zaterdag 29 juni 2013

Doing things and ambitions

So, the point I feared has arrived. I'm already struggling to find things I really want to write about. Why don't I want to write about mundane things? I don't really know.

What I do know, is that quite some things have happened in the past week. I went shopping with my girlfriend, which I actually quite enjoyed - I really don't see what bothers other people with the whole shopping thing, actually spending quality time with your better side is fun, right? - and actually brought home more things than she did. This was mostly due to the fact that she's all 'I have so many things already, so if I buy something it really has to stand out', which is only something I can admire, but it was still a point of minor ridicule upon return and the realization of this.
What I also did during that shopping trip was buy a red shirt, because the only red shirt I have is starting to get old and worn by repeated ironing, which sucks. Unfortunately, I only realized afterwards that it was a short sleeved shirt, as opposed to a long sleeved shirt, which I think look horrible when worn with a suit. Opinions might differ on this, but I really don't like it, but I already managed to misplace the receipt, so I'll have to live with it and purchase an actual red shirt some time else. Or really dig through my paper bin, I'm sure it's somewhere in there.

Speaking of my girlfriend, she actually graduated from her high school, and had her graduation ceremony just this thursday, which was... different, when comparing it to my own graduation ceremony, three years ago. When I graduated, every student got a chance to say something about one of their colleagues, but now the mentors made picture collages that would symbolize the student and his or her experiences at the school and gave the students a chance to say what they tought about the pictures before actually telling the story they intended.
There were a lot of stories coming from the teachers and the mentors of the students, but I think it was wrong of them to give the students only a minor chance to talk about their life and, something I noticed, whenever something negative was said, the mentors immediately started to contradict that, or go 'I didn't really want to mention that', which was a shame in my eyes. No stories are without their negative points, and actually talking about bad things can be quite fun when done in the right way and about the right things. It felt rather forced, now.
It was a fun day, though, during which a big chapter in my girlfriend's life got closed, so I'm proud of her regardless and hope she'll do just as well at university as she did during high school.

Now, about the ambitions part... Because of my thesis, I didn't really have a chance to buy new games for the better part of the year... The last game I bought was Black Ops 2... Used. This means I have quite the bucket list of games I want to buy and play, which I might just spend a future blog about, but right now, Mass Effect 3's DLC (Omega and Citadel, respectively) is managing to keep me occupied whenever I desire a moment of distraction from the more important parts of my life.
I really need to get that backlog cleared up, though...

Finally, I've been debating with myself for a while now whether or not to invest in a keyboard and some piano lessons, considering the fact that I always resented the fact that I never invested that much in my music classes at school and now can't really play an instrument. Considering the fact that I tend to suffer from a low self-esteem and never really seemed to connect with anything place in front of me at school, I always pushed this idea away from me...
Courtesy of 9gag.com, which is hilarious
I think the above image fits my situation rather well. I think I'm currently hovering between 'I can't do it' and 'I want to do it', which is a minor victory in my mind. One optimistic day I actually went 'How do I do it', and went looking for a (cheap) keyboard, which I found at eBay (link), but I'm still thinking about the investment of time, money, and commitment it will require. The last thing I want is a keyboard sitting in my room, taunting me every day about the lack of will to put time into learning to use that thing.
It's still a point of doubt for me, mostly because I doubt my ability to focus on two things (my hands) at a time and, thus, suck at it by default. However, my grandfather, who plays (or used to play) his church's organ, admitted that he spent hours just practicing the music he would have to play that sunday, because he wouldn't be able to, otherwise. That's a reason to at the very least try, in my eyes...

dinsdag 18 juni 2013

Gamer’s Dice


So I recently ordered a pretty big amount of dice from The Dice Shop Online, mostly thanks to a long video from the Spoony One about dice (link), which prompted me to take a look at the current dice I’ve got in my possession and think about what I’d want to do with all of them. I know that, right now, I’ve got about eight full polyhedral sets in use (more or less, keep reading for the explanation about that), with six or seven sets ‘in reserve’ and one bag that has collected most of the d10 dice for White Wolf-style games that require lots and lots of d10s.

Following below I should place a picture I’ve taken recently, which contains all of the dice I’ve got, with their respective containers (which I always find to be just as important). Without containers, after all, dice have the tendency to get terribly lost, which is a gosh-darn waste in my eyes.


Rotated for your viewing pleasure
Click to enlarge
 
If I don’t go by those in some kind of system, I’m pretty sure I’m going to forget one of the sets, so let’s start with the top left and work to the right, shall we? Note: for some reason, Blogger rotated the picture 90 degrees to the left, so bear with me and work with the little descriptions to actually understand this...

So, we’ve got the black set of six, on top of the grey Sony bag. That dice set was included with the Red Box and is, quite interestingly, used solely for Nolan the elf rogue and his adversaries up until now. This little set has shown itself to have quite the enmity for me, considering the fact that I couldn’t hit the goblins if I wanted to if it hadn’t been for Nolan being an elf and getting a re-roll once per encounter, but the goblins were quite capable of rolling twenties one after the other. Thank goodness for them being minions.
The d10 of this set is interesting in a way that I haven’t seen very often. As people who have ever studied a d10 know, it runs from 1 to 0, so two d10’s can be properly combined in order to get a d100 and get some real numbers going down. This one runs from 1 to 10, though, making it harder to combine, but making more sense when it’s the only d10 in the set and making it very compatible with Savage Worlds games, which is why I’ll probably add a second d6 to that set when the time is right in order to run Savage Worlds properly.
The bag they’re in is, quite frankly, an example of what you’re going to read quite often. It’s a felt bag that came with a set of earbuds that served me for quite long, until one of them failed. However, I don’t really like using that kind of bags with earbuds (because untangling them every time is so much more interesting), so these kinds of bags become unused and, when I find them back again, start getting re-purposed for dice holding. In this case, it’s a rather small bag that’s really good for about one set, maybe with a few extra’s if they’re really necessary. So, all things considered, it’s an excellent bag for a travel-set. However, for that I’ve got…

The second bag, which contains both a grey and a sparkly blue set. That’s two complete sets that I really try to always carry around with me, just in case I forget to pack the dice I wanted to take, and I have a set to fall back on. They’re both sets that have ‘failed’ me before, though, the grey set being used for a Pirate Paladin of Kord that was played in The Hague and lasted for about three sessions of absolutely atrocious rolling, and the blue set being used for an Avenger of the Good gods who got killed by a Paladin of Zarus that he had previously cooperated with and subsequently fell all the way back down to the realms of chaos. Neither set really brought me much success.
They do get the honour of sitting in my spanking, brand new chain-mail bag that I’ve recently ordered from E-Bay, though. It’s pretty hefty, but it looks pretty damn awesome, too, but the most important aspect, really, is that it’s probably sturdy enough to withstand quite a bit of punishment before probably giving up and raining my dice down.

The two d10’s on the tiny blue bag are the Dark Heresy set I’m keeping aside from the others. They’re pretty good at rolling high, which is absolutely terrible in Dark Heresy, so you might say that these dice have got it in for me even more than the rest, considering the deadliness of the game system, and they’ve done an excellent job of making me fail at tasks and killing people up until now.
The blue bag is actually a re-purposed gift bag I got from my girlfriend containing a necklace. After taking the necklace out, I actually didn’t really have a purpose for it, so I took it up to myself to give it a new goal in life and keep my little set of two dice.

The giant set right next to the two little d10’s is my White Wolf d10 set, which I originally built by taking all the d10’s of my original polyhedral sets and, later on, expanding it by buying an amount of single dice to make sure that I could play Exalted with it without re-rolling absurd amounts of the dice. Too bad our Exalted game lasted for about one session before falling apart, which was quite a shame.
The bag was actually made for me by request, and is filled quite well (the dice are just about to lay flat when spread around completely). It’s really made with some spare piece of fabric and a couple of shoelaces, but it really fits the bill quite well and is sturdy as heck.

The fourth, green set, in the little box, is a special little set for me. It was originally bought to form the dice for an elf ranger I was going to play in a cute little introductory campaign, but it didn’t take long until I noticed that these dice appeared to roll higher for me than others. They were my ‘lucky’ dice, and since then, I’ve kept them behind for that moment that my characters would need a little moor oomph.
The box is actually just an old cufflink box that I’m keeping shut with a little rubber band, but it feels right to give this set a little special container that I can snap open to grab the dice when necessary. It’s also exactly big enough to keep one set in comfortably, so the dice don’t klonk together too much during transport.

The set next to that, on the brownish bag, is a little special as well, but that’s just because those are my non-regular dice. Right now it consists of a purple d30, which I originally mistook for a hilariously-oversized d20 when I was just starting out and had just learned about polyhedrals, and three character builder dice. The d6 has chaotic evil, evil, neutral, good, lawful good, and roll again on it, deciding on the character’s morale, one of the d8’s has eight different DnD character classes on it, while the other one has eight different character races on it. It’s geared entirely to fourth edition (or the alignment die would’ve been a d10 to allow for the full alignment spectrum), but it fits the bill if I need to make a new character and don’t really know what to roll with.
The bag has a Sennheiser logo on it, which could be right, because I recently had to replace a set of Sennheiser earbuds. It probably came from that little set, and has worked quite well for me up until now. It actually held my travel set, until my chain mail bag came in.

Down one row, all the way to the left, is a giant set of green dice on a cream bag. I originally bought the dice because of the box it came in, which I needed to hold a particularly large miniature I was going to gift to one of my friends. It was slightly too large for the usual containers dice come in, so these came just at the right moment. I’ve used them only once, so far, though, and they didn’t exactly work out that time. Gave me a lot of low numbers on pretty crucial rolls, though I managed to drag myself out by the skin of my teeth.
The bag was actually included with my first-ever MP3-player, a Creative machine that served me quite well for over five years before, sadly, breaking down and having to be replaced. The bag was about the only one large enough to actually hold the comically oversized dice, so it was a natural choice for the dice.

The following set is a little special to me, being built specifically to accommodate my first ever DnD character, Nick Basel, the cleric of Avandra. There are three d20’s, one for Initiative, one for Skill Checks, and one for Attack Rolls. The one d8 is needed for roughly half his damaging powers and the one d10 is needed for his melee attacks with the Morning Star. The lonely d6 is for the other half of the damaging powers, and the double d6 is for his Healing Word power, which decides on the amount of extra health the power heals. The lonely d6 is actually an artefact from my very first polyhedral set and is one of three dice from that set that is actually still in use (the other two are the d10’s in the white bag I mentioned before).
The bag, I’m actually very disappointed in. It’s a felt bag with a red lining on the inside, but the bag is of a terribly low quality and the ropes holding it closed are unable to properly do so without tying a knot in it, which is a shame.

Almost there, the two red sets on the beige bag are actually used for wizard-like characters who, basically, are built to attack large amounts of enemies and thus benefit from the 2d20 die I’ve got down there, so that I can attack twice as much targets at once. These sets are… Rather undistinguished, with the two biggest points being the abovementioned 2d20 and the fact that the d10’s of the darker set are actually the dice I use for Dark Heresy, so that’s a thing.
The bag is, just like the one above, a bit of a disappointment. It didn’t take long for the ends of the ropes to start splitting and the image printed on the bag to wear down, so I’m a bit hesitant to actually keep using the bag. It’ll have to do for what it’s supposed to do, though.

The last bag is the large, blue bag that is absolutely littered with different coloured dice that don’t really seem to have any connection. That’s okay, because there’s really only one thing that’s keeping these dice together: they’re the rest. Everything that I once used, but opted not to use anymore, and was placed in this bag. It was once called – affectionately – the ‘fuck-off bag’, though I don’t think that’s the right name for it anymore. Right now, it’s really a bag I’m keeping around just in case. In case I need some extra dice, though that’s hardly ever an issue, or in case someone forgot theirs and they can take a grab. There’s only one really complete set in there, though, and that’s the precision set with the un-inked numerals. I’m thinking about inking those some day, so maybe that set might see some use again, some day. It was really used only once, but got retired really quickly when I found out how hard it was to read them.
I… Don’t really know where I got the bag, though. There’s no logo on it, no label (not even on the inside), and I couldn’t remember where it came from if I tried. For as far as I’m aware, it’s been in my room for a long while by now and it’s probably a relic from a time long past. It’s large, though, which is a boon when I’m trying to keep a lot of dice.

Finally, let’s not forget the three dice rings that are lying at the bottom left. Those are the result a Kickstarter I backed, some time ago, and I don’t really keep them in any kind of bag. One of them is an r20, one is an rDirection (having North, North-East, East, etc on them) and the last one is an rAlignment, having the nine alignments from chaotic to lawful and good to evil on them. The r20 gets the most use, which is probably expected, as it was the original product to be made with the Kickstarter, and it actually rolls pretty well and naturally. I really hope it won’t invalidate my other d20’s, though…

So, there you have it, my little dice collection that is soon going to get some extra’s, courtesy of The Dice Shop Online. It’ll be fun to see how that’s going to work out, because it’s going to be a doozy.

woensdag 12 juni 2013

The adventures of Nolan, elven rogue. Part One: goblins attack!

So, I recently managed to place my hands on a Dungeons and Dragons Red Box, which I did mostly for the poster maps and the monster tokens included with it, and with it came two little books: a Player’s Book and a Dungeon Master’s Book. I wasn’t really interested in either of those, considering the fact that I think I’ve got the art of playing and running Dungeons and Dragons down at least a bit. It wasn’t until I found a little note, which contained a download code for a free adventure, which meant free stuff, and which his something I’m always interested in.

As soon as I had downloaded the free adventure, I realized that it was a solo adventure, in the same style as the Player’s Book’s ‘choose your own adventure’ style (‘if you agree, go to 41, if you disagree, go to 89’). The Player’s Book was more to teach people how to create their own character and get it going a little bit, but this extra adventure motivated me to just try it out and build a character, which I’d send through these solo adventures whenever I have a free moment to do so.

So, without a shadow of a doubt, I jumped into the Red Box’s Player’s Book. Chronicled below are the (mis)adventures of Nolan, the elven rogue I built using this book, and it will be followed up with more adventures as soon as I get the time to do them. Naturally, this means these stories will contain spoilers for these adventures.

---
Nolan was just your average elf, accompanying Traevus, a dwarven merchant as he travelled to Fallcrest to sell his wares and gather return wares and supplies for his trip back to Hammerfast, where he’d perform the same thing over again. Though the man wasn’t very talkative, as was in the dwarven nature, Nolan didn’t really mind. He preferred the stalwart silence of the dwarves over any talkative halfling any day.

What hadn’t been in the planning, though, was the sudden strike of an arrow, embedding itself deeply in Traevus’ shoulder. As the dwarf cried out, Nolan noticed a pack of little creatures storming towards them: goblins, coming to steal the car and Traevus’ wares and killing them in the progress.

Nolan acted quickly and grabbed a dagger he had seen lying around, jumping out of the car to sneak around it and confront the goblins from a position of advantage before they could bring serious harm to Traevus. At the first opportunity, he jumped on the closest goblin and quickly ended its life.

Though the other goblins were clearly shocked by this display of defiance, they also still had the idea of ‘strength in numbers’, quickly running at Nolan and starting to stab at him with knives and short swords. A couple of them managed to wound him, but he also managed to fight back and, turning his fighting into a more defensive style, eventually wear the goblins down enough to make them realize that he was more of a challenge than they had initially thought. The survivors chose that discretion was still the better part of valour, turned their tail, and ran for their lives.

As the goblins ran, Nolan noticed a person sitting on a black horse, standing on the crest of a hill, several hundred yards away. Though Nolan couldn’t make out any features, he saw the rider shake his fists in frustration before turning away and riding for the Moon Hills. Before Nolan could decide if the pursuit would be worth the trouble, though, Traevus’ swears pulled him back to reality.

The dwarf had noticed that something had been stolen, though he wasn’t very specific about what it was. All he said was that it was very precious to him. Though the dwarf hadn’t been very talkative, Nolan had appreciated his willingness to let him travel besides him on the trek to Fallcrest, so he decided that it would be worth the trouble to help the merchant with his problem. Traevus even offered to reward him with thirty gold pieces, after which he described the little wooden box with personal contents that he had to find and retrieve.

Figuring that the fleeing goblins had taken the little lockbox – even though Nolan hadn’t seen any of them carrying it away, the situation had been rather chaotic – Nolan decided that he would have to put the rider out of his mind for the moment and track the little creatures to their lair.

Though the goblins had scattered in all directions after they had ran, Nolan managed to find tracks leading back to the direction of attack the goblins had chosen. After picking up their tracks, it was easy for him to decide where to go and find more signs of the little critters passing by. The tracking quickly led through rough terrain, but it wasn’t much of a problem for his trained, elven feet, and he eventually found his way to the entrance of a cave system without alerting any goblin guards posted outside.

Sneaking in, it didn’t take long before Nolan managed he was finally starting to mess up. One of the goblins inside spotted him and screamed before he managed to silence him, and he got swarmed by four of the creatures before he even realized it. Stabbing left and right, still only brandishing the dagger he had taken from Traevus’ cart, the creatures managed to wear him down quite badly before he took them all down.

Looking at the entrance going deeper into the cave, Nolan realized there would be a whole lot more goblins waiting inside. Though the fight in the entrance might not have warned them off just yet, it was just a matter of time before they would be alerted to his presence and swarm him until he was dead.

He would need some allies to do this.

Noting the cave’s entrance on his map, Nolan turned his back to the caves and started walking to Fallcrest. Adventure was waiting for him.
---

So, there you have it, the Red Box’s little create-your-character adventure. The immediate sequel to this is ‘Ghost Tower of the Witchlight Fens’, which will be the next adventure log, detailing Nolan’s further misadventures. Looking forward to it!

dinsdag 11 juni 2013

Finding a reason to talk

When I started this little blog last year, it was to practice my writing in order to have a bit of a portfolio for my future career in column-writing. It quickly became clear that my future probably wouldn’t be in the column business, though, and my interest faded pretty quickly. It was pretty clear that my reason to talk, or write, was lacking, to say the least.

Coming to terms with that, I realized that I wasn’t even that sad about the sudden silence I had allowed to fall, but that didn’t mean my surroundings were going to let me live it down. My father had started writing, mostly about the bike vacation he had taken with my mother to the several middle points of our country, and seeing him write day after day, working on what can only be described as ‘articles’, was actually something that made me think about starting to write again and upload it. My family was actually starting to push me, as well, hoping for me to actually put something down again, but I might have pushed back against that, because I always said ‘maybe’, and as such it never really happened.

For a long time, I did nothing. Chances and subjects went by, and I liked it, because I waved at them, thinking I could write about them and then letting them go again (that Pirates reference turned into a fishing metaphor really quickly…).

So it isn’t like I didn’t think about it.

No, I think the real turn-around came for me when I started working on my thesis about publishing and the contact between writers and publishers. It didn’t take long for me to realize that, when trying to publish a book, it helps immensely to be known beforehand and have a bit of a publication history, kind of like you’ve been busy selling yourself before and giving people a chance to get to know your work before they actually get to see you. Making yourself famous, so to say.

Anyway, I’m talking around the subject. I had an interview with a very pleasant woman, who wrote about her dieing mother and the last days she was living with her. It turned out to take a little longer than she had expected, and she actually built up quite a little fan base before her mother actually died and the ‘story’ had ended. She confided in me that it had been over a year ago, and that she still hadn’t had the heart to update her blog again and tell the readers that the story had actually ended. By not writing, she allowed her readers to let her live for the time being.

I’m straying, though. What had happened, was that people had found her story and had started reading it. The same happened to my father, who suddenly got read by several people he had never expected to reach him, including the father of a poet he had written about at one point. It was pretty exciting to hear about, and I could only think that ‘that would be cool to have, as well’. That’s how I tend to think, bite me.

So, what’s my reason to write? I guess it’s to try and get out in the world, but I recently realized that my life might not be as boring as I sometimes make it out to be. And I want to see if I can actually get some name branding going, though, if I’m fair, that’s not my main goal.

Getting to write again should be fun, I haven’t been doing a lot of it since NaNoWriMo 2012, so I’ll be glad to actually get to working on it, again. Writing fiction is, probably, one of the most enjoyable things I can do on a daily basis, but I’ve been struggling with both a writer’s block and a complete and total lack of time, so writing for this place in the little nooks and cranny’s of time I can manage to put my hands on should at least ‘ease the itch’, so to say. It’s just not exactly the same as writing fiction, though I might just throw some pitches, ideas and mind farts out there…

maandag 10 juni 2013

Mobile blogging

Next to my promise of writing more for this blog, I decided to download a mobile application for Blogger to assist me in writing blogs whenever and wherever the inspiration strikes me.
So, right now, I'm sitting in college, having given a presentation on my thesis and more or less testing the application for the first time.
About that thesis... Time is really starting to run out, what with the deadline being less than two weeks away from today... What is positive, though, is that I have finished the research already and only really have to write out the final parts for my first draft, Wednesday. Then, I've got a week to finish my prototype and I might just be done with this part of university...

zondag 9 juni 2013

It's been a while...

Getting back on the horse might just be one of the hardest things to do when you’ve been out of the blogging for so very long. Looking back, I’ve had enough reasons to step back into the bloggosphere and throw a little story out there since I threw out the big ‘things to do during the vacation’ post, which was the last one.

Let’s start with that one, though, because that’s a kind of story that’s reserved for backrooms and sport’s bars, where people have great fun making fun of the person they’re talking about. Looking back at the plans I had made, depressingly little of it has actually been done since that time.

The crate radio I had promised myself (more of an amplifier, really) is still sitting in parts on my desk. I still haven’t gotten any wood (heh, there’s a dirty joke in there, somewhere), so I still don’t have the parts necessary to actually build the case. I have to admit that the wind has been taken out of my motivation ever since it had been delayed, that January. It might be completed sometime in the coming months, but I’m not making any promises there.

The book actually got written. I hated it, though, and it has been waiting on a re-write ever since. I started it, but then my publisher started charging me for every book I have published with them, or I could refuse to pay them money and my books wouldn’t be publicly available outside of the publisher’s store. Needless to say, you can’t order my books online anymore, anywhere other than from the publisher’s store, and I’m not really sure where to go next. That’s something for the future, though.

The D&D campaign actually got another session recently, after about a year of no activity, and it was an absolute blast. The players are taking the story into places that I’d never expected them to go and forcing me to adapt and improvise as fast as I can, but I think I’m managing (I guess I’ll find out I didn’t the very moment everything blows up in my face). I’m already happy that my friends challenge me in such a way, that forces me to try and adapt to the crazy antics that they can come up with and that I, quite frankly, enjoy throwing at them whenever I’m a player. It’s great fun.

The Savage Worlds introduction session was ran with great success. The players appeared to love Reginald and his crazy Artificial Intelligence antics and blackmailing, greatly enjoying threatening him back and, once again, giving me a hard time while we were improvising our way around the rules and the characters I had pre-made for everyone. It actually taught me that, even though I might be able to think about solutions to different problems, a group that’s pushed into a situation and forced to think about those solutions is quite capable of coming up with plans that I never thought about. Learning to say ‘yes’ was one of the most important things for me at that point, because trying to find out how everything was working and how their plans could possibly work out was, even though a challenge, about as much of a blast as the rest of the game was.

The Savage Worlds Declipse setting has made absolutely zero progress, though. Not much to say about that, besides from the fact that I recently looked at the file and spotted some errors in it which I could correct. Even though I’m excited to try and run something like that, I think my plans would restrict the players a little too much. In other words, I’m going to see if I can generalize my personal plans a little more. The last thing I want to do is give my players restrictions that are more than ‘you start out in this area’…

The backlog of games… I don’t even know how much of that I happened to work out. I know I still need to buy the new Bioshock, but I also still have to beat some Mass Effect 3 DLC for the achievements. Internet penis and everything is important to me!

I think the girlfriend I mentioned in that post lasted about four more weeks after that, before we broke up. It was a sad thing, but it was better for me to separate from her and do my own thing again. I’m glad to say that I’m in a new relationship right now (one of the things I could’ve made a blog about) that is a great improvement over the one I had back then, if I look back at it. I’m not complaining, anyway.

And the last three points… I can safely say that I did those things and kept things up. We never stopped playing D&D, though, for one reason or another, we still haven’t managed to make a regular game. There’s plans to do just that, though, so this might change in the near future.

Okay, now that I’ve done catching up to the things I’ve promised in the past, let’s head back to the present for the moment. Though my university has gone on pretty much without interruption (it’s pretty hard to just, you know, stop that for a year), I’ve also found the time to get my driver’s license and start saving up to get my own car. Though I don’t really have a reason to own a car, my job is within biking distance from my house, it’ll be nice to have the money on hand when the moment arises and I actually need some personal transportation that’s more reliable than the public transport that the Netherlands have. Until that time, though… I’m pretty sure I can borrow my parents’ car when I really need it. That’s pretty reassuring, though it sometimes makes me want to have my own car…

What more to tell… One of my friends introduced me to the amazing story of the Kickstarter, the website that allows small ideas to grow huge. By showing me to the Reaper Bones Kickstarter, he showed me the entrance to something pretty huge. For example, I backed the Pad of Geomorphic Intent Kickstarter, which left me with… well, eight pads of essentially squared paper that I used to use to do my mathematics homework on. I’m really using them, though, to build out a semi-random dungeon with a little bit of a terribly predictable twist that the players, should I ever get to running it (not going to happen, we’re way too busy), will see coming from miles away. It’s fun, though, and it gives me the feeling that I didn’t waste my money on supporting this particularly kick to start.

Next to that Kickstarter, though, there’s also the Dice Rings, which were quite a hit, the Lace Anchors, which were ideal for my laces-hating girlfriend, and a couple more that I'm still waiting for the fulfillment.
 
Considering the fact that I'm trying to get back on the Blogging horse, I'm pretty sure I'll find a reason to post about these things when they come in. I might even make a couple of pictures. Just like the miniatures I paint, of which I think my skill keeps increasing with every single miniature I paint. It's another thing that I never mentioned, I guess, but I've been doing it on and off for quite a bit, so we'll see when I find the time to paint again and post pictures whenever the chance arises...
 
Until the next time, I hope I can keep it up, this time!