My kind of nastiness

Oh yeah... I was intending to drop on for an update, and I'll get to that, but oh I found something I have to share with anyone that hasn't seen it yet. THIS is my kind of nastiness to pull on players as a GM. It's currently downtime on Eve-Online and being the night owl I am, I'm up for a few more hours before I crash, so this is my surfing time, and an odd morning time during which my posts will often show up. Started out by just hitting a couple D&D related sites and got refered to that one by a post at GameMastering. It's a web based Random Drinking Binge Generator. That's the kinda crap you do to deal with a problem player or a character that is just plain stupid. It also gives me an idea, and that brings us to...

I said something about an update, didn't I? Well, a couple points.

First, out of game, I have managed to come up with a way that I can get a copy of adobe Acrobat soon (the one tool I still need before I can really start publishing pdf files properly) and should be able to start pumping out the kind of weekly or bi-weekly cheap gaming tidbits that most of the e-book publishers in the gaming biz are doing these days. A couple of collaborators, like people that just like to write filler material (sample encounters, written character descriptions, etc.) and artists willing to work cheap, for exposure or for future royalties on their contributions to the final product and I'd be golden. Already trying to start talks with a couple artists I know and know of. I could really do my own art if I had to and at some point will post an example of my actual work on here to prove it, but I am SO out of practice that anything I do will take excessively long and I'd rather just leave the art to someone practiced enough to rip out publishable material quickly. For anyone that hasn't figured it out from documentation or my contact email address, the company name I'll probably be publishing under is Vizhon Design Studio, though I may start another name just for the publishing portion, like I have a second 'doing business as' that I use for my photography work. VDS is just the name I have used as the parent name to all of my business ventures no matter how big or small.

The other update is more directly involved with the core point of this site and the design stuff I'm working on here. I've done some poking through and re-editing and tweaking of documents. Both the skills list and the characters rough have been modified recently. The skills list had a couple skills added a little over a week ago, and the characters rough has had 4 new classes added, 3 in a new class type of Tinkerer. In addition, I'm about half through the finishing off the detailed rules on the races in the game, or at least those that I will have available in the initial rules. That is the next thing I am determined to put up as new material, but I must give a little warning. Like the descriptive material is just descriptive, the rules material will JUST be rules. I don't plan on putting the two together, myself, until I'm ready to publish it, thus CLEARLY seperating on my site the OGL material from the not so OGL material. The pure rules and data sections will be OGL at least for derivation purposes.

Oh, and PS: For anyone that hasn't heard word yet, the new 4th edition SRD has been finalised. Pre-release copies are going out soon if they haven't already been sent. I'm not lucky enough to be on the pre-notified list of people that will be getting them and I really didn't expect I would be. That's alright, though, because I have been doing some HARD thinking about the 3.5/4th edition dilemna and I've really decided I'm going to do Both. My own rules are going to be hybrid enough and out different enough from both that it should be, just as I intend to write it up, usable off of either base system, so I'm actually looking at aiming for releasing a 3.5 version first, then following it with a 4th edition version of JUST the rules sections with all supplement material being written to work with either. If I do it this way, I'm going to be offering the 4th edition copies at a serious discount to anyone that buys the 3.5 version before the 4th edition one comes out.