A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

Apologies for long delays between posts; recent events have kept me distracted and busy.  Perhaps most significant of those is that I signed a contract as a contributor to Ulisses Spiele 's Torg Eternity line.  I'm not going to get into details on that, but it turns out that an eclectic skillset, and knowing someone interested, turns you into an RPG author.  That has been occupying much of the runtime that this blog had been. The other significant-to-me development is that there's an aikido group on the north side of Austin that includes, among its other activities, Yagyū shinkage-ryū lessons (and, since the Yagyū family's involvement in the school, never mind the school's existence, predates 1600, that makes this an A&S post!).  The irony of this is that the park where most of those lessons take place is the same park where Austin's SCA group, the Barony of Bryn Gwlad, does most of their combat practices, and it is theoretically possible, if BG ever holds ...

TORG (short for That Other Role-Playing Game) is a kitchen-sink RPG developed by West End Games in the early '90s, famous for a high concept and a terrible execution.  It was picked up a few years ago by Ulisses Spiele and re-released as TORG Eternity , a vast improvement on the ruleset - as in, it was actually playable and doesn't require a slide rule or abacus.  Because I don't generally deal in negative examples, I won't spend a lot of time on my problems with old TORG, but please believe me when I say that Eternity is a massive improvement that makes the Possibility Wars actually possible.  Because TORG is not a household name, I think it needs some background description before I get into why this is on my mind. The Possibility Wars are a central conceit of TORG - the idea that there are an infinite number of possible worlds, and that the force of those possibilities power reality.  There are Sinister Forces (tm) who wish to siphon that possibility energy for t...