Meta: The Return

Me, returning to my blog.
The Internet, 1983 (colourised).

So it's been a while.

The main reason for this was that the players for the game I had been planning (and getting really excited about) fell through, and it really bummed me out. It killed my desire to keep planning and scheming GURPS stuff, so I just sort of forgot about this blog and my goals of two posts a week died a quiet death. In truth, I struggled to meet that target almost every single week, so going forward I'm probably going to stick to once a week.

But there's some good news: after a while in limbo, the game has been resurrected! The three players have good ideas of what they want to play, I've started scheming horrible things that will happen to them and we've arranged both a Session 0 (for character creation) and a Session -1.

Session -1 will consist of me handing the players pre-generated characters and thrusting them into a situation with little context, designed for them to fail and die in a plot-relevant way, much like the False Protagonist trope often used in TV series. It serves the purpose of letting us get right into how the game works in play without having to explain it during character creation, allows me to tightly shepherd a scenario designed to display a variety of possible gameplay situations, and lets the players feel out how lethal GURPS combat can be without putting their precious homemade characters at risk. The more I sharpen my knives for this session, the better an idea it seems!

I have plenty of half-finished posts from back when I was actively working on things, so those will be resurrected too, polished up and make up new content. I will be doing some after-action reports on my sessions (providing the players consent) but I'm aware of the fact that they tend to not be very popular content. I know that I almost always skim over AARs on other blogs in the gurps-o-sphere, so I might instead do something like highlights or character descriptions. I'm going to play this one by ear!

Meta: One Year Blogiversary

I started my blog on the 9th February 2016, after learning about GURPSday from Gaming Ballistic and taking a look at the mess of textfiles on my harddrive containing hastily-typed notes on homebrew content. By coincidence, the one-year anniversary of the blog falls on a GURPSday! Nice. As a celebration, I'll look at the past year and look ahead at what I want to do in the next, along with giving two of my top fives: my five most-viewed posts and my five favourite posts.

Meta: D'oh!

As I'd mentioned in previous posts on and on the forum thread, my work has been heating up a lot recently – I'm writing this at 10PM in a hotel room in Barcelona, having been working since about 10AM! This is why there's only been one post this week instead of the normal two. It's also why there'll likely be no posts for another week – I'm off to Amsterdam at the weekend for another week and almost certainly won't have the spare time or energy to write more posts there. And unlike Mailanka I don't have a massive queue of posts to fall back on!

So that's it for the next week or two but there is some good news. I've finally managed to put together a group for a space opera GURPS game! As long as my players consent, I'll likely be posting things like after-action reports, character profiles, setting details, etc., which will be much easier and faster to create and result in slightly less interruption when I inevitably become busy with jetting off to exotic locales to make powerpoint presentations.

In the meantime, Thursday is GURPS day as always, so head over to Gaming Ballistic to check out what's been happening in the GURPS-o-sphere this week.

Meta: New Look and Christmas Break

I'm visiting family for the Christmas holiday now and have decided that "But it's Christmas!" is an excuse for me to shirk all responsibilities, not just work and healthy eating. As such I won't be keeping to my twice-weekly schedule until the New Year. The first GURPSday pull of 2017 will be on 5th January, so I intend to have two posts for it and then back on the schedule afterwards.

I've also finally overhauled the look of the blog. A few weeks ago I realised I'd been on a totally unmodified default layout and colour scheme the entire time – having just picked one when I started up to satisfy the requirement and forgetting about it – and I've now got around to changing it to something more unique. I'm well aware the colours on the mobile version are a bit janky but overall I think it looks better. If you have any issues or critique, let me know.

Meta: Dude, Where's My Shield (Design System)?

So one of the things I mentioned in a previous post is the shield design system I've been working on. I've also talked a bit about it in the GURPS Discord if you've been lurking there at the right times. It's something I'm very proud of because of it's elegance – it encapsulates what could be a very complex problem in a simple and direct way. But the reason it's not shown up on this blog yet is because last weekend I sent a query letter to Steve Jackson Games for writing it as a GURPS Pyramid article.

When I started this blog it was always one of my intentions to hold myself to a professional standard, as well as to use a similar voice and tone to Pyramid articles. Writing for Pyramid is something that I've thought about for at least the last year. I had the ideas, for sure, but the writing itself was the issue. But beginning this blog and setting my two-per-week goal has really helped me refine my writing, both in terms of quality and speed. After some unexpected but glowing feedback on the Discord, I decided to pitch the shield design article to SJG. I got quite a positive response, so if all goes well and it's accepted, it won't be appearing here. But, as Bob Ross says, it'll put a happy buck in my pocket. But if it's not accepted, I'll post it here!

EDIT: To clarify, nothing has been decided yet; the query I sent got a good response but there's no guarantee of publication implied in that. I did point them at this blog but I have no idea whether reading what I've posted here was part of the decision or not. I'll talk more about it when there's something to talk about.

Meta: In the Pipeline

I'm currently writing from the CERN accommodation in Geneva, Switzerland, because as a particle physicist it was only a matter of time until I ended up here for a week or so. This also means that I won't be making my goal of two posts every GURPSday pull this week. Damn! This would have been a full month of keeping to that goal, too. But nevermind.

This isn't for lack of content, mind you. There's quite a few things I've got knocking around, all nearly-ready for deployment:

• A shield design system, based on Pulver's armour design system
• Superscience lightning guns!
• Plasma weapons that use the vortex ring system so that they're only limited-superscience, rather than total superscience
• A system for designing electromagnetic guns from the ground up
• The first instalment of a new column, Dramatis Personae, where I create characters for use as PCs or NPCs

I just need some time...

Meta: New Goals

So anyone who's been following this blog for longer than the last two or three months (so two people?) may have noticed that there was a big gap in the middle of the year. There were a number of reasons for it but to be honest the biggest was a lack of initiative – all the content I had made that was easy to dress up and present had been done, so getting the rest out there involved more work that I wasn't bothered to put in. I've recently come back to this blog properly and I'm trying to get a better flow of content. I have a lot of content half-finished – there's about the same number of draft posts as there are published posts. 

So from now on, I've made a goal for myself to make at least two posts every week. More specifically, to get two posts in every GURPSday pull, since it's currently my biggest source of traffic and views. Tomorrow's pull will mark the second week of keeping this goal. Most of the posts will be coming from my large amount of unfinished drafts, many of which are basically done but for my perfectionist streak. After that backlog is cleaned out... well hopefully I'll have built up more half-finished ideas to finish by then.

Meta: He's Not Dead, He's Pining for the Fjords

All's been quiet here for nearly a month now, and the reason is work. Doing a PhD and being a researcher means I have a highly non-uniform workload. Sometimes I have very little to do. Sometimes I have way too much to do. In this case, I've had a lot for the past month and a bit. I had a week of work in Germany, followed by the Easter holiday, two weeks of illness due to tonsillitis followed by a week of of catching up from missing two weeks, then a week of crunch work in Germany again before we deployed some hardware for testing in a beam, then a week of testing everything in the beam. All while teaching a lab module and taking two modules myself. I currently have a week more work on our testbeam and if the experience so far is representative, I'll have very little free time for working on anything for this blog for the next week or so.

Another reason is that I've already posted a lot of the content I had already worked on before starting the blog. Most of my backlog of content is already posted. In addition, a lot of the stuff I'm working on right now is bigger and meatier. It's taking longer because there's more of it.

So there'll be more posts. Eventually.

Introns

This is a blog about Steve Jackson Games' GURPS 4th Edition. I'll be posting mostly content that I make, remix or alter for the game, which is going to cover a wide variety of topics, genres and levels of detail, although there will be a faint predilection towards science fiction, since I have a slight preference for that to other genres. I'm planning to structure the blog in the useful skeuomorphism of 'columns', separating posts by content type. So far I have several columns planned:

Ars Mundi
Elements, ideas and seeds for worldbuilding, generally ones I haven't expanded into full-blown settings elsewhere. It will also include discussions on worldbuilding, especially on implications or knock-on effects of technology or other features.

Equipment Locker
New equipment and worked examples of equipment created using existing rules for equipment creation and modification. This may also include discussions on the utility of existing equipment. 

Forms Most Wondrous
Animals, beasts, monsters and aliens of all kinds, magical and nonmagical, realistic and cinematic. Will occasionally include player races/species.

Playbook
New optional rules, or expansions upon existing ones.

Reliquary
Artefacts, relics or mythical treasures. Any kind of item that is one-of-a-kind, unique or noteworthy.

Soapbox
Rants/diatribes about game mechanics, game design or approaches to play that don't serve any concrete purpose. Feel free to ignore.

Utility Closet
Random useful information that doesn't fit under other columns. Typically more GM-focused.

Worlds-R-Us
Seeds or fully-detailed descriptions of settings or parallel worlds. It differs from Ars Mundi in that these are fleshed-out and given specific details, rather than throwing out concepts and discussing how they might be used. Where applicable, information for integrating them into GURPS Infinite Worlds will be given.