What’s in a blog name?

I might shut down this blog. The reason? Its name.

This blog, as many of you imagine, got its name out of a Gygax+Kuntz module called “Lost Cavern of Tsojcanth” and a bit of wordplay. I enjoyed running the module for my now-completed Greyhawk20 campaign so much that I started using Tsojcanth as online handle about 8-10 years ago.

Nowadays I feel like I should stop using it: not only because of the 3E re-adaptation of the module, but because legally it doesn’t belong to me, which leads to a vague feeling of anxiety (here used in a quasi-kierkegårdian sense) whenever I type it.

So, as soon as I’ll come up with a decent name and make up my mind the blog provider, I’ll stop writing here and go somewhere else.

Post-Release Depression

Dear gentle reader,
I’m still alive. I went through a bit of a strange period.

The first reason is that I’ve been working like stupid on a project since December, which coalesced in this:

The second is that the project completely stressed and burned me out, to a point where everything, even role-playing games, felt gimmicky and stupid. This caused a plethora of personal problems as well, which left me depressed for quite a while.

I have bounced back a bit now.  Last night I couldn’t sleep and had some terrific game mechanic design ideas to solve a problem that has been bugging me and a bunch of other professional and skilled designers for a long, long while. One can only hope.

EDIT: I might feel a bit strongly about the issue, and I’m not sure if I “solved” it, but, again, one can only hope.

Across Germany and Switzerland

The reason for the lack of posts in the last two weeks is that, well, I’ve resigned to take a sabbatical. Well, a mostly fake one. I’ve been working in IT for the last 10 years, while studying for a degree for the last four. My BSc is done and, since September, I’ll be a full-time, bona-fide postgrad student; yep, that’s my idea of a sabbatical year: after all I started studying again because I was getting a bit bored.

The last two weeks have been busy with going across Germany and Switzerland (3000+ km in two weeks), spending time with girlfriends and stuff like that. No gaming except SPANC, Carcassonne and Dominion. But I managed to visit Bauhaus Dessau, which it’s something I’ve been wanting to do since… 2002 maybe?

Posts at the usual semi-regular rate will start again soon 😉

Dice test, Volcano and Life

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

You are a d4: You are bright, perceptive, and driven. You would be considered a blessing to mankind, if you didn’t insist on using your powers for evil. You are devious, deceitful, doubtful, and downright dangerous. Assassins can learn a lot from you. If your fellow party members knew how rotten you were, they’d go over and join the bad guys. Justified or not, you are meticulous in your ways: A poison for every person, and a dagger for every back. Much of your day is spent scheming or plotting. The rest of your time is spent trying to convince others that you’re simply misunderstood.

Odd. I just plot the demise of my players’ characters. 😉

And, yes, the last two weeks have been a very lean period for the blog. As excuse I can say I’ve been in Britain at my s/o’s and we’ve been quite busy (the first week holiday, the second s/o had to sort stuff and me telecommuting since my flight back to the Old Continent got canceled due to fire and earth elementals fighting somewhere in Iceland and I had to do work regardless of my location). Not all days have been merry but it’s always good to spend time together. ❤

Gamingwise, this allowed me to think a lot about stuff and to work on “my fantasy game” (supporting both OSR and d6 mechanics, hopefully), play some Carcassonne and San Juan with friends and s/o (she likes both, yay for me). I also found myself at the gaming club of one of the local universities and being kinda asked to run a game (I had with me S&W Whitebox in a three ring binder), but having nothing to run I chickened out instead of improvising for a bunch f people I never met. Shame on me.

Could spend some time writing on O-P-Dungeons…

North of the Wall. Also, Imperial Badassery

The reason for the lack of posting in the last few days is that I’m currently in Britain having fun with the locals. Yesterday we drove from Manchester to Glasgow and stopped to visit Hadrian’s Wall.
Seeing the wall provoked a number of thoughs, such as:

• invading a place and cutting it halfway with a stone wall 7 feel thick and a few meter high and protecting it with a stupid numbers of watchtowers will be from now on my own metric of Imperial Badassery.
• it takes an implausible amount of stone to build something like this.
• sure lots of workers must have died to build it. Badass-o-meter off the scale.
• romans made AMAZING mortar. How it sustained 2000 years of horrible Cumbrian/Northumberlandish weather is impressive.
• sure Caledonia (Scotland nowadays) must have been really inhospitable to Romans to wall it off and not bothering to conquer it (ok, Antonine’s wall was built later and further up north because apparently they had afterthoughts about Lothian, the Borders and Inverclyde. Antonine never went up there, and if he did he wouldn’t have bothered)
• I expected to see “ROMANES EUNT DOMVS” written on it. My expectations not being met, I resisted and managed not to vandalize it.

Pretty pictures once I get back to the continent…