NaNoWriMo Begins, Munchkin, Talisman, and Other Ideas

I really hope that everyone had a fun and safe Halloween on Friday. For me it was really nothing more than cleaning and then sitting down to relax for the evening with my lovely wife.

Yeah, dull, I know but then again I am getting up in the years after all!

And this now marks one full year that I have written my weekly blog! I have a habit of saving my blog on a single file just in case I need to reference what was on my mind during the year. So at the time of my writing this blog, I have written 105 pages of material, with a total of 54,138 words.

Will I continue with my weekly blog? I don’t see why not. I rarely ever get any comments but I know that a lot of people do read what I have to say.

This week saw me finish with the last of my series of short stories. I mentioned it over the past couple of blogs. This was called ‘Meeting’ and it ended on a cliff-hanger. Once it is posted my readers will have to wait until the sequel has been published in order to see how the cliff-hanger ends.

Evil, I know.

But the story leads into the opening sequence of my latest novel ‘Familiar Bonds’. That is just a working title at the moment, and is subject to change. After all, ‘Dark Inheritance’ started out as ‘A day at the market.’

Oh and the thirteen stories I wrote encompass a total of 153,610 words in total. That should be worth a few hours reading time.

Speaking of, I have commissioned Alfonso Maesa to begin work on the images for the series of short stories. He has the description of the scene I wish depicted for the first five stories. I will of course get him to do the images for all thirteen of the stories over the next couple of months. And if by chance you have not had a chance to see his work, click on his name above and check out his Deviantart page.

You will not be disappointed.

I did begin work on ‘Familiar Bonds’ yesterday. I did that on purpose since I wanted to get involved with NaNoWriMo, or national novel writing month. I could have gotten involved last year but by the time it began, I was already about a third of the way through ‘Dark Inheritance’ so I felt that it would be cheating.

Most of my readers are already familiar with this national challenge, but for those of you who are not, click on the name above to find out more about it. But essentially it is a challenge to write 50,000 words in thirty days.

That should not be all that difficult for me to accomplish, as when I am on a roll, I can easily write 2-4k in a single day, and there have been days that I’ve written over 6,000 words. So it goes without saying that the challenge has been accepted.

Over the past few weeks I was quite busy working on my Wisdom from the Wastelands series, mainly getting around to adding bonus material for five issues. That was well overdue. I’m going to try to make sure that I don’t fall behind like that again!

This week on Tuesday or Wednesday issue 46: High Tech Weapons 4 will be released. It has a plethora of deadly and not so deadly toys for the Mutant Lord to add to his game and as always several of the weapons will be quite familiar to people who have played various video games.

I already have an idea as to what I want to write up for the bonus material, so that should be available by the time I post next week’s blog.

Before I forget, two of my earliest issues finally became ‘Silver Best Sellers’ on DrivethruRPG. Wisdom from the Wastelands issue 3: High Tech Weapons and Wisdom from the Wastelands Issue 4: New Races. I was very pleased to see this happen! As it stands a huge number of the mini E-zine have hit the Copper Best Seller rank, but to hit silver? Very cool!

Last night my son, new boarder and I sat down and finally tried playing Steve Jackson’s Munchkin game.

What a blast! It was everything that it promised to be. The cards were imaginative and made me laugh out loud more than once. And yes, it is a lot of fun stabbing your friends (or in this case my son) in the back in order to attempt to win! 

And there are so many expansions available for the game. Eight at the last count and that does not include the many different sets that can be purchased and either played alone or mixed and matched to have a REALLY bizarre game.

I do recommend this game to anyone who wants something easy and light-hearted to play.

Now my regular readers know how much I have on my plate at any given time. My novel, creating material for WftW, bonus material, and of course the various source books that are always in various stages of completion but never quite seem to get finished.

I would really love to work on a board game. It would be a semi-clone of the venerable and always enjoyable ‘Talisman’ game -which has an awesome digital version for your computer and iPad!

When I say semi-clone I mean that literally, except that it would be a post-apocalyptic version. I imagine a map encompassing all of North America (The US, Canada, and Mexico), which will be split up into regions. Each region will have either some sort of card that would be pulled, or would have something happen, just like the Talisman board game.

The system would be very similar, with easy statistics for a large number of characters. They would have mutations, both physical and mental, equipment, weapons, and even vehicles. Of course I would have to come up with some way to end the game, and future expansions could be maps of other parts of the world such as Europe, Asia, Central and South America, Africa, etc.

This would not be all that difficult a game to produce, and who knows I might build a test version, print it out and give it a whirl with my friends.

And on that note, I do believe that is all for this week.

Remember folks, only 7 weeks until Christmas!

Peace!