Dead Six, Original Monsters, Conversions, and More

This week saw me working on and off on the Monk Magic items book. Specifically the belts. It has been a slow and tedious task, and I am very sure there are plenty of people who would argue with me over the math of the project.

Still, twenty belts with their corresponding benefits and prices have been completed and I posted them earlier on Sunday as the next preview for the book.

Eight pages of material have been converted, another 20 pages to go.

I’m waffling on if I will write up a separate book for Ranger magic items as well as Tiefling items. After all, I have pictures to use for the cover of all three.

Anyone who has followed my blog for any length of time will know I could change my mind at the drop of a hat.

So it’s all up in the air at the moment.

I posted my last original creature last week. I am still trying to decide if I’m going to take the time to convert one tonight or if I will do some converting next week. Last week I posted the Bleeder – a mutant fungus.

At this time I have over 500 OSR creatures to convert. I am still putting it off as the work is just so damn daunting! Even if I could cut down the conversion time to about half an hour it will still take hundreds of hours to convert these creatures to Pathfinder.

Well, Starfinder at least.

I might have to do themes, or essentially books based on a specific type of creature. I’m kind of thinking about greatly expanding upon the Nanotech undead issue I wrote for what is probably the last ever Wisdom from the Wastelands series. I might take the dozens of creatures I converted from various comics, movies and so forth and create a pretty big zombie, vampire and other undead book.

All based on Nanotechnology of course.

Again, we shall see.

I do honestly wonder if anyone misses the weekly creatures I used to post, or if anyone even noticed I stopped?

We are now just over a month away from the Calgary Comic and Entertainment expo. I really need to hurry up and finish the various 3D printing projects I have on the go. After several attempts to try and figure out a couple of free online 3D programs so I could slice a couple of pieces I really wanted to print out in half, I finally succeeded in doing so.

Only to have the first print fail 95% of the way through. Nearly 40 meters of filament wasted, and five hours.

So as I type this, I’m trying again. If it fails again, at the same place, which I fear it will, I’m going to have to modify the STL file. It might be the only way to get this printed properly.

The helmet, blaster, Chirrut props and motion tracker all turned out pretty good, and I just need to really get around to painting all of them.

As for the Chirrut pieces, I need to get some Velcro and use my wife’s handy skills with sewing as well as her glue gun so I can get them added to Chirrut’s props.

And here is hoping I’ll be able to get all the pieces for the staff properly printed out!

Four weeks might seem like a while, but really, it’s not.

This week saw me complete two more books. The first was called Chaos: A New World by John O’Brien. This is a zombie-style novel. The story is all about an Airforce Pilot named Jack, who has managed to survive a plague which has killed the vast majority of the populace, but seems to have spared his children.

He has made a promise to his girlfriend that, if ever such an event as what is taking place actually happened, to go and retrieve her.

After getting his kids, he manages to get his hands on aircraft and sets out to do exactly that.

A good start to the series and I certainly will be continuing it.

The other novel was called Dead Six by Larry Correia, and Mike Kupari. This is a novel about two separate groups of people – one who happen to be professional thieves who target the scum of the earth, the other mercenaries who were hired to perform missions involving inflicting terror on terrorists.

Due to circumstances beyond either group’s control, they end up clashing head on during the executions of their own personal agendas.

Tons of action, and it was very enjoyable to see a fictional world in which the terrorists get what’s coming to them in spades.

It involves a lot of conspiracy theories and the protagonists are not what anyone would call nice people, but I found they quickly grew on me and I am very much looking forward to continuing with this particular series.

To cap off this blog, we did see Kong: Skull Island on Saturday. Good effects, dumb story, but what do you expect? Also it seemed to have a serious issue with multiplying helicopters. Still I had fun with the movie and it was a good, enjoyable popcorn flick.

I’ve stated many times over the years if you want serious drama or intellectual movies, don’t bitch when you get a flick like this one.

I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5.

And that’s it for this week.

Spring is here, weather is changing and getting nicer, grass is turning green, gophers are dying in droves on the roads, and it’s been all around beautiful.

Enjoy it, wherever you are!