That year resulted in 13 posts on this blog, bringing it to a total of 129. I took quite a lengthy hiatus from May through the rest of the year. It seems gaps has become something of a norm. Work and other obligations don't help those numbers any - but I am still here, and I did write behind the scenes here and again for the duration of that span.
To My Readers
Thanks to all who are still regular readers of this increasingly irregularly updated blog. I have, over the last year, gotten inquiries from various interested parties about some of what I've done, and a few irregulars have claimed to use some things in part or in whole in their campaigns - which is awesome! They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that. Me, I'll settle for basic Q&A!Things of Note in 2018
I don't believe I wrote anything particularly noteworthy this year. I did not pass any milestones, create ground-breaking content, or anything like that - just wrote a few articles. Not an effusion of writing this year, but I got some things done - mostly revolving around my GURPS: Tiberian Dawn project that I kicked off ages ago. I almost entirely focused on the Brotherhood of Nod faction this time around, balancing them out a bit with what I have for GDI. Some miscellaneous tidbits unrelated to that project made their way out, as well.GURPS: Tiberian Dawn
The Brotherhood got further support this year past with the introduction of Akrav, my over-explanation of their hand-to-hand combat system. Built in the general style we saw introduced in GURPS: Martial Arts, it plays contrast to GDI's combatives system, introduced three years ago. Which one's the better method? Well, you decide!
Related to the above, I did do an exposé on the state of Combatives training within GDI at the onset of the war - I've eluded to its generally poor quality a few times, but there I expand on what I mean and who still trains hand-to-hand when conflict erupts in 1999.
The Brotherhood's material was improved even further with two more practical entries. In the first, I finally expand on my M24 Chaffee article from 2017 to present Nod's "Rekeb" - a modernized variant of the tank that they deploy in droves during the First Tiberium War. In the latter, I give Nod something that can actually do real harm to GDI's heavier armor - the Gen 1 Obelisk of Light.
The former wasn't too bad, I think, though the latter felt rougher and less complete. The Obelisk is the first time I've done an energy weapon in GURPS, but it likely wont be the last!
To round up all of the blog entries that are related to the GURPS: Tiberian Dawn project, I actually deployed a "hub" page, which you can reach through a link in the blog's banner-bar. This hub is less comprehensive than I'd wanted originally, but it gathers up all of the various articles that I have written in support of this endeavor - and there's a fair number of them, really.
Overall, this project is fun but fatiguing. I do not think I will completely abandon it, though output may slow down. More content is in the works, though I believe for a while I may try to focus on more broadly interesting subjects, ones that may be applicable to more than just specifically the Tiberian Dawn universe. I have already partially completed a series on some of GDI's advanced infantry forces, for instance, which may come out in 2019.
Other Stuff
I wrote an article for one of the r/GURPS contests - a martial monk. This was a fairly quick creation, as I didn't see the contest's post until it was nearly over, but it meets the requirements and subverts expectations a little. Could be a character concept worth revisiting. Little seems to come from those contests - little to no discussion, no selection of "winners" or critiques or anything - so I don't really keep up with them much.
I also revisited an old draft article from some of the earliest days of the blog - one which addresses a spell from Diablo 2 - and published that. In the process, I found a small "blind spot" in the Powers ruleset. Ages ago, I had thought to do a D2 campaign in GURPS but I never followed through with it; while it might be kind of interesting, I suspect that would require a crew of folks who are very much inclined to do some of their own mechanical work with Powers and such - a population I don't have available. A campaign based on the more simple Diablo 1 would be better for relative newcomers, should I ever have cause to run it.
Lastly, I did a little bit of wargaming this year, as hinted at in the 2017 year in review. Very briefly, there was a campaign game for This is Not a Test run not too terribly far up the road from me. It was hosted by the creator of TNT himself and populated by a number of the guys who did the system's play testing as well. I didn't hear about the campaign until only a week before it kicked off, so I threw together an army that had been a "work in progress" since I first heard about the game, slapped some paint on them, and marched out. I only got three games in with that crew - one pre-campaign special scenario and then two campaign games, as detailed in the linked post. It seems like the campaign fell apart not long after, and the coordination page we had up fell silent - unfortunate, as I rather enjoyed that group. Such is the way of things.
I did improve the painting and basing job on samurai figures from that post - I'm planning to actually replace them with some similar figs from the Perry Brothers sometime in or about 2019, since my painting skills seem to be improving a little from what those started out with. I am considering putting together a local demo day at the games store here, but I'll need to finish other armies first - which is something in progress, with one of the three armies I plan to use for demo games completed so far. I plan to share these once I've got a better photography setup - not something I do often, so photo quality is a bit suspect.
Background Noise
Some time ago, I eluded to casting the GURPS: Tiberian Dawn project into a wargame type setting. This makes a lot of sense as Real Time Strategy games have much in common with table top wargames. True to it, I actually did tinker around with the idea this year - I even set up an as-yet unpublished hub page for it. The system selected for this initiative was Force on Force. I have never played that system, but I have some of the rulebooks and quite like what I see. The system is a bit like GURPS in that the base rules are pretty simple, but you can expand on them considerably through the use of various optional and special rules if you so choose. I probably will publish material for this in 2019 - it was promising but there wasn't enough time to properly address it this year. It will be a far simpler process to render the game in this rules than GURPS - instead of a lengthy, crunchy article with charts detailing something like the kinds of ballistic filler and plate inserts a GURPS character can use in the service of Nod or GDI, it just shows up as something like "2D" or "1D (Frag)". This is just another theory project (and excuse to collect miniatures) - there are no Force on Force players here - but it may be interesting to others online. The biggest holdup, I've found, is actually formatting related - once I work out those details on how I want to organize and present the data, I should be good to go.
Good old d20 Modern graced my drafts section again, for the first time in a while. Sometime earlier in the year I started putting together an encounter set in the This is Not a Test universe, but that fell off the radar before it was fully fleshed out. Sometime in September, I was suddenly and briefly inspired to do a few strung-along encounters set in the Half Life 2 game setting, again using d20 Modern as the rules. That I actually did some work for - no encounters, but I did make enemies for prospective players to fight and get a handle on available equipment. Lost that muse and moved on, however, but it may eventually make its way out to the light of day when the whim strikes me again.
The HL2 d20 Modern dive did lead to me realizing an odd incongruity in d20 Modern's armor section, though. It turns out medieval plate armor was somehow more bullet resistant than a modern ballistic vest - I wrote up a set of houserules to fix this but I never quite got the flow right. A simplified model may come to light in the future. I'm not really sure just how useful it would be to anyone, though - the game has a pretty dedicated fanbase online, but we're talking about something over 16 years old at this point (and it was never very popular to begin with). Even those guys are moving on, bit by bit.
My Impression of 2018 at CL&CC
Since about June I've generally preferred the brush to the blog, knocking out a small collection of Raiders for a future This is Not a Test warband - one of the several I mentioned having planned. I have also gotten around to working on figures for Necromunda - which I picked in November of 2017 and only really got around to beginning painting in July 2018 - still not finished with those, actually.
I also started to do some living history activities, having acquired kit and started attending events. I'm not sure any of that will ever make it to the blog, though maybe I'll use it as inspiration for a GURPS character sometime, or to opine on equipment loadouts.
Of all works this year, the Obelisk of Light article drew in the most views at over 3,400 - which still falls well short of the all-time champion at just over 17,800. Boggles the mind. My personal favorite article would be the one on Akrav - Martial Arts stuff is pretty fun to write about, even if it is likely quite marginal in the subject setting. Close second would probably be the Rekeb article.
CL&CC Goals for 2019
I don't really have any specific goals this year. I'll continue to hack away at whatever draft or another that strikes my fancy over the course of the year, but I'm not committed to any one project. I will probably roll out some Force on Force: Tiberian Dawn pages, since they're relatively simple and the idea still novel to me. Some of these are part way done; last I worked on it, I was mostly just working out how I wanted to format and present everything - tables and lengthy lists never quite look right on my blog. Subsequently, you may see more of that and other wargames-related things here in the future.GURPS-wise (the thing most of you are here for), I'm actually considering another vehicle or two this year. I've had more than a few on the back-burner just kind of waiting for GURPS: Vehicles (4e) to release so they could be all proper-like...but let's be real, I don't think that's ever coming. The big one is another real-world tank - just need to gather up the requisite materials and field manuals so I can make the article way, way more involved than it has any need to be.
Closing
Chain Link and Concrete is not a dead blog, but it is a sluggish one. I really do have other going-ons that leave less time and energy for making content here. I could always make time, of course - I'm nowhere near as busy as some of the great GURPS bloggers like Douglas Cole or Peter Dell'Orto - but I'm just not that good at managing it all, I suppose. The drive and energy has just shifted away from the usual, here, and I'm less willing to spend hours at a stretch like I used to. I was never a fast writer, and for quite a while now my focus has been on publishing a "product" of some form rather than just making a post - this is why I don't do work in progress updates or don't often share minor things like pictures of finished miniatures or terrain (we have better media for that).I also don't really have anyone to personally interact with on these sorts of things - I know no GURPS folk in person, nor any roleplayers in general these days; indeed, it has been some four years since I've run a game, and everything since has just been a passion project. That's not the end of the world, but sometimes the lack of interaction tempers the passion a bit.
We'll see what tomorrow brings.
Thanks for reading!
Cheers!
0 Yorumlar