Update: A New Future For Chaos Magic

Needless to say that I'm long overdue for an update. The pandemic introduce new issues for me and made old problems that has plague the blog for a while worse.  One reason I will get into here is that I think this blog has lost its identity and for a long time I've struggle to figure out where to go to next. When I first got into war gaming being able to make my armies truly my own was extremely important. And not just what my vision of an army in that particular gaming world but an army that is independ of the game world I'm playing in.  The lore behind the armies I play are something wholly my own.  I started this blog because I wanted someplace where I could post the stories I created for my armies and have my friends read it.  The death of Warhammer Fantasy greatly hurt this blog.  At the time none of my local friends had any interest in moving to Age of Sigmar and I had no interest in playing the fan game 9th Age.  I got interested in other games but none of them really fit the needs of the blog.  To be a replacement for Warhammer Fantasy a game needed 3 things.  It had to be a game I was personally really excited to play.  It had to be a game that I could find other people willing to invest in and play the game.  And it had to be a game that lend itself well to game by game storytelling.  All the games I got into since the end of fantasy hit one or two of these points.  I couldn't find one that hit all 3 points.

So between all that and severe anxiety writing, I've been undecided on where to go next for a while.  I felt that whatever plans I come up with to replace the hole Warhammer Fantasy left, I wanted them to be something that combines games and storytelling.  And then in my indecisiveness I considered if that was worth being an issue at all.  It was such a struggle trying to figure out what I wanted to do.  This year I decided to put in the effort to make sure I was actually moving forward with personal goals, one of which is posting stories here.  There are a handful of projects that I've been thinking about or have already put in some work.  I think it is finally time to make those projects a reality on this blog.  This will be a very new look and direction for the blog as pen and paper role-playing games plays a big part in many of my new projects.  How that will affect the blog will be by me converting the game sessions into narrative chapters.  My goal is for the sessions to read like they are apart of a novel.  I will also write short stories that will be set in these new game universes.  This will be information player characters already know, something the players will learn about later or just something to flesh out the worlds.  Any additional content will be depended on the project as well as I'm still toying with things.  With that overview, here are the projects I will be starting.

My most ambitions project I'm currently calling Lancer X Battletech.  It is my own game world that borrows some ideas from the mech pen and paper role playing game Lancer and the 40 years old mech war game Battletech.  At its core the project is a Lancer game with the players being involved in a global militry conflict.  I will be keeping track of both sides combat strength during the campaign in a similar way to a detail tabletop war game campaign.  The players themselves will have a lot of control on the direction they go as a team.  As a result, any battle that lacks the players will be played out using the Battletech system.  These battles can greatly affect the story and the overall direction of the war.  The results of these games will be reported here either as a game battle report or told as an in universe narrative story.  Because the size of this project is so big, I don't plan on starting it any time soon.  My needs will require a large collection of Battletech minis.  I did invest in the last 2 Battletech kickstarters so I do own a lot of models with A LOT more coming soon.  Still that might not be enough so it will take some time buying and painting up my collection to reach what I have in mind.  Also for special mechs (which includes both enemy bosses and players "ultimate" design) I want to put together my own custom designs by using Gundam kits.  Lastly I want more experiences in running role playing games before trying something this massive.  I ran games before but not very often and what I did run didn't last very long.

So in the meantime I will be writing articles describing the elements of the setting.  There are things my eventual players will need to know before they make their characters.  I also would like to have lore that would be interesting if players wanted to know more the setting but is not mandatory.  And the purpose of posting it here is for it to be valuable to the players and still be entertaining for science fiction/fanstay fans. I'm also toying with the idea of running another roleplaying game or two in the setting, ones that are much smaller and shorter.  There are two possible systems I'm considering.  One of couse would be Lancer.  One of the reasons to run a smaller game is to get more experience game mastering so I might as well do it with the same system I'm planning the massive game with.  And using Lancer it wouldn't be hard to come up with a side adventure that would feel like a complete story on its own and setup for things to come in the bigger campaign.  My other idea for running a game in the setting is for a very VERY different game.  The other game I'm considering running is called "You're In Space And Everything's Fucked."  You can probably imagine the type of game that is and I can easy come up with an adventure using it that will tie into my bigger campaign and hint at some very sinsiter stuff that won't otherwise reveal itself for a while.  And yes, that was the exact title of the game.

And that summarizes my plans on this project.  The next few months I will be posting articles describing the setting and maybe a few pictures of how my Battletech forces is coming.  But I will not be showing off any of my Gundam conversions, those deserve to be reveal for the first time in the story.  And I might run a surprise game or two.

My second project is a modern fantasy role playing setting I call Dreams and Nightmares.  I've had several ideas to run modern fantasy games using the new "World of Darkness" system or as it now known as Chronicles of Darkness.  The version that became Dreams and Nightmares came about suddenly when I volunteered to run a game for my friends.  I created my setting starting with Mage the Awakening Second Edition and trying to make it something more superhero like.  After getting a general idea of the type of characters my friends wanted to play, I expanded on the setting, making it more of my own thing.  Overall it is still very similar to the Mage default setting but that isn't going to last.  Unfortunately that friend group is not good at meeting regularly.  So much that my friends still have not finished making their characters.  Yet there is still interest in playing and I've keep expanding on the setting.  The point when I decided I wanted Dreams and Nightmares to be a blog project was when I realize why I felt uneasy about running a Beyond the Supernatural RPG.  I was looking for a game to run and I've enjoy Palladium games in the past.  Yet there was something about Beyond the Supernatural that made me not want to run it.  I finally realize it was because I had already put so much energy into developing one modern fantasy game and I was reluctanted to do it again when Dreams and Nightmares was still sitting on the shelve.  The two games are too different to try to run them both in the same setting... or are they?  I came to an epiphany remembering (possibly missremembering) in my reading of the Mage setting, psychic stuff was mention to exist but I didn't see any game rules for it.  And Beyond the Supernatural is game from the players point of view nearly all psychic.  Even if I am wrong about Mage and it does have its own rules for psychics, I've decide Beyond the Supernatural rules is how psychic works in Dreams and Nightmares.  In addition, adding a second rule set to a setting opens the door for third and more.  Plus Mage the Awakening itself is one of about 10 game lines that was design to somewhat work together.  Now in my mind I have ideas of multiple campaigns all using different gaming systems to reach an "Avengers: Endgame" like conclusion using yet another game system, or even every player using a different systems.  I know this probably sounds needlessly complicated but I do gravitate towards complex games and I've spend some time thinking how I could run two different game systems at the same time and why.

What would this all look like?  First I will continue trying to get the Mage game off the ground and in a few months try to get a Beyond the Supernatural game running as well.  Like Lancer I planning on writing lore articles that describe the setting as well as a series of short stories set in the world.  I will enjoy trying to figure out how to write short stories with characters whom identities are both secret with enough information to know who they are when they are reveal in the campaigns.

I've been interested in certain types of history for all my life.  In fact when I was in college I took so many history classes on the side that I was closer to a history degree than my declared degree.  And I've been thinking about doing something with history for a while so while I was coming up with ideas for revamping the blog, I figured might as well try now.  I don't know how well this is going to work on (or even what exactly this is going to look like) but I think it is time for me to see what I can do on this front.

The plan is for me to pick something about history and then spend three or four months researching it.  After that try to come up with something interesting that I learned using miniatures.  Still not sure how miniatures will play a role in this as I'm not really into painting models historically accurate.  I'll just see what ideas I come up with when I doing the research.  A possible example what this will look like is an article about a particular time in history and then I will talk about a historical game that tries to recreate that experience and go over what the game gets rights and what it glosses over.

I have one more project I want to mention here and I called it Halloween.  It is simply a serial series that will only have chapters release in October.  It will have artwork that consist of miniatures on a watercolor background.  Watercolor painting is something I've recently pick up for the sole purpose of doing something like this with it.  I don't consider myself good at it so there will probably be fewer pictures at the beginning while I'm practicing to get better.  And that is basically it.  Halloween is very different from everything else I do here given it does not have a gaming component and it is purely fiction.  It is a fantasy setting that I took some inspiration from Norse Mythology and it can be expanded upon in many different ways.  But I think I want to wait until the series starts before discussing side projects for it.

That leaves 2 final points to end on.  One, these are not the only things I'm working on.  Besides everything else I've mention I want to do, this year I also want to write a novel and write a comic book series, the latter I will briefly discuss in another article here, and I want to be more active in two other blogs.  One is my Food Blog where I recount my adventures at restuarants and other related food stories.  The other is my photography blog, Mirrorless Magic.  Something else I've done since my last update is pick up photography and Mirrorless Magic is where my photography stories (not related to gaming) will go.  It will also have my Watercolor art that I mention in the Halloween section.  If a piece is more art than game, then it will be at Mirrorless Magic.  The last thing I want to mention in this update is that the one thing I've learn about me and this hobby is that things can change and can change fast.  Something new can easily change how I feel about any and or all my projects.  While I was crafting this final version of this update, Gamesworkshop release Warhammer: The Old World and I still don't know how that is going to affect me or the blog, if it does anything at all.  All I can say is that I wrote this update to be my vision for what I want this blog to be for the rest of this year and if something does change, I hope it doesn't take me another 3 years to mention it.  Let the stories begin!