In the spirit of the recent facelifting I’ve been doing to some badly outdated portions of the site, I’ve re-designed the Bibliography page to be a little bit snazzier and a little bit more useful. Perhaps most notable, however, are the cover shots for all of the books I’ve written or contributed to:

City Supplement 1: Dweredell June 8th, 2007 Buy!

City Supplement 2: Aerie July 1st, 2007 Buy!

City Supplement 3: Anyoc October 20th, 2008 Buy!

There will probably be another revision of the Bibliography coming at some point down the road: The links to the Pyramid articles no longer work since Steve Jackson Games stopped hosting the old weekly version of the magazine; and at some point I really do need to get around to hosting my old RPGNet reviews on the Reviews page.

But I honestly have no idea when any of that will be resolved.

As I reviewed some of the older material while prepping this revision, I realized that some of it feels like a bit of a tease. For example, I wish that the adventures I wrote for Fantasy Flight’s Legends & Lairs were still available. But they are apparently almost impossible to track down. I’ve received several e-mails in the past asking me if I had any extra copies, and unfortunately, no, I don’t.

These were among my earliest published work, and although I still cringe occasionally when I read some of the prose in them, I’m still quite proud of them. The only one I really regret is The Wreyland Serpent, on which I blew my word count by producing something like 150% of the maximum content, which subsequently resulted in most of the really nice detail work I’d included being (rightfully) cut. Basically a complete meltdown by a neophyte freelancer. I frequently feel the urge to call Greg Benage (my editor on the project) and apologize all over again for the mess.

How does something like that happen? Basically you let your eyes get bigger than your stomach. You start with a nifty (but probably too complicated) concept:

The legendary exploits of the Wreyland Serpent have long passed from mouth to mouth, the stories finding their way from one mountain village to the next before finally filtering from there into the lowlands beyond. The dragon described in these legends, however, possesses a double-edge: In many accounts, the Serpent is vindicative, petty, and tyrannical – a terror to those who encounter him. In others, the Serpent is kind, helpful, and forgiving – a boon to those who cross his path.

In truth, the apparent duality of the Wreyland Serpent is due to the confused conflation of two separate dragons – Sul’tara’ha’berthur (the Serpent of Terror) and Al’aereyan’serul’il’taran (the Serpent of Peace) – into a single dragon.

Sul’tara’ha’berthur is a black dragon, born among the foothills of the Tuggorth Mountains five hundred years ago. His parents ruled their domain with an iron fist, and as Sul’tara grew older he also grew jealous of their power. When he was little more than a young adult, he attempted to overthrow and murder them. As a reward for his failure, he was nearly hunted down himself by his parents minions before fleeing west to the Wreyland Mountains a century ago.

Al’aereyan’serul’il’taran, on the other hand, is a gold dragon from the lands of the Talundin Estuary. Nearly three centuries ago, Al’aereyan earned the enmity of a Dragon Witch through actions which have been forgotten by all but the oldest of creatures. As a punishment, the Witch placed a curse upon him – causing his golden scales to tarnish. (Although the result does not make Al’aereyan appear as a true black dragon, the result is close enough that the two dragons can easily be confused for each by those with little experience in the manner.) Shortly after receiving the curse, Al’aereyan left Talundin, and journeyed to the western mountains – where he has spent the past three hundred years atoning for whatever misdeeds he may have committed in his untempered youth.

And then you try to flesh it out with details on the local protectorate; a princess in distress; warring colonies of living silver and gold; details on a mining village; and two separate dungeon complexes…

Which is right around the time that you remember that you can’t actually do all of that in 15 pages, no matter how much you might pride yourself on squeezing a maximum amount of content into a minimum amount of space. But it’s too late now because everything you’ve written depends on all the other parts of the adventure’s structure, and there’s probably a way to cut it and rewrite it, but your deadline is looming and–

Kaboom.

Freelance writing: Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes its a car crash. Not infrequently, it’s both.

Several months ago, Kynnin Scott sent me a very nice e-mail requesting that I change my RSS links for the website so that they point to the archived versions of the articles. I put that on a checklist of things to accomplish and promptly procrastinated it to death.

And then a few days ago Jalapeno Dude posted a comment pointing out that some RSS readers (including his) didn’t recognize the anchor-based links as being distinct links — instead it noted that Jalapeno Dude had already read “index.html” and marked each new feed item as already read.

Jalapeno Dude asked me to have the RSS feed link to the individual articles on separate pages. This, unfortunatley, isn’t technically feasible at the moment. Most of these daily entries simply do not exist as individual webpages.

But what I can do is finally get around to implementing Kynnin Scott’s request. So, as of yesterday, the RSS feed links now point to the permanent archive pages. I’m afraid those of you with readers similar to Jalapeno Dude’s will still have multiple entries show up as “already read”, but you will at least get pinged whenever a new archive page is initiated.

However, since the RSS feed will now be pushing readers into the archives (instead of the front page), the new archive pages will feature increased advertising. (Roughly equivalent to the front page.)

Which allows me to address another semi-frequent topic of e-mail: “How can I support the site?” or “Where’s your Paypal tip jar?”

I don’t have a Paypal tip jar (and probably won’t have one any time soon), but thank you for asking. If you want to send me a tip, it’s just as productive to buy one of my products linked to on the left. Dream Machine Productions features RPG supplements and audio books ranging in price from $2 to $20. And it’s even better than tipping, because you get a nifty RPG supplement out of the deal!

If you don’t want any of my books, but you still want to support the site, then you might consider clicking through my Amazon associate links. Many of the books I talk about get linked to through associate links. (For example, if you were to buy a Kindle through my associate link, you’d be taking care of my hosting fees for half a year or more.) But even if you aren’t interested in the specific books I’m linking to, if you click through the link before completing any order with Amazon, the site garners a small commission from the sale.

Okay, that’s enough site maintenance jabber. Tomorrow we’ll pick up with more content that you actually care about.

Boom de yada!

Sorry the website hasn’t been getting the proper TLC. My attention has been almost wholly consumed — albeit divided — between (a) working on my new house and (b) the production of The Seagull I’m directing at South High School in Minneapolis.

South High is my alma mater, and under the guidance of Louise Bormann it has had a consistently excellent theater department. I feel very honored to be serving as a guest director. For The Seagull I started by producing a completely original proxy translation of the play, and am now embroiled in the actual directing of the play — which also includes developing in-depth acting workshops for the actors.

I keep expecting to be able to get a few days ahead in my prep work for the project and, thus, find the time to work on other projects. But that hasn’t actually happened yet.

And I’m still stuck working off my laptop… which is a perfectly nice computer, but has only a fraction of the software I use to keep this website properly up to date.

Soon, however, I’m hoping to have things back to normal.

Thanks for your patience.

Enjoy the holiday made for geeky gamers.

The site hasn’t been updated in about a week and probably will only update sporadically over the next few days. After that I’m hoping to be able to push more reliable content through the pipeline.

The short version of what’s going in is pretty simple: I bought a house. I expected to have my primary computer — the one I use ot update this site — set back up pretty rapidly after the move, but that hasn’t happened. So I’m kinda hacking together an update method.

During this interim period, new content may (or may not) appear on the front page, but the archives will not be getting updated.

The Alexandrian is meant to be a place for sharing and promoting my creative work, reviews, and political thoughts, so I don’t generally do auto-biographical blogging. It’s not that I’m a necessarily private person — it’s just that this isn’t particularly the place for it.

But today I’m making an exception because, as life is often wont to do, I’m facing some hardships that are affecting my creative work.

To whit: I have Lyme disease.

I went symptomatic a couple of weeks ago and promptly went down to the local clinic. I’ve been getting dosed with amoxicillin (among other things) and I thought I would be able to kind of push my way through it.

But no such luck. My brain has been just slightly discombobulated enough to make writing difficult or impossible. Because I’ll have bad days and not-so-bad days, I’ve even had problems getting the Playtesting 4th Edition essays I had written before I went symptomatic posted on a consistent basis. (Although that’s at least partly because I’m still getting used to the new suite of software I’m using to update the website due to the computer crash I suffered near the beginning of the month.)

In short, July has been a pretty sucky month for me.

If I was a suspicious fellow, I’d say that Fate was punishing me for announcing a release date for Legends & Labyrinths. After having several products run into horrible development problems shortly after having release dates announced for them, when I started Dream Machine Productions I decided to never announce a project’s existence until it was completely finished and ready to be published.

I’ve broken that rule twice — once in a minor way and once in a major way (with L&L). Both times the project has ended up being delayed past the original release date (once because of factors completely external from myself and, now, because I haven’t finished the work).

Legends & Labyrinths will be released when it’s done (and done right). But I’m not going to make any promises about when that will be. Heck, until I’m actually feeling better I can’t even estimate when that will be.

Updates on the website are also likely to slow down once I get past the material I’ve already prepped. (Although I’m hoping fervently that I will actually be feeling better before that happens.)