I finish moving at the beginning of the month. Since then I've been relaxing and getting used to the world we now find ourselves in. Needless to say the plans I had for after I had move are now completely out the window. It is kind of hard to get the motivation to work on hobby stuff when I don't know when I will get to play. In any case my art room/office still needs work to be used as intended. I need to rearrange the layout and buy new furniture so it can be a place I can always just sit down and work. So it will be a little while before I can get back to the miniature hobby. That and having to sort all my projects that got mix together in the moved. If I had to guess before I moved how many models I had, I would have been very very wrong. There is nothing like being tired of your moving and wondering if you can just toss that box in the corner that you haven't open in years in the trash. Only to open it up and realize no you can't because it has over $200 worth of miniatures in it, some of which is nicely painted.
I normally have a beginning of the year update that explains what my plans for the year are. I really struggled with it this year because I found myself listing out the games I plan to work on without being able to show any kind of progress on them. And that got to me. So I've decide to do each game with it own article after I've done some kind of modelling progress with it. This might prevent me from talking about some projects but I will feel better if I have something to show off while talking about a game. I also had 3 other projects I wanted to talk about in that failed beginning of the year update. One was that I still wanted to do my 80s project and to put a deadline on me by announcing I will having something for it done by September. That's not happening now. I have a collection of miniatures I either got for it or I pick up for other reasons that fell apart and repurposed them for the 80s project. And while I can paint these miniature up, they are just a small amount to the number I models I need and we are in a time where my abilities to get models (and paint) are limited for the foreseen future. Until we get to some kind of normality I can't have a timetable on when I can release my 80's project. I also realize I shouldn't show off my progress on the models in the 80's project for storytelling purposes. If a new villain suddenly appears in the story, the shock of it is lost on the audience if you see me painting the guy up for a year before his appearance! So in the end I do still plan on doing the 80's project but I can't talk about it until I'm ready to start releasing it. The other two projects I wanted to talk about in January are also not happening! The projects were two very different podcasts. One was a podcast on Battletech and Gundam in a similar style to my War Journal podcast with a different friend. Being able to discuss and compare these two giant mech settings with a fellow fan would have been fun and eye-opening. The other podcast was me interviewing local artists. It would have force me to study art in a way I have never experience before and learn to come up with engaging questions to people I don't know. I miss doing podcasts and I now have easy access to equipment to make them again. However the pandemic shut those podcast projects down. I don't see recording podcasts as an option for at least a year and doing it online is not an option I want to take. I think the sound quality would be terrible and trying to setup an interview online with people I don't know is a headache I do not want.
I've talked a lot about what is NOT going to happen here, I should probably get into what I will be doing. Due to social distancing, these last few weeks I've turn to looking at pen and paper games. Most of my physical games have move online to the Roll20 web site. While working on transferring my paper character sheets into digital ones for Roll20, I was filled with ideas for games that I could run. I've been thinking about running a game for a while and converting characters to Roll20 feed into that. Eventually I got an idea for a massive game universe with Pathfinder that I love so much I had to do it. Unfortunately I'm limited on what I can say about it because there will be a twist that I want to be a surprise for the players. I envision 4 ways for the game to interact with this blog; 2 ways immediately and 2 way later down the road. The setting resembles Arthurian Myth with Olympian gods. In universe there are many stories about the gods the populace tells themselves and these stories changes depending on the region. Instead of just summarizing these stories, I will write them out into full stories and post them here. The first few stories will be ones that the player characters would have heard growing up. As the party adventures through the world, they will come across both new stories and vastly different versions of stories they already knew. At higher levels and with the party interacting more with the gods themselves, the players will start to learn about the actual source of those stories, what the real version of those stories were. Some of these stories will be important to the campaign. Others are just there to enrich the world. I will post all those stories here so the players will have a place to read them as well anyone else who is interested in reading about a mythology I just made up.
The second way Pathfinder will make an appearance here will be a narrative version of each game session. I won't post anything from the game sessions itself because I don't think it is fair for the people involve and there are some thing that should just stay private. What I will do is take a summary of what happen during the session (in-character stuff only) and make a narrative version of it. If I do it right, they should sound like classic Dungeon & Dragons novels like Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. Once I have a few posted I will make a page dedicated to Pathfinder so all the myth stories and game session stories will be all in one place. Once the real world goes back to normal and I can meet with friends in person, I will have a need to buy and paint a new range of miniatures. I've been interested in painting miniatures for role playing games for a while and running Pathfinder in a physical place will give me a reason to do just that. If the game last that long, I will post pictures of any models I make for the game. Some of those pictures might have to wait until the party face them in the game first. Lastly, one of my players is also a war gamer. If everything goes will with my campaign, the two of us could come up with a way to use Warhammer or another war game to play in my setting. Might even get to a point where his character leads an army and the result of the battle affects the Pathfinder campaign. But those are ideas for a much later date.
So, I'm back and Chaos Magic future will have a lot of tabletop role playing games in it. Beside the Pathfinder game I'm going to run, I still plan on writing those Flashback Storytime entries. My miniature hobby will make a return at some point. It is just that the menu is going to be role playing heavy for a while. Until next time, stay safe.
