Tag Archives: meta

Skill for Hire – Introduction

Last Wednesday (May 20th) I ran the first session of a new on-line Star Frontiers game. I’ve been itching to run a game again and I finally pulled the trigger on getting it started. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Game Background

Game Logo

The PCs are employees of Galactic Task Force, Incorporated whose slogan is “Secretaries to Mercenaries, we’ve got a place for you!” They are effectively a mercenary group with a wide range of skills that you can hire out for any kind of job. You can see a more detailed description on the Skills for Hire game page on my wiki.

The plan is to make the games very episodic with each adventure taking only a single session. The goal is to allow anyone that can make a given session the opportunity to play. Each session starts a new mission and it can be run with whoever is available that night. I wanted to accommodate as many players as possible, even if they can’t make every week.

I’m also recording the sessions and I’ll be posting them on-line. The video will go up on YouTube and I’ll be posting the audio-only version as a podcast here on this site (and will list it on various podcast sites as well). The video will be completely unedited and the audio minimally so. More on that when they go live.

Games are Wednesday at 8pm MDT and we play on Roll20. If you think you might want to play and are able to join, feel free to jump over to the Roll20 game page and join. Create a character (instructions on the wiki page) and join us for the next session.

Impact on the Blog

As part of this, I’m also going to return to some of the roots of this blog and be posting the various resources I create for the game as part of my prep. These will be fairly rough and not fully polished but should provide some nuggets you can use from the resources as well as small adventures you could potentially drop into your game if you desired.

This will most likely result in a fundamental shift in my posting schedule and style. Namely, if things go as planned, I’ll be posting more often and the average post length will be smaller as I break up all the information across several posts. For example, I created two new creatures for the first session and those will get posted up as small individual posts to make finding them in the future easier. Similarly, I’ll be posting location maps (when I create new places) as individual posts. Once all the pieces are up, I’ll post up a description of the full adventure linking to all the parts.

All of the posts related to this game will have the “Skills for Hire” tag applied to them in addition to any others. Which should make the easier to find. I’ll also preface the session summaries/game outlines with “Skills for Hire” in the title.

So consider this the first of these small posts. I’ll get the creatures up over the weekend and do the full adventure post as the regular Tuesday post next week. I won’t necessarily get everything posted every week. I just don’t have that much free time. But I’ll try to get the more interesting things up.

I also still plan to do more of the typical posts like I’ve been doing for a while. The timeline posts won’t go away, and I might get back to modeling. The starliner posts has me looking at my custom starship system again so maybe there will be a post soon about that as well.

Going Forward

We’ll see how this goes and if I can keep up this new pace of posting. If there is interest, I might also consider live-streaming the games, either on YouTube or Twitch. I’ll just have to check that my computer is up to it. It didn’t have any issue recording the session locally on Wednesday but I’ll have to see how streaming works.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for things going forward.

Small Website Update

Just a quick note to mention a few updated I’ve made to the website. They are relatively small but important.

server with Extended Frontier map in the background
Here’s the new server computer. My work and personal laptops are there on the right and the Extended Frontier Map is hanging on the wall behind it.

First, as I mentioned in my last State of the Frontier post, I have a new server. As of this post, I’ve migrated the site from the old server to the new one. This required reworking a little bit of the back-end infrastructure to get everything working. Not so much to get the site up, but rather to make it so it will be easier to add in all the other sites I want to bring to the server. Since the new server is a much faster machine, you might notice some performance improvements although this site has been fairly performant already.

The other change, and arguably the more important one, is that as part of those back-end changes, I’ve added an SSL certificate to the site and it is now accessible via HTTPS instead of HTTP. You may or may not have noticed when you accessed the site to read this post. As I bring other sites over to this new server they will be HTTPS enabled as well. This should hopefully help with the various search engines (which down rank non-HTTPS sites) and with browsers that give warnings or even block sites that are HTTP only.

That’s it for now. Now that I know the server and infrastructure are working, I’ll be moving the other websites over the course of the next few weeks. If you run into any problems or issues, be sure to let me know.

A Question About Posting

We’re a few months into this now and I have have a question for my readers.  I’m curious as to the style frequency of posting you’d most like to see. 

Do you like lots of frequent small posts?  Do you like the longer form posts and don’t mind that they come less frequently?  Do you not care about the size but prefer regularity?  Vote in the poll below and let me know what you think.  The poll will stay up until the end of November.

This poll is no longer accepting votes

I'm curious how people feel about the size and frequency of posts. Which of the following would you prefer?
Vote

I’ll try to take your preferences into account as I write and schedule future content.  Also feel free to expound on your vote in the comments below.

Contacting Me

Iclassic brass rotary dial telephone would love to hear from you!  If you have suggestions, comments, or questions about any of the stuff I post or am working on feel free to reach out to me.  If you do want to reach out, there are quite a number of ways to get a hold of me.

The most obvious is to comment on the post here on the site you want to discuss. I’ll respond here as well and we can have a public discussion on the topic that anyone that comes after can read and learn from.  This works best for discussions specific to the post in question.

If you want or need a non-public discussion, feel free to e-mail me at tom[at]expandingfrontier.com.  I check my e-mail regularly so you should get a fairly timely response although it definitely won’t be immediate.  If you are a Patreon supporter at the Senior Advisor level or higher, you will also have a private e-mail channel to contact me at.  Those e-mails will typically get a faster response, or at least a higher priority in responding to them.

If you are a Patreon supporter you can always contact through Patreon or on the Discord server as well.

Beyond that, I’m active on social media in a variety of places and you can find me in those venues by clicking on the social media icons in the sidebar.  Twitter (I’m @dagorym) is probably best as I typically have my Twitter feed up on a side screen during the day but my phone will ping me when I get direct messages at any of the other locations as well.

So don’t be afraid to contact me.  I want to interact with those reading the blog and supporting me on Patreon.

That said, I’ll probably be off-line from now until Tuesday (May 8, 2018) as my wife and I are headed out of town for our 24th anniversary and for at least part of the time will be places where there is no internet or cell service.  I’m going to try to get a post queued up to post tomorrow but beyond that I’ll be back next week.