Writing 5K

So, in the past, I mentioned the number of words I write daily when it is NaNoWriMo time. In case you missed all those times, it is 5.000 words, which is about three times the recommended daily amount for NaNoWriMo in order to finish the challenge on time.

I also said I was a bit of an overachiever, so don't look at me like that.

When I don't distract myself and find myself to be 'in the zone', as many would call it, I manage to type roughly 1.000 words per 30 minutes. That doesn't mean these 1.000 words are pure gold, free of typo's, or even coherent (okay, they are pretty much coherent), but these 1.000 words have appeared in my word .doc and are counting towards the wordcount.
The moment I start distracting myself, though, the speed plummets. If I have something running on the side, like a series, or a movie, I'm already happy if I reach a thousand words in an hour, which means that I'm doubling the time I'm spending on the writing process for the day.
The reason that I choose to have this blatant distraction running beside my word document, though, probably has to do with the fact that I'm feeling like I don't have the inspiration to write that day. I force myself to write, though, as I need those 5K to keep my story going and even when I feel like I'm not going to produce much, there is the chance that, whatever I'm writing, could actually be pure gold.
What I then find, is that five thousand words actually isn't that much, depending on what is happening at the moment. For example, and this is a spoiler for Hangman's Daughter, somewhere in the story is a fight that takes roughly 2.500 words to actually finish up a pretty important issue that ran through most of the story. There's barely any dialogue, but there's a lot of action that, in my mind's eye, lasted for roughly two or three minutes. The same goes up for dialogues or exposition, which can quickly get out of hand and actually start taking up more words than I had ever thought I would need for them. Suddenly, I have reached five thousand words and still haven't reached that point in the story that I had promised myself I would be at by then.

A result of this is that I start debating with myself whether I want to start writing more words per day, but then I find that there are some problems that are hard to overcome. The five thousand words are barely a problem on good days, but can take all day when I'm having a bad day. Writing more words per day, say, 7.500 instead of  5.000, would actually be a way to expand my stories and allow myself to really expand some things that I cut short this year, but it would also require me to spend another hour and a half to write on a good day. That would be two and a half hours of extra writing on a bad day, when I only type a thousand words per hour. That would mean that I'd actually be spending almost a full working day on simply writing, something I doubt I would be able to keep up next to a fulltime job.

So, there are a lot of pros to the five thousand words, but there is also the huge con that it usually doesn't bring me as much words as I could need on a day. It's a difficult thing to weigh, and I only cross over the 5.000 when I'm either in a hurry to finish the book on the last day, am incredibly inspired and actually want to keep writing despite the fact that I'm no longer forcing myself, or if I actually lose track of the amount of words I've written. That last one has become hard with me compulsively checking the word count of the novel every ten minutes or so, only broken when I've reached the before-mentioned 'zone' and forget all about it.
That doesn't happen all that much, though.

So, I think that, when the time comes around in a year and it is time to write again, I won't be writing more than five thousand words per day. It's a shame, but it keeps me sane...

November Madness

Every year in November, two events happen that are important to me and tend to control the better part of my life for the duration of the month. Everything I want to do has to be weighed and measured, and it has to be decided if the things that I want to do are worth the amount of time I will sacrifice for it.

One of the two things is Movember, an effort to increase cancer awareness and fight preventable cancer deaths. It requires that you don’t shave your moustache for a month, but many people (including me) actually use it as an excuse not to shave at all and include a beard, which is officially breaking the rules, but what the hey, right? It’s for a good cause.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort, though, so it isn’t the thing that causes me to think about each and every other pastime that came across me.

No, the reason that everything has to be weighed and every decision needs to be made with the utmost care is NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, that challenges people from around the world to write a 50.000 word novel in November. It means that, every day, the people that decided to accept the challenge are working hard and throwing quality in the wind (or not) in order to write at least 1.666 words and make sure that they have a word document containing at least 50.000 words by midnight, November 30.

Now, it has to be stated that I am a bit of an overachiever when it comes to things like this.

Back in 2010, I first joined the challenge and wrote my first book, Bright Dawn, a piece of military fiction focusing on four fighter pilots, successfully finishing the novel and ending up with 63.584 words. I decided to send the book to a print-on-demand publisher, and it’s been standing in my bookcase ever since. I remember that I had only decided to join about ten days before the challenge started, because that was when I heard about it, so I had worked with minimal preparation and maximal time wasting plots, but it had worked out and I came out with a good feeling.

So good, in fact, that I didn’t waste time and used the whole of December (and a good part of my first Moleskine notebook) on planning out the book for the year after that.

It ended up to be Physokinetic, which was a fantasy adventure that ended up getting way out of hand as I started introducing subplots and characters that turned out to be way more important than I could ever have planned. I like it when that kind of things happen, because it usually turns out to be the best writing I do and gives me more material to close inconvenient plot holes with. Physokinetic ended up with 91.477 words, but was actually finished with it by day 18, because I decided that 1.666 words per day was actually a little light. I could write that amount of words in less than an hour, and I actually enjoyed the writing, so I decided to write at least 5.000 words per day and, like that, finish a chapter each day.

In 2012, the fateful year that would bring the end of the world (or, as it turned out, not), I decided to write an indirect sequel to Physokinetic. Tamer would be in the same world as Physokinetic, dealing with the problems that had been caused by the ending of Physokinetic, but it would feature a new main character and a whole slew of different sub-characters that all had their own agendas and reasons to be. It, too, quickly got out of hand as I realized about halfway through that I hadn’t even prepared an villain, let alone an ending, but thankfully, my writing got away from me again and allowed me to fix that problem in a sudden flash of inspiration. It even allowed me to get some characters from Physokinetic back for that nostalgic thrill.

In the end, Tamer was 149.261 words long. I had reached my goal of 5.000 words almost every day, which had been a huge achievement for me.

This year, with the world still intact and another NaNoWriMo coming around, I decided to do the same as I did in 2012 and wrote an indirect sequel to Tamer and, with that, Physokinetic. It would be titled Hangman’s Daughter, and I got the first inspiration somewhere around January, when it started to dawn on me that I actually needed to prepare again. So I started writing notes when the inspiration for the new story came to me, quickly filling page after page of the little A6-notebook that I was carrying around for exactly that purpose.

At some point, though, and I imagine this being somewhere halfway through April or May, the inspiration stopped when I realized that I had hit a wall that I didn’t know how to write myself out of. I decided to put it all down while I worked on the second sequel to Bright Dawn, titled Flying Light, but it ended up in a massive writer’s block that made me stop writing anything for the rest of the year.
This blog was a first move to actually get out of that block in a long time.
Skip to halfway through October, when the jitters about November coming up started to creep up in my mind and I started to look back to my notes. I started typing them out, carefully copying the many handwritten pages to my computer, all the time marvelling at the amount of writing I had done, and eventually hitting the point where I had stopped. I realized that I still didn’t know how to get out of that situation, but re-reading everything that I had prepared meant that I had an inkling of an idea of how I could solve it and work on after that point.
I never took the trouble of actually working it out.
It turned out that the point where I had broken down and stopped taking notes happened on day 28, which meant that I had notes to guide me for the better part of the challenge (of course I kept adding characters and plots as they came to me, often making for better plot than the things that I had prepared), but the last three days were filled with improvisation. Thankfully, I had managed to come up with a solution for my problem, but it was a close shave.

In the end, Hangman’s Daughter counted 158.366 words. It beat all other stories, and it was quite the ride. I only spent 1 day without writing, because I was playing an awesome game of D&D that day, and I spent the next two days repairing that oversight. Those two days were probably the most exhausting of the whole ordeal.

I got through it, though, so I got this neat little winner’s badge, which I will proudly display on the bottom of this page.

Now I need to start thinking about 2014, because I think I introduced enough chaos in this world, by now…

I win!

Miniature Business and Updates

By at the end of August, I decided to get back in the business of the hobby that had started all the way back in August 2012. Looking at Kickstarters and the way they could get me cool stuff was and, admittedly selfish, thing that I had really grown to love and enjoy, so every once in a while I threw a look around to see if there was anything interesting to see.
Being very much into the Dungeons and Dragons business, my eye found the Kickstarter for an interesting, lovecraftian model called the QU-SH-UG. Though the name didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it looked pretty awesome, which meant that I decided to keep my eye on it, think about it, and kept looking at the model and the updates for a while.

I never really decide to fund a Kickstarter immediately. There is, after all, always the chance that different things might come into play that will ruin the whole thing for me, like a loss of interest or the fact that I quite frankly, don’t have the money to pay for the thing when it finally ends and the credit card bill rolls in. It means that I’ll have to weigh a lot of pros and cons while deciding on whether or not I’m going to sink any kind of money into the thing at all.

In the end, though, I decided that, yes, it was quite worth the money. It was a high-quality model that would require quite a lot of experience before I would ever allow myself to touch it, but it looked pretty damn amazing, so I went for it.

Long story short, after quite a bit of waiting, as is part of the Kickstarter experience, this cute little box came in around the middle of October that held two Ziploc bags, each of them holding a part of what I had ordered as part of the Kickstarter: one of them held the actual QU-SH-UG and its awesome, amazing tentacles that belonged to it, and the other held six cultists that belonged right next to it and right with it.

To the left: the QU-SH-UG. To the right: the cultists.

 

Back when I saw the Kickstarter, I realized that this thing was an amazing monster. I had some amazing ideas considering the thing and the different parts of its body, and the cultists made an excellent addition to it for multiple ideas I had.
Now, my dungeon mastering days have ground to a halt for the moment, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get the miniatures and wait for the moment to actually start using them again. The ideas are there…

Now, about the other thing. I realize I haven’t written very regular in the past month. This was partly because of a lack of inspiration and a lack of will to write, which can hit everyone at some point, I guess.

On the other side of the coin, though, was the little event called NaNoWriMo that would start on the first of November and would consume my life for the month. I remember preparing for a good part of December 2012 and January 2013 for the story that I would write, but then it all ground to a halt as I met a roadblock that I couldn’t quite pass just yet.
In October, when the big moment was about to come, I returned to the preparations. I started typing out my notes, hoping to find a way to deal with the problem I had encountered, which took a lot longer than I had expected as I realized that I had made a lot more notes than I had remembered in my little book. Thinking, I eventually found a thing that could deal with my problem, so I progressed on after that…
And then it was November. I hadn’t taken a lot of my time out of my daily schedule to write anything other than my story, and as of today, I’ve crossed into the 100.000 words, doubling the word goal at day nineteen.
That means it’s going strong, the story is going on at a pace that makes it quite possible to beat the word count of last year (149.261). It also means that I won’t be able to write for this blog a little longer, though, as the two writing things really can’t compete when it comes down to the adventure that NaNoWriMo is…

Breaking things

When going to camp with your scouts, all kinds of things can happen to you. You can fall and break something, you can end up in a ditch, you can become the target of some vicious pranks, or you can drop your phone and crack the screen.

A lot of smartphones, lately, seem to have a very weak screen. I see a lot of people walking around with a huge crack in their iPhone, scratches all around, and all that kind of things. When I got my phone, together with a contract with my provider, I immediately said I wanted to insure the phone in case something bad happens to it that wouldn’t be covered by the store guarantee. It seemed like a legit thing to do at the time.

So, when I went to scouting camp, I dropped my phone on a concrete floor. The result was a huge crack in the screen, which was very much made of glass, and which made handling the phone more than a little uncomfortable. Besides the fact that my fingers kept getting stuck behind the little ridges that were created, I was also very much afraid of cutting myself on the undoubtedly sharp edges that could get uncovered at any unlucky moment. The screen definitely had to be fixed.
Now, I wasn’t quite capable of returning to the store with the broken phone during the camp. I had some responsibilities there while walking around that required me to be available to know what time it is, and people would also need to be able to communicate with me over distance. The phone was one of the things I absolutely couldn’t miss.

So, I immediately went to the store the Monday after camp and went to the repair desk. I showed the guy the phone, the crack, told him the make, and awaited the verdict. He basically told me that they would have to order a new screen and then affix it, which I was fine with. The phone still worked, I was just afraid of a few cuts, so I was willing to wait a few days.

Then he told me that he wasn’t able to order a new screen and that he’d have to send it out to their (external) fixing service. I agreed, a little reluctantly, because he told me it’d take them ten business days to fix the phone, but it was either that or not fixing the broken phone, so I chose the lesser of two evils.

 

I was insured, after all…

The next day, I received a pricing from the company that was going to fix my phone. Still, I wasn’t expecting anything to go wrong, because I hadn’t paid off the own risk part of my insurance. I knew there were going to be some costs.
I hadn’t expected them to send me the pricing for the full repair, so I sent an e-mail to the contact address that was provided with the pricing mail, asking them to explain why my insurance wasn’t calculated into the price. I received an automated ‘we’ve got your mail, and answer it when we feel like it’ message and started the waiting game.

After four days, I figured I had waited for about long enough. I returned to the store, where the same guy as the last time was dealing with the repair booth. I asked my question to him, and he told me that I should have collected a claim number from my insurance before I let him send out the phone. He let me call the insurance from the store phone and I had the insurance generate a claim number, but they told me that they would have to validate my claim by human hands before I could get the number, which would take about two business days.
I found it a little strange that I had to do that before handing out the phone, considering the fact that having to wait two days for the insurance slows the service down considerably. What I was also wondering was why this wasn’t added automatically, because I had purchased the insurance from the provider itself. It would’ve been a lot more convenient, at least.

I actually received the claim number from the insurance the next day, Saturday, and I finally got an answer to my first question from the repair company that evening telling me what I had already learned from the store. I immediately replied the claim number towards them and expected them to react with a little haste.

So, fast-forward to Thursday.

I had been without a phone for nearly two weeks. A lot of things happen through my phone for me. All my Google accounts required verification in two steps, which made it impossible for me to log in to anything that belonged to Google. My finances were stopped dead, because I couldn’t transfer money without the codes that were sent to my mobile phone by my bank. Communication with my fellow scouting leaders had ground to a halt, because they preferred WhatsApp over e-mail.
Thankfully, I was able to disable the verification in two steps after a lengthy process with Google that required me to wait four days, so I could continue my school work more or less unhindered, but the financial and communication things were still a bit of an issue. I realized that I could go back to the store again and see if I could get a replacement phone, which would at least get me back in the communication again.

Well, no such luck. At the store, they told me that I didn’t have a replacement option in my plan, which would cost me an additional €2,50 per month. Also, I couldn’t get a replacement at that time, because it was only possible to have a replacement phone delivered to them by the same courier that would pick up the phone. The best they could do was give me a new SIM card and I would buy a new, cheap phone that would help me along until my phone was repaired.

Now, I still had my old SIM card, I had taken it out of my phone before I handed it in, but it was one of the new, smaller SIM cards, so it didn’t fit in my old smartphone, which still uses the old, larger SIM cards. This new card I was handed, though, was a large one that could be punched out to become a smaller one. I immediately pushed it into my old phone, which I had been using as a glorified MP3-player up until then, and it worked, so now I have my previous phone back while waiting for the repairs to complete.

When I got back, I wrote a complaint about the lack of information I had been receiving during the process that made me run around and get frustrated on the company’s facebook page, which garnered me a reaction from someone who knew someone who used to work for the repair company that my provider had sent my phone to and which took more than its time to answer my questions. That person linked me a forum that had customer reviews from the repair company, and basically, it scared the living shit out of me. A lot of complaints about machines disappearing, claims made by the company that the owner had given them permission to recycle their phone, and a lot of unbased claims of water damage.

 

It kind of makes me afraid of how my phone will be returned to me…

Playing Cards and D&D

While playing Dungeons and Dragons, my friends and I have found several reasons to use card games. I used it to get a kick out of my players freaking out, we’ve had several instances of our characters consulting a Tarot deck, and we even played poker to earn money at one point (I wasn’t very successful at that…). At one point, I even had a plan to invoke a system of drawing cards to add a couple of random effects to the game at times it would need a little spicing up, or to punish my players.
When thinking about it, playing cards are actually an excellent way to randomise effects. Different numbers and houses can yield different effects, or have different meanings for the players. Quite frankly, there can be as many different options as the person who designs the system really needs.
That’s what pulled me to one of the Kickstarter campaigns I decided to support. It was a combination of the many different options that could come out of a deck of cards, combined with another of my weaknesses: creating Non-Player Characters that are somewhat believable and have a personality, especially on the fly. This Kickstarter campaign was of the Character Cards, cards that laid out a basic person with four primary points:

“Their heart’s desire”, which was symbolized by the house of hearts. It basically tells you about the main goal of the person in life.

“Their occupation”, symbolized by spades. It tells you what they do all day or night.
“Their physical appearance”, symbolized by diamonds. Exactly what it says on the tin, really.
“Their social connections”, symbolized by clubs. Who they know, and who matters.

Every card has a name, a ‘big’ description based on the suit of the card, and several smaller descriptions for the other suits. A King of Hearts would have a large text telling about what that person wants in life, while three smaller texts tell about their occupation, appearance and connections. A Queen of Clubs would have a large text telling about the connections the character has in life, while three smaller texts tell about their heart’s desire, occupation and appearance.

What makes the cards extra interesting, though, is the secret all characters have. It is assumed that nobody is completely honest, or knows absolutely everything about themselves. They give people a twist, or a dark side, or maybe even a light side if it’s possible.

They even thanked all of us!

As you might notice, I separated the stack in two different stacks before I took the picture. That’s because there’s a full Major Arcana set next to the 54 cards that fill up a normal deck of playing cards. There’s also four ‘knights’ that have been added to the court cards of the four suits of which I’m not exactly sure if they are part of the arcana set, or if they were just a nice addition, but with the 22 Major Arcana cards and the four knights, it’s a total of 80 character cards.

My main motivation when pledging for this Kickstarter was to get myself enough names, characters and motivations to help myself build characters for RPG’s, tales and books. Especially the last two have always caused me trouble. Names are hard to me, especially believable names, and making ‘generic character #14’ again to bore even me at some point, so there should actually be some interesting, original names and characters in my stories in the future…
Can’t wait!

Reaper Bones

Quite a while ago, somewhere around July 2012, the one friend I always paint miniatures with pointed me out to the Reaper Bones Kickstarter, which was basically a ‘we sell existing miniatures dirt cheap so we can get funds to design new miniatures’ drive. Some other friends and the two of us decided that it was well worth the money and, if we all chipped in, the costs could probably be overseen. We put our heads together, made our decisions, and pledged for the Bones.
The Kickstarter turned out to be a huge success, gathering 3,4 million dollars worth of pledges, and it was pretty clear that everyone was going to get a huge load of awesome miniatures. The estimated delivery time would be somewhere around march 2013, but with all of the add-ons and stretch goals that were met, we were pretty sure they were never going to make it in time for that date.
March came and went. April, May and June also passed, and we started joking about the time we had to wait. July and August also passed…
And then I received the confirmation mail. Our order had been processed and sent by airmail to my house. On the third of September, the mailman rang our doorbell, demanded we paid him for import tax (damn you, tax system!) and then handed me a box that was actually a little smaller than I had expected it to be. Giddy with excitement, I set up a camera on a tripod and started to record my very first unboxing video.

 

 

It was pretty bad, considering the fact that the camera’s battery died about halfway through the unboxing and missed about all the important things, but it was fun, so I uploaded it anyway. After sorting everything out so my friends and I could get all the miniatures we had called dibbs on, I decided that it was a great idea to immediately start painting one of the mini’s the first chance I got.
I planned to wait with this blog post until I had finished that mini, so I could get a good comparison picture of what an unpainted miniature looks like, next to a (rather poorly, knowing me) painted miniature. The Bones material was specially designed for painting, after all. Unfortunately, the friend I paint with, and the friend whose paint I use, is currently moving and isn’t really able to paint with me. So I can’t paint. Life’s hard like that.
What I can say is that, quite frankly, the promotional pictures didn’t prepare me for the actual quality of the Bones miniatures. The first image of the material I had seen was this one:

 

As you might see, there are a couple of places where the detail appears to suffer because of the material. However, when you place it next to a miniature that was photographed slightly better (maybe without the use of flash photography…), you can see that the details are actually nicely preserved by the material:

 

It’s actually pretty fun to work with the material. As it’s got some limited ability to bend, it’s suddenly very possible to reach points on the miniature that would otherwise be covered by different parts. Though this same attribute means that some of the more spiky things, like spears and staves, can be stuck in a bent position thanks to the moulding process, it is more of a boon than a curse. The bent pieces can be fixed with some boiling water, and there will be no more axes breaking because the rigid resin decided it didn’t like the minimal pressure that was placed on it! (yes, there’s a story behind that one, too…)

With all of the Bones miniatures I’ve got lined up now, it’s quite probable that I’ll be set for quite some time. One of them is planned for my Declipse Savage Worlds game, if that ever gets started, and several others are planned characters or little surprises for my friends…

I really look forward to painting these things…

Coffee II

And yes, I did get a second one...

Coffee

I never really drank coffee, mostly because I couldn't see the appeal to the bitter drink that was supposed to keep me awake. I always figured that I could deal with that using energy drink, which indeed worked for me for a long time.
I managed to keep that up, until I went to Switzerland with scouting. It took one groggy morning for me to decide that, yes, it was time for me to learn drinking coffee. Coffee was readily available, energy drink wasn't.
After that, I started drinking a lot more coffee. I realized it was a great boon for both my home life and my college life. My university has quite a few options for getting my hands on a cup, so as I'm staring at the (by now empty) cup on my desk, I think I'll need to relocate soon to get a chance at some more...

Games and Books

I recall that, a long time ago (around 2005, to be exact), we had a house computer that we all shared on the ground floor. It was the computer that everyone used and which was often a test machine for my father’s new acquisitions.
As such, both my brother and I spent most of the time on that computer, playing new games as they came along and enjoying them or telling my father to get rid of them. It was a good time, which brought me in contact with several video game franchises and learned me to enjoy them.
In 2005, I suddenly found a new Star Wars game on the computer. Star Wars: Republic Commando, to be exact. It was a game that was praised for its excellent AI, interesting storyline and fast gameplay, three things that I couldn’t agree more with. It basically followed a single commando squad, comprised of four different individuals, that was fighting its way through the well-known Clone Wars that made up the second and third movies of the prequel trilogy.
I recall highly enjoying the first of three large levels, which brought the player through several environments on Geonosis, where the player and his squad were constantly being harassed by the flying, insect-like Geonosian hunters and the droids that made up the meat of the separatist army. It had its ups, it had its downs, its busy moments and its calm moments, and it formed an excellent introduction to the game.
Then… came the second chapter, which took me a very long time to complete. Not because it was very hard, because it wasn’t. It was your typical ghost ship mission with a lot of dark corners, shadows and speedy enemies that tended to jump out of dark corners and approach you rapidly.
And, I was a wimp. That same chapter brought you the shotgun-like slug thrower, which was basically an instant kill button in that chapter (its use diminished in the third and last chapter, though…), and suddenly made all those scary enemies a laughing stock that was taken care of with the push of a button.

In the end, I replayed that chapter for fun, countless times, because it was an excellent chapter, but the story was a bit lacklustre. It was the third chapter, which ended on a bit of a cliff-hanger, that really piqued my interest in the game.
(obviously, spoilers coming up for the ending of an eight-year-old game that you should’ve played already)
The final challenge is an enemy battleship hanging above the location that your squad is currently residing in. You’re told that the best way to deal with this battleship is to take the four anti-air cannons that are set up in a circle directly underneath said battleship, so you go out and find said cannons. You leave the sniper at the first cannon, the demolitions expert at the second, fight your way through hordes of droids with your tech expert and leave him at the third cannon (really the hardest fight of that part, if I recall correctly…) and finally take a seat yourself in the fourth one. Your team takes care of the battleship, it explodes, and you get picked up in your gunship to deal with the next assignment.

However, as you go to pick up your sniper, you hear that he’s being overrun by enemies and his communication stops. You’re told to leave him behind by Yoda, the door of the gunship closes, and the game ends.

There are a lot of people who wanted to find out what had happened with Sev (the sniper), but unfortunately, the sequel, called ‘Imperial Commando’, never left the planning stage and the fans were left hanging.
That included me.
I figured that I would probably never find out and was actually quite happy with that, but I kept returning to my drifting Republic Cruiser and the monstrosities that inhabited it. It was a happy little memory that was sitting in the back of my mind and something I could return to if I wanted to have some fun.

Then, one day, as I was browsing the internet, I stumbled across a series of novels written by a women called Karen Traviss. They were based on the same universe as the fantastic game I had played, though it followed a different squad on obviously different adventures. How else could it be.
I bought the first book online, to see how it was, and I was impressed. The story was well written, detailed, and gave me insights in the actual culture of the commandos outside of combat. What they were like without their armour and while dealing with other commandos, soldiers and civilians.
After a little more research, I found out that Traviss had been involved in the production of Republic Commando and had had a say in writing the banter between the squad of the game and had actually built a complete language to write a song with. It was pretty impressive, so I decided to keep reading on.
I enjoyed the book series as relationships were built and characters were introduced. The characters of the game were actually introduced in the books, the books detailing the things that happened between the different missions in the game and, of course, by the time the mission on Kashyyyk had rolled around and Sev had been lost, the way they coped with the loss.

Unfortunately, the series ended abruptly after the series had received a name change. Originally, it had always been called ‘Republic Commando [subtitle]’, but as time went on and Order 66 had passed (Star Wars fans will know what that means), it started to be called ‘Imperial Commando’, of which only the book called ‘Order 66’ had been written.
After that, Lucasarts decided to make some… radical changes to the Mandalorean culture to make it more suitable for the Clone Wars animated series that was running at the time. The change could basically be explained as the nomadic warrior culture that had been the undertone of all of the books being turned into a treehugging hippy culture that would make it virtually impossible to write the next books without rebooting the whole story. Because of the contract with Lucasarts, considering the use of their IP, Traviss couldn’t keep writing on in her own continuity, and she logically decided to abandon the Republic Commando series, leaving the last book with cliff-hangers, characters lost and scattered all across the Star Wars universe.
Though she posted spoilers about the book that would have closed it all off, which she had planned in a rush as she got the idea her books wouldn’t fall in good grace anymore before being forced to cancel it all together, I never really felt like it was good enough. A list of spoilers and planned notes never has and never will beat reading the actual book, but I had managed to push the feelings of loss and lack of closure to the back of my mind for a while.
I found other books written by Traviss that I enjoyed. She wrote a couple of books in the Gears of War universe, bridging the gaps between the games, but unfortunately, they started to get tedious and I started seeing the critique that other readers had about her. Idolizing tribal cultures to the point of extremism, making sure they were told of as legendary warriors and that they came out like that in the books. Extremely detailed combat scenario’s that, quite frankly, coloured my own way of writing combat and went on for many pages at a time. Witty banter that probably wasn’t as funny to me as it was to her. The list doesn’t go on and on, but there’s multiple points that I couldn’t ignore as I read on.
I ultimately opted to stop reading her books, because they turned out to be long and tedious, with the excitement of the story gone. I didn’t like it, because I had a lot of fun moments with her stories, and I could almost compare it to ending a long and intimate relationship, but I couldn’t keep up with the irritations anymore.

Some days ago, I returned to Traviss’ website and took a look at the Republic Commando section. Maybe I was hoping things had changed and that the Imperial Commando story would keep going, or maybe I just wanted to remind myself what had happened and what belonged to the past. I don’t know, but I do know it inspired me to write this piece and that it reminded me of an excellent time. I actually downloaded the game again, though I’ll have to see if I get it running again. I really hope so…

Responsibilities, books, and Kickstarters.

With my vacation ending soon, I find the recent developments quite interesting to observe, as well as participate in said developments.
My thesis, which has been in the works since January, is finally starting to near its epic conclusion. The last words are being typed, the last screenshots are being captured and I’m waiting for the last e-mails to arrive. I hope to be able to end the whole deal before university starts, in September, or at least finish it off within the first few weeks, so I don’t have to deal with the responsibilities of the thesis for the duration of my first class this year. That would be inconvenient.

At the same time, I’m also being reminded about November coming closer and closer, which means that NaNoWriMo is also nearing at an equally vast speed. My first NaNoWriMo was quickly followed by my first published book, even though it was with a print-on-demand publisher, and I enjoyed writing the year after that and the year after that, always succeeding in reaching the 50.000 word goal easily. So easily, in fact, that I usually already met the word goal on day ten and went on from there, writing at a steady pace of 5.000 to 7.000 words per day. Maybe more, if I had to make up for a lost day, but the average would be around 5.000 words per day.
What you generally don’t see while looking at the statistics of my userpage, though, is the amount of preparation that comes with writing a story. I like to write out the general outline of a story, which can differ from highly detailed (when I actually envision a certain scene) to terribly general (when I just want to make a point come across) and see where I end up. I recall my second NaNoWriMo being about five pages of notes, but the ideas started to pile up as I was writing and I started adding subplots and making changes as I went along, never really failing to keep up with these undocumented changes. The result was Physokinetic, a universe in which breaking the rules of physics was, for some people, not all that weird.
The year after that, I decided to write a sequel to Physokinetic, called Tamer. It followed a (in my mind) logical consequence to the reality-shaking climax of Physokinetic and how it caused several different kinds of creatures to invade Earth. It ended with (spoilers) only the dragons being left on Earth thanks to plot-related reasons, and I planned to end it with that.
Unfortunately, a couple of months ago, I started finding reasons to revisit this universe, with its dragons, its physics-denying humanoids, and its nearly indestructible creatures. With this story, I plan on ending it, though, which may or may not work, because I’ve already started editing and changing the notes I had been making to better suit a change of mind I’ve been having.
All things considered, though, I’m thoroughly enjoying this. Knowing that I’m willing and able to think about these things and start the creative engine that’s necessary to think about the changes I want to make and the repercussions they’ll have in my little universe means that I’ll probably be able to write with my usual style, making it up as I go along.

Thirdly, the Kickstarters. I continue to enjoy following and actually funding Kickstarter projects. Recently, I finally received a message about the Reaper Bones Kickstarter being sent out to me, almost a year after the actual funding ended and almost five months after the actually estimated time of delivery. I’ve been excited about this Kickstarter since the very start, especially since it basically introduced me to the basic concept of the system, and it was a huge rush to see the stretch goals passing by as time went on.
Another project was the Character Cards Kickstarter, which is basically an 80-card deck of personalities and basic ideas about NPC’s that I plan to use extensively if necessary. They also sent out the message that they had started to send out their rewards, which means that I’ll be able to start writing about these rewards very soon.

Finally, in a bit of an addendum, my dice collection has been expanded quite a bit since the last post about the dice. I guess I’ll spend a minute or two to take another picture and document that, in the near future…

Heirloom shooting

So, today was a bit of an interesting day for me.

Quite some time ago, my father had inherited an airsoft gun, which had been left to him by his grandfather (that being, my great-grandfather). It had been in our possession for a while, mostly because we couldn’t (legally) do anything. Dutch law states that you can’t use firearms in public areas, but our backyard is, unfortunately, quite a bit too small to actually fire a rifle it at any range.

So, back in July, my father took my brother out (I was, unfortunately, otherwise occupied) to illegally go into the forest and shoot the gun at a couple of empty cans. The full story about that can be read (in Dutch) HERE.

Fast-forward a month or so, and my father admits to me that he was getting rather itchy to go and try the gun out again. We still had ammo for it, so there was no reason not to go out and perform more delicious can homicide. Needless to say, after hearing stories from both my father and my brother, and hearing how enthusiastic they were about the whole experience, I was quite interested in going out shooting, too.

So, today, we went back to the spot that my father and brother had spent a good hour of shooting and set up some cans for me there. The first thing I noticed as I held the rifle was that the thing was a lot heavier than I had thought, but I had also forgotten about the heavy wooden stock that probably added a lot to that weight.

After painstakingly learning how to load it (I already shot an air rifle, dad, I know how these things work), and having set up a can, all I could really do was start aiming…

It was nothing like the videogames, that’s one thing. It took me a few moments to get the hang of the sights, which were a lot less intuitive than I had imagined it to be. More on good faith and the whole belief that ‘not shooting is never a hit’, I pulled the trigger…

 

BAM, was about all I could think. After this great success, we decided to take a couple of steps back and shoot again. This all was pretty successful, but the fork in the tree soon didn’t fit anymore. There were unfortunate plants in the way that prevented us from walking back, so we placed a plank that we had taken with us on the ground and started placing the cans on there…

 

 

I’m absolutely no marksman, but especially that last shot made me feel pretty damn awesome. After that, we just started taking potshots from different angles, places and distances, until my brother arrived from his work to also join us for a bit. It was great fun, but we quickly started to notice our aim was declining. We were obviously growing tired, so after an hour or so, we packed up and headed back home.

The cans were utterly destroyed, so I didn’t even regret it.

Medal of Honor: Generic Warfighter

So, after my last blog post about games, I feel like I’m obliged to admit that I’ve recently acquired Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Bioshock: Infinite, which I pretty much bought from the credit I received for handing in ‘a couple’ of old games I’m never playing anymore.

Two games :3

Yep, I pretty much only included the receipt there to show how long it was, because that’s twelve games I handed in, mostly because I’m never going to play them anymore and have zip emotional investment in them. I kept games like the Army of Two games, mostly because of the fun I had with my little brother playing them and the fact that at least the first one had great humour, even if it was a bit lacking in the story department.
The same goes up for the Gears of War games, of which I beat the first two in co-op with my bro as well, and I still need to see if I can bait him into playing the third one together. Probably won’t happen, though.
What I’m in doubt about, is keeping both HAWX and HAWX2, because I greatly enjoyed HAWX, but the story and missions of HAWX2 were really starting to get on my nerves real quick. I’m a bit of a military plane fan, but the arcade style of the first game was a lot better than the style of the second one, where things were a lot more unclear and there were quite a few points of unfair difficulty (instant-death space lasers, anyone?) that really threw the reality out of the window with about as much force as it could possibly manage. I know, Tom Clancy games tend to do this (anybody who played Endwar knows what I’m talking about, and HAWX2 appears to play at least around the same time period…), but the first HAWX didn’t do that and remained feasible at least. Kind of. If you disregarded the military strength a corporation managed to muster, anyway (spoilers). I liked that one better.

Anyway, on to the point I was trying to go and make. I played Warfighter and beat it in a day or two. It was way shorter than what I was expecting it to be, though I think it equalled a Call of Duty game in length. It was a disappointment.
Why, you may ask. I knew what I was going in to, what with spectacle-based Modern Warfare shooters being the short campaign beasts they are. However, when I opened the case, I saw two discs. Two. So I put the first one in, booted up the game, ran the patch (because there’s always a patch) and allowed the game to boot properly. After the obligatory ‘press start’ screen, I was confronted with the question of whether I wanted to ‘install the HD pack for the full game experience’, which was partnered with the message that this would require 1.7 gigabytes of hardware space.

1.7 gigabytes.

I hate to be honest, but I didn’t exactly splurge when I bought my XBOX and went for the one with the smaller hard drive (40 gigs, if I remember correctly), which has started to fill up over time. I don’t have the space to manage what would essentially be a 1.7 gigabyte texture pack, so I decided that no, fuck you, I don’t want your ‘HD pack’, hit ‘no’ and went on.
After I pushed that aside and entered the start screen, I wanted to start the campaign (I’m a single player guy), only to be prompted to ‘insert the single player disc’. So, the game didn’t actually run the amazing graphics that were promised, it had also taken the trouble of dividing the multiplayer (which I have no intention of even trying, if there’s even a multiplayer base left) and the single player content over different discs. Considering the size of the HD dvd’s of the XBOX, that means there’s quite some room left to make an AMAZING single player experience, right?
WRONG.
It was generic, at best. Having played the previous modern Medal of Honor game, I recall an amazing chopper level, where you actually controlled the gunner of an attack helicopter. Though it wasn’t an actual shooter mechanic and it could be made out to be ‘gimmicky’, I enjoyed that part immensely (see the part about HAWX, above). There was nothing like that, though there were two incredible clusterfucks they called driving levels, where all you did was drive a car through busy streets at high speeds. Though exhilarating during play, I frequently found myself being frustrated by them (one mistake and you were as good as done for, with very little recovery possible if you, say, hit a wall and came to a full stop) and realized, afterwards, that I didn’t even enjoy them.

Another point was the gunplay. So far, I haven’t found a way to see what gun you’re holding, except for the ones you pick up from the enemy. However, there is no reason to pick up a gun from the enemy, because you’re never without an ally and your allies are walking ammo containers that give out ammo like candy on request and don’t appear to run out of ammunition or grenades… ever. So you never really ditch your starting weapons, which means you’ll never find out what guns you’re using (because of the aforementioned point).
One of the strong points of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was the weapon customisation option during the campaign, which basically gave you the chance to choose which weapons and attachments your character was going to carry at the start of the mission. Sure, there were a couple of suggested options, which meant that you would be ‘optimised’ for the tasks at hand, but nothing was forcing you to follow those suggestions.
This system allowed you to get familiar with the different weapons and find preferences. I know I never ran without an LMG as soon as I saw the destruction one could create with those beasts, something that I couldn’t possibly do with Warfighter. I never knew what kind of weapons I was using, never had the option to choose a different loadout, and even if I managed to find what kind of weapon I was using, all the enemies were using different weapons (there’s even an achievement for getting 50 kills with ‘enemy weapons’ that’s called ‘Tier 1 imports’, or, basically, weapons that are too shitty for the main character to use), so there was absolutely no way for me to acquire my preferred gun. As such, all guns felt the same (mostly. Some, like shotguns, still had a clearly different feel, but there were awfully few differences with the ‘Assault Rifle’ category), and led to an ‘eh’ feel with each and every one of them. A real shame, because I play the modern shooters because of the guns. Sure, I’ll beat the story a couple more times for the achievements (I fancy myself a bit of an achievement hunter), but after that, it’s going straight back for store credit…

Anyway, I’m going to try and be done with it, soon. If I manage to find some regular play time (and I won’t), it’ll be done in about a week or two, so we’ll see…

Responsibilities

So, at work today, they actually let me run the show for the evening.
Sure, there was someone more experienced than me to back me up and take care of missing things, but the plan is for me to do this more often. That, maybe, I can start closing shop on my own in the near future.
To be completely fair, I stopped enjoying my work a while ago. It was starting to get frustrating, and I didn't go home happy anymore. The fun was just gone from it all. Today was pretty intense, though, despite the fact that it was 'leadership light', and if it always goes like it went today (it won't), it'll be fun and games. It might just bring the fun back into my work, which is something I crave, despite the fact that I'm still planning to go and find a real job when I've finished my bachelor's degree.
So, let's see how this goes. Who knows, it might just give me a sense of responsibility and experience. Spooky...

Game Time

During a previous blog post, I promised to make a backlog list of the games I still want to play, but which I don’t have in my possession just yet. It actually required a bit of thinking, considering the fact that I’m not that good at remembering things, and I eventually decided to call in the help of xboxworld.nl, which conveniently allows me to look back at the releases per month, so I can actually find what I’m still missing.
Now, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t make some kind of system and make a somewhat longer list with a bit of a story and explanation, so… Let’s do this thing. Word of warning ahead: there’s probably going to be quite some shooters in here, because I’m not ashamed of the fact that I enjoy games like Call of Duty. It’s mindless fun.

Asura’s Wrath, released on February 24, 2012. I’m not all too sure about this one, I’ve played the demo and actually enjoyed it, but I noticed that it was mostly QTE’s and a lot of spectacle, and something is telling me that the actual game might not be that great. A second-hand tryout, I guess…

Prototype 2, released on April 27, 2012. I… guess I enjoyed the original? I don’t know, I never really got around to unlocking the full story of the original. Second-hand, definitely.

Lollipop Chainsaw, released on June 15, 2012. The sex appeal, mostly, though I watched a lot of gameplay video’s and achievement guides, and it appeared to be pretty tongue-in-cheek next to that sex appeal, which can be quite fun. Worst case scenario, I return it for store credit.

Spec-Ops: The Line, released on June 29, 2012. The story has been applauded as being deep and, quite frankly, rather broody and dark. The ally AI has been condemned for being stupid and suicidal. If I’d buy this, it’d be for the story, I’m sure. I don’t think I’ll feel forced to play it for the gameplay or the achievements…

Dishonored, released on October 12, 2012. I’ve heard many good things about this game, and I’ve come to understand that the story is quite excellent while the gameplay is interesting and innovative. That’s a lot of big keywords, which really don’t mean anything when considered, but I’m willing to believe the critics (and no, I don’t consider Yahtzee to be a critic) that it might just be a good game.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown, released on October 12, 2012, as well. This one is probably more of a legacy game, even though I never really played the original XCOM’s. I’m pretty unsure about how much enjoyment I’ll get out of this, considering the fact that I heard it contains quite some bugs that only the real die-hard XCOM fans can look past. It’s probably a game I’ll pick up second-hand somewhere when it becomes available and I need to kill some time.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter, released on October 25, 2012. This is mostly because I’m not ashamed of the fact that I enjoy Modern Shooter games, which includes their linearity and spectacle effects. I might be a bit of a freak, there, so don’t mind me in my little hole.

Halo 4, released on November 6, 2012. I’m really not all that sure about this game, actually. I picked up the other Halo’s during sales, second-hand, etcetera, and I never really enjoyed them all that much. I’m hearing good things about it, just like about the other ones, and it’d be a shame if I left a legacy game of the 360 behind, especially if it turns out really good. I’ll probably give it the same treatment as XCOM, see if I can find it second-hand somewhere.

The Crysis trilogy, which is released at various dates, is just about the same as the previous ones. I never really got interested in the original Crysis, mostly because it was akin to torturing my computer when it was just released, but now it’s one of those games that can prove to be quite the experience once again. Back then, when I was able to play it for about an hour or so, I saw quite some things I liked, and now that it’s available as an XBOX downloadable, it might be worth it to invest in that one and get the other two, again, second-hand somewhere.

Gears of War: Judgement, released on March 19, 2013. This is one of the big ones, which I actually really want to have. I was one of the few who actually liked the story in the Gears of War games and I’ve read four of the novels that connect the different games to each other, so I’m considering myself to be quite invested in the story. I’m pretty interested in what happens during that game.

Bioshock Infinite, released on March 26, 2013. Another big one, probably the first one I’ll pick up. Again, Bioshock and Bioshock 2 were really fun and interesting to play, and I’ve only heard better things about Infinite. It’s even gone so far that I’ve purposely been avoiding reviews and blogs containing spoilers, mostly because I want to find out by myself.

Army of Two: the Devil’s Cartel, released on March 29, 2013. My brother and I beat the original Army of Two and 40^th Day in co-op together, and I actually hope to be able to do that with The Devil’s Cartel, as well. Though I thought that Army of Two: 40^th Day wasn’t as much fun as the original, lacking a lot of the feel of and being a lot more dark and serious than the original. I’m also unsure about how I’ll deal with the lack of the original protagonists (spoilers, I guess), but we’ll see.

Deadpool, released on June 28, 2013. This one really slipped underneath my radar, and I really don’t consider myself to be a fan of Deadpool, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about the game and the character, again, so I guess I’ll give it a whirl if I can find the time for it…

So, concluding… That’s a lot of games I’ll pick up second-hand. I actually always try to do it like this, mostly because it safes me a bucketload of money, so it was one of the reasons I was starting to doubt about what I’d do after the whole XBOX One debacle. With it’s lack of second-hand compatibility (until the One became the One-Eighty, at least), it would seriously hurt my funding. Thankfully, the guys at Microsoft decided that the negative backlash they had received after that little announcement was enough to make them re-think their strategy and back-pedal a bit, which means I don’t have to be afraid of that fact. Making the One-Eighty backwards-compatible would be awesome, but I think that’s a little more difficult. I’m no expert, but I’d be willing to buy it if they said it was harder.

So, when the time comes around for me to buy a new console, I guess I’m going to stack the XBOXes in case I ever feel like going back to the older games, though I have to admit, aside from a recent Freelancer craving (ten years later, still a great game), I don’t tend to suffer from that kind of things. We’ll see.

Kickstarter: Savage Worlds Character Sheets

So, today, one of my backed Kickstarters delivered, which is always a joy to see.

It was the Savage Worlds Character Sheet pads one (link), which was actually one I was looking forward to, what with me preparing a homebrew Savage Worlds setting for some time, now. I like the system, because it allows easy access to just about every kind of game you want to run, without being forced to homebrew stuff, and it advertises it's combat as being 'fast, fluid and fun'. That's one of my pet peeves in DnD4e, where combat, with the massive amount of available powers and abilities at higher levels, can quickly slow down to a crawl when one or two people start pulling out the big guns. With SW's simplified combat system and its allowance of making roleplay-heavy games, it seems like an excellent alternative, just like the (new) World of Darkness.


The pad and card, next to a printed Deluxe Edition Character Sheet

A while back, I took the liberty of statting out one of the important NPC's of the homebrew world I mentioned above and printed out the sheet to make this easier to do. As you can see, the sheet has started to curl a little, which I blame mostly on the cheap quality of the printer paper we use over here, combined with the liberal amounts of ink applied to it thanks to the full-color page I printed. It wasn't cheap.
Now, when you look at the pad, you can see that, though it's black-and-white, the paper is of high quality and it probably won't start curling up unless you start rolling it. I've got five of those pads, and there's twenty-five sheets per pad, so that's 125 characters ready to be made.
Above the pad are the businesscard-sized mini-sheets, which are really more to 'take your sheet with you', so you don't have to slog around a character sheet and can, basically, play your character everywhere, every time, if you keep it in your wallet. They're very small and basic, though, and especially advanced characters probably won't manage to fit everything on there. I've received 120 of these, as well, so I'll see how much we can do with those.

Now, I just need to find a way to get that game going. We've got a lot of things going, already, so I told my friends I won't start anything new until we've finished off something else, so it might be a while, but these things will be ready when the time comes!

Doing things and ambitions

So, the point I feared has arrived. I'm already struggling to find things I really want to write about. Why don't I want to write about mundane things? I don't really know.

What I do know, is that quite some things have happened in the past week. I went shopping with my girlfriend, which I actually quite enjoyed - I really don't see what bothers other people with the whole shopping thing, actually spending quality time with your better side is fun, right? - and actually brought home more things than she did. This was mostly due to the fact that she's all 'I have so many things already, so if I buy something it really has to stand out', which is only something I can admire, but it was still a point of minor ridicule upon return and the realization of this.
What I also did during that shopping trip was buy a red shirt, because the only red shirt I have is starting to get old and worn by repeated ironing, which sucks. Unfortunately, I only realized afterwards that it was a short sleeved shirt, as opposed to a long sleeved shirt, which I think look horrible when worn with a suit. Opinions might differ on this, but I really don't like it, but I already managed to misplace the receipt, so I'll have to live with it and purchase an actual red shirt some time else. Or really dig through my paper bin, I'm sure it's somewhere in there.

Speaking of my girlfriend, she actually graduated from her high school, and had her graduation ceremony just this thursday, which was... different, when comparing it to my own graduation ceremony, three years ago. When I graduated, every student got a chance to say something about one of their colleagues, but now the mentors made picture collages that would symbolize the student and his or her experiences at the school and gave the students a chance to say what they tought about the pictures before actually telling the story they intended.
There were a lot of stories coming from the teachers and the mentors of the students, but I think it was wrong of them to give the students only a minor chance to talk about their life and, something I noticed, whenever something negative was said, the mentors immediately started to contradict that, or go 'I didn't really want to mention that', which was a shame in my eyes. No stories are without their negative points, and actually talking about bad things can be quite fun when done in the right way and about the right things. It felt rather forced, now.
It was a fun day, though, during which a big chapter in my girlfriend's life got closed, so I'm proud of her regardless and hope she'll do just as well at university as she did during high school.

Now, about the ambitions part... Because of my thesis, I didn't really have a chance to buy new games for the better part of the year... The last game I bought was Black Ops 2... Used. This means I have quite the bucket list of games I want to buy and play, which I might just spend a future blog about, but right now, Mass Effect 3's DLC (Omega and Citadel, respectively) is managing to keep me occupied whenever I desire a moment of distraction from the more important parts of my life.
I really need to get that backlog cleared up, though...

Finally, I've been debating with myself for a while now whether or not to invest in a keyboard and some piano lessons, considering the fact that I always resented the fact that I never invested that much in my music classes at school and now can't really play an instrument. Considering the fact that I tend to suffer from a low self-esteem and never really seemed to connect with anything place in front of me at school, I always pushed this idea away from me...

Courtesy of 9gag.com, which is hilarious

I think the above image fits my situation rather well. I think I'm currently hovering between 'I can't do it' and 'I want to do it', which is a minor victory in my mind. One optimistic day I actually went 'How do I do it', and went looking for a (cheap) keyboard, which I found at eBay (link), but I'm still thinking about the investment of time, money, and commitment it will require. The last thing I want is a keyboard sitting in my room, taunting me every day about the lack of will to put time into learning to use that thing.
It's still a point of doubt for me, mostly because I doubt my ability to focus on two things (my hands) at a time and, thus, suck at it by default. However, my grandfather, who plays (or used to play) his church's organ, admitted that he spent hours just practicing the music he would have to play that sunday, because he wouldn't be able to, otherwise. That's a reason to at the very least try, in my eyes...

Gamer’s Dice

So I recently ordered a pretty big amount of dice from The Dice Shop Online, mostly thanks to a long video from the Spoony One about dice (link), which prompted me to take a look at the current dice I’ve got in my possession and think about what I’d want to do with all of them. I know that, right now, I’ve got about eight full polyhedral sets in use (more or less, keep reading for the explanation about that), with six or seven sets ‘in reserve’ and one bag that has collected most of the d10 dice for White Wolf-style games that require lots and lots of d10s.

Following below I should place a picture I’ve taken recently, which contains all of the dice I’ve got, with their respective containers (which I always find to be just as important). Without containers, after all, dice have the tendency to get terribly lost, which is a gosh-darn waste in my eyes.



Click to enlarge

 

If I don’t go by those in some kind of system, I’m pretty sure I’m going to forget one of the sets, so let’s start with the top left and work to the right, shall we? Note: for some reason, Blogger rotated the picture 90 degrees to the left, so bear with me and work with the little descriptions to actually understand this...

So, we’ve got the black set of six, on top of the grey Sony bag. That dice set was included with the Red Box and is, quite interestingly, used solely for Nolan the elf rogue and his adversaries up until now. This little set has shown itself to have quite the enmity for me, considering the fact that I couldn’t hit the goblins if I wanted to if it hadn’t been for Nolan being an elf and getting a re-roll once per encounter, but the goblins were quite capable of rolling twenties one after the other. Thank goodness for them being minions.
The d10 of this set is interesting in a way that I haven’t seen very often. As people who have ever studied a d10 know, it runs from 1 to 0, so two d10’s can be properly combined in order to get a d100 and get some real numbers going down. This one runs from 1 to 10, though, making it harder to combine, but making more sense when it’s the only d10 in the set and making it very compatible with Savage Worlds games, which is why I’ll probably add a second d6 to that set when the time is right in order to run Savage Worlds properly.
The bag they’re in is, quite frankly, an example of what you’re going to read quite often. It’s a felt bag that came with a set of earbuds that served me for quite long, until one of them failed. However, I don’t really like using that kind of bags with earbuds (because untangling them every time is so much more interesting), so these kinds of bags become unused and, when I find them back again, start getting re-purposed for dice holding. In this case, it’s a rather small bag that’s really good for about one set, maybe with a few extra’s if they’re really necessary. So, all things considered, it’s an excellent bag for a travel-set. However, for that I’ve got…

The second bag, which contains both a grey and a sparkly blue set. That’s two complete sets that I really try to always carry around with me, just in case I forget to pack the dice I wanted to take, and I have a set to fall back on. They’re both sets that have ‘failed’ me before, though, the grey set being used for a Pirate Paladin of Kord that was played in The Hague and lasted for about three sessions of absolutely atrocious rolling, and the blue set being used for an Avenger of the Good gods who got killed by a Paladin of Zarus that he had previously cooperated with and subsequently fell all the way back down to the realms of chaos. Neither set really brought me much success.
They do get the honour of sitting in my spanking, brand new chain-mail bag that I’ve recently ordered from E-Bay, though. It’s pretty hefty, but it looks pretty damn awesome, too, but the most important aspect, really, is that it’s probably sturdy enough to withstand quite a bit of punishment before probably giving up and raining my dice down.

The two d10’s on the tiny blue bag are the Dark Heresy set I’m keeping aside from the others. They’re pretty good at rolling high, which is absolutely terrible in Dark Heresy, so you might say that these dice have got it in for me even more than the rest, considering the deadliness of the game system, and they’ve done an excellent job of making me fail at tasks and killing people up until now.
The blue bag is actually a re-purposed gift bag I got from my girlfriend containing a necklace. After taking the necklace out, I actually didn’t really have a purpose for it, so I took it up to myself to give it a new goal in life and keep my little set of two dice.

The giant set right next to the two little d10’s is my White Wolf d10 set, which I originally built by taking all the d10’s of my original polyhedral sets and, later on, expanding it by buying an amount of single dice to make sure that I could play Exalted with it without re-rolling absurd amounts of the dice. Too bad our Exalted game lasted for about one session before falling apart, which was quite a shame.

The bag was actually made for me by request, and is filled quite well (the dice are just about to lay flat when spread around completely). It’s really made with some spare piece of fabric and a couple of shoelaces, but it really fits the bill quite well and is sturdy as heck.

The fourth, green set, in the little box, is a special little set for me. It was originally bought to form the dice for an elf ranger I was going to play in a cute little introductory campaign, but it didn’t take long until I noticed that these dice appeared to roll higher for me than others. They were my ‘lucky’ dice, and since then, I’ve kept them behind for that moment that my characters would need a little moor oomph.
The box is actually just an old cufflink box that I’m keeping shut with a little rubber band, but it feels right to give this set a little special container that I can snap open to grab the dice when necessary. It’s also exactly big enough to keep one set in comfortably, so the dice don’t klonk together too much during transport.

The set next to that, on the brownish bag, is a little special as well, but that’s just because those are my non-regular dice. Right now it consists of a purple d30, which I originally mistook for a hilariously-oversized d20 when I was just starting out and had just learned about polyhedrals, and three character builder dice. The d6 has chaotic evil, evil, neutral, good, lawful good, and roll again on it, deciding on the character’s morale, one of the d8’s has eight different DnD character classes on it, while the other one has eight different character races on it. It’s geared entirely to fourth edition (or the alignment die would’ve been a d10 to allow for the full alignment spectrum), but it fits the bill if I need to make a new character and don’t really know what to roll with.
The bag has a Sennheiser logo on it, which could be right, because I recently had to replace a set of Sennheiser earbuds. It probably came from that little set, and has worked quite well for me up until now. It actually held my travel set, until my chain mail bag came in.

Down one row, all the way to the left, is a giant set of green dice on a cream bag. I originally bought the dice because of the box it came in, which I needed to hold a particularly large miniature I was going to gift to one of my friends. It was slightly too large for the usual containers dice come in, so these came just at the right moment. I’ve used them only once, so far, though, and they didn’t exactly work out that time. Gave me a lot of low numbers on pretty crucial rolls, though I managed to drag myself out by the skin of my teeth.
The bag was actually included with my first-ever MP3-player, a Creative machine that served me quite well for over five years before, sadly, breaking down and having to be replaced. The bag was about the only one large enough to actually hold the comically oversized dice, so it was a natural choice for the dice.

The following set is a little special to me, being built specifically to accommodate my first ever DnD character, Nick Basel, the cleric of Avandra. There are three d20’s, one for Initiative, one for Skill Checks, and one for Attack Rolls. The one d8 is needed for roughly half his damaging powers and the one d10 is needed for his melee attacks with the Morning Star. The lonely d6 is for the other half of the damaging powers, and the double d6 is for his Healing Word power, which decides on the amount of extra health the power heals. The lonely d6 is actually an artefact from my very first polyhedral set and is one of three dice from that set that is actually still in use (the other two are the d10’s in the white bag I mentioned before).
The bag, I’m actually very disappointed in. It’s a felt bag with a red lining on the inside, but the bag is of a terribly low quality and the ropes holding it closed are unable to properly do so without tying a knot in it, which is a shame.

Almost there, the two red sets on the beige bag are actually used for wizard-like characters who, basically, are built to attack large amounts of enemies and thus benefit from the 2d20 die I’ve got down there, so that I can attack twice as much targets at once. These sets are… Rather undistinguished, with the two biggest points being the abovementioned 2d20 and the fact that the d10’s of the darker set are actually the dice I use for Dark Heresy, so that’s a thing.
The bag is, just like the one above, a bit of a disappointment. It didn’t take long for the ends of the ropes to start splitting and the image printed on the bag to wear down, so I’m a bit hesitant to actually keep using the bag. It’ll have to do for what it’s supposed to do, though.

The last bag is the large, blue bag that is absolutely littered with different coloured dice that don’t really seem to have any connection. That’s okay, because there’s really only one thing that’s keeping these dice together: they’re the rest. Everything that I once used, but opted not to use anymore, and was placed in this bag. It was once called – affectionately – the ‘fuck-off bag’, though I don’t think that’s the right name for it anymore. Right now, it’s really a bag I’m keeping around just in case. In case I need some extra dice, though that’s hardly ever an issue, or in case someone forgot theirs and they can take a grab. There’s only one really complete set in there, though, and that’s the precision set with the un-inked numerals. I’m thinking about inking those some day, so maybe that set might see some use again, some day. It was really used only once, but got retired really quickly when I found out how hard it was to read them.
I… Don’t really know where I got the bag, though. There’s no logo on it, no label (not even on the inside), and I couldn’t remember where it came from if I tried. For as far as I’m aware, it’s been in my room for a long while by now and it’s probably a relic from a time long past. It’s large, though, which is a boon when I’m trying to keep a lot of dice.

Finally, let’s not forget the three dice rings that are lying at the bottom left. Those are the result a Kickstarter I backed, some time ago, and I don’t really keep them in any kind of bag. One of them is an r20, one is an rDirection (having North, North-East, East, etc on them) and the last one is an rAlignment, having the nine alignments from chaotic to lawful and good to evil on them. The r20 gets the most use, which is probably expected, as it was the original product to be made with the Kickstarter, and it actually rolls pretty well and naturally. I really hope it won’t invalidate my other d20’s, though…

So, there you have it, my little dice collection that is soon going to get some extra’s, courtesy of The Dice Shop Online. It’ll be fun to see how that’s going to work out, because it’s going to be a doozy.