¦ dialling in from the Sky Bunker ¦
16:12 GMT, Sunday 29th March 2009. Bright sunlight squeezes through the gaps between the cardboard shutters and the frame of glass canopy above my head. "Time to Fly" by SYNTAX is playing by choice. Beautiful and blissful sounds. Matching my mood for this day.
I had a long lie-in this morning...after falling asleep on the sofa last night, lying in front of the roaring fire... flickering flames dancing through the blood red veil of my eyelids, sound of logs cracking and spitting. It's been a full-on week and I needed the rest. Just before noon I jumped into Swampy and nosed her down the steep roads leading to the river near my house. Parked up and did the walk, SYNTAX in my earphones. Wow. I'm going to call it the post-apocalyptic walk. It's brilliant. This is the route I discovered last weekend - go figure, I've been living here for over 2 years now. For long periods of time you're utterly alone, walking through terrain that is wild despite being tamed... it is decidedly eerie in spots, terrain that reminds me of the landscape West of Boston MA (I drove there in the year 2000 on the hunt for mythical Dunwich...or the area I felt Dunwich could be based on). There's crumbling 18th century ruins barely breathing through the dense tangles of vines and trees pressing up against them...and weird 20th century industrial components jutting out at random points, walls of dirty concrete daubed in sun-bleached graffiti. Walking by the edge of the river you can gaze across to the line of the vertical cliffs keeping pace with you, or sometimes find yourself dwarfed by the nearly vertical hillside looming close to you, looking up you see trees growing out at angles rather than straight-up, so that they're actually hanging over you... if their roots gave way they wouldn't topple, they'd drop straight down onto you.
Yesterday was a Yellow Dawn session and the team reached a concluding moment of Shadows of the Quantinex . They'd discovered the truth behind what caused Yellow Dawn to happen; defeated the major risks to the world, humanity and the universe, and delivered justice upon the malefactors... only to discover a separate threat: it's down to them to decide whether they're going to try and tackle it, but leaving it and walking away poses no direct threat to the world. However, as Jean-Luc Korda has pointed out, the only risks now remaining... are to them. The surviving bad guys might yet still decide to go after them out of revenge. The team have been playing "Shadows..." for over a year now. When I wrote "Shadows..."I set out to create a story as large and enjoyable as Masks of Nyarlathotep was for me (back when I was 16). I think I've succeeded. I certainly hope I have. The campaign book is still available only in Beta, (version 8 now). I'll leave it in Beta until the team has written up feedback: what went wrong, what can be improved, what went right, and I've had a chance to update the final version ready to publish and promote.
Work tomorrow, and a chance to put into practice the new knowledge I've had iron-branded into my brain during last week's course.
Djr