Something New to Offset the Old Tried and True

As January comes to a close, it is time for my weekly ramblings and updates and all the usual material that my readers have come to expect from me.

The Conversions and the New Mutant Monday books are coming closer to completion with each entry. Tomorrow I will post another four new mutant creatures, which will put the total at 96. I have only 8 more to write at this point and then the original document will be sent to Michael Varhola for him to do whatever is required to produce it.

I still have quite a few more entries to write up for the Conversion book, but I am assuming that I should (hopefully) have the three hundred completed by the time I leave for my month in the Philippines.

While I am out there this year, I am hoping to finally finish off the Powered Armor book and the Robot book. I don’t know if I can get the Vehicle rules book written up, since it is currently only in raw note form, but we shall see. If things go well, I will also want to put a huge amount of work on that mythical mutation book I have been talking about on and off for a couple of years now.

This trip is a vacation. An actual vacation. I don’t have to worry about buying a car, dealing with a rotted wisdom tooth (I was smart enough to get all my dental woes taken care of earlier this month), or bury a family member.

It’s a VACATION and I fully intend on enjoying myself. I can still accomplish a great deal of writing while I’m there, and intend to.

Well and catch up on about 30 DVD’s that have been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be watched.

The way things are going, I hopefully will have at least a couple of books printed and ready to be autographed and sold at Comicpalooza!

Now onto the usual. I posted four new creatures on Monday. The Big Horners, Camerus, Wendigo, and Heway. As stated I will be posting four more tomorrow morning.

Only three conversions went up this week as I was very busy with training and other fun stuff after work. I posted the Kraken, Gargs and Doppler.

I likewise posted the third short story that features the character Ronnath. This one is entitled ‘Waking Nightmare’ and is all about the aftermath of a demonic possession and what is going through the mind of the victim.

This week the boys at D-Infinity played Bloodhounds, and as always they had a blast! *sigh* someday I’ll be able to join in on one of these online romps, I know that I will end up having a hell of a great time.

Now I’m going to talk about an old game that I haven’t played in years, but really wish I had the time and could get back into playing.

Kind of like Battletech.

One of the first board games I played back in high school was the venerable Car Wars by Steve Jackson games.

I loved the game! Playing with my friends, designing cars with the armor and weapons, dueling it out on the streets, and generally blowing shit up.

And the support was awesome! Every year I could look forward to the latest Uncle Albert’s Auto Stop and Gunnery shop catalog, books filled with new designs, new maps and counters and of course the Autoduel Quarterly.

If I had any complaints about the game, it was the lack of – I don’t know, maybe a really cohesive world. See a lot of the vehicle designs were submitted by fans, so of course they made up all manner of strange-named auto manufacturers. Instead of having a million manufactures, Steve Jackson games should have had a handful of company names to choose from. Well, maybe a few dozen.

And for me the way the armor did not really work. I could not wrap around my mind how a single point of armor would weigh say 5 pounds on a compact car, and yet would weigh like 20 pounds on a tractor trailer. I know, I know all about game balance of course, but it just did not make all that much sense to me.

I know that Steve Jackson games has been re-releasing the game in spurts and starts over the past several years, but I really don’t think it’ll ever make a comeback.

At least Battletech is still going strong!

No new movies this week, as I am saving them up to watch in the Philippines.

I did finish Aurora CV 01 – Book 1 of the frontiers saga. I really did not know what to expect from the novel and decided to give it a whirl. In a nutshell an undermanned and yet-to-be-completed Carrier is fitted with a skeletal green crew to test out a new faster than light engine.

As to be expected, things go awry and they find themselves over a thousand light-years from home in hostile territory with a recently promoted Ensign as the captain.

You know, I liked it! Really, I enjoyed the novel, even when my mind kept flashing back to the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. I enjoyed it enough to make sure that I added the second novel to my wish list. Currently there are 14 novels in this series.

I finally have an RPG supplement to discuss! I picked up the latest Pathfinder Player Companion: Arcane Anthology. This book is quite rules-light, and has a plethora of spell books that can be incorporated into your game. There are a few new feats, rules on transcribing spellbooks and preparing rituals, and several other neat additions to the game.

Considering the nature of the book, it also contains quite a few new spells for your game. This reminds me of several old Dragon Magazine articles about specific spell books and their contents, so it was a bit of a nostalgic read.

Great for people who play spell casters and GM’s.

So that is it for another week. One month down, 11 more to go.

As usual, please find the time to like my author page on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter. Also if you are so inclined, I have started to use my 14 year old Fanfiction account. There are only a handful of stories that I wrote many years ago available on there, and believe me I considered erasing them.

They are that bad.

But  then again, every author has to start somewhere, right? I bet even Shakespeare struggled before he became an great playwright.

And no I am NOT comparing myself to him. I’ll never be that skilled!

I hope that the first month of 2016 has been great for each and every one of you!