cpip

I never did post how the rest of the show ran. Pretty well, all things considered. The remaining five nights were entirely enjoyable; such that now, as a member of the troupe, I'm pretty much guaranteed a spot in the next show, which I will be taking. By the end of this week I should know casting; rehearsals will start probably next Tuesday. The show is a Medieval Christmas Carol. It's kind of weird -- it was amethystjade's first show with the troupe, last year; but she doesn't have the time to commit to it this year, so ... I have already asked the director not to cast me in the same role she played last year. That would be too damned weird.

In other news, my work in the financial sector is continuing, because I do like the outlandish paychecks. I hate pretty much everything else about the place; though some of the coworkers are nice enough, the supervisor's a pain, the work itself is drudgery that frustrates me, and in general I'm a semi-ignored cog, and the place is so broken in so many ways that it evokes my desire to FIX THE THINGS, REPAIR THE PROCESSES, MAKE IT WORK -- but I am very uneasy about attempting to DO that, because I am indeed a mostly-ignored cog. Conversations have quite literally gone like so:
cpip: Shouldn't we be doing X?
Nameless Co-Worker: Yeah, probably. *vague smile*
cpip: So ... why aren't we?
Nameless Co-Worker: *vague smile*

And since some of these things are things that other people would need to be doing ... yeah. I do not want to be the one to work myself into a lather trying to save these people from themselves, but by god it offends my pride and professional sensibilities. So I keep half-heartedly looking for something else, but so far nothing's panned out; this is partly because I really don't know what I want to do with my life.

Put up the set today. Tech hell begins. The show opens on Friday. It's crazy how much time this thing eats up. Just insane.

Meanwhile I'm skipping out of work on Monday to interview with two other staffing agencies, because this place is not fulfilling me in the slightest, and even after ninety days I'm just not feeling it, not wanting to be part of the place. Maybe I'm just hoping for too much, but ... I don't like it there, so may as well keep hunting. I can't see why I shouldn't.

It was a long and lovely weekend, spent mostly in Columbus; but even so... the drive back was oddly tiring. Maybe it was that the weekend tipped over my sleep schedule and I was already a little bushed; but having returned home, all I want to do is lay about and do nothing.

However, things must be done, and I suppose I ought be off to do them.

A penguin tried, repeatedly, to bite me in the ass. Elvis is molting, he's grouchy, and he was very unhappy that I was in the exhibit. So, when I sat down to give out fish to the other penguins (molting penguins rarely eat), he tried to bite me through the rubber overalls. He was quite persistent until the trainer told me to push him away.

In stage news... well. Thirty-two days to curtain. I have only seen three of the seven fight-phases I need to have memorized by curtain. I am still learning the basics; I simultaneously must learn to walk, dance, and run a marathon all within this time. I will be committing myself to more practice time; it's all I can do. Practice and re-reading the choreography until I have it memorized perfectly. (Anyone who has tricks for memorization, now would be a lovely time to offer them.)

Work at the new place. Things moving forward pretty well there, I think; at least, for now.

Gaming. Wednesday night gaming, Saturday gaming, and then some general hanging out and boardgaming in the mix. It's a good time for that. The Saturday group is shifting and changing and a lot of fun -- after winding down a Warhammer Fantasy game, we're going to be launching some Dungeon Crawl Classics and Marvel Heroic RPG. Manipuraka will be revisited shortly; I'll be converting it, I think, to DCC rules. I'll be co-running the Marvel game with one of the other players; we'll be trading off the Watcher's duties back and forth. I really do like that game!

At some point I may let byzantienne talk me into working up that sandbox Shal-Mari setting to turn loose players into.

Also, I'm going out of town this weekend to see gileonnen and attend UBCon.

Other Life Matters. I haven't been cooking much, but am hopeful to change that once I get back in town. I like cooking; I just ... haven't, much. It's been one of those "drag myself home, go flop down in front of the computer 'til you pass out" sort of periods the last couple of weeks.

Hey! I said I was gonna write a post or two today, didn't I?

I am, however, rather tired. So. We start with CRPG.

Brian Fargo's Kickstarter for Wasteland 2 has already, in less than 48 hours, met its $900,000 goal. Clearly, there was a demand for it. I certainly was happy to see it -- Wasteland was among my early RPGs (Ultima III, Wasteland, The Bard's Tale, Legacy of the Ancients, Might and Magic I, Phantasie III, Wizardry I, and Pool of Radiance were the greats that linger in my mind now). I cannot deny I am very much looking forward to it -- while I am considerably less interested in Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition. Partly because it's just a retread of the same game; at least Wasteland is setting off with a new game; while the Fallout series may have been spiritual successors (and occasionally had mentions, early on, that suggested it was the same universe), it still wasn't Wasteland, and I look forward to seeing Brian Fargo and a bunch of the old band get together again.

I have a to-do list trying just to keep my leisure time activities organized, now.

Perhaps, just perhaps, I am overdoing it. Perhaps.

Job continues! Spent the weekend in the company of a pyrephox watching horror films! (Tempted to write a post recapping all ten films we watched.)

Continued dungeon-building!

I have new thoughts on that idea from way back about cities and the fight for control of humanity's destiny!

Brian Fargo is making another Wasteland game!

I HAVE MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS!

...I do not, however, have the brainmeats to write coherently about any of this tonight.

But! Know that I think of you all, dear readers! And on Thursday I shall address all these things... and MORE!

Took Manipuraka down off the FLGS calendar tonight. One player showed up -- which is half as many as the week before, and still one more than the first two weeks. Monday nights, the store owner tells me, are rough there, to be certain, and it's a pretty niche idea in a niche hobby -- old-school dungeon-bashing.

So, the project isn't as constrained to a timetable now; but that doesn't mean (a) I'm not still working on it and (b) I'm not still interested in MORE. Sure, I have other ideas for games, and my mind is starting the rotation into Other Game Ideas I Have Had -- but I really want to get this one worked up more. I want an entire binder filled with notes. I want more levels drawn and keyed. I want to know that I have made this damned thing, with the jewels and the tunnels and the voices of the dead, and Crafter's Well and the Smelter's Prison; of Worm's Burrows and the Sunlit Terrace.

In a day or so, I think, I shall pursue raising this thing up as an online game; and of course I will continue delving into this dungeon.

Hells, if it's all done, after a few delves, maybe I'll just bundle it together, make a PDF of it, and post it for download. See if anyone wants to read this thing.

One of the things that's terribly interesting, I find, as I work through Manipuraka, is how very different my design philosophy is in 2E than in 4E. I think the upper works of Manipuraka are a key example.

Were I building Manipuraka in D&D 4th Edition, the Gatehouse would be, probably, an extended skill challenge, and the animal encounters incidental -- narratively related as part of the price of failing the skill challenge to find one of the secret entrances into the actual dungeon proper; possibly failure could entail a quick combat encounter, or merely a narrated penalty of reduced healing surges as the players had to fight off inquisitive wild animals as they searched the rubble. Instead, in Second Edition, the gatehouse is its own minidungeon -- twenty-six small noted rooms and spots of note, with several small caches of treasure and a range of animal encounters, before finding one of the ways to gain entrance into the Great Entry Hall. This assumes, of course, that the PCs proceed through the Gatehouse -- there are other ways into the City of Jewels, or at least I'd like there to be. I haven't finished the vent shafts past the broad strokes and the map; it really needs to be keyed up.

In 4th Edition, it's focused heavily around the narrative Encounter. You generally string together set-piece encounters; Manipuraka 4E could be envisioned as a chain of events, forking and twisting in a tree structure but having definite "nodes" along the way. 2nd Edition still retained the "location-based" structure, or at least still allowed it as an option: a widely keyed map of locations in the ruins, and events that could be provoked as you interacted with the area. The "nodes" of Manipuraka are merely differing mapsheets. Both styles have their advantages -- and it's an important and interesting change of mental gears to go from 4E design back into 2E design, especially when I still am playing 4th Edition once a week as well as running the 2nd Edition dungeon.

An interesting statistical note: I have posted just slightly more tweets as I have posted journal entries. This goes to show you that you can type a lot of 140 character bursts.

Of course, it's also worth noting that I just don't post as much here. I'm tempted to post bits about Manipuraka, but the fact is that some of my readers are also people I'd like to dive into Manipuraka -- and that the people who I'd like to explore my megadungeon are pretty much the same people I'd want to talk about it with. There just isn't much overlap there of "people who play D&D" and "people who I don't play D&D with at all."

I cannot help but note that I have now produced over four times as much verbiage on Manipuraka than I have on my 2011 project. I think I'm just going to accept that the 2011 project was a bust -- there were a number of reasons for that (mostly involving choking on final execution: what was it going to end up BEING?) -- and at least I know exactly what I am trying to make with this project. Will I succeed? I might argue that the fact that I have two levels, some maps, and players means that I already have in the meaningful way; now it's just a matter of getting to the bottom of this magnificent ruin before my players do!

And so, in the final session of this season of D&D Encounters, the heroes finally defeated the hag Judy Garland and her basket of infinite Totos and cocaine.

I had a wonderful visit from byzantienne this past weekend. Things which she was introduced to:

• Lorikeets
  
• The Booth at the End
  
• The Random Harlot Encounter Table
  
• Twin Peaks
  
• Terribly Sexist 1970s D&D Articles
  
• Coconut rum
  
• ieatedyourcooki
  

An excellent time was had by all. Planning for Dragon*Con was begun. (I will be wearing a costume. With body paint. And horns. And a ruby rod.) Planning for nearer cons was briefly touched on. It was a marvelous time.

I have pants (and two new shirts, to boot -- a man can never have too many white dress shirts). I also have the sad realization that I really have gained in the waistline. Boo hiss. I have to step up and actually do something about that, or else just accept that I have grown considerably fatter as I have aged.

Further, I reworked my sketch of the entire dungeon (in part because I need to do a sketch of it suitable for players to look at, as I've put a stylized map of the city in a mural on the first level). With that diagram in place, suddenly another map that I was having problems with suddenly made perfect sense, so I could make the map THERE. I have to sometimes remind myself that each level is NOT independent of each other; they're interconnected parts of a ruined city, and the more I think about them as such, the better that they will all end up being...

I've got some errands to run today. Taking inventory, I realized that I have somehow run terribly low on trousers. Admittedly, I haven't been wearing many pairs lately, but with the new job I'll be back in business casual (4 days a week, at least -- the place does denim Fridays)... so off I go to get a couple more pairs of pants to refortify my wardrobe.

The megadungeon finally has a name, and a first level completely mapped (if not keyed). I really ought to have two other levels at least briefly sketched before Monday; the whole place is shaping up and starting to get a character. Somehow it also acquired some legends, and a rumor sheet is starting to form. I'm enjoying this a very great deal...