• Taking a break from thinking about Pathfinder and Covid recently, to do a bit of design work. I have been looking for ways to re-organize and improve my storage for X-Wing pieces and parts, and been browsing the various sites for 3d printing options. For tokens, I am working on a design that collects them all together, along with the damage deck, and fits within the profile of a Stanley storage box. My current method uses the same Stanley, but uses all the miscellaneous small boxes. Since most games really do not need every token of each type, but do…

  • One issue I have had off and on in different campaigns has been and continues to be Alignment – a rare difficult concept for many players, and a frequent area of friction in a story. Although different games have attempted to define it more or less carefully, the traditional values of Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, or Neutral Evil (and other combinations) eventually lead to disagreement. With large groups (of which both of my current campaigns are), these issues are accentuated. With the release of Paizo’s Gamemastery Guide (Archives of Nethys Reference), they have a couple of alternative options, some of…

  • Yesterday was our latest RPG session, continuing our use of Fantasy Grounds for a virtual tabletop. Of note, this was the second session after switching back to Fantasy Grounds Classic on Friday (following several performance issues with Unity). Fortunately, the software was much more stable, and at least from my view, more responsive. Unfortunately, the session itself was rather rough – though primarily a factor of my own lack of preparation, and the repetitive nature of the storyline. Most of the current story is around the group traveling in a sandbox-format exploration, seeking out and eliminating magic dragon pillars. As…

  • Episode 4 of the 2nd Chapter (Cult of Cinders) of our Age of Ashes campaign is being released now on YouTube. If you are a supporter on Patreon, you can view the content up to two weeks early. Otherwise, the content will be released in pieces over the next couple of weeks. This particular session was the Battle of the Cinderclaw mine, which was started during the prior episode, and ran for two additional sessions (counting a bonus one for the group). As a result, there was a lot of content to trim down, though the final length is relatively…

  • For the last few years, my focus on publishing gaming sessions has been on YouTube content, slowly trying to build an audience (or at least learn how to edit and create content). Near the beginning on this journey, I dabbled a bit in podcast formats, specifically audio only versions of the game sessions. These tends to be far smaller, faster to edit, and relatively easy to create once I have the final video files. However, it was also a step that I ended up dropping since it didn’t seem like much of an audience with the growth of YouTube and…

  • I haven’t posted about my media server and file server in a long time, which is an indication of just how out of date the current software is. In truth, it has been running fine, so there was little reason to upgrade. And the last time I tried a major update, everything crashed and had to be rebuilt. Hopefully, by the time this posts, the current update will be completed successfully. I am upgrading from v11.2u6 (released mid-2019) to the latest v11.3u2 (released early April 2020). For our system, this is mainly a compatibility update – I still don’t have…

  • So realizing at this point that trying to fit in a second Age of Ashes session, and include the content in my usual editing sequence, was a mistake. This is also a good indication that any thoughts of publishing two campaigns at the same time should likely be squashed as well. It doesn’t help that due to a “proactive” change in the recording format, I had a lot of additional rendering time for the relatively simple video files. Functionally, a normal 5 hour game session occupies about a week of my spare time to edit, trim, adjust, and process, before…

  • Thus far, we have completed 5 sessions of Pathfinder 2e, utilizing the Fantasy Grounds Unity virtual tabletop. In full defense of the application, it is considered pre-release, so I don’t really expect it to run smoothly. Most of the games (other than expected group technical learning) have been very successful – everyone has quickly adapted and learned the basic of the program. However, the Unity version continues to be hampered by slow performance likely increased due to our large group sizes. At times, opening a item list, or referencing a spell can pause the windows for many seconds, and with…