Ai is fun. But... the Future of 5x5 Fronts

I realized that I was having too much fun generating campaign images with AI. More to the point, I was spending too much effort generating and posting those images and less effort on any actual, significant development. I was pleased to have finally done the Cult of Undeath supercut, but also disappointed, honestly, that I hadn't done it months ago. I certainly could have, but I just didn't put the effort in to it. As a question of some discipline, I will no longer create posts that have no other purpose other than to show off some AI generated art that I've ginned up in the last couple of days. Even if they are settings or characters from Old Night, I don't need more than one or two images (mostly) per post, for visual engagement and guidance on the look, not just for its own sake without any other meaningful content. Rather, what I want to spend more time on is creating 5x5 Fronts. I've got two that are mostly done, or at least at a sufficiently detailed outline format that if I needed to run them, I could sit down with less than 24 hours to plan the first session or two and actually run them, and have a good idea of where the campaign would be going the entire time. (For what it's worth, I've run quite satisfying campaigns before where I had no idea where I was going and was making it up more or less on the fly, and that works just fine for me. But I do like to have a solid campaign outline nonetheless. If I change my mind and don't use everything the way I originally planned it, that's fine. It's still nice to have an idea of what I think is likely to happen.) 

A potential new iconic in the works...

In addition to the two that are done: DARKNESS IN THE HILL COUNTRY and CULT OF UNDEATH, I have another that's spelled out super high level, and another that I've done a lot of research for and am (more or less) ready to start working on: TERROR IN TIMISCHBURG and CURSE OF THE CORSAIR COAST, as well as a couple of others that are just concepts so far: MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES and ICY GRAVES OF HYPERBOREA. Hill Country is mostly a completely unique one, of my own invention, whereas Cult of Undeath was always based on the idea of adapting the Paizo adventure path Carrion Crown, although as it went along, it became much less and less like the adventure path, and now resembles it relatively little. I've had very little focus on these, which is why my progress has been very slow, but it certainly occurs to me... well, two things.

1) If I focus on one of these 5x5 fronts, it really shouldn't take me more than a few weeks to do one, honestly. Even going slowly, we're talking 6-8 weeks being plenty of time to write the five fronts with their five steps, creating the 5x5 matrix, and filling it out from just a sentence or two to a few paragraphs that's a sufficiently detailed outline that I could actually run the game if needed based on that, preparing more details one session at a time. If I'd just freaking been doing that, I'd have easily two or three dozen of these done instead of two and a a brief outline of a third. Of course, that's the actual writing, but.... well, see below.

2) I really like how turning Carrion Crown into Cult of Undeath worked, and I think that I could do that with other campaigns and adventure paths, i.e., reading through one and then taking some elements or themes out of it, but remixing them to such a degree that they hardly resemble the original anymore except in terms of themes and a few notable beats. Of course, if I use these adventure paths and campaigns as starting places for 5x5 Fronts, then I have to actually read the adventure path or campaigns first, and I've only systemically done a few of those (relatively speaking) so far. Of course, not every adventure path is created equal; some of them are way too meandering, with some good chapters but overall a weak theme, or one that maybe I'm less interested in, while others may have a good theme, but need to slot and adapt some completely different ideas in order to actually meet the theme. And some of them I'm just not really that interested in trying to do because they focus a lot of very specific D&Disms. The earliest adventure paths are like this: Shackled City, Age of Worms, Savage Tide, Rise of the Runelords, etc. Curse of the Crimson Throne is the first one that has a theme and overall arc that I think I could see myself actually being interested in. (Although there are individual modules or chapters or whatever in those that I think are absolutely excellent, and I've been looking for a way to integrate them into something that I would run for a long time, like "The Skinsaw Murders" from Runelords for instance, and some of the early adventures of Age of Worms or Savage Tide.)

Of course, there are now other competitors to the Paizo adventure path model, and WotC's own campaign books are arguably easier to use for someone like me because they don't over-detail, and they stay a little more focused on the theme... although I don't necessarily care for their themes as much, because again, so D&D. I actually think the second SPCM campaign with the unfortunately stupid name of Yig Snake Granddaddy is a good alternative too, as well as some other 3pp campaigns. In fact, the next one that I'm likely to develop beyond Terror in Timischburg is one that's a synthesis of all of the Freeport stuff that I've read kind of recently from Green Ronin, and Yig Snake will contribute to one a little further down the line. Which brings me neatly to...

So; what new 5x5 Fronts can I envision that I will want to do? I already think working on a synthesis of Yig Snake Granddaddy, the Sertrous chapter of Elder Evils and the Serpent's Skull adventure path, which I have already read, is a doable 5x5 Front and one that I have some interest in. SHADOW OF THE SERPENT GOD I'll call that one, and it'll start to eventually get the 5x5 Front treatment. I want a dark ancient Egyptian-themed one, but I've got stuff I need to read before I'm ready to do that. It'll be my first exploration of Porhomok, the red desert beyond the jungles of the Corsair Coast. THE SLEEPER BENEATH THE SANDS will be it's tentative title, although if it isn't something sleeping after all, maybe I'll change it. But c'mon. Of course it will be something horrible that sleeps beneath the sands. Would I do anything else? Something icy and set in Hyperborea is already on my radar, I've got the Icy Graves of Hyperborea established, but have no idea what material I'd use or what plot beats I'd hew to. I'd probably start with Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden and look for other wilderness themed adventures set in the ice to layer in and substitute out for elements of Rime that I'm not interested in. And there are a number of urban campaigns or at least adventure paths, starting with Curse of the Crimson Throne which I've already read (although it's possibly a bit less urban than you'd expect) and shortly I'll also have Council of Thieves, and lots of other modules, including much of the Freeport stuff or Enemy Within stuff that I don't end up using in Curse of the Corsair Coast could easily be used here too. I'll tentatively call that one DAEMONS OF THE GUTTER and put that on the plan.

OK, so what have I got in terms of 5x5 Fronts?

• Darkness in the Hill Country - a full 5x5 Front outline is already complete
• Cult of Undeath - a full 5x5 Front outline is already complete
• Terror in Timischburg - a brief executive summary-style 5x5 Front outline is already complete
• Curse of the Corsair Coast - no outline, but I've read a lot of source material, so I could make one quickly based on that material
• Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes - a concept is thought out, but no outline and no obvious source material to draw from yet another than a non-fantasy comedy movie.
• Icy Graves of Hyperborea - I have some small bit of source material identified and a concept, but not much yet. I'll need to trawl my titles for other potential materials to use. Maybe some Father Llymic stuff from Elder Evils can be worked in too and some "Mountains of Madness" material from Cthulhu.
• Shadow of the Serpent God - I've already read enough source material to draw from that I should be able to quickly create an outline. 
• Daemons of the Gutter - I've read some source material, but I have more available. Could probably start a draft of the outline right now.
• The Sleeper Beneath the Sands - I have to read source material that I already have first, so this is probably the one that will be among the farthest from being done.
• Secrets of the Blackness Beneath - set in an alternate dimension that's combination Plane of Shadow and Underdark, accessed as if it were the Underdark, but behaving in many ways like alternate worlds once you reach certain destinations.

There are, of course, many more that I could use, but these are the ones that I have at least an idea of where to go with them. I've highlighted the first two in green, because there's nothing really that I'm doing with them right now; the big outlines in supercut format are already done. What I want next is keep to the following milestones:

• By the end of August, I want to have brief outlines, like I currently do with Terror in Timischburg for Curse of the Corsair Coast, Shadow of the Serpent God and Daemons of the Gutter, at least. By mid-September, I want to have a supercut full outline for Terror in Timischburg based on the quick one that I already have. By the end of October, I can turn Corsair Coast, Serpent God and Daemons of the Gutter into supercut full outlines. 
• Also during this time frame, I want to identify which adventure paths and campaigns I need to read to support Icy Graves, Mind-Wizards, Sleeper, and Blackness Beneath.
• Identify two to three additional ones to add to the plan by end of October as well. I'm thinking in particular of some kind of exploration of some of the dark forests of the Three Realms+, and some kind of expedition to the Plateau of Leng, but I need to do a lot more work before I can even consider those still. 

Sadly, I didn't document all of the fonts that I used so recreating them might be more difficult than I'd like. Sigh. That's what I get for having literally hundreds of fonts, I guess.

UPDATE: Nope, figured it out. Daemons of the Gutter is the Blood font, Secrets of the Blackness Beneath is Wonder Raiders, Shadow of the Serpent God is Magna Carta, and The Sleeper Beneath the Sands is Scurlock. Sadly, I'm not 100% sure I know what that Icy Graves of Hyperborea font is, even though that's an old banner.

Bad Blogger

Sigh. I wish I had enough money to "soft retire" and then I'd do three things. Concurrently.

 - Overlanding and hiking trips, especially in the Rocky Mountains of (mostly) Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana in the summer, and to the deserts of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and even Wyoming in the shoulder seasons, and New Mexico, southern Arizona and West Texas in the winter. I'd make YouTube videos and blog posts about my adventures outdoors.

 - Create videos about gaming. Some general gaming news, but mostly talking about my setting. I'd also blog a lot more and a lot better. I'm whipping this out while multitasking on a meeting, but that's about all that I have the time or mental energy to do. Actually, a lot of these would overlap. I'm sure I'd do some videos from a studio/office room in my house, but what I'd like to do is talk about gaming from outside. If you're familiar with Jackson Crawford's Old Norse videos, it'd be kind of like that for most videos, if I could. Heck, I'd focus on utilizing the wilderness in my gaming, because that's kind of a thing for me. Maybe not focus, but I'd talk about it quite a bit, and how the place that I'm standing in for that video can be utilized/adapted to make your game session more interesting. Crawford dresses kind of like a cowboy. Maybe I'd dress kind of like a pirate to mix it up. At least sometimes, just for fun. The image below isn't really me, by the way, although it's (originally) based on a picture of me, run through AI several times until it doesn't look that much like me anymore in most respects.

 - Also, in an ideal world, I'd have another room in my house that would be my model railroad room, and I'd have that hobby that I always kind of wanted but never did anything with for the last four decades other than tinker a bit here and there. This one is, sadly, a little disconnected from my other two hobbies, which would be more tightly integrated, but the reality is that being outside inspires me to create models of the outside on the inside in miniature. 

Anyway, as if. If anyone wants to fund my desired lifestyle by giving me a few million dollars that I can invest and quit my terrible day job, you know where to reach me.

Polycrisis

I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of a "polycrisis" or not. If not, it's a pretty self-explanatory word, really. I heard it recently in the political commentary sphere, where it's being used to refer to the state of the current Democrat party. But as expected, it refers to a kind of perfect storm; multiple crises converging at the same time where the impact of the total is more than just the sum of the impacts of the individual crises. I kind of feel like that's what my life has been like the last few weeks. A family crisis of surprising magnitude. A short term financial crisis. Two separate work crises. I've been completely unable to even think much about my hobbies, much less accomplish anything useful. About a week or so ago, I did finish the d20 Freeport Companion, so I'll talk just a little bit about that before I forget the details.

I don't actually play d20 anymore, of course (or 3.5) but I could, as I've mentioned in some of my low fantasy posts recently. Because of that, and because of my additional more charitable feelings towards the system due to my rereading of much of it, I found the Companion as interesting to read this time as it was when I first read it nearly twenty years ago. (When it was new. I got it while it was still the d20 Freeport Companion, but once 4e launched in 2008 and the d20 license was canceled, it was renamed the 3rd Era Freeport Companion and the old d20 licensing image was replaced with an OGL Compatible unofficial alternative. That one is still available, I believe, on DrivethruRPG or the Green Ronin store. Albeit, in my opinion, at a pretty overblown price point. ~$15 for a pdf for a system that it's not clear how many people are even still using? ~$30 for a POD softcover? I mean, I know this was nearly twenty years ago now, but a book this size shouldn't have sold more for than $20 as a softbound book when it was new, I wouldn't think, and if PDF is half of that, that's a more reasonable.

Too much of the book is new feats, no skills or skill uses and new spells. That's pretty par for the course for this kind of product, but it takes up a lot of space and you're not likely to use much of it. There are, however, a number of pretty cool classes, including several new base classes; a corsair (like a swashbuckling duelist), a survivalist (a less supernatural and less Kung Fu monk. I had forgotten how big a deal Kung Fu was on TV, but it started in 1972 and ran through 1975, right when D&D was first being released. I watched it myself in syndication in either the late 70s or early 80s, so it was fresh to me when I discovered D&D just as it was to Gygax when he wrote it.) There's also a full 20-level assassin, and a few others... some of them are even quite good. There's a shorter (shorter than the earlier d20 Call of Cthulhu ones, which were replicated in Unearthed Arcana at least) madness/sanity ruleset, which I still think is probably a bit overblown, but which is mercifully shorter than what was otherwise in print. There's a bunch of monsters, almost all if not all (I didn't check) were from the Creatures of Freeport book. There's a brief discussion of why they didn't include naval combat rules, and referred to you one of three already otherwise in print at the time, and there's a decent little adventure. 

It's mostly interesting to you, unsurprisingly, if you play D&D 3.5, or d20 as the license called it. Which, of course, I did for many, many years (2000-2018 or so) but even though I probably wouldn't use it again, I still found it interesting to review and refresh myself on it. I'm still not sure exactly how I'll do the other Companions, but I'll at least skim them. I think I got them on some Humble Bundle or some other kind of deal years and years ago.

That ChatGPT image is a little too DEI for my taste, but what the heck. You get what you pay for.

Banners

Thinking about swapping my banner again. I get tired and want to switch it up every so often. I also just got a load of new fonts, so I'm trying some of them out. I'm also going to put the current banner; the three new options are similar.

The original up top is pretty good. I obviously faded the background more; (I didn't realize that when I was making the new ones) and used a different, and additionally faded glyphic font in the background. The Backbone font, which I used, is kind of a classic for Old Night now.

The next one is pretty cool, but probably too flowery for what I'm looking for. The third one is pretty good, but I think the fourth one, with the slight splattery effect, is probably my favorite of the bunch. I think maybe I need a more faded background so that the title itself stands out more, though. Maybe I'll rework it before adopting it. I'll think about it.

Here's another alternate using that same font. It has a bit more going on in the background, but it's also more faded, so it just looks like background noise a bit more.

I'm exhausted...

Everyone at work is running around with their hair on fire. It's exhausting. To make matters worse, the same thing is going on at home right now. And even church is adding to the flame. It's been this way for weeks, at least. More accurately it's approaching months status. I'm just exhausted. No wonder my reading is so down this year. Four books so far, and we're more than halfway through March. Last year by this time, I'd read at least twenty or thirty, I think (I must have to have topped one hundred in the year. If not technically, then by smoothing out the averages.)

I can't keep up this pace for long. 

Bad news; sometimes when I'm really stressed and frustrated, I end up becoming more argumentative in "real life." I'm trying to keep it under wraps as best I can, but sometimes I get in more stupid arguments online that I'd otherwise ignore when I'm in a bad mood.

Luckily, my wife stepped in and stayed on the line with one of our issues while I was doing work stuff and couldn't spend all that time on my phone. At least that will be one issue checked off.

UPDATE: My wife's been on the phone for over three hours, I think. It wasn't quite as easy as she assumed it'd be. But, she had the time to do that and I didn't. We'll see how she feels about stepping in to do it after I get back. I think she already thinks that I somehow could have done it on the weekend or the evening... y'know, after they were closed. I love her, but she doesn't always understand how things work because she usually doesn't do them, so in her mind it's much simpler than it actually is. UPDATE ADD-ON: She got it done. She was on the phone for five hours. She said I could have done that on evenings or weekends, but that's not true. They aren't open evenings or weekends, and until this morning, we didn't know that that's what would need to be done. I'm glad that that's done, but the way she's acting like she came in and did something that I couldn't do because I'm just not persistent enough rather than because I don't have time to do it honestly makes me even more tired. Sigh.

UPDATE 2: While I was in a meeting and the agenda wandered for a moment from my stuff, I got my crappy profile pic from LinkedIn, uploaded it to Grok and told it to make me a resume photo out of it. First it tried to change my greenish hazel eyes to brown, and I said that it was wrong and it gave me Fremen blue eyes. Luckily, I just resized it so you couldn't really tell and reuploaded it on LinkedIn in low resolution. It mostly looks like a good picture of me after all. I hate LinkedIn. It's the worst of the social medias, but it's also the one that I don't feel like I can get rid of as long as I'm working and potentially will be looking for another job again someday. Ugh. 

Back in the saddle

Well, last time I posted, I said I was rushing off to my parent's current home town due to my father's illness taking a turn for the worst. I think we all saw it coming, but less than twenty-four hours after I arrived, he passed away. Obviously, I've been kind of occupied lately, and haven't made any posts.

I think up until even a few weeks ago, we had hopes that he would make some kind of recovery, and there were treatments that he had scheduled, but in the end, maybe this was the best way for him, at least. At 79, he wasn't young, but wasn't too old, although he did outlive his younger sister by a few years and is survived by both his older brother and sister, and of course, my mother, who now threatens to live for another twenty years, since she's on her own now. She turns 81 later this year. Another twenty years would be... well, beating the odds, let's just say. Luckily, I work at a place where my team jumped in to take care of stuff without me, and they aren't even immediately bombarding me with stuff now that I'm back. I've got over 900 emails still to read (and I've already gotten rid of quite a few—over 350) so I won't have my head above water for several days, if I even get to that point at all this week. 

I spent four days of business travel, was home for less than 24 hours before heading out of town for the weekend, and then was back less than 48 hours before heading out of town for my dad's death and funeral, which ended up being nearly another two weeks. I burned four days of vacation and my week allotment of bereavement leave. But luckily, I have enough seniority that I still have four weeks of unscheduled vacation left for the year even after the stuff that I've already done and just had to do. Another week I should have already scheduled for a vacation at the end of this month I went ahead and put in. I'll also need time off in late June for my youngest son's wedding out of state, and I'll probably burn some time at the time to go hiking in the Rockies since I'll be nearby. If the snow situation is good at the June/July crossover, I may go to Red Castle in the Uintas. That may be early for such a high mountain range, but so far at least, the snow situation has been extremely lower than average, and the expectation is that without significant changes in the next little while, the high country snowpack will be lower and will be gone sooner than on average. Normally, I'd prefer that hike for a late July or even August time frame. I think I might be able to get it done early this year, of all years, which is convenient.

If not, the Lost Creek Wilderness in Colorado is my backup plan. It's a bit lower and tends to be snow free earlier even in general. I'll probably have a third backup just in case that one's not good too, though. You never know, especially a couple of months or more in advance. A third backup isn't a bad idea.

My AI alter-ego who looks sorta like me and is a good stand-in actually looks pretty good in those two environments, which ChatGPT can replicate fairly accurately by scraping images online of those places. Although curiously, Red Castle looks a little underwhelming in that image compared to most that I've seen. I guess I'll see when I actually go there what it's really like. Also, although I like the look of a walking stick, I don't actually hike with one. That's just an affectation of mine for the AI images.

Other than that, I haven't read as much as I hoped while traveling, I haven't played as much SWTOR as much as I'd hoped because of so much travel, and my blogging has been pretty vacuous fluff for a couple of months or more, even by my already pretty weak standards. 

However, one thing that I did do while traveling was to watch/listen to some of my old YouTube videos to remind myself of where I was a year or so ago on gaming. I would like to at least finish the racial Deep Dives in the next few weeks or a month or so. I have a few left to do, and many of them are more than one race dumped together, i.e., the Elementalists are really four races, the Expansion races are several races, the High Fantasy races are several races, etc. And the human one is extraordinarily complicated, of course, as well.

Doing so will, however, get me back in the saddle when it comes to game setting development. Some of those are slight modifications to existing blog posts, but some of them I'll need to write from scratch.

Now I need to finish reading the book that I started, Write Great AI Fiction by J. W. Riceman (i.e., John del Arroz) and get a pro subscription to Sudowrite or something, and see where it goes. I'm also almost done (finally!) with Monster Manual II, and I'm getting closer to finishing Rise of the Seventh Moon, and I also started reading Cults of Freeport and should finish that pretty fast. Keeping the Trawls moving, slowly but surely. I need to finish Curse of the Crimson Throne (I'm about halfway through) before I forget what was going on when I last read the last portion of it, a few months ago now. I also have a bunch of unpacking to do tonight, so I may not get much done with SWTOR, but I'd like to do one more weeks worth of Heroics with the "Just Started" characters, at least. That's probably the only thing that I'd worry about for now, though. That's not insignificant. Technically, I'm trying to do the Tython Heroic every week with Gãndalf Greyhame, the three Ord Mantell Heroics each with Kenth Odon, Vandal Guent and Karr Tanus, the four Hutta Heroics each with Iakar Kodo and Jado Vikunn and the two Korriban Heroics with Goth Severax. That's twenty missions, and some of them are not really all that fast. That'll keep me busy for at least an hour... if I can spare that much time. 

And one more ChatGPT conversion of some SWTOR screenshots into a character sketch. Anstal Tane, my "space biker" Scoundrel character. One that I'd love to adapt somehow to Capes & Rayguns, even though Psarians aren't normally a "PC race" that I'd give much thought to.

Post weekend update

Well, I was home for literally less than 24 hours before leaving town again to spend a whirlwind weekend at my daughter's house, celebrating her son's 1st birthday with her, her husband, my wife, and my other son and his family and kids who lives nearby. It was fun, but... whirlwind. On top of that, my dad is not expected to recover. The whole "recover and then do another procedure in Houston" is no longer the plan; he's now basically going to go on hospice and linger... for a few weeks, and then he's done. At this point, he's ready to go, honestly, and my mom has accepted it too. My wife has been telling me for a few months that I needed to be prepared for this, and I agreed, but didn't really think about it, because that wasn't "the plan." However, he's having cascade failures of multiple systems at this point. So, back out of town again shortly; I'll spend all of next week at their house, seeing them before he's gone, and helping my mom out. Not sure what's on the agenda; but there's a long list, including buying a cemetery plot. I think my brother will probably get that done before I get into town, but we'll see what still remains on the list. If all I do is spend a week sitting with them and talking, well... that's not the worst thing either. But I think that there will still be plenty to do. My one brother actually does financial planning professionally, so he's the executor, and is working on their taxes, etc. so I don't need to do that, at last. I think that they're hoping to buy the plot before I get there, but there's plenty of other things to do.

Anyway, I didn't really expect that complication, although I probably should have. I kind of did in the back of my mind, but in the front of my mind, I hadn't really thought too much about it. 

Meanwhile, the paperwork fiasco that is my mortgage refinance, which is struggling because I don't actually live in my house right now; I'm kinda sorta relocated, but not really. I haven't sold my house, because my son is still living in it, so we're renting here locally, and my son is paying our house payment to us. That's been an additional level of stress on top of everything else going on.

So, I'll probably have to go back again soon for a funeral. I also have my youngest son's wedding later this year. My wife is trying to take us to Epic Universe. But what I really want to do is just get away and be outside. Preferably in the West where the scenery is beautiful and the solitude is for real. 

My son will be getting married in late June in Utah. I'm going to keep an eye on the snow and temperature situation, and see where I can go while I'm up there—it might be too early for high mountains, and too late for nice temps in the desert. Or maybe I can do either. Or both. Depends on the year, I guess. I have more time off available to use than my wife, so I'll probably spend an extra week after she goes home to hike and site-see. I need it. I need to decompress. I think that's why I've been so into SWTOR instead of reading; it's more decompressing to just play a relatively mindless video game than to read. 

Again, that isn't me. That's an AI generated model of someone who meets my description, but who actually looks like someone else that ChatGPT created. But it's pretty darn close except for details of the face. I like to hike in bucket hats too.

At some point soon, though, I have to think that things will settle down. Work won't be one emergency after another forever. My dad will go the way of all the earth, and life will have to go on, as it does. The refinance will be finished, and my wife will stop stressing so much about cash flow. One thing after another. When it does, I want to start doing some of the hobby things that I wanted to do last year but didn't get around to, like some specific YouTube videos I wanted to make. I want to slow down on SWTOR (although I'll probably hang around long enough to do another Season first) and get back to reading. I want to stop traveling to Mexico. Mexico is a dump, dirty country with a dysfunctional and corrupt culture and terrible weather. And the food isn't as great as people make it out to be; I get much better "Mexican" food on the Texas side of the border, and I always have. I look forward to not having to have any aspect of Hispanic culture other than Tex-Mex tacos, burritos and fajitas shoved in my face ever again. I don't want to keep going to Mexico. I don't want to keep running into Mexicans in my country, or other Third World Hispanic peasants. I wish that I could retire early to a ranch in the country in Wyoming. I'd even be happy doing what my wife wants to do instead; retiring early to a house or condo on the beach in Destin or Pensacola Beach. I wouldn't like that as much as Wyoming, but I could live with it.

And I want to get my trawl reads going again. And my putative game running. The "flaky" guys have actually been better lately, so that hasn't come back up too much. 

UPDATE: Although I must say that if our conflict with Mexico continues and we end up picking up more territory like we did after the Mexican-American War, I'd certainly go visit Copper Canyon on vacation when the weather is nice. But I wouldn't want to pick up any part of northern Mexico as long as its still full of Mexicans. I think we've confirmed through many years of experimentation that they don't really integrate well with Americans, and they need their own country just like we need ours.

UPDATE 2: Latest news is that my flight plans might already be too late; he may not last the week, so if I fly out on Saturday, it could be after the fact. Talking about changing the date and possibly leaving tomorrow.

Well...

What a terrible week. Not only has the work trip been quite frustrating, but it's not just work; I'm trying to refinance my house with the lower interest rates now in play, and there's been snags, and my assignment at church has had someone who's really anxious and pressing on something that she thinks is super urgent and needs immediate attention even though I'm out of town, and my dad's health has gone from bad to considerably worse over the last few months, accelerated even more in the last few weeks. I'll probably have to take some time to my folks house and help my mom out with him. And, who knows? At his age, these compounding health issues simply are not a great sign. His younger sister passed away a couple of years ago; it might be his time this year too, unless he can rebound shortly. 

So, my plans to have a semi-relaxing work trip didn't work out. When I wasn't frantically texting or calling people in my off time, I was pretty drained, and just kind of sat and vegged with my phone; either listening to music, blowing through YouTube videos that I was only semi-interested in, or otherwise doing things that required little to no brain power or emotional investment. I did not read anything other than a couple of chapters of Rise of the Seventh Moon. I'm still a little bit shy of halfway. Which is easy to tell, because I'm reading it on my Kindle app on my phone. 46% right now. Maybe I'll finish that with my additional personal travel that I'm doing tonight and this weekend in general. Sigh. I'll take my stuff if I go to my folks house too; I won't be busy literally the entire time, of course.

The image is ChatGPT generated, of course, but it's a reasonably accurate facsimile. Maybe he's a little better looking than me, and maybe just a little bit grayer. (Or maybe not.) But otherwise, that's pretty close. Other than that I don't wear dress shirts like that very often, especially when sitting in a hotel room by myself. 

Anyway, yeah—sometimes life sucks, and sometimes the suckage lingers for a while. Don't get me wrong; things could be worse. But I've mostly just been very busy, very stressed, and very frustrated by things, and haven't had an avenue to "come down" and decompress very well. I think that's part of the reason I've embraced SWTOR so much lately; it's a pretty brainless activity that accomplishes that. Without it, my more aggressive reading plans ended up not being the best—they required more mental horsepower than I had left at the end of the day. 

I do need to mark my completed book in my tracker, but with only one complete, that's not super urgent. I just don't want to forget it. Although maybe I don't need to worry so much about tracking my reading. I've only done that for the last four years, and I was reading just fine before that. I did find that tracking my reading ended up encouraging me to read more, but even that wasn't necessarily consistent. 2024 wasn't a good year for reading, for instance, even though it was a good year for tracking what relatively little I read. 

Anyway, it's nice to make plans, even for something as frivolous as how to spend my free time while out of town on a business trip, but making plans is no guarantee of keeping plans. I don't know if this is literally true, and Google's seach AI seems to suggest "sorta" but I'm feeling it today.

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.

Some pictures

I don't do Friday Art Attacks very often anymore (although I should!) but here's a few images. I had downloaded them while taking a break at work, but I don't really want them on my work laptop, so I'm posting them online. Many of them I generated through ChatGTP. But not all.

A recent Eberron picture. Meant to be, we think, the city of Wroat. Because why not? It's got a moat. And a boat. Probably at least one goat.

Weird things washing up on shore in the mist.

Ghostly pirate ships and fall colors. Believe it or not, Colonial Americans made up more pirates than we're often told about, so why not ghost pirate ships off the coast of New England?

Some guy took this at a work cost event. I'm the fat guy with the beak nose on the right. I've been meaning to send this picture "home" for months and haven't gotten around to it until now.

Surprise visitor

Had a surprise visitor last night. My son-in-law does IT deployment for a very major nationwide (and beyond) company, and often has to travel. He had spent much of the week about three hours away from us to the east, but had a flight to catch about an hour or so to the west of us today. Because the IT deployment is a pretty chancy thing, and he often waits a long time for stuff to be available, and then can get work done quickly, he often spends more time on the road than he strictly speaking needs to. Yesterday as I was wrapping up work, he mentioned that he was done with everything he needed to do on site, and other than have a batch run, which he could do remotely, he was done with the deployment, so wondered if I wanted to catch dinner with him, since he had nothing else to do and doesn't mind driving. I actually invited him to stay at our house, which would cut a good 5-6 hours of driving total out, plus our guest bed is almost certainly more comfortable than a hotel bed, and we got to hang out last night, and get one of our personal favorites, Red Robin and their new A1 Steakhouse burger. Because he was able to expense dinner, he also sprung for an extra appetizer; the onion ring tower, even though it made dinner ... er... more than we're used to eating a little bit. I don't usually spring for appetizers, because I'm usually not hungry enough to eat them along with the regular meal anyway. And if I was still hungry, I'd just have gotten an extra helping of their bottomless fries anyway, which needless to say, I was not hungry enough to do. 

Anyway, it was fun to see him, and we had a good time. My son-in-law and I get along quite well because we have similar personalities in many ways and lots of common interests. Among them, are roleplaying games. And hiking/camping. (And the outdoors, especially in the American west in particular.) Classic geek-themed pop culture (although he's a Dr. Who fan—that's always been way too cringe for me.) Etc. Plus, he's a great guy generally, and the father of one (so far) of my grandchildren, so I can't complain. 

Not that I would, even if I could. It did obviously put my binge watching of Wednesday behind, but I've got all weekend to do that, which is much more time than I need, so I'm not feeling like I'm out anything. The break for an actually pleasant social interaction, unlike all of the crap going on at work lately, was welcome. Only one thing that it inadvertently caused me to miss; I was going to email the material I'm going to run in my one-shot on Thursday to myself to print off so I could have printed copies of it at the table, and I forgot to. I can still do it next week, but today was the perfect day to have done it; quieter and less busy, I suspect, and less busy at the printer too. But I suspect next week we'll continue to see slowdowns here in the office as people who haven't spent their time off for the year are forced to do so so as not to lose it at year end. Man, I cannot wait to get to that point at the end of next week myself. November and December have been miserable for work this year. Not that things'll be instantly better in the new year, but there are certain things that will necessarily make them better than they have been, at least. Next weekend, and I'm not sure if it'll be Saturday or Sunday yet, I'll make the drive back to my old house where the family will be waiting, and we'll have the two week Christmas break. Merry Christmas, in advance! I probably won't post during that entire time. I would like to have time to make a quick report of my one-shot before I go, though.

Work, meanwhile, continues to get worse just when I thought it's already at rock bottom. I can't believe what's going on. How incredibly miserable. 

RPGs and Time

Yesterday, as I pointed it, it occurred to me that 2026 is an interesting year in the history of RPGs. And that hinges on the fact that 2000 was an interesting year. 2000 was the year that the first edition of D&D that was developed by WotC (instead of TSR) was sold. It was the advent of the Open Gaming concept, the OGL, and the huge wave of third party publishers. It was the end of D&D systems that were all broadly compatible with each other (as OD&D, BD&D, B/X, RC, BECMI, AD&D 1e and 2e had all been.) Even today, it's kind of seen as the hinge where "old" gaming transitions to "modern" gaming; although that's usually a perspective promoted by people who dislike modern gaming. I'm not sure that 5e players necessarily think that. Or, for that matter, players of games other than D&D; games like Call of Cthulhu and other BRP based games have had only minor updates to the mechanics since their inception in the late 70s and early 80s. But given the preponderance of D&D and d20, other than making that caveat up front, I can now proceed to ignore it for purposes of the rest of this post.

Personally, it's also when I got back in to gaming and D&D specifically. I'd just finished grad school and started my "real" job, and had enough money to buy a lot of books in the 00s, and I did. My collection of 3e related and derivative stuff is still quite large, and I still enjoy it even today. I had already gotten back into RPGs in the 90s, but I was playing old out of print Top Secret and buying some of the World of Darkness stuff. And "playing" is generous; mostly I was buying and reading, but too busy to play; I was after all working full time, going to grad school, and had two small children. After moving for work and the release of d20, I actually started playing again much more regularly than I ever had been previously. 

But 2000 and the release of d20, and D&D 3e was a major watershed moment both for my own personal investment in the hobby as well as a clear dividing line between what came before and after in the hobby at large. Which is why it's so interesting to me that sometime in 2026 we'll hit the point where 2000 is the midpoint of the hobby; it will have been as long since 2000 and the "OGL Revolution" as it was between the inception of the hobby with the publishing of the first edition of OD&D and 2000 itself. That's a huge deal. I don't feel like the magnitude of changes in the first decade and a half or so of the hobby has been anything at all like it's been since, with the exception of 2000. There was a brief flourishing of new ideas in the wake of the OGL, but the pace of innovation has certainly been more staid in general for some time now, and people generally "seem" to think of 3e, 4e and 5e has similar in many ways in their thrust. At least people who don't typically play those systems anymore think that.

Pre-3e D&D, like I said, went through many versions, but they are all quite similar to each other, and were broadly compatible. You could say that they were more like iterative minor details and tweaks to the same system rather than calling them all separate versions of the same game, and you'd be pretty accurate, all things considered. But 3e lasted quite a while, depending on how you count it. Technically, 3e was replaced by 4e in 2008. But Paizo (and many others) continued to make 3e compatible product for some time; they issued four adventure paths, which means two years worth. And then they released the Pathfinder game in 2009; nine years after the release of 3e. Pathfinder made some updates to the system, but it was still "broadly compatible" with 3e and 3.5, and can be seen as another iteration of the same system. It lasted until it was replaced by the more radical remodeling of Pathfinder 2e in later 2019, so it essentially added an additional 11 years to the lifecycle of 3e, making it last almost twenty years. Not quite as long as the 1974-2000 period with interchangeable versions of the game, but nearly so. 

And for that matter, after the radical remodeling WotC did itself to D&D with 4e, 5e came back and feels like a streamlining and major refreshing of 3e. I don't think I'd go so far as to say that it's broadly compatible in the same way that B/X was to AD&D, or that 3e was to 3.5 and Pathfinder, but at the same time, it is still remarkably and notably quite similar again. 

In any case, after the four 3.5 adventure paths (two of which were later updated and combined in omnibus format for Pathfinder) there were twenty Pathfinder 1e adventure paths. At one volume a month, and six issue arcs for each path, that means two adventure paths a year. Combining 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e, that means twelve years of adventure paths. I do have a problem with adventure paths in some ways, and I think the one volume 5e campaign books is a better model (certainly that's true for the way I play, where a lot of the details and stats aren't going to matter to me). That said, as I was deciding which trawl to pursue last night, I started Rise of the Runelords #1: Burnt Offerings and read about a third of it last night. I do still need to read the last part of Ghoul Island, but I like leapfrogging rather than being stuck in a single campaign for a long period. My attention span is, probably, not very good.

UPDATE: I did finish Homeland but rather than immediately picking up Exile, I went for Ghouls of the Miskatonic instead, the first of the Dark Waters trilogy. I'll leapfrog those two trilogies, so after Ghouls will be Exile, then back to Dark Water 2 (Bones of the Yopasi) and so on until both trilogies are done. Once both are done, I'll go to the James Silke Horned Helmet quadrilogy, which I'll leapfrog with Steven Savile's Vampire Wars trilogy. I probably don't need to think too far past that; that's a dozen novels ahead still. For my game books trawls, I'll be leapfrogging between more than two streams; I should finish Burnt Offerings today, then I'll read the last Ghoul Island book, then back to the Bleeding Edge subseries within the Freeport trawl before going back to book two of Rise of the Runelords, the first book of the next SPCM Saga (Yig, I think?), etc.

The Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path begins here, in the small coastal town of Sandpoint. Five years after a tragic fire and spate of brutal murders, the people of Sandpoint eagerly anticipate the Swallowtail Festival to commemorate the consecration of the town's new temple. At the height of the ceremony, disaster strikes!

In the days that follow, a sinister shadow settles over Sandpoint. Rumors of goblin armies and wrathful monsters in forgotten ruins have set the populace on edge. As Sandpoint's newest heroes, the PCs must deal with treachery, goblins, and the rising threat of a forgotten empire whose cruel and despotic rulers might not be as dead as history records.

Exit 23

I volunteered to run a Halloween-themed one-shot for my gaming group, or at least for the host of my gaming group and maybe a slightly different crowd, depending on availability, and we're looking at actually doing it on Friday, Halloween evening.

This is a group that, as far as I know, has only played 4e and 5e. I thought it was a great opportunity to introduce them to something new, as a one-shot, because hey, the cost is low, and if it's not what they want to play ongoing, that's OK, they're not committed to it. I thought about going really radical and doing Dread, the game that uses a Jenga tower instead of dice to resolve actions, but I decided that that was too much. I'll probably whip up a few pre-gens using a very slightly modified version of Old Night (which I prefer to typing Shadow of Old Night all the time) to a modern setting, and then run "Exit 23", or a slightly bulked up version of it anyway. "Exit 23" is the small adventure that was included in original Dark•Matter setting book, first published in December 1999. 

Quick history aside. Wizard of the Coast bought TSR in 1997, and continued to publish material for it, especially in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2e line, although the schedule was minimized, and they went to work pretty quickly on revamping D&D, relaunching it, rebranding it even, as 3e, which happened in August and into the fall of 2000. However, TSR had also been working on a science fiction game, Alternity, which was released in 1998, delayed slightly from its 1997 schedule and quick play preview due to the acquisition of TSR by WotC. Alternity was probably more like D&D than prior TSR science fiction non-D&D games, like Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Top Secret, etc. had been, and it was meant, I presume, to be the second pillar of RPGs alongside D&D, and be able to support anything that wasn't fantasy. It didn't get a ton of rules support, about half a dozen products or so, and it officially had four settings released for it (as well as kinda sorta a Sliders mimicking setting in the book Tangents. Which wasn't really a setting, but kind of was, and was focused on alternate realities/dimensions and the ability to go back and forth between them.)

It also had four official settings, each of which had some material beyond just the setting book published for it. The first was Star*Drive (the asterisk is usually how it was officially written) which was a pretty standard space opera setting not terribly unlike that of Traveller, TSR's own earlier Star Frontiers, or Star Trek, etc. It also got a Gamma World re-release for this rule-set, and a licensed StarCraft game, based on the wildly popular (during the 90s) Blizzard computer RTS game of the same name. And, of course, it got the Dark•Matter release; a setting, some adventures, even some novels. (Again, the stylized way of writing it with the • is pretty typical, even if it requires an awkward keystroke to pull off.) Dark•Matter was heavily influenced by the popularity of The X-Files throughout the 90s, which was still going strong at the time of its release. I'm not 100% sure that that's what most people considered "science fiction" not taking place in any setting more exotic than the normal real world—just with exotic stuff rolled into it, like The X-Files did. 

The X-Files was really incredibly well-known and well-regarded in the 90s and early 00s, though. It was an important cultural touchstone too, because it highlighted the distrust that people had developed of the government. Although obviously less serious, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was another big "indie" hit during the same period, that explored similar themes, except in a high school light-hearted way compared to The X-Files. Dark•Matter was hardly unique; during that period, we also got games like Conspiracy X (Unisystem; same system as the Buffy RPG), Delta Green (a kind of Cthulhu-themed X-Files for Call of Cthulhu; has since become its own game), Bureau 13 (which actually predates The X-Files by a few months, and is obviously somewhat sillier, or at least it looks like it with the Phil Foglio cover art), and even World of Darkness (also huge in the RPG scene in the 90s) got in on the action in 1995 with "Year of the Hunter" where each of their product lines had a supplement that was focused on regular guys and government agents hunting the monstrous characters that were otherwise normally the protagonist PCs of the World of Darkness. And I'm sure that's just a sampling of the ones that I was more familiar with. I doubt that GURPS wasn't in on it too, for instance (Black Ops and Illuminati, I think, both had similar themes—there were probably many more.)

I think Dark•Matter may have been the most well-known, or most highly regarded of them. At least, it's certainly the one I heard about the most, even from people who were familiar with all of them. It was a bit of a kitchen sink; Delta Green was more focused, and generally seen as therefore "better" but Dark•Matter could do everything from aliens to ghost stories to Bigfoot to dark mages, etc. Alternity didn't last very long, but d20 Modern was the spiritual successor to it, and Dark•Matter got both a mini-update to d20 Modern in the pages of Polyhedron magazine, and later its own actual source book; it was essentially re-released as a d20 Modern setting. Most of the rest of the old TSR stuff was also released for d20 Modern, but it wasn't stand-alone like Dark•Matter was, it was just kind of folded into the generic d20 Modern (d20 Future had a lot of elements that were originally from Star Frontiers or Star*Drive, for instance, but Star Frontiers and Star*Drive were not released as settings or supplements for d20 Modern.) Another clue that Dark•Matter was by far the runaway success of the line and the most popular.

All that said, and I'm of course a fan of The X-Files as a campaign model in terms of themes, tone and even structure, even for fantasy, moreso than I am for your typical D&D model, my "Exit 23" is not really meant to be an introduction to an X-Files-inspired game; I'm considering it a stand-alone supernatural horror adventure of a group of PCs stuck in a remote rest stop (I'll probably relocate it to Wyoming or Montana, because that feels even more remote to me than just a few miles from Spokane) by a sudden, unexpected snow storm, a summoned ice demon or wendigo kind of thing, and some bad guy sorcerers who are in over their head after the death of their cabal leader. 

I'm going to rewrite a few minor details, but it will still mostly resemble the scenario as written. I anticipate enjoying myself. I've run that at least three times in the past at conventions—maybe four, but I don't remember anymore—as a one-shot, and its a great scenario. Depending on how fast people do stuff vs roleplaying and conversation with each other and NPCs, it can be a little light, though, so I want to make sure that I have a little bit more meat on the bones, just in case I need it. And, of course, I'll document it here.