The Spinward Main

08 June 2008 - I am finally back home. I made it home on the 6th of June, my personal D-Day as it were, except the beachhead was a welcoming one. My surgery went well and so far things are going well. I had a bit of a mishap in surgery and in post op. But the doctors were able to pull me through both incidents so I could be here today to write this. It wasn’t the first time I have come close and I am sure it won’t be the last. I am, after it happens, just really happy to still be around.

I am now beginning to catch up on my pre-hospital plans. Today I released the first part in the Tales of the Astral Veil. This is a multipart campaign log of an on going campaign we started in February with all new players. It has been a long time since I did any professional writing and I am sure it will show. Writing, like so many other things requires practice to stay sharp - I just hope my stories aren’t too dull.

I plan on adding some more stuff to the website this week. Start getting some files loaded and available for download. Hopefully you all will find some useful programs and such.

I am really excited about gaming right now. I have had a burst of inspiration since before my hospital stay so I have been working in a lot of new material. Some of which I am planning on submitting for publication in a couple new gaming magazines. Some other material I am working on, I am going to try to get published and try to make a bit of beer money from it. A new OGL based game that is very similar to Original D&D is soon to be released and I hope to use it as a launching pad to start publishing OD&D material. In the mean time, I am still working on a new campaign for the Traveller group and I am also working on a number of projects for an Original Dungeons and Dragons game (the little brown books from the little woodgrain or white box set) that I hope to start up - but I need players. So few people want to even try to play OD&D anymore. They have it often confused with Basic/Expert D&D and some are too stubborn to hear otherwise. Most people simply don’t understand that OD&D is simply 1e AD&D and 2e AD&D with a lot less rules and hoops to jump through. Like Classic Traveller, the first three books are a very simple, very rules lite, and very open ended and highly modifiable as a game system. It is not until you get to the other books, Eldritch Wizardy, Greyhawk, and Blackmoor that you see what will become 1e AD&D. Like Traveller, when you add books 4-7 you see exactly what will become MegaTraveller. That is obvious to them where Traveller is concerned but for some reason they don’t want to see that with OD&D. It is very odd and frustrating. Anyhow…

There is something about little box games that get me right in the soft tissue area. Guess it’s because that is what I started with. My first RPG was the Little Box D&D set. My next RPG was the little black box Traveller. There is just something really cool about being able to put your whole game in a 5″x8″x1.5″ box and that includes dice, a pencil, and extra character sheets - then being able to take it anywhere since it fits in everything from a jacket pocket to a small gym bag. You don’t need a huge back pack or book bag, or a milk crate or worse to carry the game around. Heck you could even toss in a few miniatures if you had them. There was plenty of room, even if you had some of the supplements. Of course Traveller started to get carried away a bit, 8 rule books, 13 supplements, the little box barely held the 8 rule books and character sheets. So if you played with the advanced rules and still wanted to carry things around in a simple box, then you had to buy a second set for two little boxes (two jacket pockets) or upgrade to the Starter or Deluxe box set so you could have a bigger box. But then you could no longer carry it in your jacket pockets. You had to have a gym bag or backpack.

Maybe that is why I have always stuck to OD&D and Classic Traveller with out all the expanded rules for either game. I only use 3 supplements from Traveller so I still only need the LBB. I only use the Deities and Heroes book from OD&D and sometimes on occasion I will use one of the supplements but not often. So when I do go to game day I can still go hands free, no back pack unless I am packing water and snacks along. Cause both my games still fit in each of my jacket pockets.

Did I mention that a while back I picked up the new Tunnels and Trolls release. I had to. The tin it comes in fits perfect in my one of my pockets as well. It actually fits in my inside breast pocket of my jacket. So I can take all three along and if there is no one to play Traveller or D&D with I can play T&T by myself.

Yeah I know. But I’m just kinda funny like that.

-Jerry

25 May 2008 - Best laid plans and all of that… I did not go into the hospital as planned earlier in the month. Due to scheduling I have had to wait until this coming Wednesday, 28 May. I won’t bore you with an account of the past 25 days, I will leave it at that it has been an up and down ride between feeling great one day and sick as a dog the next. Oh well, that’s life.

We ended up scrubbing two game sessions this month much to my disappointment. I had hoped to get as much gaming in before H-hour as I could. We finally were able to get a game in this past Friday and somehow even starting 2 hours late I was able to fit in the whole adventure into our limited time frame (only ran two hours over). Unfortunately for the players, by not making the two previous sessions happen due to too many absentees, I had an extra 2 weeks to refine the adventure. I hope to have a usable adventure write up for other Referees available within a week or two - sooner if possible. I also plan to post a synopsis of how the game played out as well. I was very happy with how it ran although the group was really on an off night - likely because they hadn’t played in a months time. They missed everything and missed even the most obvious and blatant clues and hints. I feel I ended up having to use an NPC to get their buts out of the fire way too much. But they were really that out of sync. So in the end I had pity on them, which is extremely abnormal and allowed them an out. All said and done though I had a ton of fun running it and watching them stumble over themselves ala the keystone cops. I finally cut out the last scene and let the players head home not knowing if they would live, die, end up in a Imperial Navy brig, or actually walk away unscathed.

Of course I won’t tell them the outcome until after I have returned home from the hospital and we start playing again in a few weeks. Frankly, I haven’t decided on the outcome. By all rights they should be dead or worse. So we shall see.

Anyhow, I will continue to be around until Tuesday afternoon. I will go in for surgery Wednesday morning in the early A.M. I should be back online by sometime over the weekend or the first of next week at the latest if all goes as planed. Then I should be back home by a week from Wednesday, 4 June or at least by the end of that week. So hopefully I can start getting some more updates done and more material put online.

I am only mentioning this now because I feel it is only fair that you all who have joined and any who join later be aware that since I acquired the webspace this site is on ( back last fall) my family and I have ran into some financial setbacks. I am working on making sure they don’t affect this website, but I can not predict gas prices, food prices, heating and cooling prices, etc over then next six or seven months. I have to be honest and say that if money is needed elsewhere in the household, then that will always come first (which I know you all understand). This obviously means that if I can not afford to renew my contract or afford going to month to month payments then I will have to shut down the Spinward Main. When I got the webspace and then a few months later opened this site I had no idea what that the economy was going to do what it has done. Neither did I know that I would end up paying a bunch of extra money out to effect repairs on unexpected damages to some of our property. I hope to be back in the black soon but fair warning is given and I will assuredly let everyone know if we are going to close shop before it happens so that files can be downloaded and archives made as wanted and needed.

But be assured, this WILL NOT happen, if at all, until November/December 08. I am confident though that I will be able to find a way to keep the site online.

30 April 2008 - Many of the updates and new files I have been wanting to get uploaded and available on the site will not be coming as soon as I had hoped. Due to my current state of health I will not be working on the site as often as planned over the next month. I will be entering the hospital very soon and should be back home before the end of the month, at which point my activities will be limited but should not affect work on the website that much. But while I am in the hospital and during recovery from my surgery, additions will be few.

Once I get home and am able to get back online regularly, I hope I can get quite a bit done. But between two and four months from the time I come home I will be going back in for a second surgery. It will result in me being in the hospital much longer than this one coming up, so there will be another slow down at that time. I now looking at August or September as the target date for having the bulk of the site up. If it hadn’t been for all this hoopla I had foresaw everything up and running by mid-June at the latest. Oh well.

01 April 2008 - The site is ready for content. A few things are already being added. It was a hard choice on the scheme of the site. The ones I liked best had the fewest options and the most problems, along with being harder to customize. The current theme is working and I plan on staying with it as long as it remains compatible with the current version of the software. I have another theme that is cool and also is widget ready if I need to switch - but I would prefer not to if I can help it.

The key thing now is to bring in members. I can add all sorts of material but this will not be a living site until we have more active members that are also willing to add their content - new or old.

26 March 2008 - The Spinward Main is now online. There will be a lot of visual/theme changes coming. I want to make sure the site works before a lot of content starts to be added. So far there are some formatting issues I have to work around or go to a new theme. But the bottom line is we are go.