3rd January, 2010 (a.k.a. the future!)

I hope everyone had a great festive season/new years celebration, I certainly did! Been busy the past month, but I've also made much headway on the novel, and the world Aielund is in too (still need to come up with a world name obviously).

So, I've finally uploaded the prelude and the first two chapters of the novel under the new 'World of Aielund' button. I'm also deep into chapter three, thanks to a new compact laptop I received as a christmas gift - it is truly liberating to be able to write anywhere at anytime, should the mood strike me, and as a result I've done more writing the past two weeks than the past 2 months.

I've also put the new expanded world map (beta) in the world section too. It's not quite finished yet but it'll certainly give you a sense of the size of the world. It was educational for me too, since I was now able to get a sense of the size of Aielund itself, relative to it's neighbors. It's still the single largest kingdom on the island of which it is a part, but there's plenty of people down south as well, and one day I may get around to telling their stories too. :)

4th December 2009:

Hell of a hectic month for yours truly, mostly with RL stuff but I've also done a heap of work on the Aielund map (amongst other things) too. Though not finished, you can see the preliminary work here. That's Aielund in the top right corner ;)

Oh, played dragon age a bit too, kind of... underwhelmed really. Sure the visuals and story are excellent, and the characters and voice acting are top-notch, but the whole thing feels too warcraft-ish for my liking. I do not like the combat engine, style, control etc. It just feels very consoley. Yes, I invented that word. Just now! I never knew how much I needed intricate details on the character abilites until they were gone. Improved combat ability? In what way, I ask you! I need numbers, man!

Maybe I'm just hooked on pen 'n' paper games again. Our group is still having a blast with Pathfinder, which I should probably put a link to at some point.

1st November 2009:

Been a while since I've updated here, since the new website fell apart so badly it killed my enthusiasm for the project. I do miss having the forums around though. Anyway, I thought I'd put in a little update: Still running D&D sessions every friday (although we've switched over to the Pathfinder system, which is just fantastic), and our group has grown to four people now. Making good use of the sessions to bring more detail and balance to the Aielund campaign setting - I've completed the Deities section, and the 'Cities of Aielund' file is well past the halfway point now. I've also brought in rules for primitive gunpowder weapons, such as the arquebus, because these days I like my fantasy settings to have dwarves with guns :D

Still hammering out the rules for that but I plan to put all this up in a new section soon. Oh, and I've finished chapter 2 of the novel (finally!) so that'll all be part of the new content as well.

As for the NWN version of Aielund, I felt a bit disappointed with the final result: a year of effort and it still had problems, mostly due to the new content such as tilesets that weren't reliable, and horse scripts caused me no end of trouble. I may yet take another crack at fixing those issues, but I'm in no rush. Besides, Dragon Age is nearly with us!

Peace.

19th August:

Haven't had much to report lately, been taking a break from the whole thing, as I mentioned I would. Done some work on the novel, but not as much as I would have liked (halfway through chapter 2). Winter is always a slow time for yours truly ;)

The forums have been down lately as Liquidfire has been flooded with work (and bad luck) so I have no idea when they'll be back up.

I'm aware that there are still some problems with the saga that a year of work didn't get rid of. They're relatively minor, though, so I haven't been in a huge rush to get them fixed. I shall do it in the near future.

Still been running my D&D sessions on fridays, and filling in the 'Cities of Aielund' file for future reference. I've also nearly finished the rules for firearms in Aielund too, and both of these will appear online at some point... even if I have to put them on this site ;)