Mile Markers

You're traveling through another dimension,
a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.
A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.
That's the signpost up ahead—your next stop, Falstaffe's Tavern!

What a busy week! Falstaffe here, with an update on what's been going on lately, and I have lots of news to share, starting with this bad boy right here: 

IT'S ALIVE!!!!  After over a year of work, the Third Edition of the FAST RPG is done and available for purchase (a mere $30 at Lulu.) That's the big exciting news, and I do want to delve a little deeper into the making of this behemoth in another post, but first I wanted to give a larger overview of where I'm at now, where I'm headed, and why it took so long to return to the blog.

Let's start with some other good news and work backwards, shall we?

My new year's resolution was to create a new slate of short stories, and yesterday (6/19/2018) I sent out three! They are:

"The Justice of Atla" -- a tale of ancient Greek sailors vs. a monster of their own making.
"The Bride of Barton Ash" -- a Grimm fable of a boy on a mission to find himself a bride.
"Snooker" -- a fantasy/sci-fi mashup about castles in space.

These are working their way through the submission process right now. I'm hopeful that they find a home somewhere, because they represent some of my best work, blending some unique ideas with action, emotion, and humor.

In addition, I've also resurrected another story, "The Weary Traveler" and hope that it finds new life via a podcast. A humorous fantasy heist, the potential to hear it in an audio format has me more excited than the return of chocolate-covered Peeps at Easter. Fingers crossed.

So what took so long to get here?

The simple answer is the FAST 3rd Edition . It's a beast of a book at 266 pages with full-color illustrations, and slated for a mass-market paperback edition. 3rd Edition was a difficult and demanding project that gobbled up most of my free time, demolishing Spring Breaks, Christmas Breaks, and Summer Vacation days with glee.

Was it worth it? 

Oh yeah!

Like I said, I'm planning on posting more about the process of working on the guts of the rule-book in a later post, so for now I'll just say that our home gaming back got their first good look at the Beta in the Fall of 2017, and since then I was busy refining the copy, play-testing the rules, and adding new artwork. Everything was going great.

Confident that the book was 100% ready to go, the printing process quickly relieved me of that silly notion. This was my first time working with Lulu, and while the finished product looks great, their website is NOT user friendly, and was filled with broken and empty links. It also didn't help that most of the work was being done on an old loaner Dell laptop, slowing pdf rendering time to a crawl.

Finally, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth the printer's proof arrived on my doorstep in early June, coincidentally, the first day of DieCon, our first big game event of the year. Talk about a dramatic entrance! The con-goers loved it, and we've already sold a bunch of copies online. Next week, FAST goes to FearTheCon with actual copies to sell.

So that's the simple answer to my absence. Of course, the reality is much more complicated than that. As always "real life" threw curve balls into my path, although Summer of 2018 finds everyone here doing well and in good health. I felt like now it was time to return to that New Year's resolution and get back to doing the thing that I want to do most: telling great stories.

Thanks for stopping by the Tavern, see you again soon.

Falstaffe