Musings

My job is two different aspects. In the build season, I travel. In the off-season, we stay put. This is my first off-season, so it's a whole new set of tasks. Up until now my bosses have worked out of their homes (or coffee shops, as boss #1 has 3 young kids at home AND his wife runs a daycare), but two weeks ago we moved into real offices. Now I've got a nice, warm (everyone else bitches about it; I don't understand what's so terrible about having circulation in my fingers and getting to wear a t-shirt in February) office that I share with one other person. I've never had an office. It's all very exciting.

This is an amazing time. Specifically, the internet is amazing. Last week I was using Google Street View to "drive" through a small town in Romania. This place is small enough and remote enough that horse-drawn carts are still a regular thing (the google van passed at least two), and I can sit here and see it as my leisure. You want to lay out a realistic village? Everything you need is at your fingertips.

I'm happy about the 5e SRD and the fact that it uses the OGL. I can honestly say WotC exceeded my expectations in a good way. The DMs Guild setup is excellent as well. There's a good chance I'll dip my toes into some of it, but as a casual exercise and (to be honest) to make a little scratch. Convert some stuff from 2e; something along those lines.

I'm not feeling a super-strong urge to tinker with 5e, just to kind of poke at it a bit. I do feel that a lot of my strength in RPG design is in riffing off of existing material; I don't feel I get the epiphany idea very often that lets me draw something out of nothing. I like making lists and seeing what clicks, and crossing different ideas. I need a starting point.

I have a few lists of 3rd-part OGC character races that I might toy with converting, and I'm seriously considering digging out my 2e material to sort through the kits. Basically make a list of all the 2e kits from the various books, and probably all the 3e class variants from Mongoose's Quintessential books, and look for stuff that sparks ideas (the mongoose books aren't great mechanically, but they usually got a lot of ideas packed into a small space and are good places to start if you want a lot of concepts fast).