28 June 2025: Classic Traveller

     I have been thinking about a science fiction game for some time now, and I finally pulled the trigger and got Deluxe Traveller. I have never played Traveller before, although I may have owned some of the original books way back in the day (digest sized paperbacks). I remember seeing them many times in game shops and bookstores back in the early and mid 80s, but I was very wedded to D&D then, and had other games--Gamma World, Call of Cthulhu, Chill, Star Frontiers--so I never got into it. I do remember people absolutely loving this game, though. For some reason, deep in my neurons, there is a connection with MIT, but I can't recall the details. 

    So I splurged $135 in store credit at Noble Knight and got the 1983 box set. I am pretty excited about it! I like old games much more than newer games, and I waffled back and forth for a few months before deciding to go wicked old school (at least for now). There is an enormous Traveller ecosystem out there on the internet; I am already reading a bit about the community, and looking forward to engaging. In my heart of hearts, science fiction is my most favorite thing ever (fantasy and horror are close!). I have been sucked into some excellent military science fiction this summer, and I'm reading a big, heavy book called The Space Opera Renaissance (and I mean literally heavy: this thing could kill a small child). Sci-fi on the brain, I guess. There are worse places to be...

    I don't know what I'm going to do with this game, if anything, but I am hoping to imagine up some stuff and get a bit of -building done (world, sector, sub-sector, local cluster, empire...whatever!). Should be fun. 

26 June 2025 Men, Reading, and the New York Times Article that Pissed Me Off

 This shit right here

    I read. A lot. I read constantly, and have since I was a little kid. Reading is the main activity of my life, and while how I read has changed (thanks, technology), that I read, and will continue to read, is not a question for me. Reading is like breathing for me at this point; it's just what I do. I can't imagine my life without it, and I wouldn't want to.

    People read less now than they have in decades, or so the research tells us. Fewer adults read books for pleasure nowadays (although those who do read, read a lot!) Men, in particular, read less, and that's especially true for fiction, and even more true for modern fiction of the type the author of this article is championing. I'm not sure how you describe the kinds of books that women--his ideal readers--read. Adult contemporary fiction? Romantasy? Literary fiction? Oprah's Book Club fiction? Something like that, or somethings like that. Definitely not the kind of stuff that I read. 

    What grinds my gears about this article is the feeling that I am being hectored for not being a soy-boy when I read, and that if I could just weep a bit more when I read about the fictionalized lives of BIPOC  2SLGBTQIA+? people, the world would be a better place indeed because I would recognize how riddled I am with toxic masculinity, a colonial mindset, a cis-normative world view, and late-stage capitalism. Fucking straight guys! All we do is stream porn, Netflix, Joe Rogan, and World of Warcraft. What a bunch of assholes.

        Note that the author flippantly dismissed Watchmen, a graphic novel included in Time Magazine's 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century, and which has been made into a feature film, two animated films,  and a series on HBO. Yes, yes, but it's not literature. It's more of that 'speculative fiction' gruel: horror, science fiction, fantasy. Stephen King and his penny dreadfuls (thanks Howard Bloom)! Genre fiction, like westerns, thrillers, mystery...posh. If one is not reading from the NYT's Best Sellers list, well...really, why read at all? 

    What a fucking pretentious, condescending douche-bag. This guy reminds of a poodle: sure, you see it for what it is on the outside, but deep inside its DNA, there is a wolf, howling to be let out. This dude needs to do some push-ups, eat a steak, and read some Conan.  Asshole. Men don't read the kinds of books he values because we aren't the target audience. Those books are not for us. We don't read for therapy, or to be made aware of all of our shortcomings. 

    We read, as C.S. Lewis said in the movie Shadowlands, so that we know we are not alone. 

Pajama Boy 

20 June 2025 "We'll Imagine It For You Wholesale!"

     As I wrote about last month, the act of pure, imaginative creation isn't something I do (or have ever done, really). I have always taken the bones of what others have done and added my own meat to them, which is fine--a lot of people game that way--but sitting down and actually making something new and unique was a novel experience for me. I liked it. It was challenging for sure...but it was good.

    I mention this again as I have now started my summer vacation from school, and I am looking at a lot of free time that I need to fill. I am a creature of habit to my core, so I'll do the same things over and over again ("peace is the tranquility of order," as St. Augustine said). What I want to build into my daily routines is some creativity...and that's hard for me. Here is why: there is just so much stuff. So. Much. Endless books and pdfs and websites and podcasts and message boards and Facebook groups and Discord channels and Youtube shows and podcasts. I can, literally, spend all day every day swimming in the infinite seas of TTRPG content and never reach the end. And that doesn't include the limitless depths of my Kindle, or the internet in general. The title of this post is a reference to the Phillip K. Dick short story of the same name (trading 'imagine' for 'remember'; it is the basis of the old sci-fi movie Total Recall). [Note: the movie is 36 years old, and I am now old and dying  and how did this happen?]

    Also--and as far as problems go, this is a good problem to have--I am at the point in my life where I can pretty much buy whatever I want to, whenever I want to. I try very, very hard to keep my buying of stuff to a dull roar, but if I see something I want, I just get it. There is an element of collecting (vs. actually using) that I need to be ever mindful of as I move through the TTRPG space. I often tell my friends that I have dragon sickness when it comes to game stuff. We...wants it. We...loves it. We...needs it, my precious...

    So last night I was just poking around the wilds of the net, looking at stuff, and it occured to me that I was engaging in what I always do: searching for things that other people made as a way to exercise my imagination. I should buy this book! I should get this game! I should subscribe to this...whatever. I, literally, have every single issue (in PDF) of Dungeon Magazine, Dragon Magazine, Kobold Quarterly, and The Crusader. That's like five years of content I have not even scratched the surface of, yet I'm still hunting around for more stuff. 

    Why, I ask you? Why? 

    I have been thinking that maybe I'll put some constraints on myself this summer and try to force myself to think differently. Only use what I already have, for example. Stick with the old stuff (DMG, MM, PHB, the C&C core books). I had so much fun just creating a randomly generated hex map. Why don't I do more of that? Setting up a pointcrawl on some map I find online. Throw in some factions, a couple of pre-generated 'random' encounters...why not? As Thoreau said, I don't want to die with my music still in me, and to be completely honest, I may come to the realization that I am not terribly creative to begin with. If so, so be it. But maybe I need to spend a bit more time in my own imagination instead of enjoying and building off of the imaginations of others. 

    Live without discipline, die without honor! No more buying. Mostly. For now. 

12 June 2025 Underdark Hex Crawl

 12 June 2025 Underdark Hexcrawl

    This is complicated. Since re-discovering Gygax's wilderness hex crawl generator in the DMG from back in the 70s, I've been thinking hard about a few core things related to my gaming activities. First, I realized that I am letting companies and people imagine things for me. I have almost always used modules and campaigns, and while I've personalized them (mixing, matching, changing, adding, subtracting), it is rare that I've actually created something unique. The hex crawl rules have piqued my interest  as far as doing more on my own instead of obsessively buying and collecting. Second, I've been thinking about how to take these hex crawl rules--used for wilderness generation--and apply them to an underdark hex crawl. It has proven to be an extremely complicated endeavor. 

    The under dark is three dimensional, so there is the issue of incline and decline. There are different types of passages (going off of the original underdark module, Descent Into the Depths of the Earth). And there are levels of the underdark (upper, middle, and lower). That's a lot of moving parts. Even if I were to just abstract the three dimensionality of an underdark map, I am left with a large number of variables that have to be accounted for in the creation of any generator. 

For what it's worth, here is my first stab at it.

Passage types: primary (wide and relatively flat), secondary (narrower, less ease of travel, descending), and tertiary (narrow, steep, hazardous). 

Areas: rubble, running water, stagnant water, sinkholes, crevasses, fungal forests, large/medium/small cavern(s), lairs, ruins, stalactite/stalagmite forests, cave in, lemon squeeze/choke points, settlement (with various sizes). 

If each hex is a passage type, how do I determine how many other passages entries there are in each hex, and of what type? And how do you move from one passage type to another? I can picture a 3-D map in my head pretty easily, but I am working in two dimensions on a piece of graph paper. [Solution: table for each hex determining how many, and what kind, of passages exist in the hex. But what about direction?]

So let's say we are working in a primary passage hex square that represents one mile. When the characters move to the next hex (and how many options will there be? They are underground and surrounded by solid rock!) how to I determine...

Thought: each hex has an option for each kind of tunnel, and player decisions determine what kind of passage they will enter when they leave the hex. They will create the next hex by choosing the passage type. I'd need a table for each kind of passage. Can you go from primary to tertiary without secondary? Probably not, right? So primary only leads to secondary, and secondary allows for both primary or tertiary as options. Tertiary only allows for the choice of secondary. 

Similarly, a primary passage is upperdark, a secondary passage is middle dark, and a tertiary passage is lowerdark. Distance would have be abstracted (i.e. 'this passage descends quickly)

Question: If you went from a primary to a secondary, then back to a primary...is it the same tunnel? How would that look on a map? 

Question: d10, d12, d20? 

So each hex is a one mile passage with one kind of feature and multiple (maybe) other passages. 

Rough draft