Ravenous Role Playing

Gary, how you are missed though I never met you in person. Without your diligence, creativity and willingness to share your wonderful works, my life would be much poorer than it is now.

Gary Gygax at GenCon 2007

I would not have the best friends in the world for it is role playing that brought us together.

I would not have the blessed child and wonderful wife that I have now for it is through role playing that we met.

I would not have the drive to create and share that I have now for it is role playing that has instilled these things in me.

Tonight I will hoist a glass of scotch in your honor, and tomorrow I will be rolling dice about the table in your memory.

Thank you.

This came across my RSS feed from Gnome Stew. I can’t detail it any better than they have, so I’m just linking to their post. Go check it out. Cheap RPG stuff for a good cause. Everyone wins. Once this post is up, I’m following the links to make my purchases.

I just found out that I didn’t make the cut for the top 32 wondrous items submitted to Paizo for their RPG Supertar 2011 competition. I’m partially bummed about this, and partially relieved. The only reason I have a little relief in my outlook is that each round will require more and more time to complete and do well in. It’s time that I could squeeze into my schedule, but I’m glad that it’s not a requirement anymore. I was truly worried about the time commitment and the lack of sleep that I would have to endure over the next couple of months.

Good luck to all 32 contestants in RPG Superstar 2011! I wish you the best of luck and greatest of rewards in the competition. I’ll be keeping a close eye on things from here on out.

This is the 200th post on this blog. When I first started, I had hoped to reach this mark. I’ve done it. Unfortunately, I figured I would have hit this mark much sooner. I started this grand adventure on June 4th of 2009. This means it took me about a year and a half to reach 200 posts. I figured I would have done it within a year. I guess I’m not too far off of schedule.

I guess I didn’t allow for the time it was going to take to finish my masters, raise my toddler son, play RPGs, finish my novel, work on my own RPG system (there’s a mention of that thing again) and generally live life. All told, I could have done better than mostly doing Friday Five links and actually writing some original articles of my own, but time just doesn’t allow for everything we want.

The masters is nearly done, the novel is finished (and being shopped around to agents), but I still have tons of work to do on Lore (the RPG system) and the work of raising a son is never done. I also still live an active social life, so gathering more time for this blog in the future isn’t in the books right away. Maybe once the masters degree is out of the way in about 2 months, I’ll be able to generate some more original work for Ravenous RPG. We’ll see how things go.

For all of the readers that have stuck with me through the past 18 (or so) months, I greatly appreciate your patronage, and I hope the site has been as useful to you as it has been fun for me to keep going.

As of December 23th, I’m finally free and clear of a non-compete agreement that I had entered with some fellow RPG geeks that had formed Fluid Games LLC. We had worked on two books, but only one that I was involved in made it “to print” in PDF form. The title is “Ashen Sands of Aegandos Player’s Guide.” Before you ask, I never made it rich from my efforts. I actually never saw a dime since “costs” had to be covered before profit was to be split evenly between all involved parties. I’m pretty sure we never sold enough copies to cover our costs, but that’s how things go. I have no hard feelings toward any of the team. As a matter of fact, I have fond memories of the long design session, play testing, running the game four times in two days at a convention and so much more. My best memories are of the people that I worked with. We all had our areas of speciality, and we worked really well as a team.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Paizo’s RPG Superstar for 2011?

Since I’m free of the non-compete agreement with Fluid Games, I’m now available for entering the contest with Paizo. I just submitted my contest entry yesterday, so life is good. Let’s hope that I make it through to round 2, but that means that I’ll have to be one of the top 32 submissions out of hundreds (thousands?) that they’ll be receiving and judging. Let’s see how things go.

Oh. While I’m talking about being out from under the non-compete agreement… I can return to work on my own RPG that I had in the works before I joined forced with the folks at Fluid Games. Once I have more details that I’m willing to release, I’ll post some more here.

DriveThruRPG is doing another great deal where you spend $25 and get a ton of RPG products. All proceeds go towards Doctors Without Borders who are currently focusing on helping people in Pakistan and other areas that are affected by massive flooding. If you like RPG deals, this is for you. If you like helping other people, this deal is for you. If you just want to get a ton of stuff (89 files in all!) for a great price ($25!), then this deal is for you.

I just finished downloading all of the goodies, and there appears to be some great stuff in there. I may even review some of it as time permits, but it’ll be a while before I get to that as I’m one class away from finishing my masters degree and it’s going to be a rough one.

I figured that since most of the rest of the RPG world is posting their GenCon schedule, I figured I’d do the same.

Thursday (that’s today) I was at work all day long.

Friday I’ll be at work all day long again.

Saturday I’ll be sleeping in a bit, and then piddling around the house doing chores. In the evening, I’ll be at a friend’s house gaming. Since most of my RPG group is out of town (California, not GenCon) we’ll be playing Arkham Horror. Excellent board game.

Sunday, I’ll be sleeping in a bit more and then watching the kiddo while the spousal-unit runs around town and blows off some steam.

… yeah…. I’d rather by in Indy doing some serious gaming. *sigh*

… maybe next year? Probably not.

In the past few weeks, I’ve received or bought:

• The Dresden Files RPG that I pre-ordered months ago.
• Mutants and Masterminds and a supplement with a bunch of pregenerated characters.
• Runequest from Mongoose Games
• A variety of items from Free RPG Day.

Now to find the time to go through all of this and start writing some reviews. I’m still not sure what order I’ll be hitting them or when I’ll have a chance to get through all of this new material. I can’t wait to do it, though!

I just heard that Mike Cook pulled up a chair to the great D&D table in the sky on June 7th. He was an executive and a driving force at TSR during the 80s. He will be sorely missed.

More information can be found here, here and here.

Be at peace, Mike. You’ll be missed here on the prime material plane.

I’m going to be out of touch and away from the Interwebs for a few days. I’ll do the Friday Five on Sunday, and since I’m making you wait for it (yes, all three of you reading this) I’ll post at least seven links on Sunday… maybe more.