Current situation
I have a very talented artist producing colour faction iconics, but since he has a very serious real-life job, and I only have monthly funds from which to pay him, that front is steady, and not likely to outpace my sporadic writing and technical illustrations and layout and editing as I go -- routine.
There is a particular section, one which requires setting-specific character background tags, which stymies forward progress in finishing a particular step in char-gen, or building, or both/either. Fortunately,I can skip past that and introduce other portions of the text, but I've been gnawing away at that and therefore not making progress in the writing.
Instead, I have been using a freeware CAD lite program to illustrate the primary faction military arms, which are essential to PCs, as this first product is explicitly from the PoV of this faction. I'm likely to import these images into a raster programme to enhance the colours and fill areas which the CAD doesn't recognise as a shape, but rather, a collection of lines.
I generally get to run this once a week over Discord, and a wayward player may be rejoining us after a couple of months off. They do much more setting-effery than mechanics testing, but that may simply be the thing that kids do these days, dunno.
Other stuff
Recovered a copy of my 'award winning novella' from a site that had been out of commission for years, and my mom is urging me to get back to that and expand it or simply publish it and get on with actually writing Urutsk' grand cycle. Considering my age and general health, not a bad idea; it'd be kinda bittersweet to sign off thinking of my unpublished Magnum Opus I've talked about so much. Here's to the hope for that I do get to it before too late.
I participated in a Harnworld seminar at GenCon 2020 online, and also played in a Morrow Project 4e game while suffering from disabling allergy symptoms. I had also been playing Jessica Jones in an online ICONS game with reprobates from G+/MeWe, and I think I won the internet when I played Frank Castle in the finale and had him urge a ghostlike baddie to kill him so he could spend time with his dead family; still, playing Jessica was a lot of fun, and Mothmaiden the GM (not her handle) ran a fun campaign with decent RP moments. Oh, yeah, imagine Jessica Jones paired up with Dazzler, it was priceless.
Let's see, I've recently received my HarnMaster Deluxe 3rd Edition books in print, and added them to my zipper binder. I'm waiting on Fading Suns, Dark Matter, MetAlpha Warden, and a clay monster maker game from KS. I found the Legendary Games' Forest Kingdom Compendium pdf and then purchased the hardback new: gorgeous and well worthy of mention. It, as another poster wrote, and the 5e PHB are all that are necessary for a long campaign in that sort of setting. It also pairs up thematically with my Harn and The Green Knight focus.
A24 movies, such as Midsommar, and, The Vvitch, have produced a beautifully boxed starter style FRPG with wonderful production value, and a very solid system -- but hobbled by the strict adherence to what I suppose will be the movie's narrative structure and philosophy. I plan to spend some time liberating it from the hardwired railroad encounter system which penalises PCs for mandatory encounters and then hard-codes specific outcomes. The end-state of three addressed outcomes of the boss fight do not permit future play with the same PCs, and there is no evidence they plan to support the game with future, freer scenarios or anything else, but this is 202, so, who knows?
If the Coof weren't screwing everything up, I could conceivably actually see a Dr. about this and other health issues, but this one is my daily antagonist); when I was smoking on a daily basis I don't think I was ever this bad off, but perhaps that is what led to the current situation. Oh, I've been smoke-free for years now, btw, for anyone who knew me for a while. Now I drink Kombucha 2x a day; crazy, I know.
OK, that's it for now, or is it? <eerie music>
