Table of Contents

Introduction

Hello folks, Clearly my once a week intentions on my post were a little bit ambitious.

And don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I haven’t had other projects to post about, there’s actually been a LOT going on that I just… Kind of haven’t made a post about, so I’m going to do my best to summarize some of those things tonight.

The Roleplaying Game

We printed a second playtest edition of my game, changing the name in the process from Fables of Galaeffa to Fables of the Twin Moons.

I say we, I mean me, this was more of a project for myself but it’s been a nice one regardless.

• We also scheduled and did an in-person playtest of this (shoutout to Connor, Tensi, K, and Cosmo for their time and input on this.)

• I faced some despair with this, I was so stressed out about getting the playtest together and the adventure and things “going right” that I ended up really not enjoying myself in the process and that lead to a huge existential crisis on the nature of game design and playing games with friends, what is “fun”. I realized it’s been 5 years since I played a tabletop game and I’m questioning if I enjoy them anymore or if I’m just so out of practice and the situation felt so enormous I didn’t enjoy running it. I’m leaning towards the latter.

• Here’s the cover I drew for the second playtest, actually I did all the art for the playtest printing… It was a lot of art.

  

Feel free to shoot me a message on discord or an email or… Any other platform if you want to see more of my art in my posts I guess!

I’m making some changes to the game.

• I’m taking a step back and rethinking a lot of the game, I wanted so badly for the rules and mechanics to inspire creative play but I also worry that providing too many rules could cause people to start thinking they can’t do something if there’s not a rule associated with it, which is the antithesis of what I want.
• I’m also working on narrowing down and better communicating the “vibe” or genre of the type of campaign setting this book is designed to play as, ultimately it’s supposed to be a sort of optimistic heroic RPG where death can happen but can also be overcome, I’m trying to inspire a feeling not of a post-legendary world where we’re digging through the legacy of ancient adventures to find magic items and overcome a vicious evil, but instead the idea of BUILDING those magic items, creating those magic spells, to overcome equally powerful evils who can also make magic items and call on warped avatars of the same gods your characters may worship
• So that’s where it’s at right now, I’m simplifying a lot of the rules relating to initiative, how characters can do things, adding more exciting moments and opportunities for things like crits in combat and so-on, this will be the third edition of the playtest, will have significantly more hand-drawn art, and will likely be released to the “public”.
• Along with this we’re changing the world name from Galaeffa, which I find many folks are having a hard time instinctively knowing how to pronounce, and adopting more of a “generate this KIND of world” approach, the one posited in the book will be called Calaria.

Defining central themes of this type of world.

I want to create some “core characteristics” of this type of high fantasy campaign setting, lets call them guide-markers to keep the worldbuilders on the right track.

1. Magic is everwhere, can’t get rid of the damn stuff and EVERYONE has it, even the tailor uses magic to mend their shoes.
2. Magic has a cost, and the difference between an adventurer and a civilian is a willingness to pay a steeper toll for their variety of spells, also a deeper and more intense variety of spells, and building relationships with other adventurers and immortal beings (devils, demons, fae, gods, etc…)
3. The gods, fae, devils, demons, etc… Are a function of belief and mortal emotion, they can’t exist without mortals… You might have your “void god” here and there who are self-loathing and want to cease to exist, but by and large, gods know that they exist as a function of mortal belief, and are more conceptual than real… Their servitors however… Are that belief made manifest.
4. There’s as many bad folks as there are good and neutral folks, you’ve still got your cults, ancient maguses, eternal undead, asshole unicorns, etc… to contend with, and they have just as much access to these powers as you do.
5. There’s a lot of opportunities for downtime, there’s lots of heroes bandying about, you’ll run into rival adventuring groups, also very friendly adventuring groups, you can take a breather between adventures and know the world will probably be OK, work on that recipe, forge your godsword, travel to the peak of that mountain, take the time away from adventuring to restore yourself.
6. The spirit, body link is IMPORTANT, you can die, and you can play as a spirit when you die, but your body can’t heal without its spirit and your spirit can’t be in a damaged body… Healing magic is rare and calls on your very essence to heal your body, if your essence isn’t in your body… Well you’d better find some other way to get it healed up or you’re going to be in trouble.

I’ll think of more things and either add them to this post, or far more likely make them their own unique post at a later date, but that’s where my mind is at with this right now.

Continuing Technology Education

Since I did the setup for this website, I’ve done quite a few other things, moved almost all of my other websites over to a VPS, set up another github page, gotten into a bit of programming with some side-projects which I’ll share below, and gotten way back into Linux.

Getting back into the web-scene.

• I moved my mom’s memorial blog over to VPS so that I can close out one of my hosting plans, saving about a $100 a year and made a few backups of it in the process.
• I had already transitioned the omnimyth site over to VPS, so those two are sharing a server now.

Programmy projects

• I built a new website in “astro” (in quotes because it’s MOSTLY typescript) as a sort of self-learning project, it’s a character builder for the tabletop game , feel free to play with it and let me know what you think, I’m pretty proud of how it turned out even if the saving and reloading of characters is a little broken… It’s on pause until I make the changes I’m planning on making to the game, but is indicative of the types of tools I plan to put in place when the game is done, to remove barriers to entry.
• I’ve been building some other structures to track my own projects in github and getting into github actions to organize/clean up the files/create indexes and documentation in the readmes as I go.
• I’ve been making a few little python scripts just to test the math of the game and see if some of the things that feel “instictively good” are “balanced”. I’m not looking for perfect balance, but I want players to win basic evenly matched slugfests maybe… 55% of the time? To give them a reason to come up with more creative solutions than just trading blows.

Self-hosting and home servers

• I bought a cheap computer and got Windows Server for it to get used to using Windows Server and Hyper-V as a hypervisor, then ended up running an Arch Linux VM on it which I use as my “outward facing” hosting at home for other side-projects like my Minecraft server with friends, also I put together a locally hosted Minecraft server for friends and went through the whole process of setting up my network for that in the most secure manner I could (within reason), and setting up automatic backups for that.
• I set up a media server VM on the cheap computer as well, using a DAS with around 20TB of storage to host my media rips and a self-hosted version of wikipedia, the arch wiki, and a few other fun little thing to reference. It’s been a nice little side-project.
• Put together a parts list for a homemade Proxmox server/NAS… This will likely be it’s own post when it’s done, but it should have around 40-50TB of storage and quite a bit more power than my current $200 “server”.

Gardening and family

My dad (for the most part) moved out of the local area this summer, so I took over a bunch of the maintenance work on his garden, I haven’t done the best job taking care of it, but I’ve kept it watered enough and weeded enough that we’ve been getting a solid yield out of it this year. Plants that are doing well this year.

• Cucumbers
• Tomatoes
• Zucchini
• Flowers (especially zinnias and lavendar)
• Spaghetti Squash
• Carrots
• Various herbs, sage, mint, cilantro, basil, lemon grass

Things that did not so well

• Summer Squash
• Onions
• I honestly don’t really remember the stuff that didn’t end up growing…

I’ve really enjoyed popping over there a few times a week to water, weed a bit, get some sunshine and I’ve LOVED pulling bits of the plants and having fresh greenery around the house, it makes me wish I could have a hydroponic herb garden, not so much to use for food, but just to put in little bottles around the apartment around the year for a pop of color. It’s been such a delight having a little sprig of fresh mint and a couple black eyed susans on the bathroom sink all summer.

In addition my sister and brother-in-law came to visit with the my nieces and nephew and that was a wonderful time, it’s so interesting to see them grow and develop their own personalities. The youngest felt much safer around me this trip. The highlights of their visit

• Taking them to the lighthouse for sweet treats.
• Making “bootleg churros” with some leftover homemade tortillas I had cooked up for dinner one night.
• Taking them to my in-laws pool to go swimming and getting a couple family BBQs in, it felt “right”.

The Fish Tanks and general housekeeping

A friend moved to the midwest and I bought a few of her fish tanks and some of her fish, I set up her 35 Gallon tank in the office and then ended up breaking it down after a month or so because… I had put the fish I bought from her into my 29 Gallon tank, with the plan of transferring all the contents to the 35 gallon and then getting rid of the 29 gallon entirely and replacing it in the living room with a 40 gallon breeder tank. I decided that was just one big tank too many and ended up getting rid of the 35 gallon instead, and will move the 29 gallon community tank into the office, then will put the 40 gallon breeder into the living room omn the appropriate stand for it. I have a little 5 gallon on my desk in my office with a few chilli rasboras and some shrimp, that one is mostly just for growing plants out of though.

I cleaned up the office a lot, moving the bookshelf against the wall to open things up and cleaning off the shelves so they’re more for display rather than storage, I also cleaned out the closet quite a bit (it’s currently storing the unused 35 gallon and 40 gallon breeder), and put my hobby carts in the main office against the wall where the chalkboard used to be, the chalkboard is now in the office.

I also got a new monitor, a nice 32” 4k display, and removed a lot of the fans and extra equipment from my desktop, reducing the amount of surplus storage by about 5TB and the power overhead by about 80W at idle (I removed like… 6 of the fans, 2 HDDs, and half the memory, the memory will be going into the NAS that I’m building)

Reading

Honestly the only big book of note that I’ve finished recently is Children of Time, which deserves its own post, I’ll just leave the note that I enjoyed it quite a bit.

That’s about is as a catching-up glossover, a lot of these things deserve their own posts and this was a pretty big read I’m sure, and I’m sure I’m leaving plenty of stuff out but you know, high level overview.

Thanks for reading.

• Brian