Of Colds and Steam(punk)

Monday evening, I started to notice a scratchy feeling in my throat, and was sniffing some. "Lovely," thought I, "this feels like the onset of a cold." I made a point of drinking more fluids and getting some extra sleep. Tuesday morning felt a little worse, but by Tuesday night I felt... mostly okay. Today I've been a touch stuffed up, but barely noticeable. It feels like my taking care of myself has kicked a cold before it really fully manifested. Go team?

The irony being I almost wish I'd done otherwise. Being sick would at least be an excuse to take some time off work. And I seem to need excuses these days to justify such things to myself.

I finished up The Janus Affair last night, the second Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novel. I seem to be unable to find my comments on the previous one to link at the moment. Steampunk secret agent adventure, this time about miraculous abductions and the parties responsible. The setting isn't bad, but I find steampunk is drawing me in less at present than fantasy - which is something of another topic. I do like the characters, though, both the protagonist agents and a couple of their rivals (friendly and otherwise) stand out. Pretty good steampunky adventure and read all told.

And... I've been finding myself missing some high fantasy, probably since reading Lesser Evils, really. It recently occurred to me that part of what I miss may be the worldbuilding and story presentation I did as a GM back "in the day." I really did enjoy coming up with a setting and plot to present to players to interact with. And I don't get a whole lot of that anymore for various reason. A few problem points off the top of my head...
- Audience: Primary offline gamine group maybe. There are a few people I'm comfortable enough with online, but there are conflict issues.
- Timing: I don't want to supplant our Aeranos game, that gets played infrequently enough as it is. And scheduling more than one or two other people online is a bitch.
- Distraction: I think it was a lot easier to focus on a good campaign when I only had the one to worry about. When I've got multiple scenes with multiple people online, plus a game or two offline, plus work and real life, it seems much harder for me to focus on any one story to develop.

Ah well.

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