Tired....

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been exceptionally tired this last weekend. I got home from work, my wife was already hitting the wall because of her travel earlier in the week, and I simply could barely keep my eyes open an hour or so after getting home. I managed to force myself to stay awake by watching cheesy fail videos and stuff on YouTube, just so I didn’t throw my sleep schedule completely off, but it was pretty bad. Saturday and Sunday I was still pretty tired. I didn’t do the house cleaning chores that I meant to do and I didn’t do my taxes, so those are still hanging over me. I did, however, get to do a little bit of work on High Fantasy X, HFX, my lingering project that started out as Elemental Fantasy X, and then kinda took a back seat. 

I’m not 100% sure what prompted me to look at this again, but something reminded me of my Eberron Remixed project, and that led me to HFX. I was able to determine, as noted in my last post, how to change the rules to accommodate the HFX vs DFX setting, and I was able to do so with relatively little actual change. There’s still the task to fill out the fluff, such as it is, but that’s not a big deal, and then I’ll have a skeleton outline of a setting, ready to go. That’s usually the degree of detail that I like to do anyway.

Other than that, I recently finished the pdf game book I’m reading and queued up some new ones. However, most of the ones I queued up are freakin’ gigantic; more than 500 pages; almost 900 pages on the longest one. I’ve had many of these pdfs for many years, but I’ve not read them. I may not, if they’re that intimidating. I kind of threw up my hands in frustration at lunch today and didn’t even pick up a game book at all, and started the novel that I’d been carrying around in my backpack instead. I also started listening (again) to the Dune soundtracks. You’d think that there’d be two soundtracks; one for Dune part one and another for part two, but the first movie actually had three soundtracks for some reason, although two of them seem like mood music rearranged specifically to be a soundtrack album rather than the actual movie soundtrack, which is something different. It was kind of moodier and more melancholy than I remembered, with a lot of slow, sad saxophone melody lines. (I’m always amused to see sax again. Saxophone used to be common in the 80s, and gradually it kind of faded from popular music. I didn’t really notice until someone pointed it out that it was gone.) I wonder if Hans Zimmer was unconsciously (or consciously) influenced by the old Vangelis Blade Runner love theme. I’m not saying that they sounded alike, but I am saying that they kinda sounded like part of the same family of music, if that makes any sense. 

To be fair, it was a little too moody and melancholy for the Arkham Horror novel I was reading. It wasn’t really quite the right mood. Oh, well. I’ll finish the Dune stuff soon enough, and then I can switch to some Graham Plowman or something for the rest of the read-throughs. I’ve got four more Arkham Horror novels after this one that I’m on; although I might not read them all right away.

Next up, besides reading, I’ve been trying to watch some older movies again that I haven’t watched in a long time. I enjoyed the two Predators a weekend or so ago; I’m kinda thinking I need to watch Aliens, The Untouchables, and Solomon Kane again. I barely even remember the last one, and it’s been enough time since I saw the first two that I could use a refresher. And then, I’ll also want to make the next video in my 5x5 Shadows Over Garenport vlog series on YouTube, and draw a new, more detailed map of the HFX continent… which I could probably stand to name, while I’m at it. I’ve got a good first map, but it’s a little small, and has too many unnamed features. As I start filling out the space on the new Google Sites for HFX, I’ll need more names, which means… I’ll need a new map.

As an aside, I'm amused that the main continent of Eberron is named Khorvaire. Maybe I should name my continent Stuuddabhacre or something?

UPDATE: A curious note. ShadowDark was one of the most successful RPG kickstarters of all time a couple of years ago managed by someone not named Brandon Sanderson. When it went live, it reached $1.365M, I think, and was considered by everyone involved (or even just observing) as a phenomenal success. It had a part 2 launch just yesterday, a setting and more material. It's currently sitting at $1.227M as a write this, but at less than 48 hours in, it has continued to trickle upward after it's initial $1M, which it reached in less than 12 hours. It should reach at least the total of the first kickstarter before finishing, and maybe will edge up closer to $1.5M. I did notice, however, that it's reached almost the same total with less than half the number of backers (so far.) The pledge tiers are all considerably more expensive than they were the first time. The least expensive pledge level, pdfs of the three new zines, is still $45, and the most expensive, premium hardcopies of everything new, is $349. I currently only own a pdf copy of the game, which I bought long after the original kickstarter was over. If I were to get into it and want hard copies, I'd probably have get the ShadowDark Newcomer package, which is $199, or perhaps the premium versions which are higher quality, and come with a few accessories, for $269.

Not sure what that means. If it makes the same money, or even better, does it matter if it's fewer backers, but who are individually bigger spenders? Or is that a sign that ShadowDark is on the decline? Or is the fact that I wondered that merely a sign that I'm a pessimistic black-piller who should shut up?

UPDATE 2: Physiognomy is real. I'm not shocked by, say, the mannerisms of Sly Flourish or Matt Glicker. Professor DM and Baron de Roppe, on the other hand, are actually in many ways more charismatic when unscripted and not in "performative" mode. 

As for my own take on the questions?

1. I would love to play my own game, but I never will. As a player, I'd probably say something like Call of Cthulhu, I suppose. But I love fantasy; if I could get the same vibe as Call of Cthulhu but in fantasy, and without the d100 system, which I don't much care for, that'd be perfect for me. Of course, that's pretty much exactly what my game, Dark Fantasy X is, which is my favorite to run.
2. I have plenty of other interests, but what I'd most be interested in branching out of (to the extent that I don't already) would be hiking slash camping slash overlanding. I'd love to have a second channel where I do pretty much what SUV RVing does. Except I'm older, more out of shape and slower than him, so my adventures would necessarily be quite a bit more sedate.
3. Not sure. I used to really like a lot of definition in the system for players to use to customize their characters, but I liked it because it led to roleplaying hooks. I now realize that most games that offer that are really geared towards power gamers and character builds, so I'm less likely to prefer them. But not because I don't have the same tastes; ironically its because my tastes are now more aligned with mechanics I prefer. 

I think that last point is kind of interesting. When I started playing, there were other games, of course. D&D was out, as was AD&D, and a few others. Gamma World was out already. Top Secret was just releasing, Star Frontiers and Call of Cthulhu were about to be released, Traveller was out, etc. And I played around with most of those, although it's also fair to say that everyone played D&D, at least some of the time, and that was the common language that all gamers knew. We took it for granted more that different people wanted different things out of the game, and that the game didn't parcel them out automatically to each playstyle; it was up to a good GM to make sure everyone got enough of what they liked that they kept playing, and balanced the competing priorities of different people with different tastes at the same table.

I think that's kind of been lost over the years, and honestly, I've kind of lost it myself. As I've gotten older, I've lost patience with stuff that I'm not interested in being a significant portion of my game, and I'm much more interested in finding like-minded people to game with rather than gaming with anyone just because, hey, it's a game, or hey, they're the only friends I've got who game, etc. I want games to be good, and I've become much more hardened in my opinion on what is good for me and what isn't. I've taken it on the chin too many times to think otherwise, and played in mediocre or even bad games, or with people that I didn't rally enjoy gaming with, or even sometimes hanging around with. I'm over that. But yeah; the idea of a game perfectly suited to your tastes? I'm not sure I could delineate what my tastes were when I was younger (although in retrospect, they haven't really meaningfully changed at their core). But it never occurred to me that a game could actually be crafted specifically to match them.