I'm Alive!

It's amazing to feel alive! I feel it from time to time between bouts of being mundane. When I say feel alive I mean truly alive, in the throws of feeling above and beyond the chemical interactions that make up my body. It is a transcendent feeling, and I hope everyone can feel it in their lifetime. It drives me to write and create, to stop and feel my soul, a taut string running through my body. I have trouble explaining it, In my mind I'm somewhere else. There's a glorious storm in full deluge and the wind whips at tall grass around me, there's a single tree in the field and I'm standing under it eyes closed feeling the storm winds and rain. I believe at some level it's a connection to the divine, a harmonic resonance between myself and the universe. It feels like the universe is running through my head and paralyzing me. My lack of direction while writing this is due completely to this feeling of being alive. Again in my head I'm somewhere else no longer at my desk typing, I'm standing tall against insurmountable odds declaring proudly "I AM ALIVE!" knowing that no matter what happens I have lived and felt alive and that's all that matters in the moment. It drowns out the rest of life the bills, the work that needs to get done, the worries of the day all pale in comparison to this feeling of being alive. I can't fully explain this feeling, but it is glorious. Frequently I have to stop writing because the feeling overwhelms and demands my full attention. When it has subsided it leaves peace in its wake a sense of calm and reverence. I see the rain outside and my spirit soars, caught on the winds of life and beauty. Something about the rain brings this feeling on more than anything else. Rain is, to me, one of the most beautiful things. Rain is a multi-sensory concert. It plays a beautiful rhythm on every surface as it falls from the clouds and slides down your skin in loving trickles. Rain brings all the beautiful earthy smells of nature into stark clarity and wraps you in winds as it simultaneously nurtures everything. Rain amazes me and storms are a magnitude above and beyond even what I've written here.

The Last 2 months in review

For anyone out there following this blog, I'm sorry I went dark for so long. There's been a lot going on lately. I've moved into a new place. The game I've been working on has grown a life of it's own. I started my own game studio (It feels very pretentious to say that since it's just me) I started writing for Nerd Titan. This coming weekend will make for a third consecutive weekend of gaming conventions. I've also decided to create my own game setting which I have yet to name.

The new place is great. It's a much better size for me and my wife. I get to have an office now complete with cardboard organizers I scrapped together. Lacey, our dog, doesn't mind not having her own yard as long as we leave a blanket around for her to crawl under and sleep. Not much else to say about the move.

Dig Site is doing well. I need to test a few minor changes that I just made and then I'm ready to send a prototype off to the publishers for evaluation. I played with the idea of changing how Artifacts work, but in the end it would be a lot of trouble to change something that didn't need to be fixed. I also played with the idea of setting it in the steam punk world that Bonsai Games created for Ruse (with their permission), but in the end I also decided that the game is better off without trying to layer two themes into it.

The game studio is called Elderhaven Entertainment. like I said earlier I feel very pretentious saying I own a game studio, but I do even if it's just me and my computer. We have a twitter, @elderhavengames and a facebook page /Elderhavenentertainment. Dig Site is going to be the first game Elderhaven will get published hopefully, and I have a few other ideas for future games.


Nerd Titan is a nerd blog site that I've been writing for for a couple of months. I'm not sure how much longer I will be contributing to their site. My schedule has changed recently and I'm not sure how much time I can devote to the posts.

My trio of game conventions started with Game Storm which was march 22-24 then Table Top Day on the 31st and this weekend is Jut a Game Con. Game Storm was amazing 3 days of non-stop gaming. I got introduced to Dragon Dice showed Dig Site a few times, and met some awesome people. For Table Top Day several local geek groups got together and threw a fundraiser for the local Girls and Boys club. We had a great turn out for a first time event and are already planning next years festivities. JAGC is a local bi-yearly convention. I'm super excited about going because I'm about 6 months ahead of my self imposed development schedule for Dig Site. I didn't think I would be able to bring a nice prototype until the JAGC in August.

The Setting I'm planning on putting together is still very nebulous, but I'm going to file it in the genre of Spell-Punk. The idea is to take the time period of steampunk but instead of the mechanical advancement replace mechanical progression with magical. I'm not enough of a history buff to set it in anything like a real world time period, instead it will be an alternative Europeanesque setting.

Dungeons of Dredmor

Dungeons of Dredmor, DoD, is a roguelike game made by Gaslamp Games that was released in July 2011. DoD is a very traditional roguelike, it uses turn-based gameplay set on a tiled map that is randomly generated. DoD is written as a spoof of roguelike and traditional fantasies, be prepared for dwarf jokes. I highly recommend DoD to fans of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, or Nethack. The game offers players that are new to roguelikes several less punishing settings, such as disabling permadeath, while giving veterans of the genre a challenge on the hardest settings. There are several aspects of DoD that make it stand out from the other roguelikes that I've played. These aspects include customizable player classes, a crafting system, a fair level of comedy, and a modding community.

Math, Numbers,and Infinity

I love numbers and math, a lot of people don't and they should be warned that this post is almost exclusively about math.

I've been taking a Game theory course online through Cousera and it has been very interesting. Game theory is not actually about making board games or video games, it is a discipline that models strategic interactions of almost any kind. I'm not done with this course yet and don't want to start making posts about it until I have a better understanding of the subject. However the course has reminded me of a lot of the classes I took in college and a couple of the most interesting theories that I found there.

Alas Poor Tamawold.

My plan for this post was to introduce and present another of my D&D characters back stories, however when I opened Tamawold Stormchild's back story this morning I found that it was missing. The file was in it's place but when I opened the file up over two thirds of the story had vanished. It must have fallen through the cracks during a hard drive crash I had a few years ago. I had a moment of silence for Tamawold.

Tamawold was my favorite character to date. As far as stats go he was a shifter warden from 4.0 (which I have mixed emotions about) based mostly on Con and Str, but he was much more than that. Tamawold was my first attempt at a very serious character and my best attempt at creating a fully fleshed out personality. I try to build character personalities out of a kerrnel of emotion and set of values that I can strongly empathize with or at least understand strongly. Dalin from my previous post was based on a very simple set of ideas: youth and naivety, "I just want to sing" and the idea of a reluctant adventurer. Tamawold was a heavier character he was a shield barer to the world,  refused to give in to anything and would eventually become a force of nature.

Dalin Arethi

I've been away for too long and I don't have any good excuses other than visiting family around Christmas.

I said I was going to post a small review about Mass Victory, however I don't feel that my memory is actually up to recalling all the pros and cons of that game since it has been months since I actually played it. Instead I'm revisiting one of my older D&D characters and will likely continue to go back and flesh out a few back stories that have been lost or where very short.

     Dalin Arethi is one of my very first D&D characters that I played for any length of time, he was mostly inspired by the poor child in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The setting was home brewed and I had to talk my DM into letting me use the Whaliendo. He ultimately left the party when my college load became heavy enough I had to make the choice between grades and D&D time, which was a very hard decision. Dalin was made with 3.5 rules and was tons of fun to play. The following story is the back story I submitted to my DM, with a few grammar and spelling corrections that I should have made at the time. Dalin did eventually reunite with Hammmy who had managed to become a celestial gerbil and ,after Dalin spent a few feats, became Dalin's familiar.

Ruse: A game of murder, intrigue and hypodermic needle rifles

Ruse is a great card game. I got to play test it a few weeks ago at a local convention. It's a steam-punk themed murder mystery game.  The game play revolves around the holy trinity of murder, Method, Motive, and Opportunity. There's only one looser, the person that committed the murder, and everyone else wins. Another facet of the game I appreciated is that it is constructed from a standard 52 card deck so you can use it to play your favorite standard card games.

The cards are split into 2 general types, alibis and accusations. A player loses when they have three accusations a Motive, Method, and Opportunity in front of them and can't remove any of them with an alibi. There is a one use option everyone has to remove an accusation from in front of them. The game play is fast and solid. The longest game I played was about 30 minutes and the shortest was about 8. The turns are simple, play 1 draw 1 and the mechanics of playing cards are very simple to pick up.

Ruse is a wonderful short game. It will make a great gateway game to introduce people to more complicated card games, and I would keep it in my library as a side game to give to RPG groups while I'm taking a player to the side. The art on the cards was very well done and quite enjoyable, my favorite was the Hypodermic needle rifle. Bonsai Entertainment did a great job putting this together and I'm looking forward to getting a copy of it. It should be on kick starter within the month and I wish them the best of luck with it.