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Bike Rides & Shared Worlds
Sep. 3rd, 2011 10:49 pmVery worn out. I've gotten quite tuckered out the last couple of Saturdays after running Kingmaker. It might be that damned summer wind, which really starts coming off the Bay in the late afternoon and blowing straight at me on my way home from Endgame. That's something I've learned in my year+ of roleplaying at EndGame: in the summer, the wind blows against me both there and home, as often as not.
Muscles! Health! I figure as I fight against the wind. Just read an article the other day that said that exercise may lead to the body putting calories toward bone growth instead of fat growth.
The session of Kingmaker was good. For the last several weeks I've been doing more work (partially led by the players) in weaving the current narrative together with stuff from the next couple of adventure books. I'm hope it'll lead to a richer game world. I'm now also starting to think about some stuff to extend the campaign, since Kingmaker only goes up to level 17 or something. I've thus begun planting the first seeds for that extended narrative.
Something else I've noticed every time I've biked to Endgame lately: Oakland has pretty much stopped fixing potholes. Now they just mark them with bright orange paint.
There's some of this out on Telegraph now, which is a street you'd think they'd take care of (but it's actually sucked around 24 since I started biking again; now it just sucks even more to the tune of some huge [BUT MARKED!!] holes). There are some on our way home from Safeway too, that have been there so long--which probably means 6 months or so--that the fluorescent orange has faded and dimmed.
Quite looking forward to the rest of a long weekend. After Kimberly and I finished shopping (and watching the start of season 5 of the BBC's excellent MI-5 (aka Spooks)), the rest of my weekend was suddenly open. Thus far I've spent it reading, plus a bit of editing on my history article for October.
Among the books I'm reading right now are Fort Freak, which is Wild Cards #21, and Storm Season, which is Thieves' World #4. I guess that speaks to when I started reading science-fiction, in the mid-80s. As a result, I love shared worlds, and am happy there's been a mini-resurgence in them.
(They're actually about the only sort of short story writing I'm a big fan of. Standalone short stories often leave me cold.)
In Ye Olde Days, I read Wild Cards through book #10 or #11, though I have up to #14 on my shelves. However, I started checking them out from the library when the series revived with #18. It feels quite a bit different from what it used to, as most of the characters changed after the gap from #15 to #18, but I've been enjoying it. Fort Freak is particularly fun because it's set in the super-hero-detective subgenre, which is one of my favorites.
I intend to reread the series sometime, starting with the newly updated #1, but have been putting it off because of a failed attempt to reread the series 5 or 8 years ago, which has #1 still fairly fresh in my head. But that new copy of Wild Cards with the 3 new stories is enough to encourage me.
In Ye Olde Days, I read Thieves' World through book #7 or so. My reading fizzled out because the books became dominated by writers whose short stories confused me. I hope to be able to give them just a bit more attention and focus this time, to figure out what Morris and others really mean in their opaque stories.
I've considered picking up the Heroes in Hell series (which I sold off several years ago) or reading through Magic in Italkar or that C.J. Cherryh shared world too, but for the moment I'm probably content with just WC and TW.
Muscles! Health! I figure as I fight against the wind. Just read an article the other day that said that exercise may lead to the body putting calories toward bone growth instead of fat growth.
The session of Kingmaker was good. For the last several weeks I've been doing more work (partially led by the players) in weaving the current narrative together with stuff from the next couple of adventure books. I'm hope it'll lead to a richer game world. I'm now also starting to think about some stuff to extend the campaign, since Kingmaker only goes up to level 17 or something. I've thus begun planting the first seeds for that extended narrative.
Something else I've noticed every time I've biked to Endgame lately: Oakland has pretty much stopped fixing potholes. Now they just mark them with bright orange paint.
There's some of this out on Telegraph now, which is a street you'd think they'd take care of (but it's actually sucked around 24 since I started biking again; now it just sucks even more to the tune of some huge [BUT MARKED!!] holes). There are some on our way home from Safeway too, that have been there so long--which probably means 6 months or so--that the fluorescent orange has faded and dimmed.
Quite looking forward to the rest of a long weekend. After Kimberly and I finished shopping (and watching the start of season 5 of the BBC's excellent MI-5 (aka Spooks)), the rest of my weekend was suddenly open. Thus far I've spent it reading, plus a bit of editing on my history article for October.
Among the books I'm reading right now are Fort Freak, which is Wild Cards #21, and Storm Season, which is Thieves' World #4. I guess that speaks to when I started reading science-fiction, in the mid-80s. As a result, I love shared worlds, and am happy there's been a mini-resurgence in them.
(They're actually about the only sort of short story writing I'm a big fan of. Standalone short stories often leave me cold.)
In Ye Olde Days, I read Wild Cards through book #10 or #11, though I have up to #14 on my shelves. However, I started checking them out from the library when the series revived with #18. It feels quite a bit different from what it used to, as most of the characters changed after the gap from #15 to #18, but I've been enjoying it. Fort Freak is particularly fun because it's set in the super-hero-detective subgenre, which is one of my favorites.
I intend to reread the series sometime, starting with the newly updated #1, but have been putting it off because of a failed attempt to reread the series 5 or 8 years ago, which has #1 still fairly fresh in my head. But that new copy of Wild Cards with the 3 new stories is enough to encourage me.
In Ye Olde Days, I read Thieves' World through book #7 or so. My reading fizzled out because the books became dominated by writers whose short stories confused me. I hope to be able to give them just a bit more attention and focus this time, to figure out what Morris and others really mean in their opaque stories.
I've considered picking up the Heroes in Hell series (which I sold off several years ago) or reading through Magic in Italkar or that C.J. Cherryh shared world too, but for the moment I'm probably content with just WC and TW.