Status Update

Our life kind of imploded the last two weeks.  My wife is looking for a job to help fix our finances plus dealing with some other stuff while I'm desperately trying to keep all the plates spinning until she finds work.  Unfortunately, she is having trouble finding jobs that actually pay what they promise, when they promise.  This has made life an emotional rollercoaster as we edge closer and closer towards fiscal oblivion.

Not fun, to say the least.

I will post the next two sessions of Tim's Outlanders: Tomb Raiders this week, probably Tuesday and Thursday.  After that, I'm not 100% certain at this point.  I should work on typing up the session reports for In Search Of..., especially as I'm supposed to run the next session in two weeks, so that seems likely.  I'm also working on the next arc of the Sudden Sea campaign, when the players leave County Modon to avoid the revolution they accidentally started there and travel through the Grand Duchy of Mercia, looking for mercantile riches and whatever other wealth they can lay their hands on.

That's it for now.  Type more at you later!

Status Update - Busy Month

Apologies for the radio silence - it has been a very busy time for me, both in life and at work.  As a result I've had significantly less time to post stuff here.  We are gradually getting out of the weeds and should get to a point where I am able to post regularly again. 

The next adventure arc for Tim's Outlanders (Cultists, Cultists, Cultists) is missing the session notes from multiple sessions due to the Hard Drive Crash of 2014, so remember to regularly back up your data somewhere not your computer, unlike me.  I'll need to piece together the missing sessions based on what happens before and after them in the remaining session summaries plus my actual adventure notes (which survived!).  You might notice some bare entries here an there as a result.

Even so, this is the penultimate adventure arc for Tim's Outlanders.  I have one more arc and then the campaign ended.  It mostly ended because I did not keep tighter control on how the players spent their experience points on their characters.  Dangar in particular and Tim to a lesser extent became an issue as anything that was a challenge to Dangar in a fight would wipe out the rest of the PCs and anything challenging to the rest of the party Dangar could kill in one hit.  This is something that the HERO System is susceptible to, being a points-based system, and the GM has to set limits to how high skills, powers, and combat abilities can get.  As the campaign goes along, those limits should rise, but never spiral out of control as happened to me.  One of the important GM lessons I learned with this campaign.

We've had two more sessions of my monthly campaign, In Search Of..., which I owe write-ups for here.  My goal this week is to finish writing up the earlier one session and get it posted this week plus the first session of Cultists, Cultists, Cultists, which will be embroidered from memory as the notes from the first session are one of the sessions missing.  Next week I want to get the second In Search Of session typed up and posted before the next game happens on the 25th of this month.

Finally, the Sudden Sea campaign is on hiatus as I write up the new area the players are fleeing to, I mean, exploring bravely.  The Other GM is picking up with the characters from the Shattered Star Adventure Path, but we are stepping of the path for a "week at the beach" adventure because Book 4 was harrowing for several of us and we want some fun to cleanse the adventuring palette.  Two of the other players wish to enact something called Operation: Kaiju in game and the Other GM is actually interested in seeing it happen.  I'll report on that when it happens.

Best of luck to everyone reading this and see you soon!

In Search Of, Session 2 Session Notes Delayed

 Yesterday was just busy enough I did not get the session notes typed up.  I planed to do it today (Wednesday) during some down time at the office, but I accidentally left my notebook with the notes I took during the session at home.  This is frustrating for me as I took the time to get all the electronic files I needed available for access while at the office and looked forward to typing things up while they are still somewhat fresh in my mind. 😞

Therefore, I'll edit the notes from the next session of The Flight of the Yardbird and get them up late today or tomorrow morning and post Session 2 of In Search Of on Friday.

UPDATE:  Session 2 is now posted.

Status Update - Early 2026

Sorry about the longer than expected down time.  It turned out I needed more time away from weekly updates than expected, plus some Real Life stuff was going on as well.  The Real Life stuff is mostly under control right now and we are working on a more permanent solution to the issue.  If you want to help, maybe purchase a copy of my RPG, Adventures in the Green?  I've just reduced the price on Book I and Book II to $6 each.  I don't have a Patreon of Kofi account, so this is currently the only way to get me some help and I would greatly appreciate it.

In the meantime, I've paused my playtest game using Adventures in the Green, partly because I've accomplished everything I wanted to do as a playtest but mostly because I ran out of ideas on where to go next, story-wise.  I'll eventually figure something out and resume that campaign, possibly with a time jump over the part I'm having issues with.

To keep that group together, I'm starting a new campaign.  I polled the players what they might be interested in and the majority wanted to use the HERO System rules for whatever happened next.  One player bowed out as he is not fond of that system, but offered assistance if I needed non-system specific help.

I decided I did not want to create yet another new setting, so after brainstorming for a while I decided to place it in the same world as my Sudden Sea campaign, but in a different location.  I also decided that this campaign would have a fixed end and not be a forever campaign.  I settled on a search for lost treasure at the behest of an unknown patron.  I then worked out how the treasure got lost and where.  From that I'm working backwards for the storyline and clues.  I've revised the background twice already and after the first session (a prequel shakedown) I realized I need to rework the beginning of the actual adventure some to mesh better with the PCs skills and capabilities.  I think I'll be doing this all the way through so the PCs are most engaged with events.  Keep an eye out for session notes for In Search Of to see how it goes.

Later!

Taking the Next Two Weeks Off

I'm taking the next two weeks off, so no blog posts until the first full week of January 2026.

Enjoy the end of the year and see everyone in the new year!

Missing Session Notes

So at this point I've looked through all the files I recovered from my hard drive crash in 2014 and I do not have any further session notes for the Mansion of Illusions adventure.  It is possible I might have more on a CD backup I made with previous computers, but those are even longer odds.

Right now I'm torn between continuing on with the next Tim's Outlanders adventure arc or switching back to the more current Sudden Sea campaign.  I'll make the decision tonight as for multiple reasons we are not gaming tonight.

Digging through a Pile of Documents

Back in 2014, the hard drive on my laptop crashed.

Luckily I had friends who knew some people and files were recovered from the hard drive - mostly.  I received a USB thumb drive with all the files recovered in a single pile, the file names separated from the file contents.  So I had a bunch of unopenable files that were just the file names and a huge pile for files that had serial numbers with file extensions (.rtf, .pdf, .doc, etc.).  I could open the numbered files (mostly - some were damaged and could not be opened) and then re-save them with names and as they were mostly all my files I knew what they were.

The downside was that I kept older versions of the same file in case I messed something up and needed to revert to an older version.  These were now mixed all together in no discernable order.

Every couple of years, I spend a several hours opening files, working out what they are and maybe which version before saving them in a folder labeled "Identified".  When I started I had close to 10,000 files to sort through and now I'm down below 4000 files.  I made a push this weekend to get through the last 600+ .rtf files in that pile.  Most of them are single pages from the sci-fi novel I wrote but some were game notes from way back in the day.  One was my original writeup of the Siege of Freegate!

In the near future (possibly this weekend) I will use that to relace/correct the blog entry I made on it October 30th.  I'll point out when it happens so folks can go back and read the official version, not the stop-gap version.

In the meantime, I've started typing up the session notes for the Sunken Sea Campaign, starting with Session 22, the last session before my surgery.  I've completed the write-up for Session 23 and will likely type up Session 24 this weekend.  I'm torn between posting the rest of the Tim's Outlanders material (three or four complete arcs) or switch back over to the active campaign once I've finished posting the session notes for The Mansion of Illusion (one more session to go).

Anyone have any opinions?

Health Update - I'm Much Better!

I didn't realize how long it's been since I last posted.  I've posted recently on FB and must have conflated the two. Sorry about that.

So 4 months later and I'm in much better shape.  I was in a rehab hospital for a month, progressing from movable with the bed to movable with a wheelchair to able to move using the wheel chair (if you see the difference) to able to move with a walker (my least favorite piece of equipment), which is where I was once I got out of the rehab hospital.  After that, intensive Physical Therapy got me to moving needing a cane to moving with some assistance from a cane.  This is where I am now.  I can walk around (slowly) without the cane but faster with it.  I still need it for steps, especially stepping down, but that is slowly getting to the point where I won't need it, it will just be nice to have.  I have about 2 months left of physical therapy at one session a week and then my insurance stops paying for it.  Yay American "health care".

The other issue I mentioned in my previous post was with my hips, specifically where my femur and pelvis connect.  My body added bone to my pelvis, extending the socket part of the ball-and-socket joint.  This is limiting my ability to move my thigh closer than a 90 degree angle to my body without causing pain or out to the left and right.  I have the same issue on both sides, but only the left side causes pain, which is a win.  The PT for my neck surgery has strengthened my leg muscles and done some work on my hip, so this issue does not require surgery for the foreseeable future.  I'll start some PT specific to that once my neck surgery PT ends.

On top of that, I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes, with an A1C of 7.3 in the hospital.  So across the line (7.0), but not very far across.  This was not particularly surprising to me - I'm a gamer and work in the tech industry so my not so good diet and lack of exercise kind of made this inevitable.  I'm now on Metformin, extended release, and have reduced sugars and carbs from my diet significantly.  Also, 5 weeks of enforced portion control in the hospital and rehab hospital reset the volume of food I eat to a smaller amount.  As of my last endocrinologist appointment in July, my A1C is down to 6.3 and I've lost 20-25 pounds of weight, which is the first time my weight has gone down in quite a while.  I need to wear one of those attachable glucose meters, but I have not purchased any yet - they are a bit pricey for me and I have a lot of medical bills now that need paying.

The recovery process takes a lot out of one and my endurance for doing things is still much reduced.  I rest often and go to sleep earlier than I used to.  My requirement for mid-day naps has tapered off as my recovery progresses and my attention span has improved.  I've been playing in a 5E D&D game that was being run while I was out and in July resumed running my monthly game, which was as early as I was mentally capable of.  There has been a hiccup in scheduling for the Monday night weekly game as the Other GM and his wife had their second child last week (Congrats Geoff and Emmy!), so I'm running an impromptu game during events the PCs are out of town for in my Sudden Sea campaign.  I'm also thinking about starting another campaign using a published megadungeon, but I'm going slow on that so I don't overcommit myself before I'm capable of running a third campaign.

I think that brings everything back up to current as far as how my health goes.  I'll resume posting my Tim's Outlanders campaign notes next week.  One of the things I'm doing today (after writing this post) is to type that one up.

Real World Busy

Sorry for the delay in the next post but the real world has contrived to keep me busy enough I haven't been able to type it up.  I should post it this week but I cannot be more specific than that as things are still keeping me busy.

Resumption of Posts

First, Thank You to those who left kind words the last couple months.  I'm not certain I can express how much I appreciated them, but I did, very much.

Next, I plan to resume posting next week, although I'm not certain what I'm going to start with.  My Monday group has just about finished Book 4 of the Shattered Star Adventure Path - we have another 3-5 sessions to go.  The Other GM said we were that close at the beginning of December as well, but we (the players and he) feel he underestimated how cautious we were being.  That said, were are 1 maybe 2 encounters from the final boss and wrap-up, so end of February is feeling right.

Overall, this book should have been right up my alley as it is majority dungeon crawling but it felt like it was full of grudge monsters [monsters that are immune to the PCs best attacks or exploit PC weaknesses at the relevant levels].  There was also fun but the fun felt very spaced out compared to the grudge, which is why we were being so cautious in our explorations.  I probably will not do detailed summaries of these sessions, partly [mostly] as my notes are skimpy in places but also to get it done quickly.

Once we finish this book of the Shattered Star, we are returning to the Sudden Sea and the political mess the players caused at the end of the last arc.  The PCs caught the head of the Green Hand bandits, only to discover the Green Hand was stealing from merchants and using the loot to help as many of the 10,000 refugees from the rising of the sea as they could.  The PCs got paid the bounty but with thousands of unhappy refugees surrounding the town, chanting "Free the Hand", they decided to sneak out of town while they could and wait for things to blow over.

"Things" do not in fact "blow over."  They instead "blow up."

But with a month to go before that campaign resumes and I have notes to post on it, I will probably start with summations of the Shattered Star Book 4 sessions and go from there.

Later!

August 2024

 My father passed away.

It had been coming since the end of last year, when they moved him to hospice care.  That's when everyone realizes that the number of things going wrong have hit the point of no return and the best thing is to make the person comfortable until the end.

At the beginning of August my dad stopped eating.  He spent most of his time sleeping.  He was not in any pain and when he was lucid he was himself.

Two weeks later that stopped and he was awake and restless.  Again, not in any pain, just restless.  He went into critical care then.  They knew the end was near, just not how near.

It was three days away.

He passed away the morning of August 24th.  When my step-mom called instead of texted later that morning, I knew why.  It hit hard that day.  Luckily I had a thing with friends that let me not focus on it for several hours and just be with friends.  Since then, grieving for me has been like being on an exercise bike with the resistance turned just a little too high.  Everything requires more effort to do.  Everything.

I don't know when I'll start writing again.  I know I will, but it may be a while [months, not years, knock-on-wood].  Sorry for the gap.

Status Update - July 2024

 It has been a busy time since my last post.  I took a vacation the first week of July, which was very relaxing until I came down with a major sinus infection that Thursday, just before my monthly Adventures in the Green game.  I had to cancel that as I was running a fever of over 101 DegF for several days.  My fever slowly dropped, but I was certain I needed to cancel our weekly Monday game and take some sick leave from work.

During this time, Hurricane Beryl went from "it will hit land in Mexico" to "it will hit land in southern Texas" to "it will roll right over the entire city of Houston".  It started hitting parts of Houston before dawn on July 8.  I lost power around 7:00 AM.  [It would not return until Friday, July 12.]  As the house grew too warm and stuffy, I discovered that my back patio was comfortable for me (still running a fever) and sat out there as the center of the storm rolled over us.  In the picture below (from the app Weatherbug), I live in the vicinity of the blue flag.  The lower red flag is downtown Houston, 26 miles away.  [That is not a typo and yes, I count as living "in Houston".]

We did not have any storm damage.  Our oak tree in the front lost two medium-sized branches, but I was able to drag them off our front walkway and onto the cul-de-sac island, as is tradition for the homeowners after a hurricane.  Our neighbors had a tree on their garage, looming over our shared fence and leaning towards my house.  The picture below is from a couple days later.

Notice the tree on the right edge of the photo and how vertical it is.  Notice how not vertical the tree in the center of the photo is.

Luckily, my MIL has a whole-house generator, so even though her area was without power, she had it plus air-conditioning.  I was reluctant to go as I was still ill, but she insisted.  So we [and by we I mean my wife, who was a hero that day] spent the afternoon packing for a multi-day stay before heading over.

Monday night, the internet went out and cell phone service dropped to barely reliable as no electricity also meant that the cell towers and internet nodes also had no power.  Tuesday internet returned but dropped again during Wednesday.  Wednesday evening it returned as CenterPoint reconnected more of the power grid to that area.

Friday, our neighbors texted us mid-day that the power was back on in our neighborhood.  I drove over during my lunch break to verify that the A/C was running and cooling the house [it was].  Not all the traffic lights were back on and people seemed to have forgotten the rules [or actively chose to ignore them], making that drive a bit harrowing, even for a native.

Due to work and a desire to have our regular Date Night that night, my wife and I did not return back to the house until the next day, Saturday.  We got home in the early afternoon, did some unpacking, ran laundry, and straightened up the public areas of the house as I had a City of Heroes LAN party scheduled for Sunday.  We also dumped all the spoiled food from our refrigerator to get the smelly stuff out of the house.

During the LAN party the next day, the tree removal guys showed up at the neighbors with a huge crane to hold the tree while they cut it apart.  They removed the cut up tree from the property...only to dump it on the cul-de-sac island in front of our houses.  OK for homeowners, not so much for tree REMOVAL companies.

At work the following week we did our best to catch up on projects that were put on hold due to the hurricane.  The writer I'm working with did not get her power back until Tuesday, eight days after the hurricane.  I have friends who did not get power back until July 19, 11 days after the hurricane.

As I write this, power has been restored to almost everyone.  People who had trees slice into their homes or sheer off their electricity connections and/or fuse boxes are still waiting on electricians to reconnect their homes to the grid.  The City of Houston and Harris County have only just started removing storm debris in residential areas this week.  We received a check from our insurance company for food lost [best rider in our home insurance and worth every penny] and have started replacing food.

In summation: I do not recommend getting ill just as a hurricane lands on your city and things have returned to mostly normal at this point.

Later!

Working on a New Novel

I started working on a new novel and it is consuming most of my writing time right now.  My goal is to get at least the first draft done as quickly as I can so I can send a copy to my dad while he is still with us.  He's entered hospice care, which is when they do their best to keep the patient comfortable until the end.  This happened after either his chemo or his stage 4 prostate cancer triggered another stroke.

On the plus side, he has come back from those events somewhat and so I have more time than I thought I would at the end of January.  Still have no idea how much time that is, so I am somewhat prioritizing getting the outline done so I can start the actual writing.  I'll post more update on that as I have them.

As to the session notes, those will continue at a sporadic level as a result.  I want to try for twice a month as a minimum, but I'm not certain I can meet that.  Either way, I'll have Session 16 of the Sudden Sea campaign up in the next week.

Later!

REMINDER: PDFs of my OD&D clone, Adventures in the Green, are available for purchase on DriveThruRPG.com.  See the specific links in the sidebar under Downloads.

Adventures in the Green Published!

My OD&D clone set of rules, Adventures in the Green, is now published and available on DriveThruRPG.com!

Think "OD&D, but readable" and you will understand what Adventures in the Green offers.  The rules were reorganized to consolidate rules bits from across the original booklets where clauses and complete rules were hidden away in magic item descriptions or magazine interviews published separately.  I also rewrote the rules to make them clear and concise.

Book I: Characters is 68 pages and provides the rules for creating characters to play, equipping them, and some basics of adventuring.  This is the link to the Book I product page.

Book II: Conflicts is 68 pages and provides the rules for combat, including naval and aerial, plus the writeups for all the monsters.  This is the link to the Book II product page.

Book III: Campaigns is 66 pages and provides the rules for Referees to run campaigns plus the random treasure tables and descriptions of magic items.  This is the link to the Book III product page.

Each booklet is sold separately at $10 each, which I feel is a fair price for 66-68 page booklets with five years of development behind them.  I've been running a test campaign parallel to the rules development, which has helped spot rules gaps (like how much light a torch provides) and eliminate typos.  

[As a tech writer, I know by saying those words that someone will now find an obvious typo, but that is the nature of writing.  Send me an email or comment here and I'll fix it and update the published PDFs.]

That's it for right now.  I should have the next session of the Sudden Sea campaign up later this week.  We've reached a stopping point, right after the players trigger a revolt and are switching back to Book 4 of the Shattered Star AP.  Keep reading!

Status Update - Beginning of 2024

December was busier than November at the Day Job (plus the holidays) and I'm just now coming off that busy period in January.

After reviewing the AdSense results I removed the ads from this blog.  I never met the minimum amount for payout, in fact I barely reached 5% of that number in the time I've had the ads running.  No real loss.

The Monday Group (a.k.a., Super Rat) has continued playing and we just did Session 17, so I'm 8 sessions behind.  I will resume writing up the session summaries this month and try to catch up a session every two weeks.

My clone of the OD&D rules is still progressing, although slowly.  I've done what should be the final editorial pass on Books 1 and 2, finishing Book 2 last week.  Next is Book 3, which I want to have done no later than the end of February.  After that I will put the PDFs up on DriveThru RPG for sale and then create a POD version because I want physical copies to show for my effort.

That's it for now.  My next regular post should be early next week.

Busy Thanksgiving

First, "Happy Thanksgiving!" to those in the US.  It is a significant holiday here and one of the major family-gathering holidays.  With our families scattered this year, my wife and I are hosting a get together for friends who cannot be with their families for various reasons.  We should have 16 or so people with a wide range of dietary needs but I'm looking forward to seeing everyone.

As a result of that plus other scheduled events and games, time has been short for writing last week and will be short for this week.  Saturday the 25th has been designated by me as a Day of Writing, so I plan to type up the next set of session notes and get them posted then.

That's all I have time for right now.  Later!

Session Notes Delayed

 The next two sessions have happened but I ran into an unexpected snag.  As I am running encounters in the town of Nomi, a certain amount of which I'm creating on the spot, I eased back on my note taking, expecting to rely upon the wealth of notes my players turn in.  They do this in exchange for Hero Points that they can use to reroll a single die or adjust the result on a die up or down by one.

Over the last five session, I relied on their notes to help me get the order of events correct or get small details I might have missed.  As soon as I chose to rely on them turning in notes as the basis of my write-ups, they stopped turning them in.  Two of the players have a newborn they are dealing and two others had work situations become super busy to the point they don't want to look at a computer after work.  One player still turns them in but doesn't make notes on things her character isn't there for and the last player hasn't been turning in notes.

That guy is now typing up notes as text messages and sending them to me, but his character is a bit delusional and the notes reflect this.

Long story short (too late!), I have most of Session 6 typed up, but not an important bit at the end of the session.  I'm waiting on the player notes for some detail and then I can post it.  The players should be sending their notes more on the regular after this, so once we get started I should be able to post regularly again.

TL;DR: Sorry for the delay, material is inbound, just not here yet.

Status Now, Writeups to Follow

I spent all my available writing time the last two weeks to get ready for running my new campaign (The Sudden Sea Campaign) for the Monday Group.  This consisted of getting all the character creation guidelines written plus a listing of languages spoken in-game plus a listing of the martial arts available.

We did Session 0 this past Monday, which was wrapping up character creation (most people had their characters mostly done but had campaign or rules questions they needed answered so they could finish.  We spent a minimal time stringing together reasons for the PCs to know each other.  5 of the 6 players were able to complete their characters and send me copies.  The sixth player has been swamped at work (in fact he could not attend that night because of work) and is also one of the new parents in the group.  He should have a support character ready by the first game session, work and life allowing.

We played sessions 4 and 5 of Hell Comes a'Glittering the last two weeks and wrapped up the adventure.  I have a better grasp of D&D 5E now and some ideas on how I would have built my Sorcerer slightly differently.  It was a good experiment and did the job necessary to bridge us from the conclusion of the Shattered Star, Book 3 adventure to the beginning of my "new" campaign.  Clone GM One did a good job.

My goal is to have session 4 of Hell Comes a'Glittering posted by Friday as I'm running my monthly Adventures in the Green game on Saturday and doing house chores (and maybe a movie) Sunday.  Session 5 (the conclusion) will post next week.  Session 1 of the Sudden Sea Campaign will get written up and posted the week after that, allowing a week between when a session happens and when it gets posted.  We'll see how it actually goes.

Later!

CORRECTION: Hell Comes a'Glittering made it to FIVE sessions.  I adjusted the text above to count for that.

Status Update - 3 Day Power Outage

 Lots has happened, but little that I wanted to happen.

A storm blew through north Houston Wednesday last week, and knocked out power to 250k households.  My wife and I stayed in the house that night as CenterPoint claimed power would be restored by 2:00 AM.  It was uncomfortable but bearable.  When we awoke in the morning still without power, we packed up stuff to do and vacated the house and stayed at a restaurant with Wi-Fi and (some) AC until 3:00 PM.  At that point we knew that power was going to be out for at least another day, so we headed to the other side of Houston where a friend took us in.

I worked remotely Friday, but that evening we drove back to our house to pick up more clothes and food from our pantry to take back with us.  We expected to be at our friend's through the weekend and we could not really afford to eat out for every meal.  Besides, by this point we knew the contents of our refrigerator and stand-up freezer were spoiled or spoiling and we would need to replace everything.  I also went upstairs to get some books and it was well over 100 degrees up there - I was panting heavily when I came back down.

Late Saturday afternoon we received word from one of our neighbors that they had power again.  Another friend drove by that night and sent of a photo showing out porch lights were on, confirming power.  We did not drive back that night as we needed to let the AC cool the house, something that would take hours.  The other reason was that we had moved a scheduled game on Sunday from our house to the place we were staying (our host was one of the players).

Sunday, after the game, the other players helped load up our car and we headed back home.  When we got there, the house had cooled off but we could tell it was not done doing so.  Neither of us went upstairs to check.  By the end of Sunday almost everyone had power back in our neighborhood.  The only exceptions were people out of town who had trees down that CenterPoint needs removed.

Monday we spent clearing out the refrigerator and part of the freezer of spoiled food.  We stopped when our two trash cans were full and dragged them out to the corner for pickup on Wednesday (today) morning.  I hope the trash guys did not hurt themselves.

On the plus side, our insurance has a rider for food lost due to power outage and approved our claim.  It won't replace everything, but it will get us back to being functional in the kitchen.  A roof inspector will come around later this week to check our roof.  There shouldn't be any damage, but better safe than sorry.

Here are some pictures from down the street the next morning.

Status Update - Newest Gamer Arrives on Game Day!

This past Saturday, The Other GM and Marativy's player became parents!  Marativy's player delivered their son just before 6:00 PM Houston time.  Mother and son are both healthy by all reports, so Congratulations to them!

The child was not expected for another week, so this is throwing askew campaign plans.  Saturday was supposed to be the next Adventures in the Green session, but we switched to board games.  We were supposed to play the final session for Shattered Star Book 3 tonight (Monday) before transitioning to a 5E one-shot (meaning one adventure that we expect to take 4-5 sessions to play), followed my me starting a new campaign for a while.  This was to let the new parents acclimate to having a child and those demands on their time and life while the rest of us did something different until they can return.  This whole process has now been moved up, so we are working to adapt.

I have one more session to type up for Shattered Star Book 3 (Session 36) and that will appear later this week.  I have no idea when session 37 might happen or if we will hand wave it, but I expect it will be a month or two before that gets resolved.

Tonight, we are doing character creation for the new campaign.  What I know at this point:

• Our characters will be 6th level
• We are using D&D 5E
• It will be an urban environment

I expect to learn more at tonight's session.

This also starts a countdown timer for me to have a new campaign in place.  I've chosen to revive an old campaign world after shaking things up a bit.  I'll be using HERO System, Fifth Edition, and the Fantasy Hero subset of rules.  I ran a campaign in a home-brewed world for over 12 years that has lain fallow for, um, 14 years or so?  I've always wanted to return to that world but never had a "campaign idea" to start a campaign there.  I recently decided I don't actually need a full campaign idea to start as that's not how I did it originally.  I started the world by borrowing it from a friend.  

I hankered to run a fantasy campaign and some friends and I were hanging out and bored one day and asked me to run something, so I said sure.  I needed some place to start and had a map a friend drew for a short campaign he ran to fill some time [I wasn't in the campaign but others I know were].  I took his continent map and general back ground and stole a city idea from another friend's campaign [which he "borrowed" from a fantasy novel] as a place to base three foot-loose adventurers.  I came up with a loose premise and we started.  The adventures for the next decade were the results of things the players did in game mixing with a back story I created as the campaign progressed.  The campaign ended after I ran out of ideas on what to do next.  The longest running PCs had doubled their point values by then [HERO System is a point-buy system for characters, not a level-based system] so were truly formidable.  Formidable enough that I was having trouble coming up with things to throw at them that wouldn't also level a city block.  We still tell fond stories about things that happened in that campaign, so I've always wanted to go back and I've finally found a way.

I'm advancing the timeline 30 to 40 years, dropping in an inland sea that didn't used to be there [whose source is a campaign mystery], and placing the new campaign on the shores of the Sudden Sea, hundreds of miles away from the city-state the original campaign centered on.  The Sudden Sea is at most 10 years old [I might make it younger - still working on this]  and covers lands that used to be the heart of an alliance that broke away from Imperial rule during the Horde Wars [still working on a better name for that] when the Emperor left them to fend for themselves while he protected his personal lands.  The Sea is unexpectedly deep and everyone is nervous about whether or not it will start expanding again, but in the meantime, new naval trade routes are needed and there are refugees everywhere and tensions about other powers looking to annex new territory while the Alliance is busy dealing with this crisis.

That's it for now.  More later!