End of February report

My arm has recovered quite a bit! It’s functional, but it’s not quite back to the pain-free strength that it had before. My infection (or, perhaps, the symptoms left behind by the infection) hasn’t quite resolved yet, however. I went through another round of antibiotics and painkillers, and I am waiting to see if the discomfort and pain continue to go away or… if they don’t.

Also, the GURPS stuff report has changed to RPG stuff report because I foresee talking about other RPGs as well. I have a couple in mind, but I don’t want to jump the gun.

Conlang stuff report

Even as my arm was still not doing so hot, I was still working hard on my conlang. With help from the internet in creating a macro for Excel, I got a nice database of disyllabic roots running.

• Range A is a bank of possible (according to the rules of my language) disyllabic roots. I generated this using Zompist’s Gen.
• Range B is where I input the roots I have chosen.
• Range C is a bank of roots that conflict with the roots in Range B. I also generated this using Gen with some really roundabout tricks.
• Rule 1: If a cell appears in Range A and Range C, it is highlighted yellow.
• Rule 2: If a cell appears in Range A and Range B, it is highlighted green.
• Rule 3: If a cell appears in Range B more than twice, it is highlighted red.
• Rule 4: If I a cell appears in Range B and Range C, it is highlighted red.
• Rule 5: Otherwise, a cell should not be highlighted.

Thus, any white cells in Range A were roots that could still be used because they didn’t conflict with anything else. Even though the highlighting was all done by a macro, there was still a significant portion of manual work that took a few hours. Much more time went into figuring out how to get the most efficient set of disyllabic roots. By that, I mean that I had to figure out how to get as many roots as possible that didn’t conflict with each other from the total bank of possible roots. It always comes back to Hamming Distance!

I’ll share much more about this soon.

RPG stuff report

Over the past couple of weeks, I have started to work on a very loose and flexible magic system that I think is good enough. Ritual Path Magic is loose and flexible, but it is slow and uses a whole new system. Divine Favor has flexibility built in with its prayer system, but it’s way too expensive and it doesn’t focus on flexibility. Sorcery has the same advantages and disadvantages of Divine Favor, though I do like it a bunch more. I based my system off of Wildcard Powers from GURPS Supers, but I’ll talk about it in much more detail soon.

Two more things. First, I just want to say that GURPS Transhuman Space is really cool. Second, I’m a bit late, but I just discovered The Path of Cunning, which is a new (and free!) fan-zine for GURPS content that is doing a good job at slowly filling the void left behind by the discontinuation of Pyramid #3. I’d love to hop on that in its infancy and review the zines as they come out. And—who knows—maybe even try to submit something one of these days. In fact, maybe that flexible magic system is just the thing.

Writing stuff report

I wrote a couple of short vignettes for fun. I dove into some stuff about Gnosticism for inspiration. I also toyed around with some new ideas for my main stories. That’s about it.