GoCorral

Hurray! Another big project on the GoCorral blog is complete. Early on in the blog’s genesis I’d had the idea to eventually transfer the Xorian Wars Campaign Log from the Order of the Stick Forums and now I’m finally finished! It only took ten years off and on, but FINISHED!

For a small peak behind the curtain, I’ve been working on these posts ahead of schedule. So while this post may be coming out at the end of July after the final Xorian Wars epilogue post, I’m actually writing the post back in mid-February. The campaign log blog posts are fairly easy to write since they are essentially already written on the Order of the Stick Forums. That’s why I’ve gotten so far ahead. I’d expect future updates to slow down, but I will attempt to keep a post coming at least every week.

So… What’s coming next?

Easy first answer, Some of the Characters of Cimmeria pages are outdated. They reflect the status of the characters at the time that I wrote them while the campaign was still active. There’s about twenty that I have to go back and update the ends on. Those updates are fairly small and probably will not be blog posts, so that will just be some behind the scenes stuff. Hell, I might even finish that work before this post goes up in July.

As far as new projects, I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a comic on the blog. Something in the style of Usagi Yojimbo, but following a raccoon instead of a rabbit. He would be an errant knight in Medieval Europe and it could explore different parts of Western culture and myths in the same way that Usagi explores Japanese culture and myths. I still like the idea, but I don’t really like drawing that much. Writing is something that comes easily to me and is a great stress reducer. Drawing the pencil sketches for each of the Xorian Wars Campaign Log posts has felt like a chore. The only way I could imagine doing a comic would be with AI generated backgrounds and pencil sketched characters. That way I could focus on the writing portion of the project that I enjoy instead of the art project that I tolerate. I’m not sure how that wonky style would be received so at the moment I’m tabling the project.

At the blog’s inception I did a lot of personal blog entries about myself and my daily life. I could go back to doing that. I stopped doing those posts for two reasons. One was because I didn’t want to write something negative about a person I know and then have them read about it. I share all these posts on Facebook so presumably anyone active on there could end up reading about themselves. Obvious answer is to not say negative stuff about people I’m connected to on Facebook but that can also end up presenting a falsely positive view of my life. I’m sure I could balance that, but it was easier to just stop writing about my personal life.

The second reason I stopped was because I have children now. A lot of my life revolves around them, so it would be difficult to write about my life without mentioning them. I want to be even more careful about how I present them on the blog. I know pretty much everything about them and it could lead to an easily embarrassing moment for them in the future. I don’t want to have my daughter crying to me in the future about how, “Jimmy was going to ask me to prom, but then he read about how you potty-trained me and now he’s asking Emily!” Again, I could be careful about how I write about my kids, but it was easier to just stop.

I’m not saying that I won’t do personal blog posts again, but its a tightrope walk on how I want to do them in a way that’s respectful to the people I’d be writing about.

In the past I also wrote about other random stuff besides gaming. I’m still doing that occasionally with the movie, podcast, and RPG reviews (RPG reviews are still sort of gaming, but whatever). I’ve had ideas float by that I knew I could write about, but RPG content just came easier to me. With the “big project” concluded, I can see myself following that inspiration more often.

And the “big project” isn’t really finished. There’s always more I can add on.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Leonardo da Vinci

One of the reasons I worked so hard to fill in the timeline parts of Cimmeria was because I’m planning on doing a time travel campaign for my players that hops around within that history. I have a very detailed past timeline for events leading up to Xorian Wars, but what about a future timeline? I actually have written a bit for that, so I could refine those bits and squeeze a few more blog posts out of that.

Connected to the time travel campaign idea, I’m working on some rules to make the Timewatch RPG system flow better for a high fantasy world instead of the future tech world its designed for. Those rules could be turned into a small supplement for Timewatch that I could publish. I’m not sure how that would translate into blog posts, but I think I could at least write about the process in the same way I did for the podcast stuff.

I could also write more about Cimmeria with a new section covering the Races of Cimmeria. There’s so much I’ve written for my campaign world that it’s approaching something I could format and expand on to make a published campaign setting. I could continue that process by writing pieces that end up on the blog while also covering the formatting and design process of the PDF.

Finally, I have a few book/novel ideas I could publish in a serial format on the blog. I have an idea to write a new Hornblower book where Bush secretly survived the explosion and leads Hornblower on a crusade against Napoleon’s return as a vampire. I liked the First Vampire of Cimmeria posts and think I could expand on them into a novel about the Gish Trio. Or maybe I’ll expand on some Digimon fan-fic I wrote as a kid and turn it into something that’s publishable and original instead of derivative.

There you are. Those are the waters the blog might sail into next. I’ll just go where my inspiration takes me.