The death of mass market paperbacks

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99293-last-call-for-mass-market-paperbacks.html

This is really, really sad. If the peak years of the MMP was indeed the 60s through the 90s, that's of course right in my wheelhouse, having been born in the early 70s, and developed a reading addiction in the 80s as a teenager. I consumed dump truck loads of mass market paperbacks. I still prefer to buy them, honestly. And I still have tons of them. And despite the fact that they were designed to be "disposible", I have tons and tons of copies of books that were published over 40 years ago and which are still in pretty good shape other than a bit of yellowing. I have tons of fantasy books in mmp, some science fiction, tie-in fiction like D&D, Star Wars and even Aliens and Predator fiction that I still hold on to, and I even have a pretty nice collection of late 70s and early 80s published Choose Your Own Adventure books (which I need to get back to reading and reviewing after only getting through #11 earlier. I skipped #12 because I got rid of my copy years ago and haven't been interested in reacquiring that particular title, but I've been meaning to do #13 for at least two years now.) I've had a love affair with mass market paperbacks that goes back to nearly the beginning of my memory, or at least nearly the beginning of my ability to read "real" books. 

However, I think that there's more to the story than Publishers Weekly can admit or even recognize. Like most other mediums of entertainment, books, and particularly mass market paperbacks, have been subject to the "corporate enslopification" plague. I have a lot of mass market paperbacks. I still buy them somewhat regularly. But I can't remember the last time I bought something that was "new." The closest thing is that at some point between five and ten years ago, I bought reprints of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy in mass market paperback. I mostly buy on the used market, and mostly stuff that was published decades ago. There is extremely little being published today that I have any interest in, and even if something actually good were to come out, I'd be too wary to buy it, most likely, having been burned by publishers pushing diverse voices, or women's voices, or romance novels in fantasy or science fiction drag, etc. 

Corporate mergers and strategies have also completely decimated the midlist of authors. Other than bestsellers, it's not worth it to publish smaller but profitable midlist authors anymore. The same thing happened to movies and TV; everything has to be a blockbuster, and more modestly budgeted and modestly profitable midlist movies hardly get made anymore. And if they do, they're woke anyway. Similar things happened to the music industry first, but of course, they found new distribution channels via Spotify, YouTube, etc. Curiously, sales of physical media for movies and music are rising, although for music, it's often vinyl. In fact, someone said recently (and I can't verify that it's true) that over 50% of people who buy vinyl don't even have a turntable. They're not necessarily buying it to listen to. Which to me is crazy. Vinyl becomes collectible merch rather than a source of actual music. So crazy.

RPGs and video games, on the other hand, have had a significant shift towards crowdfunding, indie-publishing, and bespoke products. Books had a migration, to some degree, to ebooks and audiobooks, although that's a dubious end state. I'm not sure what the entertainment industries can do to get themselves back on track, but bringing and end to corporate enslopification and giving customers what they actually want has to be at the heart of it. I wonder if we'd be talking about the death of the mass market paperback if we hadn't seen sales drop year over year for decades due to declining quality, and a huge fallout from the years of woke content driving customers away for years, if not literally for good. The failure of all of the entertainment industries is multifaceted. "Go woke, go broke" is part of it, but can't explain everything that's happening. Corporate slop is a huge part of it, but not the whole story. Ultimately, creators of quality entertainment products find a way to connect to an audience. Maybe the RPG industry is the harbinger, and stuff like ShadowDark which isn't exactly my cup of tea, but which I can recognize as a very legitimate hit, and the model of a bespoke, crowd-sourced product. It may not have the numbers of D&D, but it makes some pretty decent bank and has a pretty decent internet presence. And maybe that's what people should hope for rather than "the NYT Bestseller list."

"Backup" campaign

Well, I think it's a reality. We had a proposal for the 7th for the next session of our Tyranny of Dragons campaign. That might still happen, but I'm the only one who responded. The DM and her husband are, of course, in and made the proposal. The other two "flaky" guys have made no response. I'm sure there will be one additional push to get them to answer and commit to coming or not coming. But I've already talked to the other two about what to do if they don't respond and we don't have a ToD session after all. And it's not a question of if; it's a question of when. If not a week from Saturday, then it will come up as a possibility every. single. time. we try to play. 

So, I think the other two are already thinking about potential characters for a pirate themed game, which will be my adaptation of the Freeport Trilogy, rather loosely run, I think. I'm going to re-read Death in Freeport from the Freeport Trilogy pdf that I've had for many, many years, I'll at least skim some of my Enemy Within material to add the mistaken identity "Kastor Lieberung" subplot. The Unspeakable One will be revised to some other entity of my own creation (name generated by ChatGPT probably to be deliberately reminiscent of a Lovecraftian entity, but a new one.) The serpent people will be replaced with rat people, which I like better. This was mentioned in my brief notes on how to run Freeport via the Freeport Trawl, which will be fleshed out and followed pretty strictly. 

Fighting ratmen in Port Liure

That image could be the two person party, which I imagine will be a man and a woman since a husband and his wife will be playing them and most people are a little bit uncomfortable playing long term a character of a different sex than they are. I'll copy and paste my older commentary into this post, from Death, Terror and Madness (in Freeport) respectively, the three modules in the Freeport Trilogy. Then I'll go through and make some minor edits to that copy-pasted text.

Death

[H]ow much of this would work in a Shadows of Old Night game, and the answer is: after changing around a few names and details, probably all of it. The scenario is a little too D&D-ish for me, but that has little impact honestly on how much of it I could use. What I was more concerned about were issues related to 1) making a sympathetic nice guy version of the snake people in the form of K'Stallo, and 2) being too kitschy with regards to Lovecraftian name-checking. K'Stallo isn't even mentioned yet at all, and "Brother Egil", who if I recall is the guy who ends up being K'Stallo, is just played pretty straight as a scholarly monk fellow and legitimate friend of Lucius, the "damsel in distress" for this module. I strongly disagree with making K'Stallo into a "good guy", but at this point, he's still completely incognito, and even in the behind the scenes text it doesn't make any reference to anything that would make it apparent that he's more than what he's presented as. It's something to think about going forward, but not a problem yet.

The hoaky Lovecraftiana isn't so bad here, but I think I do want to change some stuff anyway. The Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign can be a different cult of my own manufacture, or even one that references something else. (Brotherhood of the Dark Tapestry would be a good example; that's how Pathfinder did legitimate Yog-Sothothery by feeling legitimately Lovecraftian yet also being a new entry into the canon of Yog-Sothothery.)

Terror

I could use almost everything in this module too. Nothing in it is "too" D&D. However, the structure of the module isn't really entirely to my liking. It's very much a pre-written story with pre-written beats that have to happen for the module to play as expected. It's a railroad, in other words. While there's nothing exactly wrong with it, I don't like the structure of it, and would like to make it more flexible with the PCs figuring out exactly how to interact with the stuff that the bad guys are doing without the module having to tell me how they should interact with it.

And I was wrong in my last post; Brother Egil isn't the disguised "good guy" snakeman, that's actually Father Thuron, the "boss" of the temple. He reveals himself to the PCs at the very end of the module. I'm not a fan of that, but I'll discuss that below. And the brief "sewer crawl" is kinda sorta a dungeon-crawl, I guess, but it feels very much like the similar sewer crawl in the Bogenhafn section of Warhammer's famous Enemy Within campaign, i.e. too small and focused to be what most people would think of as a "true" dungeon-crawl.

But other than that... it's OK. I'll add an update here later when I read the next interlude, "Thieves and Liars", and I'll have that as part of an updated version of this post later today. UPDATE: "Thieves and Liars" is a completely disconnected adventure. A corrupt city official keeps an expensive mistress, who he caught in flagrante delicto with another lover. The rake managed to escape, but her normal lover beat her until she told him who he was, and now there's a huge bounty out for him. The corrupt official wants to kill him, then kill her; she wants to escape with him, he just wants to escape, and potentially dangerous bounty hunters want the big haul. It's a little D&Dish in that he's a bard and she's a sorceress, so they've got some magic that they've used to charm their way into their gold-digging successes, but if you want to pad your run through with this, you certainly can. It also offers three mini-adventure ideas, although not with any details; all three are crammed into a single page. But in terms of what you could make of the three of them, they're probably all about as meaty as the interlude itself. They're a little more supernaturally; one involves a mystery of a murdered merman, one involves aquatic ghouls attacking the corpse barge heading to the crematorium, and one involves a succubus setting up shop in a whore house.

[...] There's a few details that I'd like to discuss on how I'd convert if I were to use. I'll probably do this section as a dot point list.

• There is no Temple of the Knowledge God. I know that this was deliberately vague so that you could slot in whatever god from your setting was most appropriate, but in Port Liure, this would just be the Academy. There may be a chapel and small chaplaincy associated with the university or library; kind of like a medieval monastery, and if I even need a religious (as opposed to academic) background for "Brother Egil", then he'll be a chaplain of the chapel of the Academy. But it's OK if it's just a scholar too.
• Snakes suck, and almost everyone thinks so, so they make good bad guys. Chris Pramas also picked them for this module series, no doubt, because of the whole Yig deal from Lovecraft, and the disguised serpent-people of Howard from stories like "The Shadow Kingdom." Pramas even designed Freeport to be built on the ancient ruins of the serpent kingdom Valossa is clearly based on the name Valusia, which the serpent people tried to take over in "The Shadow Kingdom." But just because snakemen make good bad guys doesn't mean that they're necessarily the best ones I could use. I kind of think my skaven-like ratmen would work very well for this module to replace the snakemen. I guess I could go either way; snakes or rats; everyone pretty hates both of them, so they've got bad guys written all over them, but wandering around in the sewers and stuff seems more ratlike than snakelike. Plus, switching to rats makes it feel a little less like Freeport, even if I'm technically running the Freeport modules.
• Thuron, or whatever I rename him to because that name doesn't fit my setting, will either 1) not actually be a disguised snakeman (or ratman), or if he is, he'll be killed. I kind of like that, actually, because then he reverts to his real form and nobody knows what to think about that. Was he opposing the other snakemen who attacked the "temple"? Was he helping them? What's going on with them? I like the mystery. And if the PCs go haring after this, it can develop into something interesting. Not that I need more hooks with things to do. Freeport is pretty chock full of things to do already.

Mentioned this already, but I want to either make up my own cult dedicated to my own new Great Old One analog, or use a more obscure one than Hastur (the Unspeakable One) and his Yellow Sign. I'm not great at creating names, so I'm unlikely to attempt it, but there are enough super obscure elements of the Mythos that I can easily coopt an existing name that has no real development and turn it into something interesting. Names that I currently like include Zo-Kalar, Gol-Goroth, Yogash the Ghoul, Ghoth the Burrower, and maybe even Sebek, who is also a real Egyptian god and a Robert Bloch created Mythos analog of such.

Madness

"Madness" has four parts listed, but two of them are actually quite similar and run together, and only are split by kind of fiat, and because it makes the four parts roughly equal in size that way. I see it as fundamentally a three part module, with a longer and mostly frustrating middle act. The first act is a soiree held by the corrupt Sea Lord to honor the PCs, but also to entrap them and frame them. It's mostly a roleplaying opportunity, where they get to wear nice things and hang out with important people in the palace, sniping at each other, getting information, and looking for clues. It's also meant to be tense, because by this point, the PCs already know that at least some of the people that they have to tolerate during this section are corrupt. This part of the module, and the way that it was written, reminds me strongly of a similar event in Warhammer's famous Enemy Within campaign, in the "Power Behind the Throne" module, and I can't believe that that wasn't deliberate. In fact, in many ways the Freeport Trilogy reminds me of the Enemy Within campaign, although clearly smaller in scope and more D&D-ish rather than embracing it's differences, as Warhammer did. Graeme Davis very explicitly said that Enemy Within was written with the directive of being a Call of Cthulhu scenario in a D&D-like fantasy setting, and it feels like it. The Freeport Trilogy, on the other hand, feels very much like a D&D scenario in D&D that pays some superficial lip service to Yog-Sothothery. Sometimes second-hand, as here where it's imitating the most famous Warhammer campaign explicitly. [...]

The next two parts are two connected and back to back dungeon crawls. The PCs are meant to infiltrate first a haunted semi-flooded cave on the coast where some pirate treasure is hidden, and which connects to the second; the old serpent temple, which of course is also haunted. Not only do I not like dungeon crawls at all, but I also don't like the sympathetic "friendly" ghost monsters of some of the snakes, I hate the riddles and traps and randomness of many of the monsters present, and I also hate the McGuffin angle; find the Yig McGuffin which will counter the Unspeakable One McGuffin that the bad guys are using like paper to the bad guy's rock. I don't mind the idea of caves on the shore of some cliffs that you have to watch the timing of because of the tides. That's a whole Pirates of the Caribbean (the original ride from the 60s) angle that's pretty cool, and is a cool environment. But there's way too much of it here, and they don't even focus on the sea caves and tides all that much, instead focusing on traps and crap. 

The final part is the confrontation with the Sea Lord and his cronies in his big, finished lighthouse where they're trying to summon Hastur (never named, but c'mon, it's obviously him). I don't like the "substitute the magical Hastur crystal for the healing Yig crystal angle", but a climactic confrontation in the lighthouse is, of course, inevitable. 

— (  †  ) —

So, how would I change this module to make it fit? To make it more overtly dark, Lovecraftian and all that, the monsters have to all be monstrous. There can't be any friendly, sympathetic or nice ones. Rather than an artifact from the evil serpent god who surprise! he isn't really all that evil that saves you from the other evil Lovecraftian god, I think a summoning ritual (not unlike the call deity spell from the d20 Call of Cthulhu book) can be used to summon a different alien monstrosity to drag the one that the Sea Lord summoned away from the earth to fight in the Far Realm. Or whatever. 

The massive confrontation therefore becomes a fight with two different summoning parties each trying to get their Elder Evil summoned. The cost will be tremendous; most of the PCs, the NPCs fighting, and maybe even many people in the city itself, even if shrouded in thick fog, will find the experience terrifying in the extreme, and will lose sanity like it's going out of style. The disruption to the day to day will be tremendous as cases of people going insane, and many of them not really recovering, will spike, and even people who do recover and suppress their memories of what happened, (and like I said, even if it's hidden in thick fog) it will be a devastating thing to the city, and there will almost certainly be lingering impacts for quite a long time to go in the campaign overall; NPCs that are suddenly gone, new ones that have resettled from the mainland or elsewhere, political and social upheaval, etc. 

If I do swap the serpent people and the Unspeakable One for my ratmen and .... the Horned Rat, or whatever equivalent I come up with, maybe I can still use the snake people as the alternate. PCs have to summon something more like Sertrous from the Elder Evils book or Ydersius from the Serpent's Skull adventure path. Or maybe it's just Dagon, who's already both Lovecraftian and D&Dish at the same time in equal measure. 

ChatGPT's idea of Dagon

I dunno; that's just a vague attempt to see how I could make it work. I do also like keeping the snake theme and maybe borrowing the signs and portents from the Sertrous chapter of Elder Evils to make the creepiness increase. Although I'm sure I could adapt those to rats too.

It's also worth noting that the Freeport Trilogy starts out for 1st level characters, but ends them around 7th or so level, if I remember correctly. In keeping with the way I run, my games will be more like a Lovecraftian game where lots of leveling up and getting powerful simply isn't a feature [...]. I would think that even if I adapt literally all of the Freeport adventures into a Corsair Coast campaign, the entirety of all of the adventures wouldn't get them past level 3-4 or so.

L. Sprague de Camp is a jerk

I've mentioned this before, but L. Sprague de Camp comes across as an insufferable know-it-all and gamma "smart boy." This is from the Wikipedia article on one of his series, the Pusadian Series:

Just as de Camp attempted to do for the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs with his "Krishna" stories, the Pusadian stories represent both a tribute to Howard's prehistoric "Hyborian Age" and an attempt to "get it right", reconstructing his model's concept logically, without what he regarded as Howard's anthropological and geological absurdities. Unlike Howard, de Camp brought a thorough knowledge of ancient history and geography to his project, along with a wealth of research on prior literary treatments of speculative prehistoric civilizations, as reflected in his definitive study Lost Continents (1954).

This is complete BS. Howard was extremely well-read and had as thorough a knowledge of ancient history and geography as de Camp was likely to have had. Before he—essentially—invented sword & sorcery, Howard wrote historical swashbuckling romance. Basically sword & sorcery in the real world—minus most of the sorcery. The reason he enjoyed sword & sorcery was because he was meticulous about making sure that he made no historical or geographical errors in his historical fiction, and it was both time consuming and kind of exhausting. Sword & sorcery meant he could handwave it and not have to do as much research and backchecking of details. But he was very serious about it, because he felt legitimately embarrassed to be found out in an error by a reader. Plus, he enjoyed ancient history and geography and mythology in its own right, and was quite well-read. He had both breadth and depth of historical and geographical knowledge that I simply don't believe that de Camp exceeded.

Besides, we're talking about stories about Atlantis here. It's pretty rich for de Camp to claim that his Atlantis stories are better than Howards' because he was convinced that he knew more about history and geography than Howard had twenty years earlier, without acknowledging that there's no reason to believe that there was a historical or geographic reality for Atlantis.

This is just pure and kind of obvious in retrospect gamma posturing, of the kind that we see all too much of on the internet. Attempting to position himself as some kind of "smarter than thou" know-it-all who's talents and knowledge aren't nearly as much as he personally esteems them as. De Camp can't complain about his career; he seems to have done well enough, but always been perpetually insecure and trying to push himself on everyone as some kind of expert. It's no accident that people still talk about Howard in glowing words nearly a hundred years after his death, while de Camp's works are largely forgotten only twenty five or so years after his. 

Gamma confirmed from even just this brief anecdote of his youth from his own Wikipedia page:

De Camp began his education at the Trinity School in New York, then spent ten years attending the Snyder School in North Carolina, a military-style institution. His stay at the Snyder School was an attempt by his parents, who were heavy-handed disciplinarians, to cure him of intellectual arrogance and lack of discipline. He was awkward and thin, an ineffective fighter, and suffered from bullying by his classmates. His experiences at the school taught him to develop a detached, analytical style considered cold by all but his closest friends, though he could, like his father, be disarming and funny in social situations. He would later recall these challenging childhood experiences in the semi-autobiographical story Judgment Day.

Although to be fair to de Camp; in two ways, at least, he was significantly more successful than Howard. He lived to be 92, died of old age, was married and had two children, and seems to have been happily married at that. Howard, of course, grew up with a bitter, sickly mother who clung to him, embittered him against his father, and was probably subject to mental health problems of is own; either because of his mother's smothering influence or just because people sometimes inherit those problems. Never married, and he committed suicide when his mother slipped into a coma from which she never awoke, he seems to have been a happy, healthy enough guy; athletic and charming, but clearly he had problems that de Camp did not.

Post Birthday

It was a pretty low-key birthday. I had to work all day, so obviously there was that most of the day. Talked to my folks at lunch. They're in Houston at a cancer hospital running some tests and getting few answers. They're in their 80s (my mom) and just shy of 80 (my dad) and his condition seems to be related to "vax" related anomalous and unexpected turbo cancer. So that's not exactly good news, but it's not worse news than we've already known for months either. It just was a minor update; more the case that I actually managed to catch them and talk to them briefly.

I heard from three of my four kids. Didn't even think about until later that my youngest didn't call. Strange. Of the boys in particular, he's the one I would have expected to think of it the most. Didn't get a lot; we spent a ton of money recently, and are being careful (at least, more careful) this year; I ordered some stuff that I needed for about $50, and we went out to eat for about $40. I'm certainly in a place financially where if I really need or want something, I usually just get it without thinking too much about it, so birthday and Christmas presents being a big deal is a thing of the past, but because my wife wasn't working the last three months, we're watching cash flow until she can start getting paychecks again. Luckily, her position will actually improve in the new year, so we'll be in good shape soon with regards to cash flow anyway. Sigh. Sadly, I'm not going to be in a position to retire early to a 800+ acre ranch in Wyoming. But for more "normal" retirement options, I'll probably be OK, at least when I get to that age. Which, even after my birthday is not really all that close still. I'll no doubt be working well into my mid-60s, and that's not coming for many more years.

 — ( † ) —

Anyway, as expected, I didn't play much SWTOR yesterday, and I haven't read much of anything either, except for my Old Testament audio while commuting in the morning (I save the evening commute for music). I did log in to get the daily login, and got a seasonal accomplishment done. Did some crafting. No big deal. Took a few screenshots, and left them on my other computer, so I can't even add them to this post, although maybe I'll do so later tonight.

I did notice that I was wrong on my crafting. While I'm pretty sure that I had made Phillippion a biotech crafter, which I think I had done, and that I'd maxed out Hutran Thanatos, my Wave 2 Operative as a backup biotech crafter, I thought that I was going to delete Phillippion and changed my mind so that I had two biotech crafters. However, I logged into Phillippion and checked out his crafting companions menu, and he was maxed out on slicing. There was a change that I had made and forgotten about long ago. I don't have a backup biotech after all; Hutran Thanatos has to just be my main for that craft. I redid my list to correct that, and look at who will be backups, and in order to have one primary and one backup for each of the six crafting skills and a primary and backup for the slicing deal-e-o, I would need to utilize literally every single one of my wave 1 and wave 2 characters.

Which is perfectly fine, of course, but I just need to do it. What I think that I'm going to do is stop waiting for them to go into semi-retirement to become crafters; they can craft now, and start slowly bulking up their abilities, plus they'll be able to transform slain enemies into crafting mats. Especially the droids for most enemies, but biotech can scan monsters and get gathered materials out of them too. So all of my wave 2 characters will need to drop by the fleet and pick up their crafting and two gathering skills. 

Here's the list of current crafters:

• J'ohhn - Cybertech (maxed)
• Graggory - Armormech (maxed)
• M'aar'k - Synthweaving (maxed)
• Lu'ukke - Armstech (maxed)
• M'at Thew - Artifice (maxed)
• Hutran Thanatos - Biotech (maxed)
• Phillip'pion - Slicing (maxed)
• Taul Kajak - Artifice backup (not maxed)
• Anstal Tane - Cybertech backup (not maxed)

And here are the characters who will go pick up skills and start working on them, effective tonight.

• Vant Galaide - Armstech backup (Investigation, Scavenging)
• Revecca Arden - Biotech backup (Diplomacy, Bioanalysis)
• Elemer Kell - Synthweaving backup (Archaeology, Underworld Trading)
• Phovos Maledict - Armormech backup (Scavenging, Underworld Trading)
• Embric Stane - Slicing backup

There are six crafting skills and a seventh odd-man-out gathering skill (slicing) so it takes seven characters to be able to do it all, and fourteen to have a backup for each. 

I don't really need a backup for synthweaving, because M'aar'k has already gone into and come out of the expansion storylines, and he has access to his companions again, plus the expansion companions, like Lana Beniko, etc. But y'know. Why not? Maybe I'll even eventually get around to a second backup so I'll have seven more characters engaged in crafting. That way, anyone can go through the expansions without me feeling like I don't have access to crafting while they do so.

I've also been busily working on biochem. I think my strategy of earning money through Advanced V-9 Seismic Grenades was OK, but not the big spender. It looks like Advanced Kyrprax Attack and Critical Adrenals Mk-2 are where the real money is at; those sell for $7M on the GTN. They're obviously a bit more work to unlock and even to simply make, though. I also don't know if I'm hanging on to legendary ember, or if I'll have to grind for some. But I'll try them out and see how it goes. Meanwhile, Johhn is still making and selling grenades. And I'll be in a position to sell some OEM soon too, which is usually pretty big money. I should see a bump in my credit savings in game shortly. 

 — ( † ) —

Finally, SWTOR always makes me think of Capes & Rayguns, formerly Space Opera X, formerly Ad Astra, my space opera setting. I'd like to maybe go back to my planetary data sheets and update them with new ChatGPT generated images. The following was one I mostly did for fun, rather than attempting to resemble any specific planet already defined, but maybe I can see about using it, or even generating a new planet to fit it. It's also interesting to see my evolution through the image process; looking at what I got and thinking about how to change it.

This is meant to be kind of Korriban-like, with a ship in place that's leading an archaeological expedition of sorts.

I'd never been given two options to choose from before by ChatGPT. Maybe it's a New Years feature or something. I decided to go with the lower one as a bit closer to what I was thinking of.

Then ChatGPT took me a little bit too literally and put what is obviously a transparent pastiche of the Millennium Falcon in place. 

This one was a better ship design for my purposes. Then I just added a few more details, and voilà! I was done!

Some lightning, a droid, and an archaeological dig site camp out there on the plain in front of the pyramids, and all set.

Happy Birthday to me

So far, I've heard from my mom, even though it's really early for her and they're literally in the hospital today (although going home, I think, later today) and a bunch of people at work. My wife didn't even wake up in time to see me this morning, lol. But I'll do birthday stuff with her later, and expect to hear from all four of my adult kids during the day. We're not much of a morning family.

Anyway, I'll log in to SWTOR for a moment to get the daily login reward, I think, but otherwise, I don't expect to do much of anything tonight necessarily other than go out to diner and talk to a bunch of folks on the phone. 

SWTOR has wreaked expected havoc on my reading schedule. I only have so much free time budget, after all, and if I'm spending a lot of it on SWTOR, I'm spending less of it on reading. That said, I've read a few chapters of the last Heirs of Ash book and the last Dark Waters book, so I should finish those two novels (in Kindle and physical form respectively) in the next week or two even so. Then, a focus on physical game books that I bring with me in my personal little backpack to work. I doubt I'll look at my gaming PDFs very much in the next couple of weeks, however, unless I need to read one of them for actual gaming.

UPDATE: Because it's hitting the media and elsewhere, let me be clear; Scott Adams did not convert to Christianity in the final hours of his life. Him saying, and I'm paraphrasing but not with the intend to deceive his intent, that he still doesn't believe, but he'll say the words just in case isn't any kind of conversion. And he was very clear that that was all that he was doing. That may have cracked open the door for a potential conversion still after this life. We'll see.

UPDATE 2: I'm going to ask the husband wife couple, Jared and Tanya, that I game with if they want to create characters to have ready to go as a backup as needed, and if given that we've been waiting better part of a week to confirm scheduling, if they want to go ahead and put something on the schedule for it, when I see them on Sunday.

"It's time to take some action, boys, it's time to follow me!" Or, well, it's time to do something, and I think I'm the one who cares the most. Those two are in another campaign, after all. They probably aren't as "hard up" for more gaming as I am. I'm only in their campaign, and it's a much more sporadic experience than I'd like. 

The guy who runs their other game just had his time free up a bit. I wonder if he'd be interested in joining too? It's a little harder given that it's literally the last minute backup strategy, but y'know.

Gaming this weekend

I left work early on Friday because I had been coming down with a major cold, or even flu or something, and felt miserable. I actually felt pretty miserable all weekend, but I still went to D&D on Saturday afternoon anyway, and I went to church on Sunday afternoon anyway. I stayed home yesterday from work, although I probably didn't really need to; yesterday was a major improvement on the weekend.

Anyway, it was an interesting session. No combat, hardly any rolls at all. My character went on a date, fer cryin' out loud, which is not really my normal way of playing D&D. But my friends' wife is running this one, so I guess it's a little more... feminine... than most games I've played. 

Not that it wasn't fun, it just wasn't really what I expected. I actually enjoyed it a lot with the exception of being just a little worried that I was hogging the spotlight too much. 

More to the point, the guy who hadn't confirmed did at the last minute, and he did show up. But I did make my pitch anyway to the other couple after he left. I think it's obvious that we'll have him and his adult son, who are the two relatively flaky ones, be flaky on occasion. The middle-aged dad is less flaky than his son, but both of them are always at risk of not showing up, sometimes with very little warning. Next time that happens, I'm going to text just my friend and his wife and see if they still want to meet anyway and I'll start up a smaller mini-campaign, one shot or even just an alternate campaign that will admittedly meet rather more infrequently. That said, I don't know that it needs to be more infrequently. Even without the last minute flakiness, it's difficult to get them on the schedule in the first place. 

They were on board with this. We didn't make any specific plans, but we did agree that this is a good plan. I'm going to have some stuff getting ready in my back pocket so that if this does happen when we are supposed to meet next, I can pull this out of my back pocket.

And I'm almost certainly going to go with the Cult of Undeath routine. Which means, I may need to pull the Carrion Crown read-through ahead, and actually read those rather shortly!

— ( † ) —

Other than that, I've played a bunch of Old Republic this weekend too. I finished Anstal Tane, my Second Wave Scoundrel, so he becomes the third Second Wave character to move into semi-retirement, i.e., I've finished the class story with him. Hutran Thanatos and Taul Kajak, coincidentally both Mirialan green people—one operative and one Jedi sentinel—are the other two. All three of them are working on becoming backup crafters too; Hutran is already a biochem crafter from when I thought I might delete Phillippion, and Taul is coming along nicely as a artifice crafter. Anstal already picked up, although just barely started, cybertech. 

The next second wave character to finish will be Vant Galaide. He's already max level, and only has three planets left to do. Since he's max level, I just do the class stories and skip everything else. Four hours or so of play will get him done, I think. I think I'll have Vant do armstech as a backup crafter. The next highest level characters are actual Third Wave characters; Mirabeau Tane the cyborg gunslinger trooper and Gael Heckett, the cyborg powertech smuggler are both in the sixties. Should I do them next, or should I let them "rest" and finish up some other second wave character? That's what I guess I need to decide.

Gaming tomorrow

I may well make my pitch tomorrow. We're supposed to play in the afternoon. One of the two flaky guys said he's out, the other one hasn't confirmed one way or another. I wouldn't be surprised if neither show. If that happens, or even if he does, I may hang around a few minutes and talk to the hosts, I'm going to pitch my "last minute backup campaign" proposal and see what they think. That way, we can have much more regular gaming, and if the flaky guys don't show, we've still got something else to do anyway. 

If I run a chopped up Carrion Crown, i.e. Cult of Undeath, I actually had someone make some great suggestions... on reddit, of all places. Sigh. Reddit is sometimes the worst, but it's also one of the few parts of the internet that isn't dead and made up of bots. 

Let me just copy and paste his suggestions, and then I'll annotate my comments alongside.

• Replace the original BBEG with Mierela Tsilda, the leader of the Night Harrows group (Rival Guide). This group is more suitable as main antagonists due to lore reasons. Don't know about this one. It's probably fine. I'll need to look her up and read it, though. I don't think I've read that book before. I'm at the very least renaming everyone, so lore reasons doesn't matter to me anyway. Looks like the Night Harrows are a villainous party of adventurers; an anti-PC group with undead theming. I dunno. 
• Introducing corruption rules (Adventure Horrors, Vile Corruption variant). Every adventure has a specific curse (the players may risk contracting depending on the adventure, due to the influence of certain locations and monsters), in the following order: Possessed, Promethean, Lycanthropy, Deep One, Vampirism and Lich. This seems more like mechanical gimmickry, and while I understand that mechanical gimmickry is kind of the direction Pathfinder has specifically always gone, I'm less interested in it than most. Plus, I'll be running it in 5e. Not that those curses can't probably port over as is, since the systems are less unlike than many would like to admit, but still. I don't know that I think that's really the kind of game I like to run where there's enough of a focus on mechanical gimmickry to make it worth doing.
• Professor Lorrimor is still alive at the beginning of the campaign. The players received a letter by the NPC, who wanted to invite them in his house to commemorate his friendship with them and, eventually, asking them a favor about a certain problem. This is a huge change in terms of making it feel less like Carrion Crown and more like a classic whodunit to some degree. I'll almost certainly do this. I don't know about an invitation to "commemorate his friendship" but him being alive rather than it starting with his funeral is a great idea.
• Using Murder's Mark module as introductive adventure, before The Haunting of Harrowstone, set in Ravengro. In this way the players can explore the town and put into practice their investigative skills. Professor Lorrimor is destined to die while the players are facing the villains of this adventure (he noticed strange activities around the abandoned prison and visited that place; here, he met the Night Harrows and these people killed him to cover their tracks). I'm not familiar with that module, but I do have a pdf copy of it, so I need to pull it ahead and read it and see if this is a good idea or not if I actually do this. It sounds like it works quite well not only for establishing the tone, but also for tying stuff together fairly well.
• Since Lorrimor didn't expected to die, there is no last will. Instead, his daughter Kendra will take the dangerous books her father kept and also say that her father mentioned "something strange" about the prison (in this way, she gave the players a trail to follow). Lots of people have wills without expecting necessarily to die. It's just good preparation. Plus, even without a will, inheritance law might be pretty well established and it might be a moot point anyway. The purpose of the will is to give the players themselves both a hook and a reason to stick around for a little while and do the first adventure. I don't know that this change is substantial or needed.
• In the second adventure, the Trial of the Beast, Kendra will follow the players to Lepidstadt in order to return these dangerous books at the University. However, once separated from the players, Kendra got involved into the heist of the antiquities department. She was injured and eventually knocked unconscious; Vrood chose to frame Kendra instead of killing her by leaving some (fake) incriminating evidence of her involvement with the "Beast". In this way, Kendra is arrested on charges of being the mastermind behind the Beast's activities; she is now in danger of being sentenced to death on the ground of mass hysteria and forged evidence. This is exactly the brilliant breakthrough I needed to solve the whole dilemma of "the beast isn't the real monster, white males are!" or whatever. In retrospect, it seems so obvious, but... hindsight is always 20/20. I didn't think of it, but once I had it recommended to me, it's obvious and essential.
• This is why Judge Daramid will ask help to the players. She was an old friend of the Lorrimor family and she also knew that the Beast is innocent, but her hands are tied by her duty of impartial judge: she is unable to take the law into her own hands to have the charges against Kendra and the Beast dropped. During this encounter, make sure that the players understand that Kendra and the Beast's fate are bound together — if they want to save Kendra, they must clear the Beast's reputation as well! No, the Beast isn't innocent. Probably isn't coherent or cognizant either. The Beast will be like Dean Allen Halsey from Lovecraft's story "Herbert West—Reanimator"; a former (and very dead) man of science who was resuscitated as a feral, cannibalistic Beast. I know that that story was a deliberate parody of Frankenstein, but honestly, I don't hold Frankenstein in quite the same high regard many others of us "genre fans" do. I dislike the core theme of the story that the "monster" may not be in fact as much a monster as the scientist who created him. Frankenstein, as many literary works from that era are, is a little too high on high concept and a little too light on tight plotting and well-written, page-turning structure. I can appreciate what it's trying to do, but I don't really enjoy it all that much, and I disagree with its fundamental premise.

In addition, I could do the Kastor Lieberung thing easily here; they roll into town and come across the massacre of the coach Kastor was on, just like in The Enemy Within. Not sure exactly how that will play out, but probably not much other than some unsettling social encounters with cultists until they go to Lepidstadt. Which, of course, is Mittermarkt in Cult of Undeath. I didn't change the names above.

"The Beast" is not innocent. I don't like that idea at all.

My intention also was to replace the Harrowstone with the haunted house from The Skinsaw Murders and work "Carrion Hill" in somewhere, perhaps in place of the Lovecraftian episode that we have. As I've said many times before, I don't really like to nail down plans very firmly in advance; just have a handwavy idea of where I think it'll likely go if the PCs don't do anything to change it. But because they always might, I want to be flexible. My campaign arcs are much less firm than anything Paizo writes. That said, they do tend to play out more or less as I plan. I'm pretty good at anticipating what PCs are likely to do. If my plans do change, it's often as much on me as it is on the players anyway.

But we'll see. First step is make the proposal. Then I can worry about actually figuring that campaign out. It's all just moot stuff until we actually agree to have a "backup" campaign going on in the background.

In other news, I've been borderline sick all week, so I haven't done as much as I planned to. A bit of Old Republic in the evenings, early to bed. My wife has also been sick, so at least she doesn't feel too left out. We watched a few shows, and hung around moving in slow motion and feeling kind of bad. Tonight, we're supposed to go out. If we feel up to it and not exhausted. Maybe we'll do it tomorrow instead, depending on how we feel. 

I also played SWTOR just a bit with my son-in-law the other day. He was interested in doing it again yesterday, but he didn't log on until kind of late, so we suspected it wasn't going to happen. Maybe we'll hook up on Korriban again briefly this weekend sometime.

2026 in gaming

Well, we're supposed to have our first session of the year on Saturday. Already one guy bowed out. I think I'm going to talk to the husband/wife team that have been running the game (husband was running when I started, got kind of burned out and let his wife take over while he took on a character) and see if the other two are going to be as flaky as they generally have been, should we have a plan B that we can do on short notice if the sessions fall apart like this? And this is where I think I'm going to offer to run.

I'm not sure what would be best to run, but I'm kind of thinking something like Cult of Undeath; my shortened and trimmed version of Carrion Crown, or possibly the Freeport Trilogy with the whole Kastor Lieberung situation from Enemy Within thrown in too. It'll be 5e, sadly, but that's what they play and what they know, and they've expressed no desire to move from that at all. Sometimes you've got to meet people where they are rather than where you wish that they were. 

That image was generated by ChatGPT. Man, does that summarize D&D in "current year" or what? girlbosses and animal people everywhere.

We'll see how it goes.

I also was texting on Telegram with my son-in-law yesterday, and he started playing a Sith Warrior in Old Republic. I decided to join him and group with him and go through some of his early story missions with my own Sith Warrior, Phovos Maledict. He's not super high level, only 35, but certainly high enough to breeze through anything on Korriban. That was fun too.

2026

What am I going to do in 2026 with regards to my hobbies, the on-topic topic for this blog? Probably lots of things, but I'm not going to set goals or resolutions, because I can't know what I'll want to be doing in a few weeks, much less through the whole year. I can predict pretty accurately, though, I suspect.

First off, we executed a successful big family holiday. I went back to my house in the upper Midwest where my son and his family are living, and where my wife was helping as the twins were born. Her task was mostly helping with the other kids, who are still quite little; three, four and five respectively, and my daughter-in-law mostly handled the babies. My son had very little paternity leave, so was mostly at work. My daughter and her family also live sorta nearby with their baby, and my other two younger sons and their wife and fiancé respectively all came home for Christmas. Although the youngest and his fiancé were here the shortest amount of time, We did at least have the better part of a full week with literally everybody in town, and then another week with mostly everyone still in town. My in-laws even blew through town briefly. And then my wife and I took our two cars and caravanned back home together. Our cars, due to the weather up north and the long drive, are super dirty and covered in road salt. One of my tasks in the next evening or two will be to take them both through the car wash and vacuum them out. Today, though, is grocery shopping, which is a more immediate need. Yesterday was unpacking, mostly. My wife was gone for three months, so she had lots of stuff to unpack. My trip was only two weeks, so mine was shorter. Of course, I had to both pack and unpack both cars with all of the stuff, and I'm not that young anymore. Taking twenty five or so heavy loads up and down the stairs from the basement to the car and then from the car into our rental here wore me out. In spite of that, I haven't really slept super well. So, this'll be a relatively slow week, but then I'll get into stuff shortly. 

Firstly, I don't intend to stop my reading plans. I'm in the middle of a novel, and I've got long lists of gaming books in particular to read, plus plenty of fiction and even non-fiction on my docket. I haven't done much of any of this for two weeks, and I ended up capping the year off without finishing anything new that I hadn't finished before I left town, so about 110 total books. Some of those "books" were 32 page modules, so that's not quite as impressive as it sounds, but that was only a few of them; the rest were all legitimate books. This is by far my biggest year since I started tracking my reading, but I suspect that 2026 will at least look similar, if maybe not quite explicitly as many titles. In particular, before the year is out I want to finish the Freeport Trawl, the first one I started. I'm hesitant to say that I'm going to finish any other of my trawls during the year, but I will certainly make progress in them. It's reasonable to hope that I get close to finishing the 3e Eberron and 3e Forgotten Realms trawls, as well as get close to finishing the 3e and Pathfinder 1e adventure paths. But reading actual Pathfinder setting books and physical game books will slow that down. For other books, I intend to read at least a dozen novels or anthologies as well, but that's just a guess, not a goal. As I finish reading some of these, I'll document my progress on my offline tracker, and discuss it here, on my online "dear diary."

Secondly, of course I'll keep gaming with my current group. In fact, our next session is this Saturday. I would like to talk to them, though, at least the two most reliable parts of the group, if they think that the other two less reliable are going to keep our frequency low if we can't increase our frequency by running an off-bi-weekly game for those of us who would like to game more but are "throttled" by the less reliable pair. This, honestly, may be my best play to actually run something this year. My second best play is to try and do something online with a few people that I know who are interested in gaming and who may have some free time, like my son-in-law. But we'll see how it goes. Again, this is less a goal and more just thinking about what I think is likely to happen in the new year. What is for sure is that I will at least continue playing in the campaign that I'm in, although we're lucky if we play once a month for about four hours, so it's not really a lot of gaming.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to plan my campaign 5x5s here on the blog. Maybe I'll be focused enough to actually finish them this year. 2025 was not a year where I made a lot of progress on that front. No pun intended.

Thirdly, my passion for the outdoors isn't limited to the American west; the Rockies, the high deserts, and the southwestern deserts, but it's certainly concentrated there. I don't know for sure what our vacation schedule will look like, but I'd like to at least have one hiking/site-seeing or backpacking trip to the area. I'll probably end up having a wedding out west in the summer, although whether it's early or late summer is still TBD, and I'll probably try and take advantage of the fact that I'm already there to take more time off and do it then. But where exactly I go and what exactly I do depends on, among other things, when the wedding ends up getting scheduled. If I'm there in late May or even early May, or early June, then that's quite different than if I'm there in late August or early September. Many of the mountains won't be available due to snow in May or June still, and even if the snowpack is low and they are available that early this year, the chances of it being really wet, boggy and swarming with mosquitos because of snowmelt is quite high. High priority targets are the Red Castle area of the Uintas, and the Lost Creek wilderness in southern Colorado, as well as the Mill Castle trail in the West Elks Wilderness of Colorado. I've been to the West Elks before, but not to the Mill Castles area, much to my chagrin. I've always wanted to get back there. If I can convince my wife to come along for at least part of it, I've also got different plans; she's not up for anything really very tough, and she's not interested in sleeping in a tent. She's up for drive up hikes and site-seeing, though. Maybe I can take her between Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Royal Gorge, and we can even see Mesa Verde. She's always wanted to see the latter in particular. I'm a little less impressed with Injun ruins, but I did get to spend a few hours there this last year, and I wouldn't mind seeing more. Mostly because I like the scenery, though. I prefer that to the ruins. Colorado is really an incredibly beautiful state, and always has been. I fell in love with the place as a teenager in the 80s, and I'm incredibly bitter that it's turning quite rapidly into the next California. Which is also a beautiful place that I'm bitter that it's been ruined by liberals.

As a brief political aside, I'm coming around to seeing liberals more and more as actual enemies. They're not just our neighbors who disagree with us on a few points of policy. Even the nicest, most naive liberals are guilty of the equivalent of criminal negligence at best, while the less nice, less naive are guilty of aiding and abetting some of the worst political actors in the world, promulgating the worst political ideology in the world. Even Islam, Nazism and Communism are less destructive than globalism, feminism and liberalism. Of course, there's no real legal liability of criminal negligence or aiding and abetting a political ideology, not matter how dangerous it is. But there is certainly ethical and moral liability, and in 2026, I'd like to see a continuation of social liability. You position yourself as an enemy of your people, your family, your heritage and your nation, and you should be considered an enemy.

Anyway, aside over, like I said, only one western hiking trip, and then early in 2027 we're going with some friends of ours to Argentina, where we'll see the Bariloche region. The Andes in summer isn't the same as the Rockies in summer, but then again, their summer is the dead of our winter, and they are impressive mountains, with lots of Swiss settlement, leading to Swiss architecture and stuff. It's a good alternative to Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Utah or Idaho, I guess. 

Also, I'd like to do some shorter trips closer to where I currently live, in eastern Tennessee, western Virginia, and the Carolinas. This progress will mostly not be logged here, but on my very quiet Lone Star Hiker blog instead, though, honestly. 

Fourthly, the two images below will probably foreshadow what I'm into again right now...

Hutran Thanatos in his "black ops" work gear.

Hutran Thanatos relaxing in his retirement gear.

Star Wars: The Old Republic. I'm back again, after I think nearly a year and a half of not touching it. I have a brief month-long subscription that I just started, and I've played just a bit. I'm going to be making a video shortly where I review all of the eight classes, and have backup footage playing on silent in the background while I talk and have a synthwave backing track playing. White Bat Audio would make sense, but I'll probably use Lazy Laser, Neon Odin and/or Xurious tracks, because that's been my go-to for most Old Republic videos I've made. I'll probably re-up the subscription again before I quit playing, and I'll even buy the same month-long deal if it's available still. Otherwise, I'll just get the standard non-recurring two-month deal.

I won't be recording any story playthroughs. I'm just getting footage here and there of some of the cut-scenes and walk-around outfit showcases. I can use them in the background for discussion videos (like swtorista does) or I can use them for outfit showcase videos, which I've made a small number of back in 2023.

Let me briefly note my characters. I have a page dedicated to this, but I don't think it's completely up to date. In fact, I know for sure that it is not.

First off, my retired characters. I keep them around because they are either 1) doing new expansion DLC stuff, 2) they're crafting people who make all of my gear when I need to craft stuff, 3) very useful when I feel like jumping into a flashpoint or doing conquest or seasons or whatever. (Speaking of which, I re-joined more than halfway through a season. Needless to say, I'm not going to bother trying to catch up; if I'm still playing when the next one rolls around, I'll do that instead.) Some of these old characters have funky names with apostrophes and stuff so I could get them to take. My strategy now is to add first and last name to get that uniqueness, but y'know. My first pass was a much more primitive version of the game, and if I remember correctly, it had strict character limits. I'm leaving out the apostrophes and other weirdness and just writing them like normal names, so they're either more correct than the game, or not technically correct—depending greatly on your point of view.

Retired characters

• Maark - The Jedi Guardian and most played single character, probably. Certainly he's gone farther through the expansion stories than anyone else. Not that I really even care much about the expansion stories anymore. But y'know; there's scenery to admire and daily areas and reputation tracks to do, etc. He also does my synthweaving.
• Graggory - literally my oldest character, a powertech hunter, and armormech crafter. I think I stopped playing his story somewhere on Makeb, but he still does a lot of events and other stuff, and I love his look still.
• Mat Thew - one of my least favorite character names, but I love the Sith Warrior two-bladed dude. He's also the guy who crafts my crystals and dyes—artifice, I think that crafting is called. I'm reluctant to take him into Knights of the Fallen Empire because I don't want to lose my companions, but that would be the next step for him, and he'd be the obvious character to do it next. 
• Luukke - my original smuggler, a gunslinger (all of these predate the decoupling of mechanics and story) and my gun crafter—armstech. 
• Johhn - My original agent (a sniper) and my cybertech. This means that he makes most of the stuff that brings in the cash, so he gets more use even now than any other character, although I think I'm still farting around on Makeb with him in story terms. I honestly kind of don't care anymore after finishing the original story, and those characters mostly go into semi-retirement. Only one character has played through all of the expansions. Where I really lose steam is right before the Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne. Losing all of your companions sucks, and I don't love the Odessen companion menu, so I tend to only push characters beyond that if I really want to play the Valkorian story again.
• Phillippion - my Jesse Ventura guy from Predator trooper. He also does the biotech crafting. Of my OG characters, he's probably the one I play around with the least, because the biotech isn't really all that useful. He's my only commando. Maybe that would be another option if I'm looking to add another character. 
• Actsion - my OG inquisitor assassin dude. Now deleted.
• Corinthion - my OG Jedi shadow dude. Now deleted. I might even have gotten these names backwards. Don't remember or care anymore.
• Galation - my second hunter, a pyrotech. More reluctantly but eventually deleted because he was superfluous and I wanted the slot for a new character. I now have more slots and don't care, so I wouldn't probably delete him if it happened again, but whatever. He looks a lot like Graggory, and I played him the same, and before I changed it, they even had the same combat spec. He really was pretty superfluous. Plus, he doesn't craft anything or anything like that. 
• Hutran Thanatos - part of my second wave of characters, a Mirialan operative. For this wave, I went with unexpected racial mix-ups on the classes and gave them actually good names, I think. For whatever reason, I think this is the first of the second wave that I finished. He's in semi-retirement and I still use him for stuff, but he's not a crafter, and I don't need him. I just like having representatives of all the classes. Not that I don't stuck operative on many tech classes as a secondary class, but I honestly don't think about the secondary class all that much anyway. Pictured in the screenshots above.
• Taul Kajak - another Mirialan (by coincidence) who's finished his story. A Jedi Sentinel who was part of my second wave. I was actually recording his story at one point, but forgot to hit record for a section of it and abandoned the recording. Since that was still important to me at the time, I started another Jedi Sentinel, but I kept Taul around, because he's pretty cool. Only these two of the second wave have actually completely finished their class stories. I've been quite slow. I do have several other characters who are max level but who haven't finished their stories, though, in the second wave of characters.

Still in play Second Wave characters

• Embric Stane - my first attempt at using the big bruiser body type as well as the mercenary class. I thought about deleting him several times, but decided to keep him anyway. I have another mercenary hunter instead that is more advanced. I don't even think about Embric very often, but I'll get around to finishing him one day.
• Phovos Maledict - my next Sith Warrior, a juggernaut. I like this character a lot, but my advancement through the story hasn't been all that fast, really. He's only 35th level. I'll play with him some while I'm subscribed again, and advance him a bit. 
• Vant Galaide - the mercenary bounty hunter who "replaced" Embric Stane as my iconic representative of that class. Fully leveled second wave character who is on Hoth, I think, in the story. I'd like to finish him and move him into semi-retirement while I'm still playing right now.
• Anstal Tane - a sith species scoundrel. Again, in the second wave, the most "weird" thing we could do was play an unusual race, not an unusual class with the stories. He's also fully leveled and pretty close to finishing his story. On Belsavis or Voss, I think. Since he's fully leveled, I've mostly just been playing the story missions not the planetary ones. I don't need to grind for XP, so I can move them pretty fast. Mostly, the planetary stories aren't as good as the class stories anyway. With a couple of exceptions, like maybe Tatooine.
• Revecca Arden - Sith inquisitor sorceress. She's sadly behind for a second wave character and I need to give her some love. She's on Balmorra and is level 39, IIRC. Her last name should be an obvious call-back to Flash Gordon.
• Elemer Kell - Darth Maul-looking Jedi Sentinel. Because I was playing him and Taul Kajak at the same time, well obviously one of them needed to get more attention than the other. Sorry, Elemer. He's level 42 and either on Taris or just finished it. He's the last (in this list) of the second wave of characters. The third wave, below, were launched after the game decoupled class story from mechanics, and almost all of them—actually, I think literally all of them—are mismatched in terms of using some other class's mechanics with their story.

Still in play Third Wave characters

• Mirabeau Tane - a gunslinger trooper. The trooper by story is more of a James Bond special agent if you will than he really is a soldier, so I prefer to play him like one. He's actually fairly advanced; I just finished Tatooine with him and he's level 63. One of my most advanced third wave characters, and I've been enjoying him more than I thought I would.
• Codon Veile - a chiss sniper trooper. Operating on the idea that from a story perspective, the trooper is really the mirror of the Imperial Agent, I thought making a character that's the iconic race and mechanics from old promotional material for the agent, but playing him as a trooper would be fun. He's not really very far in, though. Still on Coruscant, I think, and only level 35.
• Wulf Hengest - I wanted to play a vanguard bounty hunter, where his signature weapon was a bowcaster, and Wulf is the product of that. I could play him more, but he's moving along nicely, for a late comer third wave character, honestly.
• Haul Romund - a mercenary smuggler. Although the hunter and the trooper are often considered mirrors because of their mechanics and "expectation" that they're heavily armored, I think the smuggler and the hunter are better mirrors (not mechanically, obviously) because of similar armaments, and the concept of them being semi-neutral free agents and Old West gunfighters in space. I actually rarely make my hunters heavily armored, and treat them more like typical gunfighters. Haul is my first attempt at doing that. He's been a fun one to play. 
• Vash Galaide - my favorite agent, although I need to play him more and move him along a bit. He's actually a powertech mechanically, though, although as noted above, none of his outfits are heavily armored; he's got a mix of black ops sneaky gear, disguises, and uniforms.
• Gandalf Greyhame - I wasn't sure that I even wanted to play another consular, but I decided to give one a go. I made him look like an old man, as close to the Gandalf archetype as I could get, and I'm playing him as a sith sorcerer blasting folks with lightning all the time. 
• Beorn Hengest - another bounty hunter, this time using the Republic zabrak race and the sniper mechanics. I've only played him a very little bit. He's one of the newest characters. I think he's still on Hutta even. 
• Gael Heckett - my powertech smuggler. Another one of my favorites. I just finished Taris with him, and he's level 66. Probably the fastest moving of my third wave characters, although Mirabeau is nearly as high level.
• Saxon Hettar - a sith species agent using the gunslinger mechanics. One of my newest characters. Still on Hutta in his Red Blade guise. 
• Karr Tanus - my rattataki scoundrel playing the trooper story. Kind of an odd one, but I wanted to fill up on some of the class specs, so he's a different type of scoundrel than Anstal Tane. I haven't done jack squat with him yet except run around on Ord Mantell leveling up, so he's nearly as much at the beginning as Vandal below—the only reason he's not is that the trooper is the only class story that you can't escape out of the first cut-scene, start playing, and then come back and restart from the first cut-scene. I had to at least go through the first cut scene with him, but that's all I've done.
• Vandal Guent - my very newest character, and the lowest level, 18. I literally haven't even started the story with him yet. Although I did run around killing trash mobs and doing heroics so he could get a head start. I do that with all of my characters. He's a vanguard, because I wanted to try another combat spec for that class, doing the smuggler story. 

All of these characters are fairly old; there are a lot of cosmetic customization options that have been added to the game since I created them. I'm tempted to start a fourth wave of characters. But I've got a lot of other stories to finish playing before I should think about that. I may look for a few holes in my line-up in terms of mechanical specs that I don't have a character playing, but realistically, I could just get them on my secondary class load-out if I wanted to do that. I don't know what any of these fourth wave characters would be, though. And I have so many characters still to finish that it seems silly to do so. I probably won't until at least I finish some of my second wave stories and move those characters into semi-retirement. 

All of my characters have a sneaky option in their secondary class, so if I feel like skipping trash mobs I can just turn on stealth and go past them. But I honestly don't use that very often or even remember that I have it. Needless to say, I don't enjoy playing the sneaky characters as my main class all that well. Anstal Tane has, for some reason, been the one exception to that so far, and he's max level and honestly almost done with his story. Hutran Thanatos as an operative is even further along, and I liked him well enough I suppose. 

All that said, I do have a Capes & Rayguns blog dedicated to space opera like my own setting development, and Old Republic, which are tied because I often use concept and images from Old Republic to work on my setting. While I'm into Old Republic, I'll probably update this blog less frequently and that one more frequently as a consequence.