths of the Earth, Veins of the Earth, Please Go to Sleep Arthur Cobblesworth, Sounds of the Mushroom Kingdom, and Against the Cult of the Reptile God among others.

Home Game

My home game with family has had a couple of false starts, but I just brought a satisfying end to a DCC RPG campaign and am setting up a game in AD&D.

I've also been playing a solo game in Grok?! 2e, amplified by Mythic Game Master Emulator.

Summer Game

Every year in the Summer I try to run six sessions of a classic OSR game with family, friends, and my favorite D&D people. This year I am vacillating between PARANOIA SP1 or running Operation Unfathomable and Odious Uplands in Swords & Wizardry.

Podcasting 

Two years ago, I founded an audio production company, Stormhead Productions, with terrible timing. The Descript AI changed audio production overnight about the same time I started my business. I was putting up a freelance profile on Upwork the exact same time that the going rate for that work were cut in half and the available jobs shrank by two thirds.

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em

Not to be deterred, I designed an AI-driven service that would combine data mining, AI script writing, and AI-driven voice, and AI editing to create an bespoke news gathering and reporting system that a human being simply couldn't do to the right scale to be a viable human business, and would be too expensive and time-consuming for clients to create without it. In other words, the kind of work AI should be doing: the kind that creates while new work and new possible products rather than replacing a human in an existing job...

And a business that would let me work around my numbness, pain, and chronic fatigue. 

Not to mention one that would have been revolutionary for my potential clients.

Except the tech is not simply not there. Data mining AI is absolutely terrible at what it does at this juncture. It requires so many tokens to collect simple data that a human can find in an hour or two that it erased my profit margin immediately. And it hallucinates worse than a 75 year old acidhead under stress.

I could engineer data mining software myself, I have the know-how, but the time it takes to do so would force the price and time commitment of the product way beyond useful margins.

Maybe in three years...

Swords Against Madness 

I am now up to 36 Episodes of my Podcast Swords Against Madness. 

SvM is a created by playing a solo game of Swords & Wizardry with the Mythic Game Master Emulator.

Once I have a few good encounters I write a 30 minute audio drama based on them, then narrate and act it out, sometimes with guest voice actors. Most episodes are about 2/3 story and 1/3 "behind the screen" discussion of the game experience and design.

 I tried to maximize the Science Fantasy weirdness of early D&D. And whenever possible, I borrow from other versions of D&D or other old-school clones to fill in the gaps.

In a few cases I borrow material from other classic RPGs. For example, I have adjudicated space battles using the Traveller retro clone Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition.

It's weird, intense, and an utter meat-grinder for PCs.

Horror Podcasts 

A couple of months ago, I play tested a solo horror game and turned my results into a horror audio drama. It was fun, engaging, and something of a revelation to me.

People found the podcast chilling. It turns out I am pretty good at writing horror, and I loved doing it. Despite being a life-long horror fan, I had never tried creating it before. It was like finding a part of myself that I didn't know I had.

The creator of the game, also a podcaster with a show very much like SvM asked me, "hey, do you think you could make more of these?" To which I essentially responded "Could I?! I can hardly stop!" And so he pitched a collaborative project where we create a 10-episode season of horror stories based on the game. I'll do four, he'll do four, and we'll collaborate on a couple.

I am finishing on my third episode next week! The plan is to kick off the show in October at the same time we launch the game.

But I couldn't stop there.

I started plans for my own horror fiction podcast, Last Confession. It is a series of very intimate psychologically deep stories focused on Moral Horror. Every episode is aimed at being a walk into a dark part of the human psyche.

Last Confession is in production, and I hope to launch it in September .

Writing

I am not done with Undeadwood: Weird West RPG yet! I have ideas for about nine Weird West modules that explore some of the darker, deadlier corners of Wonkatonkwa County.

But before I can settle in to writing those, I want to clear some outstanding projects. I am trying to finish The Depths of the Eternal Ocean, the GMs guide to the Rusalka setting for my Eternal Ocean & Wreck game. I have made massive strides on what is going to be a massive and extremely dense book with the geography and history of an entire planet, plus systems for using it in a number of different ways.

I also want to get The House of Amber Lanterns and A Touch of Idiocy, my two unfinished OSR modules into a useful shape by the end of the year.

Reviewing

I also have a review in the pipeline, but I am spending May trying to get way ahead on my podcasting commitments so that I can travel this Summer without bringing a ton of recording equipment with me. I will be able to game at my leisure from a beach in July with any luck.

A Fascination with Institutional Memory

Did you know that corporations lose about 1.2 billion dollars annually due to forgetting commitments, or losing track of important knowledge when leadership changes? That is something I learned earlier this year and it blew my mind.

There has been a growing boy of thought and literature about how big organizations like volunteer groups, corporations, and governments gain, use, and more interestingly lose knowledge. Big organizations learn, remember, and forget much like a person does. And when it forgets, all kinds of Brazil-esque system failures can happen.

Since the late 90s, organizations have been trying to develop tools to crystalize their memories, so that the incredible losses that come from forgetting don't happen. They call it Knowledge Management (ugh, what a name!) And the moment I saw this, I had ideas about how to create a revolutionary system for Knowledge Management.

So it has been something I am working on that might be my path forward in life. Perhaps not as interesting to my readers as the rest, but one never knows.

So...

I have no intention of abandoning Welcome to the Deathtrap; this blog, and you readers have been with me through some of the hardest times of my life, and I appreciate you all. It is just having to sit low on my priority list for a little while. Expect a lot more as other projects fall into a comfortable rhythm towards the end of the year.