Please excuse my absence last week, I finally took a vacation this year. I do feel refreshed, though thanks to the impending second trip (happening at the end of this week) none of that refreshment has made it to my work productivity. Still, it’s a good sign that I will end the year in a better headspace than I’ve been in recently. I have a whole bunch of writing to do, though given the transitory space of this week (and the fact that I seem to be having an allergy attack that’s a ‘welcome back’ present from the ragweed) most of my more involved topics will be coming in the latter half of October.

That all said, it was great to have a relatively low-key vacation. We traveled through Southern California, and though this involved some hiking (and biking, and kayaking), our day-to-day itinerary was relatively relaxed and let us take things at our own pace. That meant I had some time for my mind to wander, which helped me come up with a number of ideas for both games and fiction that weren’t really coming to me in the same way before. Of course this means I’m already reconsidering NaNoWriMo, a game idea that’s been floating around in my head has gotten itself stuck in there again and I may need to work it out onto paper and actually try doing something with it.

Beyond developing entire games, several ideas came to me for my upcoming fantasy/Dying Earth/Bastionland setting concept which really help round out both the cosmology and the underlying conflict I was considering. In the process this has of course started to worry me; I’m sitting up at 10,000 feet while I expect the campaign to start the trek from sea level, and at the very least the initial area and game start does need a lot more work. Still, having some big ideas and thinking about how to tease your players with them is a good thing; in a lot of cases it’ll help produce some organizing principles even if the actual meta-conflicts (concerned as they are with gods and the meaning of life) stay out of reach.

One small shout-out: I blew through a number of videos by Curious Archive which really made me think about elements in my setting, especially gods and monsters. Speaking of, Curious Archive has a series entitled Gods and Monsters which is specifically quite a lot of what I watched, but it’s only on Nebula and for subscribers to that service. I find Nebula has a lot of great content, but the Curious Archive videos on YouTube are also great and give you a pretty good idea what sort of inspiration I’m getting.

This will be a short update; the allergies are rough tonight and I’m still laser-focused on my group’s Beach Weekend next weekend. After that, my updates both on Cannibal Halfling and here will get more substantive.