Avatar, Sheeple, and Updates on My Various Projects!

Another week has passed and with that the first month (which I often find to be the LONGEST) of the year is all but complete. As I have stated many times during my various blogs over the past few months this week has seen a lot of work.

Just when I thought I was finally caught up on my bonus content, my latest issue of Wisdom from the Wastelands hit the electronic stands this week. Wisdom from the Wastelands issue 35: Terror Weapons was inspired for the most part by season one of the excellent series ‘Fringe’. I honestly can’t remember if we cut anything from the issue or not, so I’m going to have to compare the published copy to that of my rough draft. If there was cut material, then I’m going to post that. If not then my readers will be treated to brand new material.

I must admit that I was a little disappointed though. This has to be the first time that I have not had one of my issues in the top 100 small press releases over on DrivethruRPG.

Ah well, it was bound to happen eventually. Here’s hoping that my future work will make it back into that list!

And on top of this, the entire week has seen me writing a new conversion every single day to post here on the site. I was a little annoyed to discover that I missed so many of the creatures from the Fallout series of games when I originally wrote all the mutant conversions to post.  As a result, all this week I have been alternating between posting an S.T.A.L.K.E.R. conversion and one of the Fallout creatures that I missed.

As of right now the master document in which I have stored all the converted mutants is now 120,000 words long. That’s as long as my novel Sword of Kos: Dark Inheritance!  And it’s going to continue to grow because I still have a lot of mutants that I would like to convert and post for free.

For those of you who have enjoyed these conversions I want to point out the excellent little feature ‘add to book’ that appears with each post. This allows you to literally add every creature that I have created to a PDF that you can download and print!

Pretty sweet little function, if you ask me. The only downside is that if you want to wait until I have finished compiling all the creatures that I have written for free, that won’t be ready until probably May or later this year!

Speaking of conversions… as anyone who has followed my work and blogs know, I train Shaolin Kung Fu. I Started over 5 years ago mainly to combat my Type II diabetes. Sadly despite the amount of physical training I have put in over the years, that type II is about to become type I and I’ll be shooting up on insulin quite soon.

Anyhow, getting off track here.

What I have been considering to write for over a year now is a very basic martial arts system to incorporate into the Mutant Future game. Because the basic game is classless I was considering writing it up based on the character’s level. I think I will still look into this, and I’ll start to compile some basic notes.

Now that leads to another topic. I am a huge fan of Avatar: the Last Airbender and Avatar: Legend of Korra. Both my wife and I love both series.  I think that I fell in love with the series shortly after I started training. It combines Martial Arts and what is essentially magic. So how difficult would it be for me to convert this into something that could be incorporated into Mutant Future?

A lot of research, for starters. I would have to watch the whole series once again (oh no!  Say it isn’t so!). This is one thing that I might consider working on, but it’ll have to wait until all my other myriad of projects has been completed. Especially the 3 Mutation books, Armor, Robots and the faction book.

Yes the Armor book is coming along slowly. I’m still working on basic descriptions and optional rules to include in it. And I’m also going through numerous other sources that I own for inspiration.   In some ways the longer it takes me to work on the book, the greater the end result will be.

Now, the mutations are another story entirely. I recently discovered that a gentleman released a mutation book of his own for Mutant Future that contained over 650 mutations. I tried to find the free PDF version of the book and discovered that it was no longer available, so I broke down and purchased the Lulu version today. I should have it in a couple of weeks or so.

I want to go through his book and see just how many of the mutations Derek Holland and I have created end up overlapping. And I won’t lie… I will use his book as inspiration as well. There will be no mutations that have the same name (except in the case where I already wrote it up for my book), nor will the descriptions be even remotely similar. I will use it for ideas and that is the extent of it.

Shame that I found the book by pure accident - the gentleman in question should do far more work promoting it!

For my fellow fans, I would strongly recommend ‘One Year in the Savage After World’ by Tim ‘Sniderman’ Snider. He’s one of the main posters over on the Goblinoid Games forums page. When I first saw that the book was available, I thought that it was for the Savage Worlds game system. I did not realize that it was in fact for Mutant Future. I’ve only had a few minutes to skim through the book, but what I have seen so far I really like. I’ll see if I can find the time to read it properly and write a review for it.

Doesn’t hurt to review fellow author’s works, does it? Sometimes this leads to similar favors being returned.

That reminds me… I really need to go back and start to write up the short story ‘Reunion’ to help promote my Sword of Kos: Dark Inheritance novel. I’ll set a goal of the end of February to complete, edit and post that story here.

The image accompanying this blog is once again from Giorgio Alfonso Maesa. This is from Chapter 8. It’s of a young woman that the three encounter on the streets of Kos and the scene itself is quite funny to read.

Now that I’ve discussed all the work that I have been doing, I’m just going to make a couple of observations about things I’ve seen on Facebook or in the news.

First, Dark Horse comics has owned the rights for Star Wars comics for many years. Now that Disney owns Star Wars as well as Marvel comics, I recall seeing a few weeks back that Disney will be taking back the rights for the comics and handing them over to Marvel.

Could be interesting to see where that will take Star Wars now.

Now for disturbing trends… to me at least. Remember, this blog is for my personal views and you have every right to disagree with these views.

It seems that certain fanatical groups are really trying to exert control over the minds of Christians. They use slogans like ‘Free Thinkers are Satan’s Slave’ and the like. Sorry but we have free will to choose. Too many people are becoming what I like to call ‘Sheeple’. These are people who blindly follow and never question.

Always question, especially if you don’t agree with something. Never accept ‘because I said so’ (unless you’re 5 years old). Always question and demand reasons. If you don’t, terrible things have happened and will continue to happen.

Blind faith in ANYTHING like this and taking away free thinking is a control mechanism.

But then again those who read this blog are gamers and are FREE THINKERS with wonderful imaginations. So I really don’t need to say this now, do I?

Anyhow, that’s all for this week. Stay warm, happy and enjoy life!

Peace!