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Good Monday Gamer,
It's the holiday schedule takeover! And already I'm losing game time!! My Twilight: 2000 game is on pause due to some personal schedule conflicts and some holiday schedules. IIRC, we were kind of this way a year ago and resumed immediately after Christmas - without much loss of game inertia. The situation on pause is HOT, which helps when we resume. A cliffhanger of sorts. A new force of marauders camped outside the base. New exploration leads discovered. And two deal-making meetings on the agenda—one with The World's Most Interesting Man.
Anthem: Zero, our home mashup of Tenra Bansho Zero and the video game Anthem, has our young hero pilot, Emil, being recruited into a Freelancer team rebuilding its roster after a massive failure on its last gig...only the silver-tongued recruiter hasn't told the new recruit about that detail!
After that, it's been a lot of Auto Battler research for my game, The Last Age of Sorcery —and that's been fascinating! The genre exploded as a result of some modder’s work on DOTA. If I get my druthers in LAOS, combat encounters will have a large auto-battle element where your retainers and companions will handle their own actions; you have control over your wizard and turn-by-turn actions.
I'll upgrade and move my Foundry VTT instance this week. I’m consolidating cloud servers, and the current implementation failed to reboot after an update—perfect time to move it! Tinkering with using Notion for managing RPG sessions/campaigns is also on my agenda, I like the presentation and sharing aspects of it beyond using Google Sheet-based character keepers. I’ll also look into what effort is needed to make a Foundry implementation for my Lifted: Indomitable RPG for Cortex Prime and what is needed for “just playing” vs. a generic or universally customizable implementation —those also tend to have a steep learning/work curve.
Speaking of holidays, I'll also dust off my 'family-ready' games for our winter gatherings. We've got old favorites like Ticket to Ride, Fury of Dracula, and Smash-Up 🤷🏾♂️ I think I'll add ATMA to that list along with Unearthed. I've earned trust over the years, so my folks give new games an honest try; it's how Fury of Dracula made the favorites—and I soooo love that game!
If you haven't yet, check out what Paul Beakley is getting himself into over at the Indie Game Reading Club with Invisible Sun. It's got me breaking out my Black Cube. I got a very small taste of the game, and I'd like another shot at it.