You actually go back to normal traffic levels and don’t exceed your bandwidth. Looks like I managed to plug up all the holes, as this time last month, I was already spiked to above my limits. Hooray for fixing the problem. Stupid Bots. At least now I can utilize my website properly and go back to working on my D&D worldbuilding and storytelling without having to worry about this crap.

As you were…

Well, if there is still anyone visiting the site, you may or may not have noticed the lovely 509 Bandwidth exceeded notification pop up over the last few months. While the egotist in me is happy that the universe has finally recognised my genius and the masses are flocking to join my fledgling cult, the sad truth is that I left a backdoor open and some bots crawled all over my site and downloaded a bunch of my D&D files an exorbitant amount of times, eating up my precious bandwidth… the bastards.

I’ve plugged the leaks to the best of my knowledge and blocked the IP addresses to the best of my ability so hopefully it won’t happen again now that it’s the beginning of a new month. I’ve been monitoring it and so far traffic has been much lower (back to previous levels) so I should be okay, but it’s a wait and see game at this point. And to everyone else… just a reminder to throw a blank index.html file in every directory to prevent unnecessary exposure.

This ends my TED talk.

Well, look at that. Another year around the sun and only a single blog post of note in 12 months. Congratulations, I’m sure I win some sort of prize.

Now, while I know I haven’t posted in forever, I have actually been somewhat busy. For those of you who were here last year, I’m referring to my last post where I was talking about rebuilding my old D&D world and revamping it to 5E.

Well, surprise of all surprises. I actually managed to wrangle the squirrels in my brain long enough to bang out a number of updates and upgrades to my world. I’ve always had an “In the beginning…” document that gave a semi-detailed account of the genesis of the world through till the modern age and several rough framework ideas that I’ve used as a basis for the world. I know the politics and the geography, climate and whatnot and can elaborate in some fashion when asked. The problem is that 90% of it has been in my head and I find it hard to put pen to paper and turn the ephemeral into reality.

Or at least it used to be a problem.

I’ve been tinkering with this world inside my head for almost 30 years now and I’ve always struggled to express what was inside my head effectively. I have all these elaborate maps and exotic locales inside my head that I’ve never had the skill to make effectively (I’ve tried multiple times and never been satisfactorily successful with my progress – but that’s a blog for another day). However, in the modern age we have websites like Inkarnate and Wonderdraft that make mapmaking like child’s play. And sites like World Anvil and the Homebrewery make world building easy. Not to mention DnD Beyond for character creation and the various Virtual Tabletop software that exists now. I swear that back in the day, these are the tools I dreamed of having. We are living in a golden age of creative empowerment.

Anyways, now that I have these tools, I’ve put them to somewhat good use. I’ve dabbled with a few of them while also futzing about with my tarsere.shadowmyth.net subdomain. I haven’t really settled on a theme or an idea yet but I decided to nail down some starting points and go from there. I revamped the history into a more cohesive document and tied down a few loose ephemera in the process. What really surprised me however was when I started digging in developing the races (oops. sorry – species rather </insert grumpy old man eyeroll here>)… When I started working on the species, I found that I was developing just as much lore and backstory for the world as I was while creating statblocks for the races that inhabit it. It was mindblowing how much creative power and freedom I had when I added a “fluff” sidebar that explained why X species did Y thing.

All in all, it took me about 2-3 months to actually finish the species and a few other bits then because, like I said, most of the other stuff is inside my brainbox, and I can futz it if I want. I was eager to get back into playing so once the races were done, I grabbed the guys. forced them to make characters and we’ve been stumbling along ever since.

They’ve only managed to reach level 3 and I’m not certain they’ll make it to 4 at this rate but we’re having fun which is all that matters. Stay tuned. I may even post another blog before the end of this year!

Well, I blinked again and it’s been two years since my last post. WTF!?!? Where did the time go. Oh I know. Covid. Stupid bastard plague!

Well, It has taken nearly two years but our defenses finally failed and Omicron invaded our house this past week. My Wife and eldest were both laid low by it and have spent the week alternately sleeping it off or lounging on the couch playing on the playstation.

Thankfully, both myself and the youngest tested negative (or were asymptomatic) and could function like semi-normal humans. However due to an overabundance of caution my work told me to take the week off and isolate so I’ve been catering to the whims of two sick people all week and avoiding all human contact.

Since my loving wife and daughter are hogging the PS5 pretty much 24/7 these days, I’ve been left to my own devices and with nothing much else to do, I have been dreaming dark dreams of creativity.

Since I haven’t seen my friends together in one place in over two years I haven’t had many creative outlets. Our Star Wars game ground to a halt for a number of reasons. (1. We couldn’t satisfactorily get it working online with everyone’s computer setup, 2. Fantasy Flight Games/Asmodee shifted the license to Edge Studios and there hasn’t been any books in 2 years, 3. Campaign/Theme fatigue. We need a change.)

With the government continually teasing that they’ll ease lockdown restrictions we’re ever hopeful that we can finish off the last adventure. None of us want to leave it hanging where we left it but we’re already looking for other ideas and games. Since none of my friends wants to be the GM, I’m stuck with it and after messing around with various options of different campaigns, I think we’ve decided to go back to D&D in the 5e setting.

Rather than just dive into one of the pre-built existing settings in D&D, I have to be unique and to that end I’ve decided to go back to my homebrew fantasy campaign, The Realm of Tarsere, and update it to the 5e system. I’ve revamped this system so many times that one would think that I’m sick of it but quite the opposite. The world building is my favourite part!

With this quarantine, when I haven’t been tending the plague-ridden, I’ve been digging through old files, cringing at bad (or weak) world-building decisions, and revamping what I can. I’m a bit of an ADHD squirrel at times because there is so much that I have already written and stored deep in the recesses of my brain that I almost don’t know where to start (Do I redo the map? Do I rebuild the races first? Ooooh! what about the Gods? etc.) but then I settle on something and my hyperfocus kicks in and blammo! Six hours later I have something tangible.

Now I know this is silly as it’s not even something that isn’t going to come to fruition for months yet but right now, with all the shit that’s going on in the world right now, I need it to stay focused and sane.

If you’re bored and want to see my progress of stuff that I will eventually post. Swing over to http://tarsere.shadowmyth.net/. At some point I’ll update the website properly and tweak the theme.

For now. Stay safe out there fellow humans.

On a whim the other day I went through some of my old draft posts and realised it was getting kind of cluttered. It was full of thoughts that never got finished and half formed ideas that I never got around to. Most of them were unpublishable, either due to the moment passing or me just not remembering where I was going with the ideas. I ended up deleting a large amount because I know I’ll never get back to them and their time is gone but I kept a few to work on over the next few weeks.

This is the first one that I’m performing thread necromancy on. I’ve polished it off as best I can and added a few bits here and there. Let’s see how it goes.

So a little over a year and a half ago (Holy crap, I swear it was just yesterday! – Editor), some of you may remember that I did a 7 day book challenge on Facebook. Seven covers of books posted without explanation. Of course I followed up here with the explanation as to why they affected me so.

When it ended, I said I would revisit the topic because there are so many more books than 7 that have affected my life. The more I thought about it though, I realised that every book I’ve read has shaped my life in some form or fashion. Even the ones I hated.

So, what else could I do. Well, this being the modern age and me being a typical Gen-X-er. Why movies of course. I grew up in the middle of the movie rental era (heck come to think of it, I witnessed the whole lifespan of the movie rental phenomenon right to the bitter end, but that’s a blog post for another day.) Back in the days when “please be kind, rewind” actually meant something, I’m pretty certain that I watched most of these movies before it was age appropriate for me to do so. It didn’t do me any harm beyond fuelling my already overactive imagination. Movies may not have had the same impact as books on my young life, they certainly stoked the fires already there.

So without further adieu, here are some of the movies that shaped my youth (In no particular order)