Bleargh.

That was a month, I’ll give it that.

Some of my Twitter circles have been talking about folks getting hit with a “super-bug” of sorts lately. Turns out I’m apparently an early adopter, because something of that sort wiped out most of my March. The last Saturday of February is the last time I felt fully healthy — I’m still less than 100%. I got sick for a week, got better, got a different kind of sick for another week… With meds and tea, I got “better enough” to be a semi-functional human being, but it’s still rough.

As a result, I’m still hit-or-miss on my focus and energy levels, and my voice hasn’t fully recovered. Because of my background in speech, acting, and GMing, this last one is what bothers me the most.

The one silver lining is that I suddenly found a lot more time to read and scribble words, even if I didn’t have the energy for revision. Besides resuming the ’12 Days of Cleric-mas,’ I put out feelers for a future Midgard game using the Archmage Engine (13th Age). One of my friends had mentioned playing a campaign there the PCs are more monstrous than the average character, so I picked up the Kobold Press Advanced Races Compendium and asked what looked interesting. So I’ll have more “13 Age in Midgard” hacks upcoming.

I also spent much of my illness coming up with an Alchemist class for 13th Age, since another friend was looking to play a tinkerer/artificer type of character. After some initial frustration, I feel I’ve got a decent concept that I’d want to playtest/run in a game. And after re-reading some of the 13th Age in Glorantha playtest docs, I had the idea to do an Oracle class that was a “transformation” of the existing Cleric class.

Now that I’m at least back to being functional, it’s finally time to revise and post the “Undead Clerics in 13th Age” piece. And make more tea.

Fast Forward One Year

I sit at our new computer desk, listening to a shuffling playlist while the laptop downloads the newest OS, and I wonder what to do about all the written and unpublished stuff on said laptop. I wonder about that because I’m updating the OS, which always gives me slight anxiety around all our files, most of which are either my words or Steph’s pictures.

Some of those words find publication, though it’s very much a tip/iceberg ratio. Steph and I use shared documents to collaborate on our J&STAC columns for the Addison Recorder. This blog was meant to be a clearinghouse for a lot of the random (often game-related) words, for the content that wasn’t a fit at the Recorder or other places. But then I started mixing in freelance and other blog work, and the purpose became muddled.

I was writing 10,000 words a month for the Recorder, so I started using this site to promote that — but Twitter seemed a better avenue for that.

I was going to potentially write on tabletop game topics for another site, so I stopped doing so here — but then communication with the other site disappeared.

I was going to start posting stuff I’ve been working on in the meantime — but then I don’t know if it would be better suited for pitching to other sites or publications. (While I consider myself a savvy wordsmith, I consider myself quite naive on freelancing and the related industries.)

Meanwhile, waiting around to hear back or figure out what I should do just causes this blog to sit around unused, which defeats the above-stated purpose. So I might as well start publishing stuff here while I wait.

Speaking of, the download for the new OS is ready. Time to shrug in the face of anxiety and hit the button.

Welcome to the Reboot

For the past couple years, my personal site has remained fallow as I focused less on theatre and more on gaming and essay-writing. A couple years of administering & writing for the Addison Recorder site has given me a better idea of what to do with this space. I’ve got the old site archived on my laptop, and I’ll slowly build up the new site in the near future.

I working on a couple of RPG events for Gen Con (Night’s Black Agents and Delta Green, specifically), which is only a month away. Don’t be surprised if I put some game-related dramaturgy on here in the near-future.