Final updates before... I start making REAL updates

Not that anyone cares, but here’s a quick personal update. On Saturday, we finally cleared out the big pieces of furniture in our garage that we stored there temporarily because we didn’t have space for them and we weren’t sure what to do about them. After moving them to the driveway, we realized that they were in worse shape than we maybe thought, so my wife just went on Facebook Marketplace and gave them away. (Facebook Marketplace is kind of flaky; we actually have one set still on the driveway; supposed to have been picked up last night, supposed to be picked up again today. Sigh.) The good news is that this cleared enough space in the garage that we could access the boxes that the movers stacked behind them, which I’ve started moving around and looking through. I’ve found the two boxes that have my personal stuff from the basement office in the old house, which includes my art suppliers, whatever RPG suppliers I hadn’t already taken with me, etc. Because I found this stuff, I’m ready to start drawing my revised maps, my draft maps of Hyperborea and Nizrekh, and my draft map of the Elemental Fantasy X (EFX) setting. I also found my computer finally, in what was literally just about the last box left to look in. Sigh. I was very tired after moving boxes and doing yard work all evening, and it was pushing 9:30 PM by this point and was pretty dark, so I didn’t get into it or set it up, but that’ll be my task for tonight. Assuming that I’m not missing any components or cables or anything, I’ll finally have that up and running this evening. If I am, I hope to still find them in another box, or I might have to order a part or two (I have had my monitor, but without its power cord since I moved in. I really hope the missing power cord is in the box with the rest of the computer stuff. I presume it is, but if it’s not…)

I still have some personal things to take care of that will take some time here and there, including another visit of more family starting next week, but we really are getting to the point, especially once I have my computer set up, where I can consider myself more or less as moved in as we’re going to be. There’s still some more garage organization to be done, and because we’ll have to move again and don’t really have a place right now, the majority of my books will remain in boxes in the garage for the time being, but at least I’ll know how to access them, even if I don’t have a better place to put them. That will remain my only one niggling frustration, and maybe once everything else is done, I’ll look around to see if there isn’t actually a place that I can find where a bookcase or two makes some sense. Maybe even a bookcase in the garage is better than a box in the garage if there isn’t a better place for it. And there may not be. We really did move into a smaller house with less room for storage. One less bedroom, no shed and no basement. It’s been a struggle to figure out what to do with all of our stuff, even with the stuff we’re getting rid of.

Anyway, the point of all of this rambling about my personal situation is that I’m now at a point where I can make some reasonably concrete plans on what I want to do for setting and campaign development over the course of the next couple of months. After better part of a quarter being reduced to making stuff with just my phone, I was pretty limited, but when my computer is once again available, I can proceed with some better plans. Let’s do this as a dotted list; easier to read:

• Update Dark Fantasy X document. For this week, getting my computer set up and then making the updates to the Dark Fantasy X document to bring it up to the level I want it to be with a few changes are on my radar. I also am thinking about adjusting the layout to be more “ShadowDark”-like, by which I mostly mean that I want to take more space, have a larger font and more white-space, and have stuff organized so that common information is available without too much flipping around. I started with a very traditional layout, focused more on trying to minimize page-count, because that used to be something that we’d do when I was younger; use the space up rather than creatively use space to make a visually easier format. Big walls of text with small subheading titles, and all of that. I also have a lot of AI art; I might integrate more of that into the book, because why not? One of the few things I could easily do with just my phone was generate hundreds of images of AI art using Bing’s DALL-E 3 access. This will probably at least double the page count of the book, but it won’t, of course, actually add anything to the word count, which matters more. Chances are I’m not going to print the book again anytime too soon anyway, after getting burned with printing and then almost immediately spotting things that needed to be fixed or updated.
• Draw Another Setting Map. Next week, I’ll have less time with family in town from Wed-Wed but before they show up, if I can make the time, I’d like to draw the second second (yes, that’s correct) draft of the setting map in the Christopher Tolkien style with black and red ink. Then, once family is gone again, I’ll have a bit more time before we head out of town for an extended Labor Day weekend trip back to Michigan to walk the Mackinac Bridge with probably the worst governor in the nation (although she’s had some decent competition, especially from Gavin Newsom) with some old friends of ours. Then I’ll come back home, but my wife will be out of town a further week watching the grandkids, so I’ll have all of the time I could want for the evenings and one weekend to pursue hobby endeavors. Not that I want my nose to the grindstone too hard; I’m sure I’ll watch some movies and do a few other things like that too. But…
• Finish Cult of Undeath fronts: I have one front more or less done, at least to the standard that I normally do them as a draft. I want to spend the time when I’ve got the house to myself drafting the next four and finishing the fronts. Then I’ll let that 5x5 rest, and come back and clean it up into a “supercut”. But in between the drafts and the supercut, I want to…
• Modify Dark Fantasy X and Save As to be an Elemental Fantasy X. We’re still talking early to mid-September for this task, but it should be pretty easy. I want to use the rules pretty much as they are, but I’ll make a few minor changes to the magic, mostly by removing the sanity mechanic altogether and possibly lessening the cost of doing magic on a failed roll. I might also make spellcasting be a class feature, and add more spells than Dark Fantasy X currently has. I’ll also need to redo the races: I’m not going to use most of the races of Dark Fantasy X (although there’s no reason why I couldn’t) in part because I might well repurpose the existing race features into a different race. EFX, vs DFX, will be more superficially D&D-like, including elves and dwarves, for instance, and a whole gaggle of elemental near human races: genies, ifrits, tritons and chthons for air, fire, water and earth elements respectively. It’ll also have orcs and goblins (which are in DFX) and vampires and liches. Those might be represented, however, by the dhampir race from DFX; the truly monstrous ones will be NPC monsters. I don’t know for sure how to do the undead races yet. But I quite like the idea of them being a playable race, not unlike how Heroes of Might & Magic had undead of various sorts (mostly liches and vampires and necromancers—the latter not being true undead, of course) as hero types you could play as.
• Start the Solo Play Shadows Over Garenport series on YouTube. By the time September is ending, I’m wanting to be done with the docs and moving on to the podcast/actual “play” stuff. 

What none of this addresses is if or when I can get an actual regular game going. Since I just relocated to a new state, I don’t know anyone who’s interested in gaming. I’ve been by a couple of local gaming stores, but all of them are considerably less focused on RPGs than what I’m used to, so I don’t know if that’s even worthwhile to attempt to scrounge anything up there. Plus, I’m not a huge fan of finding gamers through stores, honestly. I might have better luck making gamers out of friends. But again, I just moved here, so I don’t have anyone that I see as a ready target to introduce them to the hobby. 

Meanwhile, I spent a little bit of time reviewing my EFX race line-up. It’s quite lengthy, and I might yet decide to cut some of it: humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, fiends, genies, ifrits, tritons, chthonians, vampires and liches. None of them will really be quite as exotic as they sound from some other fantasy settings; I’m going to consider all them (except humans) as near humans, with a comparable racial ability scenario to humans. None of them will be more or less powerful as starting characters, none of them will be strange ethereal super long-lived, etc. To borrow a page from my own DFX, they will all be humans who have been changed many generations ago into something near human… but no longer quite human.

There’s no reason why I couldn’t have the DFX races present in EFX too except that I already have so many racial selections as it is. But then again, if I integrate an idea from my old Realms Traveler setting seed, maybe that explains where all of these exotic near humans came from and why so many of them exist in one (relatively) constrained space. Anyway, I went ahead and generated some new images of potential iconic character art for the elemental races that look a bit less like Heroes of Might & Magic art. Here’s a small selection; a male and female each of the four elemental races.