Greetings from beyond the vale! I hope this transmission finds you well.
It has been a fair few weeks since we stepped back from Xaxa River Valley. This group of strangers has decided to continue gaming together. Murazir’s player took up the mantle of Referee, and runs us through the halls of Arden Vul, an 1100+ page mega-dungeon. I’m playing a cleric called Roke. We’ve played four sessions now, and I almost have enough XP to achieve 2nd LVL. It’s been marvelous fun hopping to the other side of the screen. Our DM is excellent, and we’ve already established group chemistry completing an arc from start to finish in Xaxa.
We’re scheduled to play the fifth session tomorrow. As the gameplay is much different (we’re adhering closely to OSE’s dungeon crawling rules, exploring methodically), it makes more sense to clump groups of sessions into single recaps. Keep an eye out for those.
I currently have two projects with Xaxa River Valley. Firstly, I’ve been recreating the blog posts as pseudo “radio dramas”, enriching the stories with music & more images. Needless to say, I’m pretty terrible at video editing so this has been great practice to learn the basics. If you’re interested, check it out here. I also have several videos covering The Dying Earth, with many more in the pipeline.
Second, I’m in the slow works of creating my first published RPG game book. Xaxa River Valley will be a 30~ page zine covering a setting overview, a bronze age science fantasy point-crawl & an impending apocalypse for GMs to unleash on their PCs. Players are prophets of fire & low LVL PCs grapple with forces well above their individual power. I have so much to learn; there’s a lot that goes into making a final, printed book. Typography, layout, design, writing, art, cartography, all are required to produce a stone cold artifact.
Why not pursue all of these things over the course of life? I find no reason not to dabble in them all and see what I can make. These channels (thedelvercollective.com, Magician’s Manse) are the perfect vessels to track my progress, hold myself accountable & more importantly, share ideas, tips, thoughts along the journey.
Beyond that, my game life has been very cool. I’ve been running a Sci-Fi Horror RPG called MOTHERSHIP. Alien, Aliens, The Thing, Event Horizon, Dead Space, & 2003 are all touchstones. There’s a bustling community of 3rd party creators making art in the form of trifolds & zines. Such projects are an excellent way to practice these skills & put more games out into the world. On Mothership, we ran Another Bug Hunt with two different groups. Both were spectacular, cinematic fun. The rules are incredibly light & stay way out of the way of fun & pulse-pounding narrative.
Just for fun, I signed up to run Mothership as a paid GM on startplaying.games. Somehow, I have 4/4 seats filled for my first professional game, to be played this Friday, August 3rd. It’s the first scenario of Another Bug Hunt, so I think it’ll go great. Look out for that recap at some point in the future!
Finally, in an effort to engage with my local community in this small forest town I inhabit, I went into our game store, who are predominantly Warhammer 40K & Magic the Gathering players, and picked up a box of Chaos Space Marines & a hardback codex. I haven’t played 40k seriously in many years, and I know collecting models can be a slippery slope. Still, I’ve already met a Mothership player from this escapade. The local discord has almost 100 people coming all the way down here. Cool!
So maybe I’ll post up some pictures of my meagre CSM force. I have some cool models from the Blackstone Fortress box, including a squad of Traitor Guardsmen & a daemon-hammer Chaos Lord. It should make for a unique force.
That’s all I’ve got for this update! This turned more into a journal of the past few weeks’ gaming, but what fun it’s been! It feels wonderful to re-engage & re-discover the joy and love for this grand hobby we all adore.
Until next time, happy gaming!
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