Epilogue

This blog is now on indefinite hiatus. One of the oddities of the Blogger platform, though, is that if a blog lies idle for long enough the system seems to "eat" the final post - it seems to do this only once, no matter how long the blog lies fallow, but it's just an oddity.

As a consequence of this, this post is serving as a placeholder to protect the "real" final post from being consumed in this manner. One day, this post may disappear in the ether...

Looking To A Future

Although I'm closing the door on my gaming career for now, I'm not locking it tightly - there may come a time at which I resume. I foresee a few possibilities:

Perhaps most likely is a one-shot game. It's not entirely impossible that this will take the form of me running a game (although I'd have to be asked, which again is unlikely). More likely, I think, is if I find myself invited to a game. That would be good.

In terms of campaign play, I'm done for any foreseeable length of time. There are two real possibilities there, I think, both of which are fairly distant: it's possible that one or both of Funsize or Surprise! may one day become interested in playing a game; it's also likely that in a few years time I'll naturally find myself with a bit more free time (or at least usable free time), such that I can maybe consider finding a new group. But both of those are sufficiently distant that I'm disinclined to give them any further consideration.

And that, essentially, is that.

THE END?

A Little Housekeeping

In the near future, if it hasn't happened already, the Falkirk RPG site is going to be shut down. As a side-effect of that change, I'm also going to remove the custom domain from this blog. The transition should be mostly seamless, with only the address changing.

The new address of this blog will therefore be: stephensimaginarium.blogspot.com

The new address should be active immediately, and for now will redirect users to the old. I'm not sure how long the old address will remain active (no later than the end of this month), but I'd encourage anyone affected to update relevant links as soon as possible.

Oops. Also, a name change

I've been reading a Eberron sourcebook recently (more on which soon), which has thrown up a realisation: the name of my Dragonborn empire of lore was lifted, albeit slightly modified, from Eberron. This was unintentional, of course, but probably somewhat influenced by the role that it played in a previous campaign.

As a consequence of this I have had to change the name of said empire: Atkalasa has become Talkalasa. (Tal-kalasa, rather than Talk-alasa...)

I've edited the three blog posts that made reference to the old name - a bit of revisionist history I would prefer to avoid, but given that the blog is essentially the repository of my work-in-progress, one that was probably necessary in this case.

Ouch!

As I mentioned last year, I'm in the process of importing the posts from a very old blog into this one. As a consequence of that, I've found myself going through a lot of those old posts, and it has made some painful reading - some of the ideas I had back then were sorely incorrect, and some of them were expressed really badly. As the title says, "ouch!"

Of course, that immediately begs the question: what will I think of my current ideas in ten years' time...?

Crossing the Streams

Once upon a time, I had a blog about gaming titled "Rules!". Truth be told, reading through the archives is always a bit of a strange process for me, because my views about gaming have evolved very considerably in the decade or so since it was last updated, and even moreso since the blog started, back in the heady days of 2003.

However, I'm generally not one to hide from the past, and I'm also going through something of a 'spring-cleaning' phase of life. As a consequence, I've started the process of consolidating the contents of that blog with the contents of this one, with a view to finally deleting that blog. (None of which is really necessary, but as I said, I'm trying to clean things up a bit.)

Oh, and actually, I think I'll be looking to bring across the gaming-related posts from Part N to this blog, too, for yet more completeness. Of course, that's a long-term project!

Anyway, if you find yourself wondering why this blog suddenly has posts from waaay back (indeed, from before the inevitable First Post), that's why.

Left Behind

One of these days, I'm going to have to cancel my subscription to the Pathfinder Adventure Path product.

The thing is, after ten years of receiving two full campaigns per year, I now have more material than I will ever use. Furthermore, not only am I highly unlikely ever to use any of these Paths (good though they are), I'm long since at a point where it would actually be really hard to do so - as time has gone on, Pathfinder has exploded way beyond the original offering, to the point where it's almost unrecognisable, and to the point where I can't claim to have any meaningful expertise with the system. It would be like trying to run Windows 10 on a 486 processor - technically the framework should be similar enough to make them compatible-ish, but in practice it just won't work at all.

So I've reached a point where I'm actually just getting them to read, not to play, and they're not that good.

Maybe when they announce Pathfinder 2nd Edition, that's the time to give it up - surely it can't be that far away? (Or, maybe when they announce Pathfinder 2nd Edition, that should be the point where I hop back onto that game big-time, and stay current?)

Funnily enough, we're also just about to get to the point where I'm left behind on D&D 5th Edition as well. With the end of the "Dust to Dust" campaign, I'm no longer actively using the system and that, coupled with my having left ENWorld, has seen my interest in the system starting to wane sharply. And the upcoming "Tales from the Yawning Portal" will mark the point where I stop buying the official adventures (unless and until they do an Eberron product) - meaning that the upcoming Major Rules Expansion is the only 5e product on the horizon I'm actually interested in.

(And more even that than: because the "Firefly" RPG appears to have come to its end, there are no current games that I am following. "N.E.W." was okay, but didn't inspire me to immediately go out and run some games, and "O.L.D." is unlikely to do so either, that being the only other RPG product I'm sure to get this year. Which just leaves the upcoming "Star Trek" game as a 'maybe', which actually means "probably not".)

And so I suddenly find myself being left behind by RPGs entirely. I'm not sure if that's just another short-term malaise, or if this is finally the end of the road. Either way, that's why things have been, and are unlikely to remain, fairly quiet around here.

Burnt Out

So, I've been on holiday for the past two weeks, during which I've given barely a thought to gaming. I've not even updated the character sheets or done any prep work for the game tomorrow, which probably wasn't the best idea ever.

I've been feeling something of a malaise as regards gaming for some time now, and most particularly for the past month. Basically, I'm burnt out. I've felt this way before, and it inevitably passes, but for the moment it just sucks. As far as I can tell, there are two main reasons:

• The current campaign just isn't what I'd hoped for. Such is life - sometimes, things just don't work. But when a player dropped out recently, that was a massive hammer-blow to my remaining enthusiasm for the campaign.
• The edition-change sucks. During the changeover to 4e I felt something similar, in that D&D has just left me behind, but this time it's somehow worse - not only does 5e leave me cold (and increasingly so as time goes on), but the lack of solid information is a constant irritant. It really shouldn't get to me, but it does.

One thing I have been thinking about over the past two weeks is a general de-stressing and de-cluttering of my life. I'll probably post something on that on the other blog in a while, but as far as RPGs are concerned, what that means is:

Campaigns

"Star Wars: Imperial Fist" is now rapidly heading to its end. There are three sessions now scheduled to come to that end, but I'm actually wondering if I can bring that forward - could we cover everything in one or, more likely, two sessions?

After that, I have no plans to start up a new campaign. "Black Crusade: Hand of Corruption" is off the list (as with everything else "Black Crusade" related), and it hasn't been replaced by anything. At some point, I may have a great idea for a campaign, and then it will be time to start building again, but for now, it's time to take a long break.

One-shots

I've also dropped my commitment to one of the two scheduled one-shot games for this year (September, to be precise). The annual "Christmas Game" remains scheduled, and I do still plan to run it, but the other is under reconsideration.

My intention here is to run one-shots (or three-shot weeknight games) as inspiration strikes for the next little while. However, my intention is also to avoid any long-term commitments - if I have an idea then I'll set it up, schedule the sessions, and run the game pretty much right away. This structure of planning one-shots a year in advance is unhelpful.

Playing

This is unchanged. I hope to play in the occasional game on the occasional weekend, with a specific hope to complete the current "Numenera" arc, and perhaps play some more "Gumshoe" is that becomes available. But I won't be joining a regular campaign, for the same reason I won't be starting one of my own - for now, I'm looking to de-clutter.

Nutshell, and this blog

Nutshell is basically dead. Every so often I tinker with a few bits and pieces, but the whole is probably never coming together. I bet that's a shock. (It's also not really a change so much as the reality of the thing.)

I'll keep this blog going on a fairly irregular basis - if I have something to post then I'll post it. Most likely, though, the next flurry of activity will come when I get an idea for a one-shot that I want to prep. That, or the updates of the crew of Betty to the "Firefly RPG" when that releases.

Retraction

In a recent discussion, it was pointed out to me that this post is actually in error. It turns out that the 3.0e PHB does have a table showing the capacities of the various containers (p.110). This table was indeed dropped with 3.5e, and doesn't appear in Pathfinder either (at least, in the Core Rulebook). Plus, rather amusingly, the table in the 3.0e PHB gives only the volume of the various containers, not the weight that they can support - and, of course, absolutely no other item gives its volume! So, it's still quite silly.

Fortunately, for at least one definition of that word, some bright spark took the volumes given, and converted this into a likely weight allowance, as follows:

• Backpack - 60lb. - 1 cubic ft.
• Barrel - 650lb. - 10 cubic ft.
• Basket - 20lb. - 2 cubic ft.
• Bucket - 65lb. - 1 cubic ft.
• Chest - 200lb. - 2 cubic ft.
• Pouch, belt - 10lb. (500 coins) - 1/10 cubic ft.
• Sack - 60lb. - 1 cubic ft.
• Saddlebags - 250lb. - 5 cubic ft.
• Spell Component Pouch - 2 lb. - 1/8 cubic ft.

A couple of thoughts about this:

1. All of the weight allowances are considerably more generous than the 2nd Edition equivalents. Further, I suspect that, in almost all cases, the 2nd Ed version is probably much closer to 'right' - those were likely taken from the 1st Ed values unchanged, and 1st Ed was actually pretty good about researching things like that.
2. The weight allowance of the belt pouch, both then and now, is pretty much insane. The D&D gold piece weighs almost exactly the same as a UK pound coin (I know, I checked!). So, can you imagine walking around with £500 in coins strapped to your leg? I'm inclined to drop that down to 2 pounds (100 coins).
3. The spell component pouch probably shouldn't be on the list - it's not really a container for general equipment as such, rather than a tax on spellcasters.
4. Honestly, I think the only items of any relevance are the backpack, the belt pouch, and the sack (maybe saddlebags as well). How many PCs really wander around carrying their equipment in a basket?

In conclusion... well, nothing really. It's just (slightly) interesting when new information comes to light.

Hail and Well Met!

So, this is my new RPG-related blog. And, of course, this is the obligatory "what this blog is about" post...

I've actually been blogging for a long time. My main blog is found over on Part Four, and is nearing 1,000 posts. But my first blog was actually RPG related, being the now-long-defunct Rulelawyers blog. So, I'm a bit of an old hand when it comes to blogging. Of course, that means I'm now more or less repeating myself...

(Why a new blog? Well, the major reason is that I don't really want to resurrect Rulelawyers, but I'm also aware that my regular readers over on Part Four are mostly non-gamers, and so don't really want to inflict endless posts on the topic on them. That said, if this post quickly becomes a content void, I'll probably shut it down and port any posts across.)

This blog is going to be about RPGs, and about anything and everything that I feel like saying about them. Unlike Brindy, therefore, it almost certainly have a whole bunch of rants on various topics, and may well venture into Edition Wars territory. It's also very likely that I'll end up posting reviews and retrospectives of many of the games I run, especially one-shots. (I almost certainly won't be doing reviews of games run by other Game Masters - that would probably be extremely rude!)

But the major thing I'm really interested in is "making things better". I'm intrigued with the means by which one could build a better game, build a better adventure, build a better setting... or just become a better GM. Therefore, I hope to spend quite a lot of my time here musing about such things.

Finally, the inevitable disclaimer: I intend to be pretty forthright with my opinions, and to say what I mean without too much messing about. And I've been known to be less-than-tactful on occasion. So, it's possible that something here may well offend. If so, I'm sorry that that's the case, and assure you it wasn't my intention to offend you. (Doesn't mean I won't do it, right enough, nor even that I would choose to say something else even knowing it would cause offense!)