jedion357's blog

Trying to draw a vrusk use to give me fits. This one was done with charcoal and conte crayon.

Vrusk Tai Chi

Recently joined a PBP run through of the classic Volturnus Campaign. Thinking about the campaign while doing my daily drawing assignment lead to the following- a group picture of the sapient species of Volturnus.

Done in charcoal.

or Intelligence for Civilization

Note: I recently enrolled again in college and the following post is from a writing exercise.

In high school my ambition was to be an editor or writer for Dragon magazine, the monthly periodical by the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons game to promote their products. However, life happened and that dream was not realized.

Today I reviewed the Star Frontiersman #19 which had close to the last of the material I put together for that zine before leaving it to start the Frontier Explorer. It had a  bunch of materail I had painstakingly tracked down from lost internet sites where snapshots of those sites had  been preserved in the Waybackmachine internet archive. Many of these sites were from the late '90s and early 2000s but are now not on the internet. Its sad becasue they had great Star Frontiers content created by fans running those sites.

Major Goals for adventure/module/campaign writing.

There has been some great development in the Star Frontiers setting concerning mega corp, the Frontier economy, and touching on matters involving space stations and star ships at the Star Frontiers community development site.

A hot new project has sprung up on the mega corps: http://www.starfrontiers.us/node/7216

This is probably more a twist for a fantasy adventure but could work for science fiction. The party of player characters are searching for the Tomb of Dude Rex and think they find it but it turns out to be his cenotaph. A cenotaph is an empty grave created to memorialize the dead individual and his real tomb is elsewhere. In the Old Kingdom Egypt the first dynasty rulers had a tomb and a cenotaph both; one in Upper or southern Egypt and one in Lower or Northern Egypt.

This series was concieved and started a year ago to add challenges that were not combat related to the referee's toolbox. Combat is invariably one of the primary challenges in most rpgs and this is not likely to change. However, throwing a non combat challenge at the PCs can spice up an adventure and add some variety. Each article is focused on a particular theme: water, heat, lunar dust and more to come. Some hazards are environmental factors and others weather effects. Issue 2's article is written and this Fall the new challenges will involve the toxicity of lunar dust.

Wow! That was two months of hard work but I am so proud of the first issue. We have a lot of functionality built into the website for us as editors and for registered users as well as the 'lurking' public. Having every article on line will be a boon to anyone who wants to refer to a specific article but also the hi-res down loads of the maps for users to print and use was an excellent idea.

Issue 2 is 80% written and Issue 3 is at 30% but the unwritten percentages are plotted so all we need to do is get them written or wrap up a partially written document.