Sorry for the lack of posts; lots of stuff going on here at Skortched Urf’ Studios HQ!

I picked up the new motorcycle on Friday.  (My first ever brand new vehicle!)  For the first 500 miles you have to keep it under 6,000 RPM’s to break the engine in.  So I have been driving it like a granny; as I can only go about 70mph max speed to keep it under that RPM range.  That’s plenty for around town but on the freeway you had better be in the slow lane at that speed.  So far I am loving it, and the ability to use HOV lanes coming to work saves me scads of time from the new house.  I’ll have 500 miles on it later today, after my commute home from work.

I also sold the Yamaha motorcycle to a local guy; we got to talking last night and he asked me where my bike went.  (I moved it to the new house, so it was no longer parked at our old residence; which is why he asked.)  He agreed to buy it, so we are either going to ‘do the deal’ later tonight or this weekend.  I kind of wanted to keep it as a “project bike” but I can sure use the cash more than I can use another project to work on! My wife dug out the title early this morning so I am ready whenever he is.

My parents came down to see the new house on Monday, so my wife and I spent all weekend working on the house to get it in as good a shape as we could manage.  We really made some headway.  I added some shelves to the new office, hung some pictures, a huge mirror and a clock, cleaned and organized stuff into the various rooms etc.  Last night I used the wood shop at my old residence to cut a bunch of plywood strips that will be the basis for tons of shelving in the garage.

As a side note, my old residence was an apartment inside a local High School!  My wife and I were Security Residents with the local county school system.  We got a small apartment to stay in for free in exchange for checking the doors and windows each night and being on site to respond to alarms, while keeping our full-time “day jobs”.  It was this arrangement that allowed us to A) buy our house in the first place and B) funnel money into my publishing business to get it off the ground.  It has been a very fun experience, though I will have to admit I have lost a lot of sleep in the past three years! I called it my seven-hundred and fifty-thousand square foot one-bedroom apartment; complete with a wood shop, gym, track, library, auditorium and tennis courts. Last Thanksgiving we had over fifty people in for dinner; we put several long cafeteria tables together and fit everyone at the same table.  We also used the home economics room (with four complete mini-kitchens!) to prepare our turkey and several other dishes. It has been a very fun experience, but we needed more space and it was time to move on.  I will miss the free rent though!

Monday we also stopped by the local furniture store to take advantage of the Labor Day sale.  We bought the living room and dining room set my wife was in love with, and it should be here in about a week.  That means for the next week I need to finish up the main level in anticipation; paint the chair rail I hung last week and vacuum/steam clean the carpet on that level, move all the junk that we have been storing there etc.

I see that several new people have posted ads on BitzBox.com!  Not many, but a few.  The site is slower to take off than I had hoped, but I still firmly believe it is a solid execution of a great idea.

We played our Star Wars Saga Edition RPG on Saturday.  It was a BLAST!  I rode the new motorcycle over there early in the morning since we all needed to make some changes to our characters since the KOTR source book was released. I was driving down the George Washington Parkway by Mount Vernon on a beautiful Saturday morning, stopped off for breakfast and was at my friends by 9:30am.  He is really putting a lot of effort into the campaign, and as Sith we are having a blast.

Our Comcast cable sucks.  The internet keeps crapping out, and on the DVR downstairs all the channels over 100 have no sound.  My wife was unable to attend her online class for her Masters program Tuesday night.  We’re done with them.  I got an offer in the mail for Verizon Fios; the fiber-optic service that does TV, Internet and phone.  They are coming on the 16th to install it.  I mean my wife NEEDS to connect to take her classes, and I am running an online publishing business so I can’t afford to mess around with high speed internet that…well…isn’t.

Which brings us to the publishing front.  I am almost done with  the Psi-Watch Flash flip book.  Once that’s done I’ll post it for sale.  (With luck later today.)  We have plenty of releases on deck and lined up right behind that one too.   Of course we are all still waiting for the revised GSL to see what will happen in October to the overall electronic RPG market.  I don’t think it will be quite the “gold rush” that 3.5 was; not even close if I guess right.  (But what do I know?)

So we got the Wizards of Shadowfell out and people seem to really like it.  (Aside from some slight confusion about the name, apparently some other company has something out with Shadowfell in the title.)

Next up is Chris Fields homage to early Image comics; the Psi-Watch Camapign setting!  I expect that to hit this weekend. We have several other releases lined up right behind that one as well. Chris has been busy like a mad-man and I have a stack of PDF’s ready to go.

Lots going on here at Skortched Urf’ Studios HQ.  Someone backed into my Yamaha motorcycle and did some minor cosmetic damage to it.  (Cracked front fairing, busted off rear view mirror, bent fairing stay bars.) He left a note, and has agreed to pay me some cash to replace the parts, which is nice.  I’ve decided to sell that bike and get a new one.  Monday I went to the bike shop during lunch and put a deposit on this baby:

They had it in stock, but at the warehouse.  It is being readied for me to ride it out of the dealership as we speak!  I will go to the dealership tonight and crunch the numbers.  We still need to work out the final sale price.  The sale of the Yamaha will give the the down payment on this one. I want to ride it to my friends house Saturday morning for our next Star Wars Saga Edition RPG session.  I found the same bike at another shop so there are a few out there.  I also saw two on eBay and printed out a copy of the dealer price so I have the ammo I need to get a good price on it. I plan to take delivery tomorow.

I was off work yesterday to handle a ton of errands that needed doing; daughter to a dental appointment, license renewed at the DMV with the new house address, turned in the cable TV boxes from the old place and picked up a couple new ones for the house, dropped the other mototcycle off at the shop for a safety inspection and some new tires, cleaned some more stuff out of our old place etc.  (I’ll be oficially out of the old place next Friday; then I’ll be living at the new house full-time.  Yay, I get to actually live with my wife again!)

I got my DVD copy of the movie Gamers: Dorkness Rising this week as well.  I’ve seen it twice with my daughter and its her new favorite movie.  If you are a gamer you need to check this movie out!

Some fun non-spoiler quotes from the movie:

“As if killing the Bard impresses us!”

“I waste him with my crossbow!”

“Everything is better with Pirates.”

“Q. Are you paying attention? A. Oh God Yes.”

“Waffles Ho!”

“You have to admit, that landelin is quite persuasive.”

“Man, Bards Suck!”

First up, we just released the Wizards of Shadowfell PDF after a long gap in our release schedule.

Look for more releases to folow right on the heels of this PDF.  To get things moving a bit faster I had Daniel Perez (High Moon Media) help with the layout. I am still buried under a massive To-Do list at the new house, so he really helped get this one out the door.

One thing I noticed and thought I would comment on.  Flip-Book previews.  When I started doing them people liked them a lot.  OBS jumped on board and implemented the feature so you don’t even have to code any HTML or configure an XML script.  (Which I do for all my previews; it gives me greater control but the OBS solution is a cake walk to use.)  So OBS has this great feature and I never see anyone using more than a page or two in the preview.  Why?  I let people see each and every page; just like a real bookstore where you can flip through a book before you buy it.  I was checking out a couple of products on the new release page and flipped through three or four pages of a fifteen dollar (!) book and that’s all they would show me.  For that kind of scratch I want to see as much as possible. So come on publishers; why so stingy with the previews?

My wife has driven the motorcycle to work the last couple of days.  She told me she really enjoys riding and save a bunch of time since she can use the HOV lanes.  I take my bike less often, but once the move is completed (I am still camping out at our old place for about two more weeks.) I’ll be doing the same.

I saw the new Clone Wars movie the other day with my in-laws.  I enjoyed it but it did feel a tad “Saturday morning cartoon”.  The soundtrack was Star Wars but just “off” enough to feel like a cheap imitation.  There was no crawling text to start the movie off; that part was narrated.  While these things threw me off a bit they were not deal-killers.  I enjoyed the animation style a lot, and the battle scenes were very well done.  One thing I really hated; the whole plot of this film.  [Spoiler ahead. You have been warned!] So Jabba’s kid gets kidnapped.  Now the Jedi/Republic want to get him back so the Hutt clan will let the Republic use the Outer Rim shipping lanes in the war effort.  So you have Jedi working with Jabba, Jedi Masters essentially bowing down to the “Mighty Jabba” etc.  Hated it.  Jabba isn’t the head of the Hutt Clans, never was.  And Tatooine was supposed to be this little backwater no-where planet no one ever heard of; and it turns out Vader was from there and it was a major strategic factor in the Clone Wars and Yoda, Anakin and Count Dooku all went to Jabba’s palace!  Look all you people lucky enough to work on Star Wars stuff; there are MILLIONS of planets out there in our favorite galaxy far, far away.  How about we have some stories revolve around new places instead of Endor, Yavin, Hoth, Couresont and Bespin.  (At least Alderan won’t be bothering us again!)  Again, I enjoyed it but felt Jabba got way too much ‘respect’ for a gangster.  How about the Republic roll in there with like a zillion clones and just TELL Jabba they are gonna be ‘borrowing’ the space lanes for a while?  And if he doesn’t like it then they can send a few Republic Commando’s or even some Jedi to “aggressively negotiate” for them! My two cents.

So apparently the database data over at OBS got messed up due to human error.  (Maybe someone ran a DELETE statement when they should have run a SELECT statement.)  The first ten or eleven days of the month are gone, as the backup data wasn’t correct either.  It doesn’t affect me too much, since I have not had any new releases this month so far.  But Morrus over at ENWorld is pitching a fit.  (Rightly so, as he has multiple thousands of dollars on the line for just the ten days in question!)  Hopefully the OBS folks will make it right. I fully expect they will, but timing is the real issue here.  I can afford to wait for a few dollars; a few thousand is not something I would be happy having to wait for.  (Especially during GenCon!)

We played 4E again last night.  hey just got down into the dungeon crawl part of the module. They are all 2nd level now, and are starting to ‘figure out’ how to play their characters.  They did much better against a room full of Goblines (even if one of them fell into the pit trap) than they did against the very first Kobold ambush.

Chris Field is chomping at the bit to get some stuff released.  I’m right there with him.  Look for the first of several to hit this weekend.

I got the new laptop yesterday.  I also got the full Adobe Creative Suite installed last night after work.  Today I transferred all the Skortched Urf’ Studios files to it so I can work from either my desktop at home or my laptop anywhere else.

I see that WOTC will be releasing a revised GSL.  It seems to me that the cold response of the third party publishers, everyone from the Piazo and Kenzer “Big Dogs” to the legion of mid-tier publishers as well as the little fish like yours truly have prompted WOTC to find something a little more appealing.  I don’t have much hope it will do any good.  You simply can’t go from an open license like the OGL and think most folks will be happy with anything more restrictive, especially when the first license was so fucked up as to be laughable.  Who in their right mind would toss all their IP eggs in the WOTC basket with no hope of ever, EVER getting them out again?  Utter bullshit.  So yeah, they are gonna take out a few things and try to get a bunch of support for the new license, but I think it will end up being too little to make any difference.

If WOTC wants active, enthusiastic third party support for 4E they need to allow works to be published in multiple formats like 4E, 3.5, True20 etc. None of this “I must either choose 4E or some other license” and NEVER be able to change it back BS.  They also need to let people publish friggin’ stat blocks in their products.  What the hell good is a module if it simply sez “The party then fights six Kobolds. (See page 52 of the MM.)”  Oh wait, you can’t even do that cuz its a PAGE NUMBER!  Yeah, that’s gonna make lots of third party modules real easy to us.  Don’t get me started on the “You pay all our court costs even if we lose” clause.  Sign me up!  When this is where we are starting from, forgive me if I am not all excited about where  the “revised” GSL will take us.  I hope I am wrong, but I doubt I will be.

WOTC has also fumbled the ball significantly on many other fronts.  Retire Dungeon and Dragon mags for digital versions, including an online tabletop where we can get together and play with our friends spread across the internet.  Yeah, hows that working out?  You’d think a company as big as Hasbro could afford some software programmers to, you know, hit a realese deadline.  (Yes, I know about the guy that killed himself and his wife.  While a tragedy, he didn’t go in and bust caps on the WOTC programmers so I don’t buy that ONE GUY is the cause of the hold up.)

Oh, and while the production values are first rate on the 4E products; a friggin 1st level module is selling for $29.95 retail.  Wow.  The two follow-on modules are $24.95 each, which looks like the new price-point for WOTC modules. Those will take you to 10th level; so in order to “play out” until 30th level using WOTC released modules your gonna shell out $225.00 in MODULES if you get ten levels out of three modules.  (How much is the full subscription to the War of the Burning Sky Campaign Saga again?)

I sent the wife off to college Sunday afternoon. In her excitement she never even called to tell me she got down to North Carolina safe and sound.  She finally called me right as I was drifting off to sleep last night.

So I have the place all to myself this week.  In addition to some PDF work I get to go over a whole “To-Do” list of things for the house.  Unpack boxes, fix the faucet and replace the leaky hose in the ice maker among other things.

Wednesday we are playing 4E again; one last session before one of the players heads out of town for three weeks.  I am supposed to play 40K soon with one of my friends as well; we want to try out the new edition rules and see whats what.  I packed up my figures and will be bringing them to the new house later tonight, as well as setting up my painting area.

I’m bummed I will not be able to attend GenCon this year.  I was really looking forward to it.  Oh well, next year.

We played 4E last night with the local group of guys I know from church.  We are doing the Keep on the Shadowfell.  I like 4E but am still getting used to all the “marking” that players can do.  I had one guy attack one model while marking a second model; which sounds hinky to me.  It seems to me that the marking mechanic is akin to “calling out” an opponent for single combat like in the very beginning of the movie Highlander. I don’t think it should be used to prevent a model from attacking (or at least effectively attacking) the guy he’s already fighting.  I need to look into it a bit more. We are going to play again next Wednesday to get one more session in before one of the players heads out of town for three weeks or so.

I am stoked about the new office.  I am still in the market for an office chair; been checking CraigsList.  Or I may just hit the local Ikea or Staples and pick one up.  My wife will be out of town all next week for school.  (She’s starting her Masters program at UNC so she’ll be down in North Carolina.) I plan to get some serious PDF work done.

They will be delivering my new laptop on Monday as well.  It’s a screaming fast Dell D830 with 4GB of RAM!  I’ll have the complete Adobe Creative Suite installed about an hour after they drop it off.

I want to apologize for the lack of new releases from Skortched Urf’ Studios recently.  I have no good excuse.  I know Chris Field has several projects just waiting for me to release them; so that is costing both of us sales.  I honestly didn’t think the whole house thing would be this much of a drain on my time and resources. It’s just like Louis says; publishers put out products.  I’ve slacked.  All the big plans for the future (and I do have some big ones!) are just so much thin air unless you are actually putting your butt in a chair and working on products.  I won’t bore anyone with my excuses.  Time to get back to work.

Upcoming releases (in no particular order)…

Fantasy Firearms II -More fantasy shooty goodness from Chris Field!

Wizards of Shadowfell -A new take on old school mages like Alanon and Gandalf by Chris Field.

Pandora Inro #1 -A comic book style introduction to the forthcoming Pandora project.  Anthony is currently illustrating it.

Pandora Intro #2 -More illustrated goodness in preperation for the release of the Pandora Project.  Modern Fantasy with a twist.

Dept. 7 Armory Update -A guide to the guns used by Department 7. (Written by yours truly!)

The Book of Plagues -Add some fantasy-style plagues to your campaign and mix things up a bit!

Adventurer Essentials line -The Ten Foot Pole and other goodness is forthcoming.

Department 7: Genesis -A first level D20 Modern adventure kicking off our Modern Campaign series of adventures.

A quick post before I head out.  I now have the new office set with computer, internet, Cable TV and a DVD/VCR combo unit!  While I still have no office chair, I am able to begin working from the new office.  I have plenty of shelf space with more to be added.  I have a small display case for my figures and a large work area.  I still need to hook up a USB hub so I can use my external hard drives and camera.  I may also throw in a second monitor to go with the Wacom tablet monitor I am currently using.

I also got the bed set up in the master bedroom.  That’s nice too I guess.

I’ve been off the internet for the last four days.  I took Thursday and Friday off so i would have a long four day weekend to work on the house and get moved.  We spent Thur/Fri painting and finishing up the bedrooms with a good steam cleaning of the carpets.  Saturday my father-in-law showed up with a moving truck and we spent the next twelve hours moving all out junk from one house to another.  The good news is that we are now moved in to the new house!  (Still plenty of un-packing ahead though.)

I also got my new desktop mounted in the office.  We got the cable/internet/phone hooked up as well.  I still need to hook everything up but I plan to get to that tonight.

In other good news my new laptop is in!  I just need to schedule to have them come install it.

My buddy just got a motorcycle and my wife got her license last week; so the three of us went for a quick ride Sunday afternoon.  After that we hit the pool for about an hour to recuperate from the hard labor of the day before.

No GenCon for me this year.  With the house purchase we are simply tapped out so I can’t see spending the cash on a plane ticket, hotel etc. to make it this year.  (Plus, who wants to go to GenCon without some spending cash for the dealer room? I sure don’t!) I was really looking forward to it; but I’ll start saving for next year.