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.

Current Project

 When it comes to my hobbies I don't so much choose my project is they choose me. I come up with an idea and I chase it as far down the rabbit hole as I'm willing to go. Because of this, some projects get done very quickly, some get put on the back burner. I have several books I'm working on that I do in small doses because they are either such a huge project doing it all at once would be masochistic,, or because I don't feel any time crunch to do the . The ideas that capture my imagination usually get the Lion's share of my energy.

Over the Summer I spent a fair amount of time running a solo game. I used the Mythic GM Emulator, Alone Among the Stars, the Science Fiction Codex of Lists, and RPG Pundit Presents #100: Star Adventurer as the engine let me scratch my itch to explore space in a tiny spaceship with a small crew.

One of my goals was to discover a rich, and lore-filled campaign setting over time. I wanted the joy of discovery as a part of how I was playing. To that end, I use the 'Codex and some random online tables mixed with the Alone Among the Stars to create the worlds I would visit and the alien races I would encounter. Whenever I encountered an alien species or culture, I use the 'Codex to flesh it out until it at least felt like something you might read in a Star Wars is extended universe Wiki entry.

I even used AI to help me enhance the experience. And wrote computer software inspired by the random star system generation tools of Traveler, the Cepheus Engine, the random space jobs generator from Donjon, and the jobs and commodity generators from the 'Codex. Once I had a bare bones, I would let my imagination run wild for several hours to flash in more details until I had entire worlds and cultures built up for my characters to explore in.

It has been a really engaging experience that took up much of the copious free time I had while on vacation in July. Because I was using random alien species in a Sci-Fi setting rather than creatures with a folkloric basis like in Dungeons and Dragons, I was constantly surprised and rewarded by what I learned. And my notes can now comfortably fill a whole role-playing game or a TV series "setting bible."

I even taught myself to use some AI tools to help generate some of the content for myself.

As you can imagine, I have been dying to share more of it with you all. I have a blog of the individual adventures with some of the notes to cover my first five voyages in the setting before I lost my crew to a TPK.

But, as of late, much of my energy has been directed towards building a unique role-playing game that borrows elements from White Star, Star Adventurer, Cepheus Engine, the 'Codex, and far more.

As I've written in the past, one of the biggest obstacles to a good SF setting is its total lack of predefinition. Fantasy games have the benefit of several canons of folklore, pagan mythology, and established conventions to work on, science fiction does not. Science fiction has to put effort into building a world and informing the reader, the viewer, or the player about it well enough that they can immerse themselves in the setting. This is time consuming. The only shortcut that ttrpgs have to this is to build a game based on an existing franchise.

This is why, the majority of SF games are built on franchises such as The Expanse, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Generic science fiction role-playing games are not as common, nor are they usuallysuccessful. Where a science fiction game tries to build itself out of whole cloth, it generally has to do so by spending an immense amount of energy on lore. 

Some games have been quite successful at this. Traveler, Shadowrun, Rifts, Numenéra,, and the Strange have done a great job of building enough lore that players can dive in. In the case of Traveler, Rifts, and Shadowrun, they have done so through years of slowly building a sizable canonwith the help of fan engagement. In the case of Numenéra,, it has been done through very intelligent World design and conventions.

Some science fiction games suffer from over-development. For example, Shadowrun has so much lore now that a player who knows the ins and out of the setting has an even better advantage over a new player that it is even more important than mastery over the rules. The same is definitely true of Rifts. 

I find that sits in a sweet spot where there is enough to go on to run the game well, but it is flexible enough to allow you to put almost anything you want for your scenario in it. You can learn all you need to know by reading just the core book. That is the balance I strive for. Enough information on aliens, culture,and technology to let the players have a sense of what they might be able to accomplish, but, not so much that I am being prescriptive of how the game plays, or giving advantage to someone who memorizes the lore.

I also decided to build my game on PANZA, as the race / background / class  / subclass structure of PCs is actually pretty close to olde-school SF games like Traveler, and that 5e-style engine can actually a lot of fun for a grognard like me, if you throw out a few things. Personally,  I am making the following changes:

• Characters are reduced to 4 attributes instead of 6: Wisdom has become conceptually meaningless, and STR and CON should be interlinked.
• Pcs have randomized starting HP 
• Death saves are gone
• CHA serves as a measure of luck, as well as attractiveness and savoir-faire
• RP inspiration is optional
• B/X D&D morale & NPC reactions (modified slightly) are imported 
• Diplomacy is now a skill governing protocol,  trade, and information gathering, it cannot simply change NPC reactions.
• Doman level play is incorporated by adding rules for colonizing a Star System
• A slot-based encumbrance system is added as non-optional
• Sense Motive, Investigation, and Perception skills are removed; these can be handled by askimg questions from a high-info GM.
• Formalized random encounters are imported to feel more like AD&D's Structure
• Only a few character options grant psionics, rather than the widespreaf magic use of modern systems
• XP system is simplified, CR is discarded
• Monster stats are simplified
• My own eight classes will replace the fantasy-themed ones, each with 2-3 subclasses .

I am hoping this offering will offer a new, original Sci-Fi game experience.  I ha e also built in a way that my game Eternal Ocean can take place in the setting. 

Tinkering and Tumult

 It has been a crazy week for me, readers! My youngest son started school, and I am suddenly back on the job market and trying to figure out where my skills can best serve the world after years of being focused on my children full-time. I'm pursuing a lot of different angles as I get back into figuring out what I want to do "when I grow up."

Honestly, getting back into life coaching with focusing on making lifestyle changes to help handle chronic pain might be the best way to put the last year of difficulties to good use... but I can hardly resist the lure of going back into tech.

To that end, I have been using my role-playing creations as a touchstone to working on reviving and updating old skills and developing new ones.

Machine Learning technology has been a big part of that focus. After all, engineering a good prompt and understanding how "AI" processes language is a new, and probably very useful skill. And I have learned a lot about both generating images and content that could be useful for TTRPGs.

I am going to share a bit of my AI experimentation here, and also talk about why I have decided to ditch some of it.

Year 3 (and a bit) in Review

 There years! I have been writing and creating through Welcome to the Deathtrap for over three years now, and I am very proud of what I have created.

And I am going to start this review by saying how much I appreciate my readers. You have kept me excited to sit down and write every single day.

Diving Back into the Eternal Ocean

I have added another 30 monsters to Dragonette this weekend all the ones listed at the end of this article.) I am feeling far more satisfied with the project.

Last night after my Sunday gaming group, I decided to sit down and work on The Depths of the Eternal Ocean for the first time in awhile. In retrospect, I am amazed at how much I bit off when I started to design this game.

The planet Rusalka has millions of years of history,  hundreds of adventure sites, interdimensional influences,  multiple alien intelligences, and a lot of mysteries... most of which are only hinted at in the Eternal Ocean setting book. Most of the heavy lifting for the game is going to be done in the third Campaign book, The Depths of the Eternal Ocean. 

Oddly, this is the least important book from the perspective of most GMs. The first book, Wreck, is a self-contained TTRPG for exploring Ocean Planets. It's the only one you'd need to play the game I'm envisioning.

Eternal Ocean sets up a detailed set of worlds that the PCs might hail from, with enough culture to make the setting interesting. Then it sets up Planet Rusalka, a setting for adventure ideal to use with Wreck. It has factions, political tension, mysteries, and natural hazards - all presented purely in fiction, without mechanics. It is, in essence, a book of creative prompts. With this book, players can make their own PCs, and the GM can make their own Planet Rusalka based on the ideas presented in the  book.

Let's Build an RPG (pt. 4)

 Creating a good RPG is a long, ongoing process. What I managed to make when I started Dragonette was playable within 20 minutes. Making it presentable to the world has taken considerably longer.

Still Polishing

What I put out last week was perfectly playable. In fact, I've gotten some good reviews and a lot of great feedback from people on it. But, it is far from something I'm satisfied with. Since it's initial release I've created an alphabetical index and a table of contents.

My Punk-Ass Gen-X Take on the Whole WotC Debacle

 I am in the middle of moving house at the moment, which has forced me to neglect my blog, much to my frustration. Especially as so much has been going on in the hobby as of late. Especially with Wizards of the Coast doing their level best to alienate the Dungeons & Dragons fan base at every turn. I really only have one thought on WotC left with sharing. I might even sing it:

There's no vestige of beginning, no prospect of an end

When we all disintegrate, it will all happen again, yeah

If you came to conquer, you'll be king for a day

But you too will deteriorate and quickly fade away

And believe these words you hear when you think your path is clear

We have no control

We have no control

We have no control

We do not understand, you have no control

You are not in command

-Bad Religion, No Control 

(©️1989 Polypteric Records)

Or perhaps, "See you WotC, enjoy your decline!"

I am, by all accounts the quintessential Gen-X slacker, I have had almost no employment with big corporations and didn't enjoy the environment. I have spent most of my life working for myself. I am suspicious of Sentiment, but enjoy Beauty. I am cynical towards ads, news, and mass media, yet I tend to communicate and think in pop culture quotations. I prefer to DIY where I can. And nothing is cool until I can personalize the Hell put of it. I have no interest in plastic,  cookie cutter corporate bullshit or brand names. D&D as a stopped being interesting to me when it was clear that it had gone from a vibrant small community hobby to another Brand Name™️ a few books into 3rd Edition. 

I walked away long ago. I don't care about the logo on the book. I briefly got sucked in with 5th when it looked like they were trying to connect with the lost fan base. I saw the error of my ways after buying one sourcebook.

I don't buy books for the sake of collecting.  I don't care to have mounds of sourcebooks. I brew my own worlds.  And until I had to balance kids and a small business, I didn't use adventure modules. What books I do buy, I buy to hack or to review. And I buy very few. Most of my 5e collection were gifts.

You can't sell D&D to me.

Building a Bespoke Science Fiction Setting: Valkyrie

 One of the projects I have been working on lately is a science fiction campaign called Valkyrie. It is separate from my Eternal Ocean project, but connected and so far as I'm using them to build on similar ideas and conduct similar experiments.

I'm also building Valkyrie as a toolbox. When I first started working on this blog, I was involved in building a custom Pern-inspired campaign called Ær. Ær was a campaign in which the last surviving members of humanity were stranded on floating islands, and traveled by riding on dragons.

Custom System 

Part of the point of Ær was to have built a D&D-based game system written in my own words and integrating my own preferred rules so that I would have something that easily copied and pasted, which would allow me to make a bespoke D&D clone for every campaign. Allowing me to fine-tune the experience to exactly what I want.

Building a Science Fiction Setting that Lasts (pt. 6)

In the last article in this series, I discussed in detail how the Themes (and Thesis, if you have one,) of your setting can help you make decisions about what technologies to include or design in your Science Fiction campaign setting.

Those same themes can help you design dilemmas, locations, alien races, villains, and revelations for your campaign. In the next few, I am going to unpack those other components.

Dilemmas

Ultimately, every adventure in the campaign is built around a singular dilemma. What do we do about situation X?

Coming up with the X helps you decide what your adventure is going to look like. It is where that short paragraph or one-sentence premise you start every good adventure with comes in.

If I have chosen a theme such as, The Gods are False, I can come up with numerous ways of expressing that idea in dilemmas that trigger adventures.  This was one of the core premises of the film Stargate, and it's spin-off TV series Stargate: SG-1. 

Stargate and the theme of False Gods

Main cast, Stargate: SG=1
Stargate:SG-1 is C 1997=2007 MGM Studios

In these early Stargate media, the U.S. Military discovers an alien device that creates portals to other worlds. They discover that the deities of Ancient Egypt were alien parasites, the Goa'uld, that used human hosts to extend their lives and wielded their advanced (mostly stolen) technology to perform miracles and inspire worship. They used the network of portals to take human slaves  and spread them across hundreds of worlds as laborers.

To fight the alien threat, the protagonists must convince the humans from other worlds that their gods are False, and help them rebel. This creates a huge range of dilemmas over the original film, 213 television episodes, and made-for-TV film sequel film Ark of Truth. Some of the prime examples include:

• How do you persuade people to fight against gods?

• Do you have the right to destroy the deeply held beliefs of a culture? Especially when you are going to benefit?

• What happens when your own people follow the example and start demanding worship from more primitive cultures?

• Can you ever trust allies who worshipped your enemies?

• Can you still believe in your own faith when you have seen how religion is used to manipulate others?

• When beings have the power to raise the dead and heal any sickness, are there times when maybe they deserve veneration.

• When a False God can force you to worship them with mind control, or by holding your very life hostage, how do you deal with the moral hazard of fighting their followers?

Each of these problems is easily transformed into at he first part of an adventure hook:

The Eternal Ocean Setting Book is Live

I have just added a version of The Eternal Ocean to my Eternal Ocean and Wreck project on Itch.io.

This is a system agnostic setting book designs to give players an idea of where their characters are from and what kind of characters they may like to play.

In effect, it is a campaign primer: it's goal is to stimulate the imagination of players and GMs. To get them thinking about what kind of Adventures and experiences they might like to have using this game.

Accordingly, I lot of the book is done as fiction. Particularly samples of correspondence, official documents, and short stories. A little of it is basic facts, but I try hard not to spend more than 40% of the book on raw info dumps.

What of the funny thing is about this book is that it necessarily must be incomplete. The whole purpose of this setting is to have player characters going to a planet based on information that is woefully out of date. In the eight year since the initial colonial effort failed, the planet Rusalka has been radically changed. It teems with life, mysteries, and a terrible traps.

Ultimately, I cannot give all the information one would expect in a campaign primer, as I'm creating this as a tool for other GMs that they can hand to their players without giving the game away. There are quite a few different tones one can set on Rusalka. The final book, the Depths of the Eternal Ocean will have advice for GMS on how to set the tone and style for a number of different kinds of campaign that could be run using this setting, as well as a set of secrets and dangers for the player characters too experience that the GM may or may not choose to use.

Get The Eternal Ocean and Wreck here!

A Fiction Interlude: A Day in the Life in the Eternal Ocean

Below is a short story I wrote as a part of The Eternal Ocean setting. The goal of the story is to give the player a sense of what life is like on a Confederate space colony, the work, the culture, and then, the danger.

The story features a character, Teddy Lovelace, whose letters to home also appear in the setting book, and a clue about his fate during the disaster that destroyed the first colony on Rusalka.

He's intentionally a man of his era: a little dull, cautious, and a bit of a sad sack. Not to mention the kind of nice guy who desperately needs to hear Frank Zappa's "Broken Hearts are for Assholes", only that song is probably blocked on his colony.

I wanted to share it here as a change of pace from my usual content.

There is a little gore and oblique sexual references in this one, as fair warning.

A Day in the Life

Ted woke up as the lights slowly brightened in his room.  He reached across the bed to the empty space  beside him. He sighed sharply through his nose. He still hadn't gotten used to sleeping alone in bed alone. The time was visible on his ceiling 

"You woke me up two minutes early," he grunted at his apartment. It responded in a feminine mid-Atlantic:

"You have listed getting to work on time a high priority. You have struggled for five days to get out of the door at your designated leaving time. Waking you two minutes early will make your day run more smoothly and reduce stress. You have had eight hours and thirteen minutes of sleep. This time is within the Copernicus Healthy Living™ Program tolerances."

He grunted. The "™" wasn't read aloud, but the computer had a way of saying trademarked titles that made you hear it anyway.

"I'm considering changing my health program subscription."

"You are very grumpy this morning," his apartment replied. "You should not make subscription or purchase decisions until you have had breakfast and your shower."

Building a Science Fiction Setting that Lasts (pt.5)

When you have a good set of themes for a science fiction setting, they serve you as idea and content generators. Every theme can suggest a piece of technology, a dilemma, A villain, an alien, or a revelation that you can use to help you build your campaign. Over the next few articles, I will cover different ways you can use your themes to tease out content, and how that will make a richer, more unified setting.

Technology

Fantasy settings rely on magic, wonders, and monsters to create extraordinary circumstances. It is the things that don't belong in the everyday world that don't just make it Fantastical, but give the PCs something to focus on. In Fantasy, either problems are caused by the magic and monsters, or can only be solved with them.

And in fantasy, you can draw upon pre-existing myths and folklore, as well as a rich tradition of pulp tropes to come up with the contents of your setting.

Modern role-playing settings rely on factions, contacts, and conspiracies to create something extraordinary for the setting. A well written conspiracy, a couple of secret societies, or a criminal organization, combined with some well done NPCs are what makes a modern setting seem like something special and worth pursuing. And again, it is these groups and NPCs that the PCs must focus on as the problem and the solution.

In a Science Fiction setting we have neither the familiarity of a modern or pseudohistorical medieval setting to work with from the beginning. And, while a good science fiction story might include conspiracies and criminal organizations, they require a lot of context to be made useful or understandable.

In science fiction, advanced technology, strange planets, and alien races create the extraordinary circumstances that drives the player characters: aliens, strange worlds, or tech that either create problems, or are the only means of solving them. 

Because Science Fiction it doesn't have the context of the modern world or a historical period or mythological backdrop, that technology has to be custom designed by the game master.

I am going to cover the basics of the technology and how you can use themes to develop the technology in your setting below:

Building a Science Fiction Setting that Lasts (pt. 4)

Whether you have chosen a or not for your Science Fiction Setting, by now you have a sense of your Tone. Not only will it shape the in-game elements of NPCs, technology, etc., it will also dictate the way you plan and think of your game, and how you will present it to potential players. 

One of the ways you will do this is by choosing themes for your campaign that are congruent with your tone.

Themes in a TTRPG campaign are not really that different from themes in film or literature: they are ideas that appear over and over again in different forms throughout the story. They are ideas that will likely be expressible in one to five words. Often they will be tensions you can express as "A v. B."

Pulling Out Themes: Babylon 5

Cast of Babylon 5, Season 3

As an example, let's look at the themes of a personal favorite, Babylon 5:

• Duty v. Conscience
• Letting others solve your problems is dangerous
• Religion can imprison or uplifts
• Foresight is a terrible burden
• Alcohol solves nothing
• Safety v. Privacy

All of these come from the central thesis of the series, which is "Can we really know Peace?"

Each of these themes appear over and over again in different forms in some combination in most episodes. There is rarely an episode that doesn't explore at least two of these.

I will try to cover these, one in detail, the others briefly in a way that doesn't assume you know the series. There will be spoilers, but the show ran over 25 years ago, so I consider that fair game. 

Building a Science Fiction Setting that Lasts (pt. 3)

One of the most critical components of any Science Fiction setting, whether it is in literature, film, video games, or ttrpgs, is the tone you choose to set with it. Tone is more than just the mood you try to set with the backdrop, it will tell us a lot about who the people in a science fiction setting are, and what kind of world they create

The technology that appears in your campaign will also need to reflect the tone. A Star Trek replicator that can all but end hunger would strip the need for money and that's the need to do dirty jobs that drove the characters in Firefly. Your choice of tone will help you decide what should be in a game, and what should not.

Building a Science Fiction Setting that Lasts (pt.1)

I am on a roll creatively with my Eternal Ocean & Wreck project! Aside from a character sheet and an editing pass, I feel like Wreck is in more or less its final form.

The real challenge right now is building the world of The Eternal Ocean in order to actually get interest in the game. A science fiction version of Cairn with deep sea diving and some submarines is all well and good, but it isn't all that helpful to play unless you have a world to work with. 

In a TTRPG the Campaign and the game world are inextricably linked. In a way, the World is the Campaign, especially if you are playing with multiple groups using strict time tracking, or playing an Open Table / West Marches game. Your decisions as a GM are going to be shaped by the internal logic of the world. When fantastical things like magic and monsters, aliens or super-technology appear, it is your understanding of that world and how it works as a player that will determine how you approach it, and will also determine how the GM resolves it.

Fantasy has a distinct edge in this arena: most fantasy worlds are a mish-mash of European folklore, romanticized Early Modern cultures, and 1960s pulp tropes. Thanks to Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy in most parts of the world has a default set of assumptions. Japanese fantasy Anime, an American Fantasy Action RPG video game, and a French Fantasy Graphic Novel are all going to feel, to some degree, like a variation on Greyhawk.

Development Blog; Designing the Eternal Ocean

 

As I work on The Eternal Ocean , I intend to blog about the process here. And I wanted to start by talking about what my structure is going to be and my rationale for it.

To start with, what is The Eternal Ocean meant to be exactly, and how is my presentation going to reflect my ideas?

Because I am taking some pretty odd steps.

What Do I Want to Accomplish?

This is probably one of the most important questions you can ask yourself starting almost any project, and it is intimately tied with another question:

Who is this for?

The answer to that one is already in the dedication to Wreck to some degree: I made this game for my oldest son, who wants to be a marine biologist and study deep sea creatures. He loves anything to do with sea exploration from cartoons like Octonauts and The Deep to watching me play video games like Subnautica to just watching old Jaques Cousteau documentaries. 

He has already consumed an impressive amount of science fiction set in the deep sea, and I would love to help him explore the tropes of that particular brand of SF.

But I also wanted to create a world that reaches a little farther than Subnautica or even The Deep does. I wanted to create a setting where the kind of weird and wonderful stuff that you can see in classic science fiction works like 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Time Machine. So I want a world full of secrets and mysteries. Not just Traveller underwater.

Of course, this idea hasn't stayed just a game for my son. I wanted to create something that, after I had done the work, I could also play with grown-ups. I wanted to make something for fans of classic science fiction like my gaming buddy Thomas.

Accordingly, I decided to make a game that relied a lot on exploration, and a world that had a lot of secrets. And I also wanted to make sure that there would be an incentive for discovering those secrets.

IIn other words, I want to create a game world that is full of secrets that feels satisfying to discover, and that feels more like a classic science fiction story then cinematic sci-fi.

What This Mean for Writing

Rather than creating a mechanical incentive,, I wanted to create an overall narrative reward for making discoveries. To this end, I have created a huge collection of secrets that can reward the characters with rare and unique gear and abilities. More importantly, the game is set up so that if the players wish to leave the planet, they will have to discover one of several particularly complex secrets at the end of a chain of revelations.

Wreck

Q: How do you make God laugh?

So, after I had the audacity to post my plans to release a new game last week, my kids finally gave me the second of the two bugs that I had been nursing them through. And while it made my poor little guys cranky and uncomfortable, it flat-out tried to murder me. But, after a week of agonizing pain, I am back to creating.

And I have finally got a draft up of Wreck for your consideration.

Wreck is the game component of my Eternal Ocean & Wreck combination project. I have intentionally separated them in such a way that you could just use the setting with any system, but I wanted one readily available with all the material necessary to bring it to life as well. One that was based on a simple, fast open engine that I could easily adapt to my needs without reinventing the wheel.

Deep Dives: Eternal Ocean, Wreck, and Midnight Zone

 A little over a week ago, my son brought a nasty case of influenza into the house. No sooner had they recovered from it than some kind of norovirus followed suit. I have spent the last eleven days caring for two little kids who were perpetually in purge mode. It has left me little time for creative projects.

What time I have had has been pretty thematically inspired.

Octonauts C 2012 Silvergate Media, based on the Children's books by Meomi

Over those weeks I have been dosed heavily with cartoons. My oldest will voraciously consume anything related to deep-sea exploration, and so I have probably re-watched the entirety of Octonauts twice over. I've also consumed nearly two seasons of a cartoon I had not heard of before but thoroughly enjoyed entitled The Deep about a family of deep-sea explorers looking for the sunken ruins of Lemuria. It would make a hell of a campaign.

The Deep is C 2015 Technicolor SA based on the Graphic Novels by Tom Taylor