It has been a strange few weeks since I last posted, and I have had a lot of things on my mind.
- Lockdown has been running for (what seems like) ages, and I am getting really frustrated now. I have been working from home, using MS Teams, to support apprentices through their course. They have been coming and going at different times – and I have not been able to establish a sensible structure to the week.
- I set fire to a camping cooker when we went for a picnic down by the beach. I live close to the sea and it was permissible under our lockdown rules. No damage done, but it was within a few feet of the ‘bus’. More importantly, it meant we had to go home to cook our dinner 🙁 And that just added to the frustration.
- I discovered that I have developed hay fever. In the past I only reacted to heavily scented flowers and rape fields. Now it seems my nose itches and I start sneezing, every time the pollen count is high. That is going to be annoying.
- On top of that I celebrated my wedding anniversary (17th) and my birthday (65th). We were supposed to be going to Venice – but that has all gone by the wayside.
- The Wiki software I use for my games site got upgraded. Unfortunately many add-ons and extensions didn’t. That messed up some formatting I had got and started throwing warnings all over the place. That was frustrating, took time to understand and it still isn’t working properly – although it is much better than it was.
My RPoL game has been in a funny stage as well. Players are still MIA, some (I am sure) due to the lockdown and I have had to reorganize the adventuring groups. So we have dropped from three groups to two, reorganized the parties and left the missing characters in a holding group. If they come back, I can ease them back into the game. If they haven’t returned in a few weeks, I’ll start recruiting again.
That has coincided with a political phase of the game, the discontent that has permeated southern Brevoy for years is coming to a head, and it looks like a Civil War is brewing. So I have been dropping clues to what has been happening. Some subtle, some much less so – but I most characters are aware, and some are staring to take sides already. One day soon they will have to make a decision about which side their rapidly growing colony should support – and I am looking forward to the RP that should come with it.
At the same time we are coming up to the start of a new Campaign Round. I have been spending a lot of time reporting back to players about the health and status of the holdings. Because Characters have joined at different times, they have different levels of holding. We have a massively wealthy merchant, a PC Bishop who has built a Cathedral at the heart of the new settlement, a hotel magnate – and that runs right down to a couple of characters who are able to build their first small shop / shrine etc this round.
Players have now started running their development plans passed me. That is great, I can tell them when they have misread the rules and suggest options that they might not have thought of – and it helps me spot any inconsistencies in the rules. Most recently, questions from a couple of players has encouraged me to re-think the Merchant House rules – and that has led to a slightly different approach where merchants control both supply of goods and try to control the sales in their own city. Ironically, it doesn’t change the actual rules all that much – but it does entail a complete rewrite as I split retail and transportation businesses into two different business groups. Which, of course, has a knock on effect on all the other business pages.
And all of that right in the middle of an overall restructure of the Campaign Rules – which then got put on the back burner again
And that is my excuse for not writing anything new ….