Where Did I Go?

It's been a hectic month. My wife is traveling for her job, which makes me a single dad again for a bit. Somehow, it is already spring

and the outside desperately needs work. There will be a garden this year. 

I'm throwing out some goals for the next 50-90 days: 

• Review of dB/dX (Done!)
• Review X-Wing game
• Review Classic Battletech  
• Review Battletech: Alpha Strike
• Complete artwork for POP-001
• Review Kingpin Comics
• Review Cosmic Comics
• Review Pulp 716 Comics

Many game shops in my area are also comic book stores, hence the reviews. I will probably throw the local places into their own tab at the top of the site.  

Over the last 2-3 years, I've tried some other social media outlets and rapidly discovered that I don't have time for all of them. I'd like to save some of the content generated from them and pull it back here. What that means to you is, you'll see more garden, craft, and cooking posts. I have already exited Minds, Twitter, and Facebook and I am working on exiting Locals. I am still pulling good content from there. 

Once this step is complete, you'll only see me here, on Ko-Fi, Dice.camp, and MeWe. I have recently entered the world of Discord, so once I get the hang of it, you find me there, too. 

In July, I will post about various outlets for content. To that end, I might re-start sharing web and sales stats under The Tek tab. 

Blarg! The Information Please!

Historically speaking, books contain a lot of "non-content information". An example is the author's name, publication date, writing date if necessary, various titles, the publication city, page numbers, and hopefully a DOI or digital object identifier. 

Of late, many books and publications are missing these pieces of data. Typically they fall into two distinct classes: The author/publisher doesn't know better or the author does not ascribe to copyright in principle. The first is just a lack of knowledge, so considered yourself on notice to make this information available in your productions. 

The second is more complex because of an earnest desire to not participate in a convention that is traditional but not obligatory. My suggestion is to do it anyway, convictions be damn. Even if you make stuff up. 

Why? Because what if "Anonymous" pens a document that becomes a significant point of data in history. This means it is the primary point of data in a stream of data. It would become difficult to ascribe it to a title or location in the stream making events prone to confusion. 

Right now, I am looking at dB/dX for an upcoming review. The book is very nice but lacks a real name, and has a nom de plume which is easily confused with a DOI and lacks a date, publication city, etc. 

When citing or referencing such a work, I end up with this: 

C P1R8. (2023). dB/dX v1.0, 1-31,  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V_Y-bDPQit2bS7HqzRHwTXvlf9hkkLZB/view

If my citation looks like that, one has to wonder if I had a stroke. God damn, be kind to reviews and historians and put your name on your work, even if you make something up. 

Homosapien, Funky. (1999). dB/dX v1.0, Save vs Ennui, 1-31, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V_Y-bDPQit2bS7HqzRHwTXvlf9hkkLZB/view

Anyway, I spoiled the surprise with annoyance. My next review will be of dB/dX v1.0. 

POP-001: Making a List and Checking It Ten Frickin' Times

I don't see why AI art is all the rage, but
boy do like it for blog posts.  

Revenants of the Lost Temple will be heavily themed, similar to but different than X-1 Isle of Dread. The climate is humid, very much like Veracruz, Mexico. It's not a primeval jungle, but a staged area. Populated regions run the risk of desertification. Abandon areas show their scars for decades and true wilderness is a riot of greenery. 

This creates an interesting scenario where getting lost on a road or trail is difficult, but leaving the beaten path can quickly shift the travelers into survivors. The Temple was lost due to a combination of environment, climate, and happenstance. Once abandoned, it was swallowed. Hundreds of years later and it is difficult to see the difference between abandoned and true wilderness. 

This flavors the sort of monsters the characters will encounter. Anything intelligent would have the ability to find the Temple. The Found Temple of the Revenants doesn't really ring. So much for my default idea of having the Kobold Tribe of Minwan wandering the area.  

I went through the monster's list from Old School Essentials and made a few choices based on the region and the challenges I wanted. I supplemented this list with animals native to Mexico. I suppressed everything I currently know about The Lost Temple and selected what seemed correct to the theme. 

Wilderness Monsters

1. Bat, Giant 
2. Bat, Normal
3. Boar
4. Cat, Ocolot
5. Centipede, Giant
6. Dryad
7. Frog, Giant
8. Green Slime
9. Grey Ooze
10. Harpy Eagle
11. Horse, Wild
12. Insect Swarm
13. Jaguarundi
14. Jaguar
15. Living Statue, Stone
16. Llama
17. Mule
18. Nixie
19. Pegasus
20. Rat, Giant
21. Snake, Python
22. Spider, Giant Tarantella
23. Spider, Normal Tarantella
24. Spider Monkey

I have a list of 24 critters. It's a bad wandering monster list because it includes a bunch of things that don't or shouldn't wander and more than a few would end in a total party kill. Many of these creatures should be static, events-type encounters. 

My favorite from the list is the normal bats. I've never killed a party with normal bats, nor would I suggest it. They are a perfect thematic encounter for setting the mood. Bats are nocturnal. Once a day the players should see them leave to hunt then hours later return to their caves, fat and satiated. It's not an encounter, it's a themed clock. 

The horses, mules, and llamas are more theming, they are lost, too. No one will die from these encounters but the sense of loss is reinforced by them. The pegasus and the unicorn give a sense of being out of one's normal place, a juxtaposition of the idea of being lost. 

The normal tarantellas, rats, ocelots, jaguarundis, and insect swarms are a part of the background environment, the living jungle. 

I'll have a whole post about the Living Statues, there is no intention of making the characters fight them. 

This leaves only 14 monsters on the wandering table and I think I will peel away 4 more to make the list 10 long. I think 10 monsters is perfect for a wandering monster list. At this link, I used 10 monsters for a whole campaign setting and I stole the idea from 3 Toadstool Blog over here. 

The goal of this product is to populate the Peninsula of Plenty with exciting, living places. In order to match X-1's page count, I need 15 more pages. Over on Ko-Fi, you can see more about this module. 

Shhhh.... A tiny hint of stuff to come (Update)

Welcome back. 

This could be a great thing... or all the sugar rockin' through my system. Anyway, it's the reason for the countdown timer to the right 

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As you can see, this is a module for 4 to 8 characters. I accidentally covered up the "Levels 1-3" statement with the background color. Not counting retainers. 

Most Favored Author - H. M. Hoover (Part 2)

And the experiment continues. 

Return to Earth: a novel of the future (1980)   

I really enjoyed this novel, one of the few that features both adults and children. Typically, adults are secondary characters for Hoover. 

Galen is a colony governor while Samara is a corporate magnate's child. This one novel could easily be a Traveller campaign all on its own. Dolmen assassins kill Samara's mother, thrusting the child into the role only Elon Musk could want, sole proprietorship of North America. Galen on the other hand simply wants to retire in his sleep hometown. At the end of the day, Galen and Samara don't need to merely defeat Dolmen, they need to counter the dying earth mentality that gave rise to his group. 

I reviewed Another Heaven, Another Earth (1981) back in April of 2021. It's a good book, I gave it 4 of 5 stars. But I'll skip the link to AbeBooks as a paperback is selling at $25. Too rich for my blood. If you follow the link to my review, you can keep an eye on prices without being driven to that high price point. 

The Bell Tree (1982) is another excellent novel, set in Hoover's default universe... which is also no available at AbeBooks. Jenny and her father discover the fossilized remains of fearsome aliens. This particular book is loaded with all kinds of details about alien lifeforms which are core to the central plot. 

The Shepherd Moon: a novel of the future (1984) is a solid performer in Hoover's universe. The protagonist is Merry, the daughter of two explorers. She befriends Mike, a young boy from the Shepard Moon. Later, Merry and Sara join forces with Merry's grandfather to counteract their one-time friend Mike as he unleashes strange forces upon the Earth. 

This novel is special as it clearly states the time period, the 48th century, and highlights some of the fantastic accomplishments of man, such as the artificial Shepard Moon of the title. There are odd references to the spacefaring culture Earth has created, and it is not without its problems. First and foremost, every spacefaring human is following "The Plan" much to humanity and every individual's detriment. There are dark hints that this culture is crazy paper AI, with every possibility arranged for by some long-gone author. 

Ah, Orvis (1987). If you like robots, this one is for you. Orvis is my all-time favorite robot tasked with an impossible mission: Destroy himself. Here is the link to my 5-star review, but I'll give you a little taste of how crazy this final mission is. I have not goofed on my tenses, I believe that Orvis exists beyond the end of all time. This bot was designed for war and after one war, all of the Orvis class bots were repurposed for space exploration. Orvis went to Venus for ground exploration. Not only does he survive a hell-scape planet for a long period of time, but he survived an Earth return mission. That is insane. 

The Dawn Palace: The Story of Medea (1988) is one novel I have never seen. It is one of Hoover's few historical fantasy novels. 

I recently picked up a copy of Away Is a Strange Place to Be (1990) but have not reviewed it yet. So, of course, I have a link. Be careful with this link as I see some copies for 6 bucks and others for $50. 

This one is an odd title, Abby and her friend Bryan are slaves in an artificial world and must escape before they age out and are euthanized. Whoa... tough love there. 

Not all stories about children are for children, but I would still place this in the YA group. 

Only Child (1992) is a strange title for Hoover as she tends to be more poetic in naming. However, it is an excellent book. Cody was born on a spaceship, illegally. Again, that strange paper AI rears its ugly head. In this return to Hoover's default universe, Cody discovers that the crew of the ship plans to colonize a world after they wipe out the sentient insectoid population. 

I reviewed The Winds of Mars (1995) in May of 2021. I feel that this one is one of Hoover's weaker novels, but it has a bit of charm to it. 

Annalyn Court is the daughter of the President of Mars. Mars experiences both rebellion and war with our child protagonist in the middle of it all. If you were concerned that she won't be able to survive, Hoover introduces the punniest robot guardian into the mix: Hector Protector. It's all right on the tin, "Hector Protect Her". 

If you like the Xanth novels of this time period, this would probably be a good read for you. While I did enjoy those Piers Anthony books, the charm of these types of stories rubs off rather easily on a re-reading. 

Or so I thought when I gave Winds of Mars three stars. In retrospect, the dynamic between Hector and Annalyn was a little more nuanced than I expected on my first read. First, Hoover follows Annalyn's life much longer than you would expect for a 190-page book. Annalyn goes from childhood to young womanhood. Initially, Hector is almost a god-like machine, but as Annalyn's world becomes much more serious and dangerous, his ability to cope with defending her was challenged. Hoover builds this slowly from the beginning to the end. There were zero surprises when Hector fails in his task. Which shouldn't have bothered me. The message of the story was growing up and doing stuff for yourself, with all of the knowledge and care of your parental units. 

(I like the term parental units, it's wrong and funny at the same time.) 

Whole Truth—and Other Myths: retelling Ancient Tales (1996) is yet another book I have never encountered. It was Hoover's last title as far as I know. 

Here ends the experimental post on Marketing and Monetization 101. I won't delete these two posts as I am using them for reference for future reviews. However, I have this powerful feeling that it's poor Marketing and Monetization. I hope it puts the nail in the coffin of non-DriveThruRPG links. 

In a future post, I'll be talking about DriveThruRPG. Stay tuned.