Monday, March 21, 2022

A Change in the Life

 So, long-term readers (both of you) may have noticed that I rarely talk about my personal life up here on Grubb Street. Yeah, I talk about the effects of the recent pandemic on our daily lives, and often talk about the weather, the seasons, and local wildlife. Sometimes I talk about food. Sometimes I talk about adventures with the Lovely Bride But mostly it is book reviews, theater reviews, collectible quarters, and the ongoing saga that is local politics. I know, boring stuff.

However, it this is a good place to mention a major change in my life. As of last Friday, I am no longer with Amazon Games. It was a good run, and really like the people I was working with and the projects I have contributed to. I have great hopes that the current project I left will be a smashing success. You want any gossip, the deal is you have to buy me a beer. Several beers. 

As of today, I have joined Tempo Games, and am working on The Bazaar, and new game they have under development. I remain a Senior Narrative Designer, responsible for sorting out the lore and minimizing the typos. My new team includes a lot of new folk, but also a lot of veterans I have worked with before at ArenaNet and Amazon Games. I'm looking forward to it, and not just because I spent the bulk of the afternoon playing the game intensely. I like it, and I think a lot of other people will like it as well.

I am also serving as a design consultant on a new RPG called Everyday Heroes. A descendent of D20 Modern brought up to date for the 5th Edition, I serve as the "old guy" walking around behind the others and giving various warnings about how we used to do things. I am not the primary designer - those roles are Sig Trent and Chris "Goober" Ramslay, and they're doing a bang-up job. But beyond that, I will say nothing (OK, there's a Kickstarter coming. There. You happy?)

And that's about it for right now. I didn't have a lot to say about what I was working on before, and probably will not have a lot to say about it right now. And a big part of it is that most of what I am working on is "in process", which means it can change, evolve, revise and otherwise mutate between now and when it seems like the light of day, and I don't want to say things on Monday I will have to correct on Friday.

Back in the old days, before everyone carried a recording device in their pocket, the TSR gang could go to GenCon and say any number of things to small rooms of people, confident that we would not be called upon to make corrections when things changed. And often, things WOULD change after we talked about them, because our bosses would ALSO be at those conventions and listen to a lot of fans about what THEY would want us to do. Such things are a part of the past, since we live in a real-time world these days, so I will wait until the cake is done and iced before inviting everyone in for a slice.

That's about it. It's a new adventure, and I am looking forward to it.

More later,