Blaugust: It’s Blog + August

There’s a “thing” called love Blaugust, which is, as far as I can tell, a community-driven initiative to encourage humans to blog often throughout August. There’s an announcement post for it, here, and also fyr.io mentioned it. I actually read fyr’s post yesterday, shortly after I had rambled my way through my first Skyrim post about DAc0da. It inspired me to give it a go. I’ve long wanted to write more, mostly as a means to catalog some ideas and also to keep tabs on my progress. Though, sometimes in the hopes it finds others who share an interest, and perhaps they reach out. Conversations, connections, community - all that jazz. There are actually some communities setup around Blaugust, such as a Discord and I think a forum, but I’m not interested in all that just yet. I know I just said I’m interested in community and what not, but joining a Discord related to writing blog posts feels like a very convenient way to convince myself I’m “doing the thing”, while not actually doing the thing.

Or maybe I’m just nervous to join, or feel unwelcomed pre-emptively, or don’t quite feel like “the proper type of person” to join. All of those sounds like silly little reasons I’d avoid something. Very silly indeed. For now, let’s put them aside.

Instead, I want to ramble a bit about some writing things that I want to approach during August.

Ramble 1: Scion

There’s an older TTRPG called Scion. Some friends and I played it while I was in college (20 years ago…), and it always brings back great memories. My friend Chris was a big driving force behind the game, both running it and encouraging others to run it. I never ran a game myself, but I definitely enjoyed playing in them.

Scion is a game in which the player characters are divine offspring of gods. Mythological gods, like the Greek gods, or the Hindu “gods” (which, some liberties are taken, and it’s more like the “Greatest Hits” of the Hindu gods; similar with Japanese gods). In any case, each character receives divine gifts, and with them and the divine guidance of NPCs or allies, you pursue a goal. The kinda “meta-goal” being to achieve divinity, which is the super cool word apotheosis. A word I learned from Daggerfall - not playing it, mind you, but watching someone play it (Grimith, specifically!), and only like 2 years ago. I’m sure it’s in the Scion books somewhere, too.

Regardless, you make cool characters, go on cool adventures; good times, great oldies. What I have not done, at least not in any significant capacity, is run a game. I’ve had a friend voice interest in playing Scion, and it wouldn’t be hard to get some other friends together, aside from the perpetual final boss of tabletop. And thus, a thing I want to write down in August: the idea and some explorations of a Scion game I would like to eventually run. I’m all but certain nobody I know reads my posts, so I’m none too worried about spoilers. How lucky.

Ramble 2: Skyrim

I already wrote part 1! There are so many more adventures for Watches-The-World (that’s my character; she’s an argonian!) and I look forward to gushing more about Vicn’s next several mods, and maybe other authors’ as well!

Ramble 3: Game-Dev

Since I was laid-off a few years ago, I’ve spent a decent amount of time pursuing the original reason I went to school: game development. I never did game-dev professionally, and really never programmed any of the ideas I’d come up with over the years, until I had free time. A blessing, and a curse. Burnout is fun.

In any case, I’ve got a few games in the pipeline, so to speak, and I want to at least explore some of my development ideas and approaches, and also do some development!

Ramble On

Maybe other stuff too, who knows! I certainly don’t. Heck, I might write all this today and completely forget about my blog again for 6 months.

Only time will tell!