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My early-year "post daily" attempt obviously ran out of steam rather rapidly, but I'm going to try and pick up the slack a bit. I'll keep continuity with those by covering Blades & Basilisks thoughts for this first one. I have some other topics I want to talk about later - aiming for perhaps once a week - but once I'm through those maybe I start filling out character content.

One of the struggles of being an amateur game designer is the tension between wanting to be informed and wanting to be original. On the former, being conversant in what people around me are doing can inform me of solutions people have already devised for problems I may be wrestling with and prepare me for comparisons others may make. On the other, there's a draw to being original, to truthfully be able to say "I came up with that". I'm dealing with this precise problem from a couple of vectors with Blades & Basilisks.

The first is the dice system. While I'm reasonably sure the exact mechanics aren't in existence anywhere else, it does have some broad-strokes similarities to what I've heard of how Cortex works - roll a fistful of polyhedrals, select a subset of them, and compare that to te resolution system. It may behoove me to read the system if only to see if there are any good ideas or advice interfacing with that sort of system.

The second is the form factor I've been aiming for; small, contained "silos" of character abilities you can freely mix and match over a character's lifetime, probably enabled by using reference cards for playbook tracking. This has been floating in the back of my head since at least 2012's Gamma World 7e and been refined by contact with PbtA and later BitD games. From what I've heard of it, this is broadly similar to how Daggerheart is structured.

I've been resistant to investigating Daggerheart because I'm not very interested in the Actual Play environment it developed from and because this project of mine has already jumped from PbtA to Blades-based, but I may need to at least sit down with a quickstart. I would certainly be more comfortable writing and collating supplemental material to, say, enable an Eberron or Dark Sun game using the system than I have been with trying to decide what parts of Blades are load-bearing and what can stand removal or modification.

Primary project lately has continued to be PF1e collation, though I've only been doing it in fits and starts. Mostly it's been standardizing the texts I'm pulling from, though the complexity of that task varies. Currently I'm redoing the Akashic Mysteries monster entries, to make them more informative and "complete". It's a bit of a chore, but it's the kind of "technically right" work that feeds my inner 3.5 dork.

Major hobby movement since my last post… Still haven't made a print order, mostly because I've been tight on cash and I'm collecting a bunch of pieces to go for at once. Save on shipping. Book collections are in a good place, as are board games and models. I am way behind on Digimon, but I at least am close to closing out BT17 and EX6, or at least getting them to an acceptable point. Last couple of order windows have dragged on because of one holdout shipper, but I'm hoping to be nearing the end of that tunnel.

Monpoc has been building up slowly, two factions each month more or less. Hoping the next run has the Martians.Haven't really hounded my brother about printing anything, hopefully that can be a next year project.

I participated in an Illimat league and pulled third place, which felt pretty nice. Had I gone to every night I feel like I could have pulled first. Regardless, I had a blast and I hope to be able to do that again soon.

Matter of fact, I'm still desperate to get some sort of regular gaming group together. Summer's always got a ton of obligations to power through, but I'd sure find it invigorating if I had a regular Game Night With Other Adults™.

Also trying to get a book club going with the wife, so we can read through our respective comic collections and talk through them.

I was in fact right about Noble Knight slow-rolling several copies of Forcemaster and Warlord - and I nabbed one of the latter today! Still need several kits to close out playsets, but it's all stuff that's less rare so I'm not in a rush. I think I'm going for "full single playset" and skipping on doubles for novice cards - I'd like to be able to but it's not strictly necessary and gets expensive fast.

The MonPoc STLs are supposed to hit sometime this week so I've been on tenterhooks waiting for that. Gonna be visiting my brother this weekend, and he has a resin printer so I want to talk with him about getting these models printed and whether I should print or buy bases.

Foundry's set up and ready to go. Learning Agon right now, then I need to prep a Discord, send out invites, and figure out what the main course'll be. Might also take some time to prep a Lancer, 4e, and Blades world, just to say I have them done. Digging through modules is a lot of fun.

I looked at my PF1e collation files the other day, and it shouldn't be too bad; I mean, it's definitely going to be a bit of work, but sometimes it's felt like too much. I found a PDF-to-Text CLI program that can detect ligatures and I figured out how to concatenate its output files, so making base manuscripts should be a little cleaner now. I'm going to need to comb through my original collected file for entries to cut, and I think I'm going to curate the full list of veils a little more aggressively - I want to cut the Variant descriptor so I'll need to go through all those veils and pick which to keep. I'm also considering including the full text of Path of War and Expanded in the Initiating section to incorporate Errata, but I haven't settled on that yet.

Noble Knight has twice gotten restocks of MWA Forcemaster and Warlord in the last week, kits which I have only seen there a handful of times. I missed both times, but hopefully there are more. I really need a copy of the Warlord so I can close out a playset.

Guild Ball errata 4.7 dropped yesterday, and overall I'm pretty pleased with it. I still think True Replication on Hoist is a mistake, but it's less of one. Though it can still hit mascots so Mother wasn't un-nerfed. One other thing that annoyed me: new CP that makes a Forest AOE. I've reached out to Art of War to see if he can make something for that, but I have to imagine shipping to the US is going to be expensive and that's assuming this doesn't require a bunch of custom work.

Between Guild Ball, Monsterpocalypse, and Digimon I think I'm going to be doing another BGM run. Just need to assemble the tokens I want for Digimon, wait for the Monpoc downloads to drop, and download the errataed GB cards. Since Monpoc uses big cards for the Monsters and there are only two of them in this first drop, I'm considering redoing all my GB stat cards as one-sided. I'm not 100% on that - need to see how many large sleeves I have spare - but this may be the right opportunity.

I'm working on preparing a new game group - we're going to play Agon as an icebreaker, then switch to either Girl by Moonlight or Avatar Legends. I've been entertaining myself with Foundry prep, but so far that's just been "troubleshooting why I can't remote to my Oracle instance" and listing the modules I may want to download.

Once I'm through with the Foundry work, I may finally buckle down for that Pathfinder 1e third-party collation project I've been sitting on. It's just a lot of text formatting to get through. I won't be able to finish it until later this year regardless - waiting on the release of a PF1e Warlock class - but I could at least have the bulk of it in manuscript format by then I bet. Just need to start making myself use evenings.

I elected to fill out my Kadena commander deck; I'm in the throes of receiving PWEs with cards, but hopefully soon I'll get a chance to take it for a spin.

There were some sneak peeks at Tarkir: Dragonstorm cards, and I'm cautiously excited. Dragons are good, Tarkir is good, Wedge clans is good. Only downside is it looks like there isn't any face-down stuff to act as a smoother. I would be super excited to see a Tarkir D&D book, though it looks like the next one of that sort will be a Lorwyn/Shadowmoor one.

It occurred to me recently that the last time I participated in a prerelease at Backstage was when I helped man the KTK one, more than a decade ago. Seems appropriate to bookend that absence with another Tarkir set. I'm thinking about nabbing a full run of the prere kits so I can get one of each spindown.

The Monsterpocalypse Kickstarter was a dud and consequently a huge loss for me - I had gone in hard on that game. Privateer Press will be releasing STLs as an apology for Mythic's mismanagement, starting with neutral buildings, G.U.A.R.D., and Planet Eaters. Hopefully I can get my brother to print those in resin for me, and get a run of cards and a mat or two printed. I'm glad to at least see something come of that.

I have several complete or near-complete collections for collectible games which have stopped or significantly slowed publishing - Dreamblade, Mage Wars, Aristeia!, Guild Ball. The problem with each is that they're all high-time-investment games. Dreamblade is the simplest and it still has a deckbuilding element that makes introducing it to folks difficult. What I really want is someone willing to pick one of these to go absolutely feral on, and then meet with me once a week to play till our eyes bleed. Don't know anyone in the immediate area, and I suspect my normal Board Game Buddy friend would prefer to play more shorter games, but I'll at least reach out.

I've been thinking a lot about the Ladder, and what draws me to it as a solution for a combat system, and I think a little detour into Guild Ball may be illustrative.

So Guild Ball uses free movement. This means that a model doesn't have to be aligned to any grid; distances are given in inches and are generally tool-measured to ensure choices made are valid. This is very common on the wargames side; it works better with the hobbycraft focus most of them have.

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Several of the subsytems I've added or considered have to do in some way with representing combat. This is because combat is such a major part of how D&D expresses its rules, so more knobs in that area makes it easier for me to emulate the feel of D&D, even if I'm opting for a different mechanical expression.

To that end, I'm interested in something that can be used to show spatial relationships for the purposes of range and combat interest, and which create an opportunity for players to use a miniature as a marker if they choose. Currently I have a pretty simple Zone system written up, which allows for terrain effects, multiple melee engagements, varying weapon ranges, and a sense of positioning. Some version of this will be around regardless - arguably Blades already has it, informally if not explicitly, in that these sorts of things can be true in the fiction even if they're not directly called out by the mechanics. Defining them gives a hook for other rules to hold onto, though.

On the more extreme end I'm considering what I've been referring to as a "ladder" system. Basically, I like the idea of there being some kind of more granular tactical movement, but I'm not a fan of being forced into battle maps or miniatures use - the latter can be fun to have but the former are always a ton of work to structure correctly and make look decent. As a result, I started looking for a system that abstracted out absolute position to more of a measure of positional advantage. The best framework for that I've encountered is dogfighting rules for airplane-focused games, and the first one that came to mind for me was Tachyon Squadron.

Basically, each zone would be represented by a series of bands, and individual engagements in a zone by lanes within that zone. Actions are resolved from top to bottom, with the set of actions allowing for different sorts of incidental or focused attacks based on relative position on the bands, and different types of movement. This sort of system would add a lot more interest into combat encounters, and consequently give me more options for designing combat effects, and does so without needing anything more than a reusable printable worksheet or graphic. The cost is that it puts more of a wall between resolution of combat and noncombat encounters, which may screw with the game's flow and risks being overkill.

I have yet to write a formal adaptation of Tachyon Squadron's rules for this use case, but it's something I'd like to test out. Even if I don't end up using it, "abstracted positional advantage combat system" is sure to keep rattling around my skull the way Origins, Abstract Weapons, and Die Ratings have.