It does surprise me that I’ve been able to keep up with a weekly blog for as long as I have. Typically I would do a couple, and then get distracted and forget about it for months at a time. So keeping up with this is a good thing, right?

Anyhow…

The first round of edits has surpassed a little over the half-way mark with Sword of Kos: Dark Inheritance.  If things go well I should be 75% or further finished with the edits by the time I’m ready to write my next blog.

I did manage to add a little more to the word count, so that the novel is now nearly 111,000 words by making various changes and fixes. And I still feel that the book will break the 120,000 mark by the time I’m finished. After all I do have to write up an epilogs that will lead into the sequel, so that will be worth several thousand words for sure.

The past week has been one filled with unexpected deaths. I’ll touch briefly upon those now. Paul Walker, who I will admit that I did like, was killed in a traffic accident. So was the guy who was driving at the time, by the name of Roger Rodas.

Yes, it’s tragic. Death almost always is. It’s sad to see someone that you like have their life cut short. But it’s not all that important when it comes right down to it!  He got a ton of media-time and yet the driver barely was a blip on the radar. Think about the families of BOTH men and how they must feel right now.

Death at any time of the year is hard to deal with but when it’s this close to Christmas, which seems to make it all that much harder to deal with.

My heart goes out to the families of both men, not just Paul’s.

And then there was the passing of a great man, Nelson Mandela. I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s and the whole issue with apartheid.  Back in the day, before I reached my twenties, I came to the realization that there was something wrong with me. I was one racist s.o.b. Thankfully I learned very quickly how incredibly stupid it was to be prejudice against someone because of their skin-color. I don’t believe in the term race, because no matter what we look like physically, we’re all HUMAN!

Back to Nelson Mandela. The man was a peaceful political figure who spent, if I’m not mistaken, nearly two full decades of his life behind bars because of his activism in trying to bring equality to the blacks of South Africa.

I won’t deny that I don’t fully comprehend the changes that took place, as it is so far away from my little corner of the world and I haven’t followed the news in decades myself, but I do know that he was finally released and ended up becoming the president of the country.

The man will go down in history as one of the greats who brought about significant and long-lasting changes.

Rest in peace, Mr. Mandela, you have certainly earned it.

Now, when it comes to gaming material I have been working quite steadily on adding new creatures to the site. I have been adding the old monsters that I created on the Skirmisher site and it’s going to take many months to finally get them all reposted. It’s not simply a matter of just copy and paste, no not at all. I’m taking the time to go through my entries and make a few corrections here and there, doing a very basic edit.

After all, I am a professional and if I let stupid grammar or spelling errors to show up on the final post, not only does it look bad for me, but it also looks bad for the company that I am writing for. I simply can’t have that.

At the moment I’m writing up the OSR equivalent for the mutant creatures that appeared in the Metro 2033 series of games. As of last night I had written up four of these monsters and I have approximately ten more to go. So this will be finished in the new-year.

After that, I’ll work on stating the undead horrors from the Dead Space series of games. And once they’re done, I think I’ll work on more horror, such as the various zombies that have appeared in film and video games.

And who knows, with the release of Aliens: Colonial Marines earlier this year, I might have to add a few new xenomorphs to the ones I’ve already written up.

Of course there will be other creatures as well, but I do try to keep a theme going once I start it.

Finally I have begun to re-post (at long last) the free material that I created for the various issues of Wisdom from the Wastelands. I even posted some never before seen bonus content for my third issue: High Tech weapons.

So, as with the re-posting of all the mutants, I will post the old material once a day until all has been re-posted, and during that time I will also try to add new bonus content for my issues that I did not create any material for.

Since that I’m talking about that, I also want to explain why my entries are so long. I realize that some people like those entries, and others do not. I try to make the entries interesting to read (after all I am an author), and add background, speculation, etc. I write what I personally would like to see when it comes to entries.

Others are of the mindset to be minimalist. A basic, bare-bones description that forces the GM to fill in the oft huge blanks. I know that there are many who prefer that method, and if that is what they like, then so be it. There is nothing I can do to change their views and it is not right that I even try to do so.

But don’t expect that out of my work, ever!

You might ask why I am so adamant about this. It’s simple. I feel that it’s lazy and that not only the reader but the GM and player are being ripped off. In many cases someone pays good money for a supplement and if they have to do all the work to make a particular creature, spell, tech, item, mutation playable, they are being ripped off!

It is one thing to come up with an idea; it’s another to make the idea playable. Gee, that kind of goes back to a previous blog, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, with the work that I put into my material, I want it to be not only playable, but interesting to read.

And thus why my entries, even the free material, are so long.

Now for something that has absolutely nothing to do with games, writing or game design. There is one thing that has bugged me for many years. What on god’s green earth do the undead have to do with Christmas? For some reason people like to talk about ghosts at Christmas time.

The only reference I can think of is the classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ that has the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.

Any ideas?

And at last the image that I am using is the rough draft of the artwork that will be available for chapter one of my upcoming novel. It is a humorous scene with the characters Viya and Jaeger. I won’t give anything away in regards to it; you’ll just have to read it.

Artwork provided by the incomparable Giorgio Alfonso Maesa.

Until next time, Peace!