shannon_a

In April 2020 I started writing new Designers & Dragons articles for a project I called "The Lost Histories". Since the 2014 publication of Evil Hat's 4-volume Designers & Dragons, I'd collected notes for about half-a-dozen additional histories, but I just hadn't been able to find the time to write them—a problem that only accelerated in the latter half of the '10s, after Kimberly and I decided to move to Hawaii in 2020.

But in April 2020, our move was done, we'd mostly managed to furnish our Hawaiian house, and most importantly I was moving over to freelance work. About half of my time was allocated to technical writing for a variety of clients (Blockchain Commons, Bitmark, Rebooting the Web of Trust, Transparent Financial), to bring in the money, while the other half of my time went to my own freelance RPG writing, as part of a new company that I created, Designers & Dragons LLC.

I immediately had two priorities for my Designers & Dragons LLC work: putting together new company histories, starting with the ones that I already had notes for, and collecting the D&D product histories I'd written for DTRPG into publishable volumes.

It's been four years. In the interim I wrote a full history of the Traveller RPG, which has already been published as _This is Free Trader Beowulf_ (print book pending!). I also finalized the first four books of D&D product histories, which Evil Hat will be publishing as _Designers & Dragons Origins_ (and though they're still a ways from publication, I just sent back my revisions of the first set of editing for the first book on Monday).

As for the Designers & Dragons company history, there's been considerable work there too, though we're likely still years from publications.

At this point I've settled on three-and-a-half books worth of "new" content: two volumes of Lost Histories covering new companies for the 70s-00s and a book of 10s Histories. The Lost Histories books are now at 109k and 114k words and the 10s is at 117k words. My plan had been to close them out this summer, but that's now pushed into next year with the decision to expand the 10s from the 120k+ words typical for the series up to 180k or so (so that there are as many 10s histories as the original histories supplemented by the new Lost Histories for each of the other decades).

And, that won't even be the end, because we're also looking at updating the original 500k+ words of histories that we published in 2014, many of which are about companies that have continued publishing in the last decade. Which means it's probably a few years before the whole project is done, even though my original goal of producing new histories is coming to a close.

Which brings me to The Moon Files that The Kraken just announced. These are excerpts from Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories, covering two new "company" histories that I wrote in 2020 or 2021, one for Reaching Moon Megacorp, the other (not announced yet) for Moon Design Publications. They tell the story of RuneQuest and the world of Glorantha in the 90s, 00s, and 10s, between its major publication by Avalon Hill and its return to Chaosium. How did the game and the world survive? Spoiler! It was because of one of the most amazing fandoms in existence, fans that are now officially in charge of the game at Chaosium itself.

My publisher Evil Hat has been super-cool in letting a few previews like this out. (There are also a few company updates over in BAYT AL AZIF for Cthulhu-related histories, which are previews of Designers & Dragons 3e, the update project I mentioned.) It's especially nice since we are a few years out from full publication.

So if you are interested in my history writing, in Glorantha, in RuneQuest, or if you want to support the Kraken convention in Germany, keep an update on Fabian Küchler's updates, as this book is going to print next week.

As of tonight, I've finished six books since we moved to Hawaii on 1/1/20 and moreso since I moved to halftime work on writing on 4/1/20. So, that's just more than four years' time (or half-time), though there was existing content for four or five of the books, depending on what you count.

DESIGNERS & DRAGONS ORIGINS (Evil Hat). Submitted 4/30/24. [4 books: 442k words]

I just sent my newest four books out today, a product-by-product history of OD&D, AD&D 1e, BD&D, and Mystara. These are based on product histories that I started writing for DTRPG way back in 2013, just as I was finishing the previous Designers & Dragons. I finished my work with DTRPG in 2017, and when I hit Hawaii and freed up time, I started turning them into books.
I actually have HUNDREDS of thousands of words more, covering AD&D 2e, 3e, 4e, and even (based on more recent writing) 5e. But that's all a possibility for another day.

I don't expect to see these first four Origins books in print until at least next year, as Evil Hat has a very busy schedule, but they should be passed off for proofing and editing very soon.

THIS IS FREE TRADER BEOWULF (Mongoose). Submitted 10/17/23. E-published 4/12/24 [112k words]

I closed out my system history of Traveller shortly after I got back from Köln last year. I'm thrilled it's already out as an ebook with the print book to follow around the end of summer.

ELFPACK (Chaosium). Submitted 12/9/21. Submitted last revisions 2/1/22. [136k words]

Yeah, this one has been sitting around a bit, as Chaosium has had a very full schedule with Cult Books, the fourth of which is due out next month. I have faith that Chaosium will eventually get to Elf Pack, though my elf books have not had the best luck, as I submitted a full manuscript of a HeroQuest elf book to Issaries almost two decades ago, and it never went anywhere since Issaries was on their way out of business. Fingers crossed.

(Funny story: the bad experience with the Issaries elf book led me to decide that I needed to shift my creative energy to IPs that I controlled. The result was Designers & Dragons.)

By the by, this was the other book that I had some existing content for, but it was mainly decades of talking with Greg about elves and writing about elves. I only reused a few thousand words from my unpublished Issaries book, the rest was brand-new.

--

And I've currently got four books wide open with lots of text: Designers & Dragons Lost Histories I + II, Designers & Dragons the '10s, and The Eternal Concordance (on Michael Moorcock). I'm also preparing to put together a letter of intent for a new system history, thinking about future product history books (since I still have so much content), and planning a small bit of time on some comics or other material with one of my old writing partners.

FREE TRADER BEOWULF. My first history book in a decade (where does the time go!?) came out today. This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller. It's 296 pages (110,000 words) detailing the history of that singular game system across four and a half decades. It was a joy to write, and I think it's my best book to date. Mongoose Publishing has the product page for the PDF and/or preorder of the hardcover: https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/this-is-free-trader-beowulf. My original Designers & Dragons hardcover through Mongoose is pretty rare now, so don't miss out on this one!

I was sitting at the airport this morning, waiting for our plane which had already been delayed more than hour, trying to finalize my Designers & Dragons article on the release of This is Free Trader Beowulf, when I idly flipped to Lihue's departures page and saw *)(@#$@ that our flight had been cancelled. We were off to the races.

THE STORM BEFORE NO CALM. Last night we had a heck of a storm. It was just pouring, for hours. The poor orangies spent much of the evening hiding under the couches. Our mud room had an influx of water, which happened one other time during a really bad storm. (I think it has to do with the dryer vent, but I'm not sure as it's been pretty mysterious both times.) There was thunder and lightning! (Very, very frightening said the orangies.) I eventually buttoned up the house as tight as possible before bed. Wow. When I got up in the morning I almost felt like a disaster survivor, stumbling around in the curious calm.

BUT THE STORM EFFECTS REMAINED. We're going out to Oahu for just a day so that Kimberly can see a BTS-related movie that was just showing twice, once a few days ago and once tomorrow. I could see how fierce the storm had been as I drove into the airport. At one of the major crossroads, there was mud all over the road and a bit of flowing water; the "flooding" signs told the story of how it had all been underwater at some point in the night. Did I mention we apparently got a foot of rain over night? Yow!

THE TSA SOUP NAZI. During what would be our first fight through TSA, they were tremendously understaffed, with just a single person checking IDs and boarding passes. She seemed to be the TSA Soup Nazi. She was constantly yelling at people to move up to certain places as she tried to coordinate the Pre-TSA, disabled, and plebeian lines. And she wasted SO much time doing so, as she argued with just about everyone about getting to the precise right places so she didn't have to wait 1 second for them to step up when it was their turn.

She also was discriminating against the disabled people, which was particularly obvious to us because Kimberly currently uses a wheelchair at airports (though hopefully she's now on a path to improvement for her knee after a good meeting with a physiatrist on Wednesday). But the TSA Soup Nazi would pick several people from each of the pre-TSA and plebeian lanes before she took someone from the disabled entrance. I'd never seen anything like it.

Real LEO agencies sometimes try to test out people who should *NOT* be in law-enforcement/authority positions. Apparently, the TSA needs some work there, because Soup Nazi was a Bad Cop stereotype.

BLOOD, BLOOD EVERYWHERE. At the airport, the departures board was a sea of red. Every single flight was delayed by an hour or more. Yes, including ours. (I'd checked that our plane was on time before we left the house. Hawaiian helpfully emailed me about the delay sometime after we'd already fought through TSA.)

I skimmed through the other flights and discovered one incoming flight had been cancelled. It was about 15 or 20 minutes before our departure, so I was pretty suspicious about that because Hawaiian turns their airplanes right around for their interisland flights. But Hawaiian said ours was just delayed, so I just kept a careful eye on things ... and then sure enough our flight was cancelled as well.

GETTING BACK ON TRACK. We were nowhere near the gate, so I knew we weren't going to get any help from what's one typically overloaded gate agent. I also felt pretty good about being able to get through TSA through the combination of us currently being on the disabled list and having pre-TSA, so back out to the main desks we went. Where we found a line 100 people long or so. Sigh. So Kimberly and I got into line, and I started keeping a hold of her wheelchair with one hand and calling up Hawaiian with the other. We only had moved several feet by the time I got an agent on the phone.

The online agent was able to get us a flight at 2.30, which was about 3 hours after our original flight, about 2 hours after our delayed flight, which was good enough. Thankfully Kimberly's movie is tomorrow not today. So, just an annoyance

We decided we'd better get lunch, since Oahu was receding further and further into the afternoon. So instead of a tasty Oahu lunch we had McDonalds. Ah well.

BACK INTO THE HURLY BURLY. Somehow our new tickets got printed without Kimberly's wheelchair this time, so when we got back to the airport, we had to wait in the ticket line, only a dozen or so people long this time. Then it was back into security. Fortunately, Soup Nazi TSA seemed to be gone and their staffing had improved, so back into the airport it was.

Ah, security checks twice in a day. haven't done that since last time I reentered the United States from Europe.

NO MASK? NO MASK! Astoundingly, planes seem to be back to no-mask classic. Besides Kimberly and myself there seemed to be just one other person wearing a mask on the whole plane. Seriously? Costco has more mask wearing! (But Costco also likely has more residents and fewer tourists than the average interisland plane.)

BACK ON OAHU AGAIN. And we're back on Oahu again, safely ensconced in our room before we go out to eat some dim sum, pay the sunscreen tax (because you can't take sunscreen back and forth between the islands unless you check-in luggage) and otherwise enjoy our evening out.

I've worked with both Matthew Sprange and Marc Miller before. Matthew Sprange was the publisher of the first edition of Designers & Dragons, the doorstopper leatherette hardcover that you can now get on Amazon for the low, low used price of $250. Marc Miller collected together my Traveller fiction reviews as The Science Fiction in Traveller. So I wasn't surprised when they sent me a piece of mail on November 29, 2021 asking if I'd like to write a "complete history of Traveller".

Now I should admit, I've been scattered and overworking myself since I gave myself 50% creative work schedule starting in April 2020. I started working on "Lost Histories" for Designers & Dragons, with the intent of producing a few new volumes of company histories. But then I began playing around with the Dungeons & Dragons/TSR product histories that I'd already written for DTRPG and started to shape those into a series of books. And THEN at the start of January 2021 I signed a contract with Chaosium to write an Elfbook for their new version of RuneQuest. Like all of the other projects, the Elfbook was something that was a long time coming, and I definitely wanted to commit to it. But it meant I simultaneously had three big projects going.

So, as 2021 was coming to an end, I was finishing up on the second TSR product history book and closing out the Elfbook as well. And I'd probably done close to three-quarters of a book worth of "Lost Histories" for Designers and Dragons that year alone.

I was in fact breathing a sigh of relief, because I'd really been grinding to get all that done in 2021.

So I of course accepted the commission from Matthew to start work on that complete history of Traveller for 2022.

Yeah, yeah.

This wasn't something I'd done work on prior to 2020 but hadn't had time to move forward on, like the Designers & Dragons, TSR product history, and RuneQuest books. All of those books I'd had notes, research, and/or content for.

But a Traveller book was definitely something special. For one thing, it obviously fit into my niche of historical gaming writing, and I was eager to dive right into a book that someone definitely wanted to publish. But I'm a big Traveller fan too.

There are basically five major RPGs that I have fairly comprehensive collections for: Ars Magica, Pendragon, RuneQuest, Stormbringer, and Traveller. (I have a couple of shelves of D&D too, but it's minor compared to the entire run of that game, although I also have hundreds and hundreds of PDFs from my work with DTRPG on those product histories.) I love them all for different reasons. For Traveller it's the richly described, detailed, mystery-filled space-opera setting of Charted Space and the Third Imperium. I've written articles about Traveller for _Signs & Portents_ and a column for RPGnet, plus the aforementioned _Science-Fiction in Traveller_ book. I've run the game using at least three different game systems. I've been a fan long enough that I've seen the game basically drop out of print as its fortunes faded and cheered when it returned in the 21st Century.

In fact, Traveller is the game that got me writing Designers & Dragons: I'd wanted to know what happened to Imperium Games, the then-final publisher of the Traveller RPG, who I'd lost track of (ironically) when I started working in the roleplaying industry for Chaosium.

So with all that history, I was *definitely* going to write a Traveller history when asked, even if I had two other projects ongoing.

I originally told Matthew it was going to be a 2022 project, and he was entirely understanding when I admitted it was going to be closer to double that. The problem was the research. I had no interest in just reiterating what I'd written about the game in Designers & Dragons. I was going to thoroughly research it from the bottom up, this time recording every reference, and finding every new thing that had been put out since. (The biggest complaint about the original edition of Designers & Dragons was the lack of references, because I'd never intended for it to be a research reference for other historians, I just wanted to tell the interesting stories of what had happened in the industry. So now, for new history material where I'm starting from scratch, like this Traveller history, I've filled that gap.)

The thing is, there's a _lot_ of Traveller reference. I wasn't able to dive in quite this far when I wrote the histories of GDW, DGP, and a few other companies last time around, but this time I scoured literally hundreds of magazines and small-press fanzines. Since I indexed them as I went, this took quite a bit of time. (It would have taken a quite a bit of time even without that.) It took me months just to get the first chapter down!

This year, the second year I was working on my Traveller history, I finally had to lighten my load a bit by putting my Designers & Dragons company histories to the side. An irony, since that was the first project I began work on in 2020. But, my TSR and Traveller projects had a bit more priority in releasing at certain (nearer) times, whereas the new Designers & Dragons company histories will actually improve the further they get away from 2020, since I'm writing about companies that began publishing RPGs as late as December 2019 (that'd be Osprey, by the by, classic publisher, but new to the RPG field). Thanks to that, I finished my second draft of the TSR books last week. Feature complete. And now I've completed my final (for now) draft of the Traveller book and sent it off to Mongoose.

This has been a really joyous project. Mark Twain said "Write what you know." I say "Write what you love." I started writing Designers & Dragons because I wanted to know what had happened to Imperium Games; this year, I *loved* finding out the whole story of what happened to all of Traveller's publishers and all of its game systems as I worked through my Traveller history. On the way, I've also rediscovered my love for Traveller. I mean, it's not like we broke up or anything. I closed out my best Traveller campaign ever about a decade before I left the Bay Area, and I didn't return to it only because I always had *something* else I was wanting to try out (and honestly because I put a lot of effort into making that campaign fun for the players and true to Charted Space for me, and I didn't have the energy to do that in later days). But I hadn't read anything new for the game since that campaign. A whole new edition of Traveller had come from Mongoose, and not quite gone, but at least been updated with some new core books, and I hadn't seen it.

But writing this history made me remember that great setting that I loved so much, and I've been picking up new volumes again and enjoying the stories of Charted Space once more. And thinking about other ways to contribute to it too.

Unlike my TSR histories, which still need another revision over the next few months, but which are advanced enough that I'm now talking with a publisher about scheduling, this Traveller book is truly done to me (until I get back comments, corrections, and questions from Mongoose). It should be the first big history book I've put out since Designers & Dragons second edition in 2014-2015.

I'm definitely looking forward to it. Our current hope is that the book will release by early summer. (I presume that'll be a PDF with a print book to follow a few months later, as that's been Mongoose's methodology for a few years now.)

In December 2012 I received a query from some of the folks at DTPRG about whether I'd be interested in writing product histories for a long series of classic D&D products to be released through DTRPG at a subsite called DnDClassics.com (later subsumed into DMsGuild.com). At the time I still had a little bit of work to go to finish up my drafts of the second edition of Designers & Dragons, to be released through Evil Hat, but it seemed like too good of it opportunity to pass up, so I cautiously entered into negotations.

DTRPG paid me a fair rate for the histories. Nothing to break the bank, but enough to make it worthwhile when combined with two other elements. First (and I hate to use this word) I knew it'd give me exposure as an RPG historian, and over the years I probably have gotten as many emails about the D&D products histories as I have for Designers & Dragons itself. Second I insisted that I maintain rights to the histories.

The latter point turned out to be the biggest stickler in the contract negotiations. The DTRPG folks were 100% reasonable, but they had valid concerns about being able to continue running the histories themselves (which I was totally OK with) and whether people might think they'd copied them in some far future where they also appeared in a book (which we covered with a credit for them in any future books). I suspect it was actually more negotiation than they wanted when they were also trying to desperately get a first batch of PDFs online, but they were great, and we finally came to an agreement.

And I started writing. At first Kevin Kulp was also writing histories for DTRPG, me for the earliest D&D products, him for the later ones. After a while (A year? Two? I'm not sure) he faded away, but I kept writing. It was actually a considerable amount of work. Even after the initial big batch I was researching and writing histories about 2-4 books every single week, in and out. But I had an incentive: I had the rights to everything I wrote.

(If there's a lesson in there about incentivizing workers by giving them a stake in the work, you should definitely take it; I would have ended my work, much as Kevin did, years earlier if not for that fact.)

So I continued on through 2017, and by then DTRPG had published somewhere over 90% of the possible products from the previous 43(!) years of D&D and their regular schedule fell off. They did publish bits and pieces afterward, and I would have loved to write histories for them, but without the weekly schedule of new content, we fell out of touch.

At some point I looked at what I'd written over the previous five years and it came out to almost a million words of D&D product histories, but I figured there was probably a lot of repetition as I talked about common elements of various books.

I was busy with plenty of other things, particularly an upcoming move to Hawaii as we entered 2019, but I did play around with a table of contents for putting those histories into print. After all, I'd retained the rights, and by now I was even getting queries as to whether they might even be collected into a book. I eventually laid out a table of contents outlining how to collect product histories on every D&D book from Chainmail to fourth edition into a series of four volumes. Apparently I thought a LOT of material was going to be repetitious, because four books were likely to have space for no more than half-million words, not a million. And I hadn't yet counted all the histories I *didn't* write for D&D 2e, 3e, and 4e, in the earlier days of the project.

In 2020, after our move, I reallocated my work schedule to allow for halftime work on more creative pursuits. My main goal was to write new Designers & Dragons histories, but pretty early on I also started playing with my D&D product histories, arranging them into chapters in actual books.

Well, pretty soon I figured out that four books were likely to cover a lot smaller scope of time than the entire run of D&D. But I also discovered that there were definitely possibilities in gathering content into full volumes. Some of the histories needed to be expanded, particularly the ones I'd written in the initial frantic leadup to the debut DnDClassics release. Everything needed to be regularized into a standard format. New interviews needed to be scoured for new tidbits. And there were missing histories that I needed to write (mostly focused on products DnDClassics hadn't gotten to in this early era).

But I completed a full second draft of a first volume in late 2020. Then additional volumes in 2021 and 2022. By that point I'd laid out a definite organization that would collect all of the product histories for OD&D, AD&D 1e, BD&D, and the later Mystara line into a set of four volumes. It covers 1974-1988 on the OD&D/AD&D side (that's the first two volumes) and 1977-1996 on the BD&D side (that's the second two volumes).

And as of today, I have the fourth and final volume of that set done in a second-draft form (or fourth-draft if you count the original product histories for DnDClassics).

That's a pretty major milestone for me and for my roleplaying histories.

We're not quite at the finish line yet. I have a number of comments I need to incorporate, plus I just sent out the last two books for more comments today. I also want to work my way through all the volumes for a third draft to make them as consistent as they can be.

And I'm also reading through some fanzines (Oerth Journal, Threshold) both to pick up any tidbits I might have missed in other places, and to offer more cross-referencing.

But my first four volumes of the TSR Codex (or Designers & Dragons Origins, or whatever we decide to call it, which will depend in part on the publisher, which is under negotiation right now) are FEATURE COMPLETE.

All the chapters are there, all the words are there. I just need to finalize them one more time.

I'm hoping these will be books #2-5 of mine that are out next year. As for book #1, well more on that in a few days, but I'm about a work day from actually sending that one off to the publisher.

(The pictures nearby just show the first page of contents for each book; comments on them have the rest of the contents for each book.)

So we've gotten our first new appliance since we moved to Hawaii.

Our dishwasher had been flaky since we got here, often having to be reset after a power outage, sometimes having to be reset several times. And, we get brown-outs here pretty regularly. Just before we went to Oahu, I had to reset it about a dozen times before it worked, and then when we got back there'd been another power outage, and that was it.

The problem was I'm pretty sure the latching mechanism. It's this electronic crap they put in everything, rather than a physical latch, and it stopped reading that the dish washer was closed. So, that was that. Looking it up online, it's apparently a common problem for these GE dishwashers.

The dishwasher was only 2.5 years old, but I figured that repairing it would be half the cost of replacing it, so hating the waste, I did the later.

So I set to handwashing dishes for a bit more than a month, and finally decided on a new one, and it arrived on Tuesday.

Fortunately, my dad came over on Wednesday to help me get it installed. There was lots of futzing with cords and hoses that he was just more familiar with, but we also ran into a few actual problems that I wouldn't have known what to do with (like the fact that Home Depot had clearly swapped out the power cord at some point, and the new one doesn't actually fit without a little surgery).

But, given my dad's help, it was a pretty easy installation. And then we just had to haul the old one out to the appliance dump near Salt Pond. (I'm still shocked how easy it is to get rid of things with a car and with Kauai having open dumps of various sorts.)

We tested it out briefly on Wednesday, and tonight I'll run it with some actual plates from meals, and we'll see if it clears out dishes without extensive prewashing, as we hope.

Meanwhile: Designers & Dragons work continues abreast. For the last three weeks or so, I've been working on some '10s histories of Swedish companies, and oh boy, I'm tired of introducing the extra step of translating stuff and then reading mostly intelligible text. I was going to continue on through all four Swedish companies now (or recently) publishing in English, but I think at least the last is going to get saved for a future month.

Meanwhile: COVID is going crazy on Hawaii. After many weeks of 0-10 cases, and then some bad week of 20-30, we've had 100 cases a day two days a row, almost entirely on Oahu.

First up, this doesn't shock me, because when we were on Oahu no one seemed to care about wearing masks.

But, this is also apparently a result of everyone running around, having large gatherings since the 4th of July.

I wouldn't be surprised if another big lockdown is coming down, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's mostly resisted by the population. As I said back in March: the problem with the lockdown strategy is that it's unsustainable. That's proving itself right now.

But here on Kauai, we really need to reintroduce the 14-day quarantine for inter-island travel. Because we're starting to have new cases too and ... shocker ... they're travel related.

Meanwhile: my dad and I have finally gotten back to my shelving project. We've actually got two shelves for my closet ready to go. We just have to stain, finish, and fill them, and they're done. Hoping to do the staining tomorrow. Hoping to get a bunch of comics out of boxes soon, and to think about what to do for the rest of our shelving needs.

Meanwhile: our solar panel installation is supposed to start in about a week and a half. Hoping it won't be too much of a pain in the neck for us, but I'm looking forward to that solar power. Saving $150 a month will be nice, but that's a long term thing. Not having brownouts all the time will be a big plus though. Hoping it works as advertised.

And that's life in these Hawaiian states.

Friday I had one of the sorts of days I'd dreamed of before moving to Hawaii. I got up, showered, and headed to my office, where I did a morning worth of work. It was Designers & Dragons work, on the third of the three OSR histories that I'm planning for this month.

Then I took Kimberly out to lunch at some food trucks in Koloa. Actually, it turned out only one food truck was open, but it was Mexican, so we were entirely content.

Then I came home and worked through the mid-afternoon.

Afterward, my dad came over, we worked on our Eternal Shelf project, and afterward we picked up Mary, and went down to Poipu to swim.

That's what I hoped life would be like in Hawaii, after I finished up my Skotos work, and dropped back to working on my own projects (with a bit of tech writing mixed in). Freedom to work on my own priorities, but also an ability to rest, relax, and enjoy myself. And it's been mostly that way for a month or so, albeit with the occasional medical issues we're dealing with, such as our recent trip to Oahu.

I'm creating patterns now, and so one thing I'm really trying to do is make sure I develop a discipline for working on my own projects. So when I get up in the morning, I head down to my office to work.

And sometimes I migrate to somewhere more comfortable to write, like a chair or a couch. In the future I hope that'll include the pavilion at the golf course and perhaps the beach. I don't need to be in my office to work, I just need to have the discipline to write.

But it turns out that my office is pretty nice too. It took me a bit to figure out the optimal setup for writing, but it turns out to work pretty well when I sit at my desk typing on my laptop and use my desktop computer with the huge screen to look up references.

Of course our entire time in Hawaii has been colored by COVID-19. We're mostly open now, though no one really knows what's supposed to be allowed and what's not. But the fact of the disease is certainly keeping us from further exploring the island, as I was in our first few months here, and as we would under normal circumstances.

So that trip out to the food trucks was our first experiment with a new food place since the shutdown had started. (And as I said, the other three or four foodtrucks at that locale are still closed.) And we haven't been trying out new food in Lihue.

And I'm still not gaming at the game store. Sure it's open, but I know how often I've gotten sick from gaming (almost any time I've gotten sick in the last few decades, I could track it to the game table), and I don't feel like I could responsibly do that and also see my folks regularly, so, choices.

And that also means that we're not making new friends here. No gaming. No plays. No community centers. No Habitat for Humanity. (Though I've told my dad to put my name in for a friend who is going to have a house built.) We've been cut off from pretty much all the ways that we could better integrate with our local community.

Still, we're very pleased to be in Kauai instead of Berkeley for the duration of this pandemic. It's safer and we can do more. The people here are more responsible about protecting the community. And given the masking requirements it's a lot more comfortable to be driving than walking.

And we're still very pleased to have moved to Hawaii generally. I think these are likely to be the most extreme circumstances ever for both physical and personal isolation, and we're doing fine.

So as things open up, as we feel more comfortable traveling the whole island, as we meet new people, as we're able to actually leave the island for workshops, for vacations, and for visits to California, things will be even better.

Now if we can just get a vaccine and a president who isn't a moronic and malignant narcissist by the end of the year!

We've been back from Oahu for 9 days now. We probably don't have COVID, since the average incubation period is 5-6 days. I guess Kimberly will know for sure in a few days as she has another required COVID test for another procedure.

Oahu was just exhausting. Part of that was, obviously, balancing work with supporting Kimberly and then having to go back to a small hotel room at night. (It was an OK hotel, but I've stayed in nicer, and I usually prefer AirBnBs, but they're currently illegal in Hawaii.) But it was really the attitude in Oahu that was the most exhausting: having all these detsroyers-of-the-commons pretty much ignoring the mask rules, and so I had to worry about how much exposure there really was. When I got home I was pretty much ready to collapse, and then having to put in a day of work on that Friday pretty much ensured that I was out of commission through that weekend.

I finally perked up on Monday, and since I'd edited histories throughout Saturday, I took that opportunity to do a shorter walk from Shipwreck to Mahaulepu. That sort of thing always relaxes me.

And then the whole week went by in a blur. That was partly semi-quarantine after Oahu, mainly not hanging out with my dad and Mary, but I think I was still tuckered out. I was a bit surprised that a week had gone by when I realized that was the case, on this Friday.

Chicks. Ares, one of the six remaining brood, was gone when we returned. This was not a surprise. When I saw the chicks just before we left, I actually wondered if I'd see Ares again, because he was so often wandering quite far afield from mom Danielle. So I was expecting him to go traveling. Which I trust is what he did. But there's been this black hen out in an adjacent yard, and one of the days since we got back, I noticed she had a half-pint companion, and so I wondered if Ares had found his Mrs. Robinson.

Lizards. The teeny lizards of Hawaii are SOOO dumb. More than once I've held back a cat so they can escape and they just sit there, frozen. And more than once they've disappeared under a couch (while I held down a cat) just to come back out a few minutes later. As I write, I hear Callisto chasing a lizard that I saved a few minutes ago.

Designers. The Designers & Dragons patreon has been every bit as successful in getting me to focus on my projects as I had hoped it would. Oh, this is work I love, and so there's a frequent desire to do it, but having monthly deadlines where I've promised certain types of content is keeping me pushing along quickly, and also letting me make grandiose plans about what I can produce each month. (It also is having a nice side effect of making me feel OK about buying source material for all of my projects, because I've got a bit of money coming in each month from the Patreon.)

Mynahs. Oh, there was one other animal-related change while we were in Oahu: THE MYNAHS RETURNED TO OUR LANAI. @)#$@#. I put Ozzie the plastic owl out when I saw this on our return, and a few days later I found a mynah on the railing staring at him! *)(#$@*#)(. But, I've determinedly kept moving Ozzie around and that seems to have done the trick again. They've left the valley once more. But those Mynahs are determined!

I was going to swim today after a hike all the way from Poipu to Mahaulepu, but that 10 miles or so is pretty exhausting in the 80+ degree heat. So I ended up having a shave ice instead, alas. Haven't swum since I returned from Oahu, but I think things are returning to normal after a week of stunned rest, so I'm sure I'll get out there sometime early this next week.

So this last week was the start of my new job, as it were. Or really, my new jobs.

Monday and Tuesday were tiring, busy days, because they were my first days of work for Christopher at Blockchain Commons. Yes, I've been working for both for quite some time, but contracting is different. It's more intensive (and when I found myself twiddling my thumbs because we don't have the structure of what we're doing down yet, I couldn't just move on to a different task).

But Wednesday through Friday: they were what I've planned since I moved to Hawaii.

In the mornings I was up first thing and doing any technical writing I had. Bitmark has thus been getting early morning attention each day (and I seem to be getting more work from them as a result, though that's probably just a result of current needs). I also did business-y work like updating my LinkedIn and sending an invoice.

Then, I had to take a lunch-time break the first two days. On Wednesday, Kimberly and I had to make an emergency trip out to get some of her meds in Lihue (and I got Taco Bell as a reward). On Thursday, my dad took us out to Paco's Tacos. (Yes! A meal in a restaurant! That's my first since I think March 7th, when my folks and I had some dinner in Lihue after a day's hike.) That really would have been the high point of the month if not for the excitement of finally being my own master.

Then in the afternoons, I did work Designers & Dragons (eventually finishing up drafts of the two histories I've been working on).

Friday there was no interruption, so I actually got the day to write. (Not that the interruptions were problematic: I want to make sure my Designers & Dragons continues forward at a good rate, and that I don't frivolously waste my now-free time, but I also want to be able to go swim in the morning or go have lunch in the afternoon if that's what I choose to do that day.)

It really great, both being able to conform my consulting to a regular work day (after spending over two years fitting Bitmark in when I could) and being able to spend weekdays on my own stuff. My challenge will probably be ensuring that my consulting work doesn't take over my newfound personal writing time, but I'm limiting BCC to two days a week, and I find it unlikely that Bitmark + RWOT + RPGnet will ever take up a full day a week beyond that. So, that should be two guaranteed days, sometimes extending to three or most of three.

So I wrote last week about ending my Skotos time (mostly), but this is the big payout, having more time for own writing, and thus far it feels great.

So, my regular work with Skotos came to an end yesterday. It's really a monumental date because I've been working for Skotos for, I dunno, somewhere around 20 years. Mind you, it's been really varied work and my focus on the Skotos games themselves is at least 15 years in the rear-view mirror. But, for around 20 years I've been keeping the Skotos games running and warding off people making various legal and physical threats and I've been spending more time maintaining and coding for RPGnet and warding off people making legal (but not generally physical) threats and in the last five years or so I've been supporting any number of decentralized identity endeavors.

So, varied work, but it's been a long time doing that every day, day after day.

The plan was to end at the end of March, but the problem was that we wanted to give away the Skotos games, and that required creating a new low-maintenance user-database that matched the commands for our old one, but could be run easily and not be a big black-box that the new maintainers couldn't really control. So, that got put off until the start of March, and then I said I really need to spend all my time on it, and my theory that we would switch over at the end of March wasn't anything like reality.

(Why not? At minimum because I ended up writing over 8,000 lines of code.)

We switched over at the end of April, and I kept coding halfway down through May, and then I started the work in really splitting the machines apart from each other and ...

As of today I've given away two of the games and got a third partly set up and I'm waiting on paperwork on a fourth. And I might need to write a contract for a fifth that I thought we were turning off. But, we're done-ish.

Oh, there's still stuff to be done. There's more stuff on some of our machines that Chris probably wants to keep. And I'm going to help out with closing the books and stuff. I've told Chris he can have up to two more weeks of my time at my old rate ... but no more than a day a week.

Which is all to say I'm free: free to work on my own projects now.

(And boy does it feel bizarre to abandon a regularly paying job with unemployment soaring in the midst of a pandemic, but this was the plan, and it should still work.)

So, what happens next week?

I start doing work for Blockchain Commons as a tech-writer contractor. Probably just a day a week, though I've told Chris he can have up to two.

And, maybe after I skip a week I go in and start tying up some of those loose ends for Skotos so that we can really turn everything off.

And I continue my work for Bitmark and RWOT (though there's very little of the latter at the moment, but I'll still edit and layout any papers we get in from past conferences).

But I've gone from my March and April schedule of having three days of Skotos work, one day of Blockchain Commons work, and one day of my own work to having one day of Blockchain Commons, maybe one day of Skotos here and there, and the rest for myself.

I'm actually not entirely sure how much this is going to increase my writing and editing output because I've really been burning the candle at both ends for the last two months: having that day of my own work was enough impetus to frequently get me working on it on evening and on weekends. So I got 20k edited words done on my first "TSR Codex" and I've got two completed Lost Histories, one drafted Lost History, and one in-process Lost History for my next Designers & Dragons book proper. I'm around 20k words there too, most of them edited Given that the previous Designers & Dragons books were 120-140k words each, I've got a third of a book (but really: a-sixth of two, and there is a method to my madness: the Lost Histories work requires a lot of effort and so if I can do those slowly only a long period of time they'll turn out better, while the Codex book is more editorial based on previous writing, though I am here and there hitting places where the past writing isn't nearly expansive enough and needs more work; but they're different sorts of writing and by balancing them I can enjoy each more).

In any case, that level of my own work atop my Skotos work was utterly unsustainable.

Now? I'll definitely be getting more time for my own projects, but I wouldn't be surprised if I feel a little bit more able to relax in the evenings.

Overall, it's a big, big change. I'm looking forward to it, but also a little nervous. Not about the writing, but just making sure I can make all the financial stuff click into space right. Should be fine: it's just the nerves of change.

So goodbye to Skotos. Thanks to Chris for letting me run our sites for two decades and generally do work that I found enjoyable in an environment that I enjoyed. And thanks to all our players and readers who have been the ones to actually make those sites successful.

When I landed in Hawaii, one of my first priorities was to set up an LLC for my writing business. As I ramp up the amount of work that I'm doing in that regard, it seemed important to separate out the business from my personal life, which also allows them to be mutually protected.

So I created Designers & Dragons LLC and started doing the things like setting up a bank account and a Paypal account.

Though this was a top priority, it actually took a few months to get to it — which should have been fine, as I was planning to start spending more time writing no sooner than April 1st (and as it turns out, a few : months later). But I almost ran headfirst into the shelter-in-place as a result. So I did the bank work, for example, a day or two before the shelter-in-place happened.

But, it all got done. When I sent out my first new Lost History last week, it was the first thing to be marked with a Copyright from Designers & Dragons LLC.

Yay: achievement unlocked.

One of the things suggested by everything I read was that you maintain a separate mailing address for your LLC, to really show they're separate. No problem: the Kalaheo post office is literally down the street from us. It's a slightly less than 10 minute walk. So, I got that set up too (and in fact had it ready before I set up my bank account, as it was one of the building blocks).

But, it turns out that maintaining that separate mailing address might not be as simple as I'd hoped, at least not here in semi-rural Hawaii.

First up, they were confused as heck when I set up the box. They double-checked that yes, I lived in Kalaheo, and carefully explained to me that they do home delivery here. (They don't do so further west of us, which I guess is semier-rural Hawaii.) I agreed that yes I got mail at my house, but said that I wanted a different address for my LLC. I don't know if they got it or not, but they set up the PO Box.

Except it hasn't worked out like I'd hoped. (Which suggests that they didn't get it.)

After I set up my bank account, the bank mailed me checks, which arrived fine, and they mailed me an ATM card, which the post office bounced back. Why? I dunno yet, as I haven't gone into the bank to ask (and when I called they said they had no record other than the ATM mailing being refused). But that really made me doubt the efficacy of this whole maneuver, because the PO Box apparently couldn't be trusted to actually receive mail.

And then this week there was even more bizarreness: a package that was addressed to my home address never was delivered, but instead said it was ready for pickup at the post office. When I went down there, I discovered a pick-up notice IN MY PO BOX, even though that's not where the package was addressed to, nor is the PO box in my personal name. And then a postal worker admonished me that I needed to have people address things right (to the PO box)!

At this point I was the one who had to explain that I got mail at home, and the package should have been delivered there. After that talk, we presumed that someone overly helpful had done something not helpful. Because in Kalaheo, like at Cheers, everyone knows your name, and apparently knows where your LLC's PO Box is.

Meanwhile, at home, I continue to get mail for the LLC of the doctors who lived in our house two or three renters ago and apparently didn't worry about getting LLC letters delivered to their home.

I may have to switch over to that, because the rural post office is letting me down in this regard.

And today was Friday which means it was my one day of real work dedicated to my own writing (for the moment; we're almost to the next step!).

I'm thrilled to say that it was the first day that I mostly got to dedicate that full time, as planned.

The problem to date has been physical therapy, which has been regularly getting rescheduled into the late morning or early afternoon. But today, Kimberly had an appointment at 2.45 and I had my penultimate appointment at 3.30, and they stuck.

So I got to work from about 7.30-2.00 (and then another 30 or 40 minutes while waiting for Kimberly's appointment) and I got great work done.

My main goal today was to put together a part of the Designers & Dragons TSR Codex having to do with the Giant and Drow adventures, because I'm going to be on a podcast tomorrow to talk about the drow. All the sections took rearrangement and rethinking, some took light polishing, and the piece de resistance, D3: Vault of the Drow, required an almost total rewrite (and expansion). But I managed to get it all done (albeit starting in on it last night and continuing into the night tonight) and as a result I have 20 pages of new first draft text for the TSR Codex, or about 8,000 words.

That makes me very happy for my first real day of my own work as I'd intended, and I think it speaks well for my ability to do this type of work and really push out new books as I settle into my new routine in Hawaii.

So part of the plan of the move to Hawaii was to reduce my stress by stepping away from the things that caused tension in my life.

But, today was a day where that was refusing to let go.

Early on, I found that Marrach was having problems. Not, like game-was-down problems, but game-was-definitely-lagging problems.

The error logs for the game definitely showed something going: a mapping (an array, apparently) overflowing multiple times every minute.

Fortunately, s. has some good experience with the code, and I was able to get some pretty quick suggestions on how to deal with the problem, though it took a bit of trial and error to get the new code in.

So, problem solved? Maybe. s. is less convinced, but we'll see.

I jumped straight from Marrach to a belated call with Chris about Blockchain Commons work for the day, and about two-thirds of the way into that, I got a call from my realtor and ... sigh.

I've been reluctant to write about too many specifics while the house sale is still in process (and hopefully is still moving forward, albeit with two steps back for every three forward), but suffice to say, our buyers had a second loan go south for stupid COVID reasons. By my understanding, some banks are now refusing to use certain occupational income to qualify for loans (basically: if they think income for the occupation is endangered due to shelter-in-place), which is really dumb, because:

1.) IT'S SHORT-TERM. Even if shelter-in-place lasts through the rest of this year, that's still short-term over the life of a house loan.

2.) In this case, our buyers have already made accommodations for COVID-19, which makes it sound to me like the work is if anything more solid than ever. (It reminds me of when an idiot bank in the '00s insisted the gov't had to give them assurance that Kimberly would keep receiving her social security checks, even though her social security check, which was guaranteed for at least a few years, was more stable than any job income, which is not guaranteed in the same way.)

I just don't understand banks. First, their core dishonesty, when they start kicking up problems when it's obvious that they just don't want to give a loan. But moreso, this level of cowardice, yet coming from the same people who were investing money into fake, non-existent things during the 2008 crisis.

It just doesn't make sense.

There is one more fallback that will allow us to sell to these folks: a loan that will cost the buyers more money. They asked for some accommodations, we met them more than halfway, and they agreed to the compromise.

So, once more into the breach? This one should be a quicker turnaround. We're hoping to close, for real this time, next week, which would be right around the limit of the extension we signed a few weeks ago. (Our original closing was March 30th, the new one is April 22nd, I think.)

And speaking of stressors, our stupid former neighbors in Berkeley apparently are continuing to kick up a fuss, because they have nothing else to do with their empty lives.

The plumbers who put in the lateral sewer line to accommodate the first bank who flaked (which makes it sound more useless than it is: the lateral sewer line replacement is a requirement of a house sale in the East Bay at this point, if it's called for) apparently left some stuff behind, because they're waiting for the city to do their inspection, and the city of Berkeley, which opted to go it alone in the whole shelter-in-place thing, unlike any other city in the greater Bay Area, is totally overwhelmed. So that hasn't happened yet, though it's been weeks, and the stuff is still sitting there.

And our neighbor has started whining about that.

That's right, she whined when our stager came to take away her furniture; she whined when the plumbers came out to do their work; and now she's whining that the plumbers *AREN'T* coming back to take away their stuff. UGGH.

I don't care, I don't really care, other than thinking that someone really needs a life.

And someone is getting totally blocked on my phone when she no longer has the ability to affect my life.

I did get some good work done for Blockchain Commons today, though less than I would had hoped with various interruptions.

And that means the last two days of my work week are focused on Skotos & RPGnet programming, which I usually find more restful and soothing — but I'm connecting my auth client up to an actual game, so it could instead be a nightmare of debugging. We'll see.

And in the late afternoon tody, I walked in the golf course just before the pouring rain came down. Always restful. There were awesome clouds in the huge Hawaiian sky.

And, I'm feeling good that I'm genuinely moving forward on the D&D product histories that are my next big Designers & Dragons project.

Over the last few Fridays I finished up two of the final three unwritten histories for what will be Book I.

And for the last few days I've been collating all of my notes for the entire project into appropriate files, clearing years worth of links and quotes.

And then I start organizing my product histories for Book I, generating Word files for each section, and ... starting actual work on something actually book shaped.

This has been a long time coming, and though it's still going to be a huge amount of work expanding, revising, cutting, and researching until I get everything both non-repetitive and with the appropriate level of detail, it'll be rewarding work.

And that's going to be big project #1 in my Hawaii writing time.

(Sometime, maybe this year, I'd like to come out with either one book for TSR: 1974-1989 or two, one for OD&D and AD&D in that time period, one for BD&D in its entirety. The word counts will tell me which ... but I've got a lot of words.)

Kauai, Day 93. Shelter-in-Place, Day 10.

Today was supposed to be my first day of "personal work". I've given Skotos somewhere between 2-5 weeks of my additional time, to finish transitioning the Skotos and RPGnet web sites, but in exchange I'm now taking Fridays for my own personal work (which was supposed to be getting most of my time starting this week: but I'm determined to leave Skotos and RPGnet in good shape.)

Well, the new plan didn't actually work out either.

I wanted to get back to my DnDClassics work, which I'm planning to turn into a multi-book history of all of D&D's official products. So I jumped right back into the "World of Greyhawk", where I was expanding and splitting up my old writing on the product into individual histories for the folio put out in 1980 and the box put out in 1983.

I got down to my office at 7.30, which is my normal start time, as I wanted to have the best work hygiene possible for my personal work, even if I don't put in a full day like I would for Skotos, RPGnet, or Blockchain Commons. But I was only able to work until about 9.30. So, two hours for my first day of work. I worked my way through everything I'd written thus far on the 1980 folio, and started in on the next sections, but there was only so much I could do.

This was not unexpected, sadly. Yesterday I got a call from my physical therapy office, and they let me know that my therapist was self-isolating, and so all of appointments were cancelled. I didn't ask too much about this self-isolation, because I really didn't want to know right now.

I managed to get Kimberly and myself a new set of paired appointments, one after the other, but they were at 10.15 and 11.00. Hence the early end to my first day of writing.

Physical therapy was fine.

My knee is actually doing better than it was last week by a noticeable amount. I dunno if that's my exercises, natural healing, or the previous therapist taping up my knee to keep it from moving in the direction that was causing pain. I still don't know if it'll be able to get entirely better on its own, but that was encouraging.

And today I got massages with rolling pins, stretches, new exercises, and more tape.

And then we had to go to Walmart for a new prescription for Kimberly and to Costco for food for us both, and that was less fun than being attacked with a rolling pin.

First up, there were lines to get into both stores. Walmart took me about 20 minutes, Costco took us 30.

As I'd feared would be the case, those lines look like petri dishes for disease, the exact thing that these restrictions are supposed to be avoiding. Walmart was pretty decent, but the way the barriers were laid out that guided the lines, it was easy to be within 6 foot of people, depending on how people were aligned in the zig-zag rows on either side of you. Costco was worse, because the back-and-forth just before the door put you maybe 4-5 feet from people on the other sides, with no way of avoiding it.

So good job, idiot Kauai mayor. You've replaced casual interactions with people within the store with long-term interactions with people while you stand in line for 20-30 minutes, and we know those long-term interactions are how COVID-19 spreads.

In the Costco line, the lady in front of us commented that we might be safe from COVID-19 now (questionable), but we'd all have melanoma in 10 years. (Because we were standing in line in the direct Hawaiian sun.)

Which I agree with. I actually had previously stood in the Walmart line slathering myself with sunscreen while I waited (which was probably too late for that line, but likely helped out later).

And I thought: "Having to put on sunscreen to get a drug prescription is perhaps the most ridiculous thing ever."

The line at Costco also had one other delightful feature: it ran all the way to the back of the store, then looped back into the parking lot ... blocking all of the handicap spaces.

I was pissed at the people at first, but as we were forced to get into the same line I realized that none of us had any power to prevent the problem at that point.

This is the continued fault of our aforementioned idiot mayor in Kauai, who has now amended the local interpretation of the shelter-in-place order twice, but has done absolutely nothing to protect the rights of the disabled, and all it would take is a reminder that these new regulations still need to respect the ADA.

But even more obviously it's the liability (legally) of these stores, in this case Costco, who was requiring a line to enter the store, then allowing it to block their handicapped spaces.

The stores were both more crowded than I expected.

The Walmart I would guess only had 50 people last time I was there, which would have reflected v1 of the mayor's emergency decree, and this time I think it had 100, which reflected the day-two, oops I messed up, v2 of the interpretation. Despite the annoying line, it was probably the right number to help people maintain distance in the store.

The Costco theoretically only was allowed 100 people, but I'd guess there were 200 or 300 in there. Which was the right amount for the size of the store. (The idiot mayor's decree just gave one allowed patron count for all stores larger than 50,000 square feet, and the typical Costco is three times that size.) There was no change to the proclamations, so either Costco is ignoring the mayor's idiocy, and just doing what's realistic to keep everyone separated in the store (and the numbers inside were 100% OK), or else they've cut a deal under the table. I don't care which: they've done what's necessary for everyone on the island to actually get food. If Costco had instead listened to the mayor's proclamation (especially the really stupid v1 which would have limited Costco to 50 people), I honestly believe there would have been food riots starting in the Costco parking lot.

Oh yeah, there was toilet paper.

In fact, generally, the shortages seem to be resolved. Which makes sense, as it's been about a month since the anti-cooperators began panic-buying hordes of materials at the expense of the rest of the citizens. And so, with some time to produce new resources and ship then in, supplies have returned.

I bought a regular pack of toilet paper at Walmart, our first stop, but then I saw at Costco they had what I really wanted, which is Costco's massive pack of 30 rolls.

Not hoarding, honest, just buying what they had, then what I really wanted.

I suppose I could have stood in a 20-minute line at Walmart to return the first pack.

(Not likely.)

Funny story, every cart at Costco looks like the owner is hoarding.

Because it's Costco.

But I saw one freakish human actually really genuinely stockpiling at the expense of the rest of the people in the store. He literally had 8-9 rotisserie chickens in his basket. (My dad thinks that Costco is actually limiting people to one rotisserie chicken right now. I certainly hope the chicken hoarder got turned back at the register.)

And crazy hoarder heard us talking about refried beans, which were only available in flats of 8 cans, which we did not want. (Because we'd either never use them, or we'd eat EIGHT CANS of refried beans.) And when we said we weren't going to get them, he said we should because YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THEY MIGHT DISAPPEAR OFF THE SHELVES AND NEVER BE SEEN AGAIN.

Enjoy those chickens and refried beans, dude. And I'm sure the 7-8 people who didn't get rotisserie chickens because of you would say the same.

(Not.)

Generally, Lihue was much more crowded than expected. Certainly, areas like the mall had tumbleweeds rolling through their parking lot, but Costco and Walmart had their parking lots about 60-75% of their normal occupancy. Home Depot looked if anything fuller. There was a drive-through line at Taco Bell (where we grabbed some take-home lunch) that ran a ways into the parking lot. The roads were about as busy as I'd expect at the times we drove, maybe a little less, but not much.

And I increasingly understand why this pisses people off so much. Because I'm sacrificing. I'm not gaming. I'm not going to my folks house on Sundays. I'm carefully limiting my trips into Lihue (and they'd be almost non-existent if not for that physical therapy.) I'm not building shelves with my dad. I'm not swimming with him. And here are the jackasses acting like it's all a f***ing holiday, presumably because they're not working. So I'm sacrificing, and it's not just that these other people aren't, but they're doing the things that will either force me to sacrifice longer or make it pointless.

If there's actually COVID-19 in the community here on Kauai. Because that isn't clear yet. We went three days without new cases, and then had one new one today and two new ones presumably that will show up on the stats tomorrow.

All still travelers? Probably.

But one of the problems is that Hawaii is becoming either increasingly secretive or increasingly incompetent at reporting out stats as time goes on. It looks like the latter, because after a few weeks of not talking about the origin of COVID-19 cases, we suddenly got some charts that showed travelers vs. community spread vs they don't know. But the specifics are very short. For example, as of Kauai case #13, the mayor said that there was still no community spread, but for #14 + #15 today, he didn't say anything, and those charts even if up-to-date aren't precise enough to tell.

So, that's a pretty big deal, because there's a wide difference in danger between travelers having COVID-19 and it actively spreading in our community, and our mayor is refusing to tell us which state we're in as of today.

I'd kind of hoped to get back to that World of Greyhawk / DnDClassics this afternoon, to make up for losing most of the "work" today, but I fiddled around and played some PACG when I got home, then went for a walk in the golf course, then generally putzed around this evening.

(Golf course: also super busy. It's had maybe twice as many walkers as usual the last two times I've been there, and more annoyingly, people hanging out in the pavilion, talking and enjoying themselves in violation of the shelter-in-place.)

But with that toehold of new work, I think I can at least finish those two Greyhawk product histories this weekend ... and then we're off to the races again.

(And I've got other stuff too, because it's just been hard to be productive lately. I should offer some comments on a RWOT paper that I was involved with, and there are chores to be done around the house, and I need to get some paperwork into the folks who'll be my new brokers as long as our house sale goes through ...

But it's hard to do stuff with the looming uncertainty of the world.)

After a heat wave early in the week that brought our temperature up to a ghastly 100 degrees (and which kept our bedroom frying for a few days straight), the marine layer descended suddenly, and by Saturday morning the high was set to be 60 degrees, it was entirely overcast, and I kept getting hit by moisture from the sky that one might call rain if it weren't so infrequent.

So, since I'm determined to make every remaining weekend count, I began to seek other places to go this Saturday.

Heading southward, to Hayward and Fremont, the temperature popped a couple of degrees, but not a lot. Darned marine layer.Fortunately I found warmer temperature the further I headed east on BART. Orinda was about the same as Berkeley, Lafayette was a few degrees warmer, and by the time I got Pleasant Hill I was seeing 73 instead of 60. So that's where I decided to go.

To be more precise, my destination was Briones Regional Park. I believe I'd been there three times before, once originating at the Reliez Valley Staging Area, once at the Lafayette Ridge Staging Area, and once at Panorama Drive. Oh, and I think I wandered over a corner of it when heading to Dave S's house in Pleasant Hill. What's amazing is that in those three trips, I've barely covered any of the same ground, except perhaps a quarter of a mile or so at Russell Peak. And that would largely be the case again this time, because it's a darned big park. (6,256 acres darned big, which is three times the size of my beloved Tilden Park, up above our house.)

This time I selected the Alhambra Creek Staging Area, which is up in the Northeast corner of the park. That means I rode in to Pleasant Hill BART (after having to single track from Walnut Creek, because BART is so often a mess nowadays), then took the western Canal Trail northwest until I broke for the hills, then followed Reliez Valley Road all the way around the park. There were several hundred feet of rise, but only a little bit of it was particularly steep. Most of the ride was pleasant, though occasionally the roads were too tight with cars, as happens over on that side of the hills.

And then I was at the Alhambra Creek Staging Area. Mind you, it was about 1.30 at this time, after a late morning, a BART ride, lunch at Wendy's, and a bike ride.

This time around I circled the north of the park: Orchard Trail, Pine Trail, Tonyon Canyon Trail, Briones Crest, Briones Road Trail, and then back along some of the same smaller trails to return to Alhambra Creek. (There was again just a quarter of a mile or so of repeat, this time along the Briones Road Trail.)

After some walks along scrub, the Tonyon Canyon Trail was the first really attractive walk, as I hiked near a creek, and then increasingly far above it. But it was the Briones Crest Trail, at about 1200 Feet, and toward the center of the park, that was the highlight. There were absolutely gorgeous views to the north there, looking down on Crockett, Martinez, beyond them the Carquinez Straights, and beyond that Vallejo and Benecia. All places I've biked to in the last few years, and great to see from this perspective. I was also really struck by how wide the waterway opened east of Martinez and Benecia. I felt like that was something I'd never seen before, and looking now I see that it's Grizzly Bay opening to the north. Those views definitely made the day.

On the way back, when I was about half-a-mile out from the Alhambra Creek Staging Area, I ran across a huge snake, four foot or so, lying across the trail. After I was momentarily frozen and shivering from waves of fear originating in the reptilian brain, I stopped and observed it for a while. Damned thing was moving really slowly, and looking pretty fat too. It was kind of green with diamond or hex patterns on it. I waited it out for a minute, but it wasn't going anywhere fast, and since it wasn't rattling at me (and didn't have a rattle that I saw), I finally walked behind it, and continued on my way.

Why'd it have to be snakes?

When I got back to the Alhambra Creek Staging Area, I looked at the little picture of snakes they had up on their signboard there, telling you not to murder them, and decided it was probably a happy gopher snake. The gopher was presumably less happy, which is a shame because they'd looked so cute when I saw many of them out by the Staging Area.

A nice hike despite the snake.

I decided to take the slightly longer route home by taking the Canal Trail down to a road that went to Walnut Creek BART. The idea was to avoid that single tracking between Pleasant Hill and Walnut Creek. But I don't learn: it was another crappy road, with too many cars going too fast, once I got past the area with bike lanes. And, my theory of avoiding the single tracking didn't help, because it just meant the whole BART system was a mess. When I got there, there should have been a train a minute or two earlier, but that clearly wasn't the case because the platform was jammed. And the next train was 13 minutes out.

While on the trains, I did my best to work on my D&D History book, specifically the "World of Greyhawk" folio article that's been open on my computer for ... honestly, months. I got everything re-edited, and got some work into the next section, which takes research, but that was it, and I didn't end up doing any more over the weekend.

Really, this probably isn't going to be a good year for my Designers & Dragons work. My free time is almost all going to preparing for the move, or keeping the household going, or putting together the little bit of blockchain writing I've got on the side.

Which means that it'll probably be 2020 before Designers & Dragons gets any real effort. Which is a darned shame. But by April 2020 the plan is to have more time for writing of this type, and that goal is in sight at this point. (There's just a house to pack and an ocean to cross first.)

About fifteen years ago now, I went on the frontlines for two online communities: RPGnet and Skotos Tech. Oh, perhaps "front lines" isn't quite the right phrase, because I'm not the one directly dealing with our users most of the time. Instead I'm the guy with the ultimate responsibility, backing up our staff, and making the decisions for the betterment of the site as a whole. But, front lines does give the proper sense of warfare, because maintaining a community online is an ongoing battle that never lets up.

Much of this is just the physical need to keep the machines that support the communities up. They could go down at any time, so I've long found myself quickly checking my emails when I get home from some outing, to make sure I don't have any reports of crashes while I was out. When I miss a call from a weird number elsewhere in the US, I worry that I missed a call from a moderator or administrator telling me something catastrophic has happened. And, these are based in real events, as I've gotten home and found that a machine had been down for a few hours, I've gotten calls from admins and mods saying that a site had come under attack. I've had to bring our machines back from the brink in the most annoying conditions, such as at my parents' dining room table this last Christmas Eve. (Thank goodness we no longer have physical machines; biking down to the machine room we used to maintain in Emeryville and sitting alone in the loud, cold room trying to resuscitate an agéd machine was really the height of no-fun.)

But my biggest stressors in my battles to maintain communities have been interpersonal ones.

Let me be clear: the vast, vast majority of people on the various sites that I support are great people. They're literally the reason that I've been willing to support these sites for so long, despite the (primarily emotional) cost. For every really crappy interaction I've had with someone as the result of one of our sites, I've literally had a hundred good interactions, usually from people who are very appreciative that we maintain them. I've worked with great creators at both RPGnet and SKotos, and I'm sad about the many that have moved on (as is natural, as the years pass) and grateful for those who remain.

But, oh, those really crappy interactions have been really crappy.

There are dozens of users who have sent me vile screeds because they got kicked off of a service. I've had people lie to me in any number of ways, usually pretending they didn't do something that they did. I've received two or three death threats. I've had to reach out to the FBI twice due to threats of violence against others. I've fielded semi-yearly legal threats, mostly from people upset by what other people were saying on forums, and wanting us to censor them.

And then there was Zak S.

I'd never heard of Zak S. before 2013, when he started getting serious flak from the RPGnet mods because he was increasingly a drag on the community. As some people do, he tried to go over the heads of the mods to get a different answer from me. It was a slimy letter. First, he tried to present himself as an authority by dazzling me with his credentials, then he acted like he was doing me a favor by being willing to tell me how the moderation on the forums was bad and could be improved. And, shit, that letter is manipulative when I reread it. He was all, hey I know this probably doesn't concern you, but if it does, please write me back and I'll tell you more. Anyone actually wanting to help, of course, would have just told me straight out, but he was trying to establish a power dynamic where I was the supplicant and he the wise master.

Fortunately, I'd already dealt with a hundred people trying to go over the heads of my mods and game hosts by that time, and so his slimy, manipulative letter made very little impression. I told him I disagreed with his assessment that there was a problem with the moderation, and I told him to talk to the mods, and then I told him it again several hours later because he was obviously bad at taking no for an answer.

Fast forward to August, by which time Zak was banned. That's when he began making posts to his blog about RPGnet, complaining about some ads we were running. The ads were frankly offensive: some of the misogynistic online-game ads that started turning up around that time. But his posts showed zero understanding of how internet advertising really worked, and as far as I could tell, he didn't care. (Nowadays, we even have a term for what he was doing: "bad faith arguments".) As far as I could tell, he was just trying to score points, to make us look like hypocrites because we'd banned him for his attitude for women, or something, I think, and here he could pretend that we were showing a shitty attitude toward women. (Here's the thing about how ads work: you sign up for networks, and you try and pick trustworthy networks, but sometimes they still send your horrible ads, and they just appear without your consent, and you have to block them; in our case we *have* been exceedingly picky about what ad networks we use, to do our best to make sure that RPGnet doesn't get any of the truly sucky ads you see elsewhere, and these ones actually came from Google, who usually does pretty good, but stuff sneaks in ...)

Just a complaint like that would have gone right by me. We actually had at least one Skotos-hate site go up after we'd been in business for a few years and had been forced to ban some people. There's at least one minor roleplaying forum that caters to RPGnet bannees and haters. When you run online communities, and when you actually moderate them, you get haters. And they publish screeds, create hate-sites, and otherwise make vocal their hatred.

But when Zak posted these "complaints", and I think there were three blog posts total, he purposefully used my whole name in the blog titles, and then he encouraged his followers to link to them, with the goal of poisoning my search results, so that this misleading and manipulative post that suggested that I was some sort of misogynist who loved misogynistic games was at the top. The object was either explicitly or implicitly (I forget which) to use that as leverage to ... I dunno, get us to stop running ads? Bring Zak back to RPGnet? I'm not sure. (We'd already blocked the bad ads, of course, as we're forced to do from time to time.)

Fortunately, Google at some point figured out that Zak was trying to artificially manipulate Google results. It didn't have anything to do with me, though Google is a rock's throw away, and though I have friends who work there. But at some point, they figured it out, and they tanked the search results for his whole site.

And that was how Zak tried to attack my reputation and my livelihood.

In the years after that, I did my best to forget about Zak, but he took the occasional shot at me. I just found a bizarre interview in 2015 where he claims I actively support bigotry and harassment. (Evidence? No, of course not.) I also discovered that the OSR community was somewhat poisoned against me around the same time. I found it somewhat baffling, as I'd had so little to do with him. It was like I was some big hatred in his life, and he was one of any number of people banned from RPGnet in 2013, and one of several who unsuccessfully tried to go over the heads of the mods to get me to let them back in.

I was never bullied growing up. But I eventually came to use that word for my interactions with Zak. And I definitely was being harassed as well, at a light level, mind you, compared to most of his victims. But it pissed me off all the more when certain professionals in the industry claimed that he'd never harassed anyone.

One of the ways I could tell that I was being bullied was that I was afraid to write about him in a public forum. Because I feared that he'd just increase the bullying and harassing, and maybe send his brigade after me.

I think the concerns mostly broke for me in early 2017, almost exactly two years ago. That's when I discovered that Zak S. had engaged in identity theft against me, creating a fake account on reddit, which he seemed to use mainly to talk himself up. And, it seems pretty obvious that he was the one who did it, because he got the accounts confused: he meant to post something under his account, accidentally posted it under the account using my stolen name, deleted it, and then reposted almost the exact same thing under his name. And there were screenshots! (Receipts!) When confronted, he claimed his roommate did it, but no one believed him.

For me, it was just unbelievably pathetic. I'd built him up as a boogie-man, but here he was rather pitifully trying to stroke his own ego by pretending to be me. I know a lot of people were pretty angry on my behalf; they were in fact much angrier than me. For me, it was more of a relief to see the manipulator laid bare.

But I also just let it go by, because I still didn't want to post and open myself to his attacks.

[Edit: This all followed an earlier identity theft on BoingBoing, something I'd entirely forgotten about until someone commented on this photo, where I discussed the two cases of fraud: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155990005831164. It was also used to defend Zak S., but it was perpetrated by some mysterious figure. I was more annoyed by that one, I think because it felt like they were multiple people out to get me, as opposed to one pathetic guy sitting in his basement, giggling while he made up fake accounts and complimented himself.]

Today a very brave woman who used to be Zak's girlfriend wrote about her horrifying experiences with him. She's apparently been sexually and emotionally abused by him for a decade, so I can't even conceive how terrified she must have been to talk about him. I mean, he had me afraid to say his name from a few isolated instances of internet attacks (and some attempted career destruction, reputation sabotage, and identity theft), so she must have been a hundred, or a thousand times more afraid. But she spoke out.

And her courage makes me more able to say: Zak S? Fuck that guy.

Worst user I ever had to deal with.

Being who I am and doing what I do, there's of course another angle to this: how do I write about Zak S. when I get to the history of the '10s? Because he's definitely been an important figure in the OSR movement. There are now people on the 'net destroying all their reviews of his products and all their publicity for them. And I can understand that, but I also have different responsibility as a historian. If he's important enough to his subgenre of publishing (which he probably is), then I need to write about his successes and also his failures.

But perhaps I'm a hair more able to do that now too.

Greg Stafford passed away last Thursday. I've written a historical memoir for Designers & Dragons about his importance to the industry, but it's entirely inadequate for someone that I counted a mentor and a friend.

I came to Greg's part of the hobby relatively late, and in large part due to another friend, Eric Rowe. Oh, I owned copies of Stormbringer and Hawkmoon when I was in high school, because I was already a great follower of Michael Moorcock, but those were some of Greg's peripheral masterpieces, which came into existence almost accidentally, thanks to his mere presence in the gaming industry. And, I played RuneQuest a few times in high school.

But I truly came under Greg's influence in college, after Eric began running his RuneQuest game, which he started the week I started at Cal, and which would continue, with a run of a year here and a year there, sporadically over time, until 2004 when he moved out of the States due to the deteriorating political climate (and he was clearly a seer for what was to come).

I loved RuneQuest. Eric's game was the most fun I've ever had while roleplaying. That was one part Steve Perrin's rules, one part Eric's own world of Erzo, and one part a great group of college friends ... but Greg's influence was clearly there too. And then when I learned that there was a whole other world of Glorantha out there, I devoured it. I remember reading the red box (Gods of Glorantha) and the orange box (Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars) and eventually starting to turn up the old Chaosium products at various gaming conventions, about the only way to find old, out-of-print RPGs at the time. King of Sartar with its contradictory stories won me over entirely. I was a fan for life. David G. was able to get me copies of the old Tales of the Reaching Moon, and poof, I was a member of the fandom.

In those college years, I also came to appreciate the breadth of Chaosium's production. I fell in love with Greg's Pendragon and I also began to read H.P. Lovecraft's stories and the mythos that it created, thanks to my introduction from Call of Cthulhu.

In 1993, as I was nearing the end of my time at UC Berkeley, I decided to start an electronic fanzine called The Chaosium Digest. It was in part a reaction to Andrew Bell's RuneQuest Digest, but a chance to highlight the rest of Chaosium's catalog. And, I had an unlikely dream: that I could get the attention of Greg and the rest of the folks at Chaosium, and maybe get a job there after I graduated, because their office was just a few miles away.

Everyone's been writing about their well-remembered first meeting with Greg, and I honestly don't remember my own. It could have been a DunDraCon or Pacificon. But it was mostly likely January 1994, way out in Maryland, when I attended David Cheng's RuneQuest-Con. We probably interacted in the "Home of the Bold" LARP and I certainly listened with rapt attention at his Lore Auction and his panel on HeroQuesting.

I know I began to talk with him on a more personal level over the next year when I helped Eric to prepare RQ-Con 2 to run on this side of the country. We also were preparing a LARP. (Spoiler Alert: never run a con and create a LARP at the same time!) It was set at the Broken Council, and Greg happily brainstormed with us on the people and places there. I vaguely recall being in his office at 950-A 56th Street for the first time with Eric, talking about Glorantha's Dawn Age. Greg was copying out the materials from his files on that time period. Later, when we went beyond his meager sources, he let us create out of whole cloth the details of the history of his world. I've got a "Red Goddess" manuscript that he signed to me and Eric in the middle of 1994, part of his Lunar Book. That tangible memento is my only real link to 1994, because the memories of that busy, crazy year are otherwise faded.

At the con the next January, I remember that we had a secret back room for staff, special guests, and LARP preparation, but the thing I remember best about it is when my friend David S. Asked Sandy Petersen for signatures on some of his books and Sandy happily agreed and added the inscription: "Signatures increase value!" But I don't remember much about interacting with Greg at that con either.

(And yes, I regularly ask people to remember the minutia of their designs from the '70s and '80s; thanks, guys, you're more use than I'd ever be!)

My actual memories of Greg tend to revolve around the two and a half years that I worked with him at Chaosium, from 1996 to 1998. I suppose it's no surprise that the day-to-day life of working with him made those older memories fade away because (happily) these new memories were so much more plentiful. They started on the day I interviewed, when I spent most of the time talking with Lynn Willis, but when I briefly stopped in to talk with Greg afterward. It was obvious that Lynn was making the staffing decisions, but Greg got the final say on everyone who joined his company. (And yes, my work on the Chaosium Digest helped, because everyone knew who I was and that I loved their games, but moreso it was Eric's running RQ-Con 2.)

After that, there are many wonderful fragments of memory.

I remember talking many more times in Greg's cramped office, book shelves off to the right, clippings covering the walls. He leaned back in his chair, wearing a flannel shirt, wrist braces on his arms. We usually talked about Glorantha, which at the time was mostly lost to Chaosium, not about the Call of Cthulhu books that I was laying out and editing.

I played around with the Dawn Age for a while after the Broken Council LARP, but I soon moved on to become the resident Gloranthan elf expert, and I remember Greg eagerly expanding upon the ideas that I had about the Aldryami, sketching out a series of "plantings" that took my mundane musings and turned them into something mythic. (I just went hunting, and no longer seem to have that piece of paper; alas!)

I remember sitting up in the loft at Chaosium, after work, as Greg gamemastered the early versions of Hero Wars, years before its publication. It was like there was a spotlight on him, in that dim, tight space. That was a spotlight on him wherever he was, in whatever room, always.

I remember how the smell of pot would start wafting down the hall from his office, past my desk, in the early evening. He'd always wait until 5 o'clock, or thereabouts. And I'd start feeling hungry, and know it was time to head home.

I remember going over his timelines for Pendragon which I later translated into some nice diagrams for the reprint of The Boy King, the one creative project for Chaosium that we worked on together.

I remember his solid handshake, I remember him clapping me on the back, I remember him laughing, such laughter. He was jolly, he was kind, he was erudite, he was creative, he was generous. It's almost impossible to conceive of a world without him.

I left Chaosium in 1998 because the decaying financial status of the company was literally giving me nightmares. It was not long after a private meeting between Greg, Lynn, Charlie, and Anne over in the kitchen that was full of raised voices which I tried to ignore until I was finally able to flee the building at 5pm. It was like hearing your parents fighting. Maybe that was the day that everyone acknowledged the problem of unpaid personnel taxes, maybe it was the day that Greg announced he was leaving, but it was certainly the day that Chaosium split apart.

Lynn was angry at me for leaving. He told me I was killing the company and afterward was politely cold to me whenever I called Chaosium to discuss some bit of business. But Greg, his attitude toward me never changed. He asked me to edit Hero Wars for release as Issaries' first product, a huge honor that I don't think I even realized at the time. Unfortunately, it was also beyond me. I didn't yet have the editorial chops to manage a manuscript of that size, and I also didn't have the self confidence to mold the work of master designers like Greg Stafford and Robin Laws into a publishable form. I did some editing on the manuscript over the next months and eventually handed it back to Greg and told him I couldn't take it to completion. He was entirely kind about that too. He didn't complain; he made sure my name was on the published book as a developer.

Around 2000 I shyly asked Greg if I could put together a book on elves, expanding on the material we'd been discussing for a few years now. Greg agreed and I was soon working on a roleplaying supplement to be published by Greg's new company, Issaries, as part of the Hero Wars (later HeroQuest) line. Greg continued to offer great support for my creativity, to offer ideas and new thoughts — most of which complemented what I was doing, but some of which made me rethink something from the start. (That was Greg.)

Unfortunately, a number of events came together that ended that collaboration and my work with Greg. The d20 industry collapsed, then Eric's Wizard's Attic died, and suddenly Issaries was without a home. Greg decided he couldn't stay in the overly expensive Bay Area and moved down to Mexico. He fell out of communication. Steve Martin took over running Issaries for him. Conflicts among the various members of fandom were escalating, but Steve did keep the torch burning for a little longer. I finished my elf book around 2004 and handed it off to Steve ... but Issaries never published another book. It's still sitting on my hard drive almost 15 years later. I've tried to find a home for it from time to time, but I've since moved on to my own creative niche, Designers & Dragons.

I've sometimes said that my experience with that elf-book was the reason that I stopped working with other peoples' properties. And, that's true. I'd completed a 100k word manuscript, my biggest work to that date, and it ended up wasted. I didn't want to ever end up in that position again. But, that had nothing to do with Greg. It was just an unfortunate coincidence of timing, a business and financial obstacle that none of us could overcome, and I did manage the next best thing, at the time: a book on elves for Mongoose's RuneQuest that made public many of the ideas that Greg and I had come up with over the previous decade.

In my mind, Greg was in Mexico for years, for a decade, but it was really just more than a year, from some time in 2004 to 2005. But it was the end of my creative relationship with him. More sadly, it was also the beginning of the end of my creative relationship with Glorantha, which sputtered out over the next several years. My interest in the books faded out during the time of Mongoose's uninspiring MRQ1 publication and Gloranthan fandom was dying away due to Issaries' fan policies and fandom's disagreements over HeroQuest and the new directions that it was taking the world.

Tradetalk and Hearts in Glorantha were the last fanzines standing, and I contributed to the scant issues of both during the rest of the decade, but the end came in 2009 and 2010 when I wrote some expansive articles meant to complement my work in the elf-book, which I then still hoped would see publication: "The Posionthorn Forest" in Hearts in Glorantha #3 (2009), "The Vale of Flowers" in Tradetalk #17, and "The Hellwood" for Hearts in Glorantha #4 (2010) I also wrote some articles for Mongoose's Signs & Portents including a pair of articles on the red elves which complemented the Mongoose book that actually did see print.

And that was the end of my creative input to Greg's mythic world.

I still miss it.

I'm happy that I stayed in touch with Greg in the years that followed. He helped me with histories on both Issaries and Chaosium that eventually went into Designers & Dragons. He contributed a bit to RPGnet, and sometimes he just told me about something fun. I remember once he wrote to me to verify that there had been no second edition Pendragon game, something that I'd worked out with him and the rest of the Chaosium staff some years before. He was my first choice to write an foreword for Designers & Dragons, and he was kind enough to introduce the '70s book.

By the end, I might hear from Greg once a year or so. Honestly, I was somewhat jealous of the folks who were now engaging in creative partnerships with him, but I'd had my chance, and I'd moved on.

The last thing I spoke with Greg about was the passing of Stewart Wieck. I wrote up the story of Stewart's life in the industry, and since Greg had been working with him on Pendragon in recent years, he was one of the people that I asked for comments. Greg suggested I humanize the piece, ending it with: "We are all impoverished by the loss. We extend condolences to his wife, children, and other family." And, I did add those condolences; Greg was always very human.

The last letter I had from Greg came after I posted Stewart's eulogy and simply said, "Thank you for [the] post".

I never would have imagined that my next historic eulogy would be for him.

T-.333 months for a trip to Toronto

This is the latest in the now long string of Rebooting the Web of Trust design workshops. It's actually in Mississauga, not Toronto, but as far as I can tell, the one is a suburb of the other, with the Toronto airport right in between. Sadly, this time around I'm not going to be able to see much of the city I'm visiting. The problem was that the organization reimbursing my trip had very strict rules on travel: the flights had to be the day before and the day after the event, unless there was prior authorization, so I couldn't give myself a day or two in addition to the work, like I did in Boston and Berlin last year. And, that's actually the second work-trip in a row where that's happened, though when I was down in Santa Barbara, I minimized my time there due to kidney stone: I didn't want to be hiking around their parks or something when doing so could give me a big attack a long way from home.

The particular rigamarole for this flight also required using Orbitz (or another price comparison) as our basis, and I am entirely shocked how crappy many of their flights are. There were a vast number of them that had layovers to the tune of 30-45 minutes. I mean, I like *long* layovers to reduce stress, but I don't even know how you make it from one airplane to another in that short of time, especially when they close the doors 10-20 minutes early nowadays and especially when I'm pretty sure I'd have to get through customs on one of those layovers). Fortunately, I found some non-insane layovers within the price range allowed.

Anywho, I have a very late flight coming back from Toronto, at ~6pm on the day after the workshop, so that should give me some time to scoot over to Toronto proper and see what there is to see, though I'll have a bag to haul around when I do.

So, prep.

Sunday was the flu shot. I've found it very frustrating in recent years that Kaiser doesn't start doing its flu shots until the start of October. I guess they're trying to keep their flu vaccine the most powerful during the height of flu season, which is the winter months. But two years running I've been traveling at the very end of September and/or start of October and I of course wanted to have my flu shot active before then. So it was off to CVS instead. Back when I used to go to Berkeley Family Practice, I'd often have a sore arm for a week after my flu shot, which really made me reconsider getting them. This time it was more like a day. (The last few CVS shots have also been quite good.)

Monday was the hair cut. I usually get it buzzed a few weeks before these business trips.

And that's most of my prep as I got my plane tickets a week or two ago and C. has dealt with housing. I'll need to get some trail mix next week for the plane and/or for snacking in Toronto. And some packing, but I'm planning to go super minimal (cf., hauling a bag around Toronto). My laptop, my iPad (with Hoopla comics), some cords, four changes of clothes, an autumnal coat (maybe; it's 85 degrees!!! in Mississauga today!, but the 10-day forecast shows 50-degree days around when I'm heading out there), my RWOT notepad, and the aforementioned trail mix should do it.

T-16 months for our move to Kauai.

On Tuesday we undertook step #2 of our Kauai prep. We took the cats to the vet. This is part of a procedure where we get them two documented rabies shots and one rabies antibody test.

I thought the cats might already have rabies shots on file with the vet, but it turns out not, which surprised me. So we got them both their first rabies shots at that vet and got signed original documents of them, which is piece of paper #1 for our files. We need one more, at least 30 days after this one, but we'll probably get them about a year from now. Meanwhile, the next step is going to be the rabies antibody test, after the rabies vaccine has taken full effect. Apparently Hawaii suggests at least 10-14 days later, the vet suggested a month, so we scheduled that vet-tech appointment for exactly a month later.

The vet also checked up both cats. Lucy had lost a little weight, but we think it's in her normal up-and-down. Callisto, unfortunately, had a serious problem. She has very red, inflamed gums and probably a cavity! Which means our poor kitty who loves eating is probably in some pain while eating. (And we probably have a ~$1,000 oral surgery coming up for her. Thank goodness for pet insurance, where we can just assume that the insurance will cover most of the cost, whether that actually happens or not.)

Berkeley Dog and Cat has always had what we consider a weird obsession with dental care for animals. But this is a case where it's apparently entirely warranted, probably because Callisto's underbite keeps bacteria and such constantly eating at her teeth and gums because she never closes her mouth.

Poor kitty!

We got a dental consultation scheduled as soon as we could (about a week after Toronto) and we'll probably need to bring her in every year or two to look at her teeth.

The whole evening after we brought the cats back from the vet, Lucy was obsessive about trying to get out of the house. Running around yowling and going for the door any time it opened. It's totally weird behavior, because she never cares about the outside ... except last year she did the exact same thing after we took her to the vet!

Weird!

(Both times, by morning she'd forgotten about it.)

Before Toronto I also wanted to finish up some writing projects.

First was Meeples Together, which I received redlines of on Monday. Pleasantly, the editor said that it was a well focused book that didn't take a lot of editorial work. C. pushed for several rounds of refocusing, which obviously helped, and I also feel like I got better at wordsmith editing while working on Designers & Dragons a few years ago. I was able to complete work on the redlines a bit ahead of schedule and the editor and I did our last back and forth today, which puts it back out of my hands until I see the laid-out text to OK in a few weeks.

Second is Designers & Dragons, where I have five major expansions and a few bits and bobs promised before the end of the month for the German translation. I'd like to get the major stuff done before I leave, at least to the point where it's just waiting for my final edit. (Final edits are easy to do on planes; research, less so.) So far I've handed over Chaosium and Paizo, I just got an OK to do a final edit of Wizards of the Coast, I have Fantasy Flight Games out for comment, and I'm accumulating notes for Evil Hat. (Whew!) But that all means it's going well.

The other planning for travel is getting up ever earlier, to prepare for the Toronto time zone (EDT). This week I got up at 8, next week I'll get up at 7, and I hope to push to 6 in the few days before my flight. (I'll then probably need to push back one more hour when I hit Toronto.)

I always try and take advantage of the early wakeup with some early hikes, so tomorrow I hope to get to the hills before 9am, and enjoy some chill but warming weather as I climb ..

Writing isn't just about writing. It's also about preparing that writing for a publisher, working with a publisher, and sometimes coming back and working with them again.

Take Designers & Dragons. I'm very pleased that there's a German edition that's now being Kickstarted. I've had some of my short gaming pieces published in foreign language magazines such as Beaumains (a French Pendragon fanzine), Free INT (a German RQ fanzine), Schattenklinge (a German BRP fanzine), and at least one Italian magazine that I can't find on the 'net. But having what's currently my masterwork translated into another language in full, that's something different.

So, of course I've offered to help them out. In prime that means updating something things for them, so that they can publish a slightly more up-to-date Designers & Dragons. So I've promised them five updates for histories, and some other, smaller bits and bobs, and that's come to consume a lot of my "free time" writing. Thus far the updated Chaosium article is done, and the others are in various stages of progress.

Take Meeples Together, which is a book on co-op game design that I've written through Skotos with Christopher Allen. We handed off to the publisher sometime around July 4th, and we're awaiting a Kickstarter sometime around the middle of October, but in the meantime I've been requesting blurbs for the book and building up its social media presence.

Take Mechanics & Meeples, my regular column discussing board games. It's been barely hanging in there lately, even on my biweekly schedule, but I was able to finish up my discussion of Legacy games today, and I've actually had very fruitful brainstorming lately, and so I have notes (or titles) for several more articles backlogged.

(I haven't been doing quite as good on board gaming reviews this year. I was shocked to find that Mike Selinker's Thornwatch was my first proper review for the year, and I've got two more that are awaiting some time right now.)

There are also a few writing projects that haven't been getting their proper attention lately. The most notable is my history series for TSR and WotC's D&D products, which I intend as my Designers & Dragons sequels. I'd been trying to write at least two histories a week since I stopped having a required schedule at DnDClassics (or rather, since I took a month after following that change), but that's sputtered out lately. I guess it's fair enough, since I am definitely doing roleplaying history work, it's just for Designers & Dragons proper.

And the Michael Moorcock book I haven't touched for probably years now.

This type of time crunch is something that I hope will change after our Hawaii move. With some money in the bank from selling the house, I'm hoping it'll be more possible to cut back on my "work" work and put more time to my "freetime" work. And if I only have two or three fully scheduled days of work a week, that'd be awesome too.

In December 2012, I received word from some of the folks at DTRPG about a secret project: they would be producing digital copies of classic D&D products on a new website, dndclassics.com. And, they were interested in having me write histories for the products.

I was very appreciative of the acknowledgement of my historical expertise, but I had two qualms.

The first qualm was Designers & Dragons, as I was then working hard to get everything ready for a second edition. But, I decided to just bite my tongue and decide that I'd have enough time to work on everything. I remember well the frantic hours spent during my "holiday week" at the end of 2012, then throughout the first several weeks of 2013, writing the histories for the first big release at the end of January. I like working out in parks, away from networked distractions, and so I spent many a cold hour that January working at the picnic tables up at Lake Temescal — sometimes at the still-damp picnic tables, as that's our rainy season too.

The second qualm was rights. As I dove into the project I discovered both that it was going to take longer than the hour a product that we'd estimated and that I was turning up some intriguing historical material that really deserved to be collected. So I started thinking that I might want to preserve some rights for these histories for myself, so that I could publish them in a book of their own some day.

The folks at DTRPG were very responsive to my desires for rights, but it was still hard coming to agreement. That's just the case sometimes, even when everyone has everyone's best interests at heart, because everyone also has specific concerns that only they can see clearly. Eventually we came to an agreement, though, where I'd have the rights to publish my histories elsewhere a year after they appeared at DTRPG, as long as it wasn't someone directly competitive with them.

I've sometimes said that an unbalanced contract can end up making both parties unhappy. That's because the party with the less rights ends up unhappy and he eventually stops caring about the contract as much as the other party. On the other case, a balanced contract can be the basis of a long and fulfilling partnership, and that was the case here. DTRPG was getting historic context for their products that, frankly, improved over time as I found my groove. They paid me a small fee to license the material that didn't nearly compensate the amount of time I ended up putting in. But that was fine with me, because I was creating an ever-increasing store of material that I owned, that I could increasingly see becoming a book in the future.

When we started out, DTRPG had a second writer, and we split the material between us. He bowed out after a few years. I surely would have too, because of the ongoing time required, except for that good contract.

Fast forward five years. The second edition of Designers & Dragons got finished, it got Kickstarted, I did more work to produce a Platinum Appendix, and that got published too.

Meanwhile, I worked through a ton of histories for DTRPG. After that initial burst of histories, I was writing 2-3 a week. I split things with our other writer, and my area of writing was 0e, 1e, Basic D&D, and parts of 2e. After he left, I slowly moved up to 4-5 histories a week, which was a lot of research and writing. And now I was covering pretty much everything.

That continued until the start of September, 2017, when DTRPG ran out of new material, at least for the moment (though I'm still hopeful to do more writing for them in the future). Able to rest after almost five years of constant work, I slowed way down in my work, but I've still continued as possible, now preparing materials for the eventual books, rather than the weekly DTRPG releases.

As of the end of 2017, I've published 782 histories and I've prepared another 49 that haven't been used, for a total of 831. My initial guess was that there are about 1,000 product histories, to cover all the D&D products from TSR and Wizards. So I'm within striking distance, but I have a lot left too. Most of the gaps are in the 3e era and a few 2e product lines (Birthright especially), all stuff written for DTRPG by our other writer.

My goal at this point is to produce a new series of books that will include all of these ~1,000 D&D histories, categorized, and in rough order given that constraint. I've currently got this laid out as a four-book series. I've some concern that the books will be too long, but I'll see how they look when finalized. I have an idea for an alternate five-book layout if the four-book one doesn't work. Either a four-book or a five-book series would nicely divide up the material by edition.

Besides writing those missing histories, I'm also going to need to heavily revise much of what I've done before. This falls into a few categories:

My earliest histories were too brief. They need more research and then more content.
Everything needs to be standardized.
Trends needs to be clearly marked with their beginnings.
Repetitive information on trends and facts need to be eliminated.
Section dividers need to be written to hold everything together.
Everything should be fact-checked by experts, including the peoples involved.

I would like to have the 4 (or 5) books done by the end of 2019. I don't know if that's possible, but the wife and I are planning a big move for the start of 2020, and it will be very disruptive, so it'd be nice if that didn't impact finishing these books.

Shorter term, for 2018, I'd like to (1) finish all the missing histories for products up through the end of AD&D 2e, which is the end of book three, probably by getting back to a schedule of two ever week; and (2) actually put together a complete draft of the first book which covers 0e, 1e, and maybe Basic.

Some people have noted the quickly approaching end of the '10s and asked if we'll see Designers & Dragons: The '10s. The answer is "not soon" or maybe "it's complicated".

For one thing, 2020 would be too soon to write a '10s book, because we won't yet know what companies from 2018 and 2019 hit it big. The '00s book was finalized in 2014, and as it was the late '00s were a bit sparser than the early, and should have included the first OSR "companies". So, call it 2024 or 2025 to write a '10s book, at best. And that doesn't address the question of what to do with older histories from the current four books that need updating.

I have though about putting together an OSR "bridge" book which would have company histories for several of the notables in the OSR space and offer a bit of coverage for the '00s and '10s both. Maybe as a stretch goal for these D&D books? It'd be a nice complement.

But for the moment, this is all a bit in the future. I have lots of D&D product histories to think about first.

Kimberly says that Labor Day is her least favorite day of the year. It's because of the block party, a loud, raucous affair with blasting music that takes over the next block around lunch time and continues through the day. I've long thought that the people putting it on are horribly abusing whatever permit they get from the city, because it's decidedly not a block party, it's a party to which they invite all their friends from the entire East Bay.

But there are some fights to be fought, and some not.

So today I suggested to K. that we should go out to Glen Park, and we did. We were out of the house before 10 and walking up into the park by 11 or so. We had a nice lunch from the overpriced but tasty Canyon Market that we ate in the park and then hiked along the canyon walls, a trek that was supported (literally) by the new walking poles that K. got recently.

We really had no desire to come home afterward, so after the hike, we hung out at a park/playground for a few hours, me writing and K. working on her iPad, then walked back the long way to 24th & Mission BART.

Ironically, the first time we went up to Glen Park was Labor Day, 2013. I didn't write about why we went that day, but obviously we were avoiding the obnoxious block party then too. Afterward, we did the same walk down through Diamond Heights to 24th and Mission, and I remember being really tired out by it. Not at all today — not by the climb up the canyon and not by the walk down to the Mission. So yay for improved physical fitness (particularly walking) over the last three years.

And by the time we got home the party had only an hour or so left to go.

The rest of the weekend I've been out and about too. On Saturday I walked from our house up to Lake Anza in Tilden via the fire trails above Clark Kerr and Strawberry Canyon. I used to think that Tilden was far away, so it's pretty great to to hike up there and to think nothing of it.

On Sunday, I mostly lazed around, but after dinner I did a quick (well, 100 minute or so) 5-mile hike from the south side of Clark Kerr to the UC Botanical Gardens and back.

It's really cool to have all those trails to accessible, so close, and offering so many different possibilities.

I've been doing plenty of writing, of course, working on three really tough histories this week for DMSGuild (and ultimately for my sequel to Designers & Dragons). I can't quite say they're about three major products for D&D, but they are about two major products, and one other that was deserving of a major history. They'll be up on DMSGuild over the next two weeks and total about 6,500 words between the three of them.

And I'm getting ready for a semi-surprise trip to British Columbia. Oh, and I'd known it was a possibility since late July, I think. C. idly mentioned it and I realized I needed to get out of the house the next day to get my passport renewed, since that was just 7 weeks out at the time.

Surprisingly, my passport arrived just two weeks after I requested it. That helped make things stress free, especially since I was a bit worried about my name change, which had never been reflected on a passport. But no problem. (Apparently.)

Then last Monday, C. confirmed to me that I was being invited on the British Columbia trip, if I thought I could deal with all the people for a full week.

The reason is a company retreat for the blockchain company that C. is now working at, and that I've been doing tech writing and editing for. I really have little idea what to expect, but I've liked working with them, and I'd liked to be included going forward, so it seemed like a good thing to do.

The venue looks beautiful, but as I told C., I hope I actually get to see some of it, and not just be stuck in a hotel the whole time. (He says there are breaks in the schedule, but we'll see how it all works out.)

Anywho, I've been trying to get books read and histories and reviews and APs written before I leave; starting tomorrow I also need to get more serious about getting a few Skotos things out of my hair.

And then it'll be off into the blue for a week away from home. Busiest year in maybe forever, since they'll be my third major trip, after Hawaii and New York.

Lucky we aren't ending up in Hawaii for Christmas too, like we'd originally considered.

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Entries tagged with designers and dragons

The Secret of the Moon Files

Six Books Done

Whattaday (Free Trader Beowulf & Oahu)

This is Free Trader Beowulf: SUBMITTED

The TSR Codices: DRAFTED

Dishwasher Destruction (and Many Meanwhiles)

Half-a-Year in Hawaii

Back from Oahu

The New Job Begins

The End of Skotos

Business & The Rural Post Office

In Which My Old Life Refuses to Let Go

In Which We Buy Toilet Paper

In Which I Return to Briones

In Which I Discuss the Trials of Maintaining Online Sites, Including Zak S.

In Which I Remember Greg

In Which We Prepare for Trips

In Which My Writing Proliferates

In Which I Write About Designers & Dragons Plans

Laboring Weekend