As has been par for the course this month, this post is coming a few hours late. I had always intended to do this post on Sept. 1st as the first post of the month but it’s still not coming at the usual time slot in the morning. (I wonder how many of my readers actually read it when it first drops. Probably very few if any.)

Looking Back

This has been a rough month for me. I managed to get my regular posts out but it was a close thing. I partially looked at this in my post last week for the RPG Blog Carnival where I summarized all the projects I’m working on. That’s really nothing new as all of those projects have been going on and off for years, but they still contribute to everything I have to think about each month as I work. The funny thing is, after I published that post, I thought of a few other things that I had forgotten. I updated the post to add the podcast stuff, but I thought of other things later that probably should have been in the list.

The other posts for last month were the regular Detailed Frontier Timeline post, a detailed post on Brekstoone Manor in Myha’s Beach on Pale, and an outline of the Skills for Hire adventure I ran last month. There should have been a second session of that game but life intervened and I had to cancel.

The month started well as we took the family up to Glacier National Park in Montana for an 8 day camping trip. We had a lot of fun and it was quite relaxing.

The problems started on the way home. As we were driving we needed to stop. As I was making a left hand turn, a car came up from behind (in the on coming traffic lane – he was apparently passing people in the line of cars behind me on the two lane highway) and clipped the front of my truck. He went flying off into the ditch with a big dent in the side doors of his car and my front bumper was bent in. Luckily no one was hurt. We were able to drive our truck home (another 650 miles) without any real problems. The only real issue to driving was that making a right turn caused the tire to rub against a bit of plastic on the bent in bumper. However, it turned out that the damage was enough that the truck was considered totaled (it was an 18 year old truck).

Dealing with that – taking the truck in for repair, finding out it was totaled, getting a rental car (with 6 drivers we could not manage on only 2 cars), and looking for a new truck – used up all my spare time this month. So there really was no “behind the scenes” game work done. I’ve even fallen way behind on the timeline posts on Twitter and have about a week and half of them to complete writing and catch up on. The good news is we found a new truck we’re happy with and all that is now officially behind us. I’m turning the rental car in later today.

Looking Forward

Beyond the Detailed Frontier Timeline post next week, I really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pipe. This month has five Tuesdays which is why I moved this post to today. I think I’ll be posting another location. I have the maps all sketched out, I’d just need to do the write-up and make nice versions of the maps. This is the next location for my Skills for Hire game which I am hopefully running tomorrow. So you might get a write-up on that adventure as well. Beyond that, we’ll see.

Behind the scenes I’m starting work this week on the next issue (#30) of the Frontier Explorer to be released in October. That will take up a bunch of my time as well but I’m going to focus on getting started early so it is more manageable and more spread out to allow me to work on other things as well.

I still have a bit of real life stuff to catch up on now that the truck purchasing is out of the way and that will probably use up any extra time I have left. School has started for my wife (she’s an astronomy professor) and kids so we’re starting to get back into a regular routine. Hopefully the schools don’t shut down again and throw a wrench in that.

Final Thoughts

It’s not a long post but there really hasn’t been a lot happening this month related to the blog. I just managed to squeak by. I looking forward to September being a little less stressful. As always feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

I can’t believe July is already over. I was sitting and thinking about what I would be doing for my next regular Tuesday post and realized that I had this one to write before then. That was last night (the 30th, I’m writing this just before it goes live). I think the month flew by because I’ve been busy working on the Frontier Explorer all month.

Looking Back

Normally, I start this section with the blog posts I made but this month they seem almost ancillary to everything that has been going on that I’m going to start with the behind the scenes stuff.

First and foremost, my time this month was taken up by getting issue 29 of the Frontier Explorer ready to go. I really struggled with this issue and procrastinated working on it until the very tail end of June so most of the work was done this month. But I managed to get it all finished just a couple of days later than I planned. If you haven’t already gotten a copy, you can get it either at DriveThruRPG or on the Frontier Explorer website.

I only ran one session of my “Skills for Hire” game on-line this month as the first session got canceled due to lack of players (we only had one). So I put out a reminder call before the next session and had a bunch of new players show up for that session. We had eight players total, although one had to drop out due to connection issues. They got through about half of the adventure I had planned, which is where I expected to get to, and everyone had a good time. We are looking forward to finishing it next week.

I also joined another game, as a player this time, were we are playing through the Second Sathar War game from the back of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book. We have several people on each side with someone playing referee between the two sides. He’s added in some twists and a bit of fog of war which makes it interesting. I’m playing the militia and unattached UPF ships. The game is played fairly asynchronously, with the players on each side of the battle taking turns moving and firing on Roll20 with the referee, but otherwise independent of the other players. There is also a forum were we post strategic movement orders. If you want to follow along, we have a Facebook group were we post updates. I think we’re also still looking for a 4th sathar admiral so if you want to play as well, jump over to the Facebook group and volunteer.

With all that going on, I also managed to get my regular blog posts out, although sometimes just barely (like this one). The first, as always was the Detailed Frontier Timeline post. If you follow the timeline on Twitter, you will have noticed that it was only coming out in batches this month and not daily as it has in the past. That was partially due to all the above going on and partially as I would be so busy with other things that I forgot to post for several days at a time. I also have gotten a bit behind in writing the updates so I’m always right on the edge of what I’ve worked out and that would sometimes cause delays as well. I’m hopefully over that and will get back to a regular schedule of tweeting this month.

Next up was a background piece discussing my ideas about the enlisted crews of Spacefleet vessels. That one had been sitting in my todo list from day one of the blog and in my mind for several years before that. After that came an update post on the HSS History’s Hope with some of the material provided by Mathew Crymble, a long time Star Frontiers fan that contacted me about helping flesh out the ship. It that post, I described the ship a bit more (using material provided by Mathew), provided its game stats, and an update on its travels to date in the detailed timeline.

Finally I ended the month’s posts with a new organization, the Tristars, an organized crime group based in Myha’s Beach. I had actually planned to write about them earlier in the month but since that one is a direct off-shoot of my Skills for Hire game, I couldn’t post it until we played through the adventure and that got delayed this month. But it’s out now.

Looking Forward

We’ll do this section slightly reversed as well. The first major thing happening this month has nothing to do with the blog. And that is my family and I are going camping and I’ll be completely off-line for nearly a third of the month. So if you see some disruption in posting, or lack of response from me, that’s why.

Otherwise, things will look pretty normal. I’m currently working on deck plans and a 3D model of the HSS History’s Hope. I teased the model on Facebook and Twitter with the image to the right. I don’t expect to finish this all up this month so it will probably be September before you see that post. I’ve also been asked if I’m going to turn this into another one of my Technical Manuals. The answer to that is probably yes, as I’ve been thinking about that as I work on it, but that is going to be even further off.

Another behind the scenes item that I’m working on is editing a new Frontier Explorer Presents product. This time a short story collection. We’ve been sitting on this since we first conceived the Frontier Explorer back in 2012 and we’re finally getting to it. It is a collection of stories based on the khad’dan, a yazirian honor sword created my Mathew Crymble back in the 90’s. Some of the stories are from that era and some are newer. If by some miracle we get all the art and editing done quickly that might come out in August but more likely, you should look for it in November, after the next Frontier Explorer issue.

As to this month’s blog posts, we’ll start as usual with a Detailed Frontier Timeline post. Assuming that the next session of my game doesn’t get canceled, that will be followed by a post on the Brekstoone Manor in Myha’s Beach. The PCs have determined that that is their next destination so once they’ve been through the manor I can post the details. You can also expect an adventure write up for the scenario they’ve been playing through once they’ve finished.

Related to the game, I’ve been recording the sessions and planning on releasing them as an actual play podcast, but haven’t had time to get that all set up with all the work on the Frontier Explorer going on. With issue 29 out of the way, I have time to focus on that so you will most likely see those sessions showing up here, probably with a kick-off post to talk about it. And maybe that rules review podcast will kick off as well but no promises there.

I didn’t do anything for the Blog Carnival this month due to lack of time. I don’t know what August’s topic is (I just haven’t looked) but there might be a related post there as well. We’ll just have to see what happens.

And I think that’s it for August. My kids start back in to school this month as well. They are starting at the school in person, but we’ll see what happens relative to COVID-19 when everyone starts getting back together. That could have an impact on events at the end of the month or, more likely, next month.

Your Thoughts

And that’s it. I’ve got eight minutes before this is supposed to go live so I just squeaked in before my self-imposed deadline. 🙂 As always, if you have suggestions on things you’d like to see me write about, let me know in the comments below.

This is coming on the first of July instead of the last day of June as I was hosting the RPG Blog Carnival last month and the normal day for this post was filled by the wrap-up post for the carnival. Let’s get to it.

Looking Back

As I already mentioned, last month I was host to the RPG Blog Carnival with a theme of “Organizations” and that was the source of the majority of last month’s posts. I started the month (and the blog carnival) off with a post about the True Yazira Society, a group that works to oppose the Family of One and preserve the cultural heritage of Yazira. Mid month, I wrote about another organization, the Investors, a shadowy organization that works to increase their personal wealth and power by manipulating governments and corporations throughout the Frontier. Finally, we finished the month with the wrap up post for the blog carnival.

In between those posts I sprinkled in the regular Detailed Frontier Timeline post, and a post about a new location, Myha’s Beach, a city east of Point True on Pale.

Behind the scenes I was supposed to be working on issue 29 of the Frontier Explorer. And while I did get some work done on that, I did not get nearly as much as I should have.

I also ran a session on my online Star Frontiers game, “Skills for Hire.” There should have been two sessions but due to technical difficulties and a lack of players, the second session didn’t happen. There was a bit of development work for that game that will show up in future posts. I just have to wait for the players to get to it so that posting the details doesn’t spoil things. But there is at least a location and possibly another organization to be written about.

On the technical side, I finally got my mail server migrated and updated from my old server to the new one. My old server is now officially retired. It’s still up and running so I can access stored passwords and such on my account there but all my servers are now running on the new machine. I even started looking into an upgrade of the starfrontiers.us site but didn’t get very far on that. Upgrading the mail server allowed me to use security certificates from Let’s Encrypt instead of being completely self-signed. Going forward this will solve some of the mail issues I’ve been having with my websites since their recent migration and upgrade.

Looking Forward

Beyond the Detailed Frontier Timeline post next week, I really don’t know what this month will bring. There should be a post about a new location. I have all the maps and room descriptions, I just need the players in my online game to get there first. 🙂

I also think I’ll be doing another post on the HSS History’s Hope. This will include at least an updated map of it’s progress, a description of the ship, it’s game specs, and possibly a rough 3D image. I’m currently working on deck plans for the ship but I don’t think I’ll finish them this month.

That just leaves one post up in the air. We’ll see what comes up, possibly a writeup of the mini adventure I’m waiting to run for my game.

The main thing I’m going to be working on is issue 29 of the Frontier Explorer. My goal is to have it all done by the 15th and out to the supporters of the magazine’s Patreon campaign. That means it will be out on the 22nd for general release. If you want to get it early, consider joining as a supporter there. Although if you are already a supporter of this site, don’t feel that you need to support both.

Also related to my on-line game, I’m still planning on posting the audio of the sessions (and possibly the video as well) on-line as a podcast here on the site. I just haven’t had the time to sit down and get it all put together. I was waiting for a Windows update that would allow me to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 on my computer. That came through earlier in the month (finally, it was dated for April). If I find time between working on the Frontier Explorer and posts for the site, I’ll try to get that up.

I’ve also floated the idea of doing a podcast series reading and discussing the core rule books for the game. I posted about this on the Facebook group and it got a positive response so maybe I’ll tackle that at some point in the future as well. But probably not this month?

Your Thoughts

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on things you’d like to see in the blog? Is the rules reading and commentary postcast something that would be of interest to you? Anything I’ve mentioned that you don’t want to see? Let me know in the comments below.

I hope this post finds you well, healthy, and safe as we navigate these troubled times. Luckily for us, we’ve managed to avoid any illness (other than allergies are hitting us hard) and everyone has remained employed. I worked from home before this all hit and the only real change from my day to day routine is that I now have to supervise school work for my kids. Of course that means less time to work on gaming projects. My wife is a college professor and for her things, actually improved in some ways as she could still go into her office but doesn’t have as many distractions every day. It has been a strange time and hopefully we all pull through it without too much damage.

Looking Back

Despite everything going one, I managed to get a new post out every week. The last post (Starship Construction in the Frontier) was only an hour late. I had actually finished it the night before but forgot to queue it up and then was busy in the morning. Otherwise, we had the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post to start the month followed by the miniature post, this time about the Agriculture Ship. The final post of the month, which was part of the RPG Blog Carnival, was an update to my star sector map generator, this time adding in a graphical user interface making it easier to use.

Now, back at the end of last month, I talked about doing a post on the True Yazira secret society. Which you may notice I didn’t get to. That was actually a conscious decision. That post will probably come in June, when I’m hosting the Blog Carnival with a theme of “Organizations”. But more on that next month.

The other major thing that happened this month was that I finished and published the next issue of the Frontier Explorer. Issue 28 represents seven full years of publishing, even including the year we took off. If you haven’t gotten a copy, jump over to the Issue 28 page on DriveThruRPG and grab one. As I’m writing this, there have already been over 600 downloads of the issue. I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

Otherwise, most of my other behind the scenes activities were completely obliterated by the changes and school closings due to COVID-19. I haven’t even looked at my book. I also didn’t do any work on migrating or updating the websites. The other thing that suffered is my modeling efforts. I didn’t get a chance to work on any new models this month. There were also a few days when I fell a little bit behind on some of my timeline posts on Twitter but I got caught back up and back on track. Although I do need to sit down and get a little bit ahead of that project.

Looking Forward

This month will start with the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post. The second post will probably not be a new model. I hope to have one later in the month but I don’t think I’ll have one ready by then. Instead the second post will probably be a spin off of my starship construction post. I’ve been thinking a lot about that and had some good discussions on Facebook and I’ve got another post in the work looking at the logistics and economics of space travel, again looking at how that affects the number of ships to expect in the setting. I have no idea what the final post of the month might be as the topic for next month’s Blog Carnival is still TBD. I guess we’ll find out together.

The other thing that will be starting this month is that I’m going to start running an on-line Star Frontiers game. I’m going to shoot for a weekly game but it might end up being bi-weekly instead. We’ll see how that turns out and I’ll probably be posting on that as we go along. If nothing else, I’ll be generating maps and adventures and can post those once the players have finished with them. It may also end up as an actual play podcast if the players are willing to let me record and post it.

The work on the Space Kids RPG hasn’t started yet so that may also begin this month. Nick Landry, who is producing the game, is working hard and may get to the point where he needs my input. At this point, I’m just waiting on him.

What have you been working on this last month? Are there things you’d like to see me post about? Let me know in the comments below.

Happy Leap Day! I hope this blog is still around in four years to say that again. Who knows where we’ll be by then. I managed to get a post in every Tuesday this month, mainly because my Yazirian Legends and Lore post ended up needing two slots. Let’s get started.

Looking Back

I think I’ve settled into a routine that may become fairly standard for the next little while. We’ll see how it goes. The month started with the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post followed on the second week by a post about a new miniature, this time the Pirate Frigate. The last two posts of the month were my posts for the RPG Blog Carnival on Yazirian History, and Yazirian Legends and Lore, which turned out to be more lore than legends but that’s okay. Doing the information for the yazirians has gotten me thinking about the other Frontier species so you may see articles like those for other species in the future.

Behind the scenes, there were a number of things going on this month. Why does it always seem February is the busiest month?

First off, I completed another orbit around the Sun celebrating my birthday mid-month. It is left as a (not so difficult) exercise for the reader to determine how many orbits I’ve made.

Another project that I finished was to move all of my websites to the new server. Last month I migrated all my externally hosted sites to the new server; this month I moved all the sites hosted on my old server over (except this one, which was already running on the new machine). This includes my old Programming Space blog, the Star Frontiersman webzine site, the Star Frontiers Network site, and the Star Frontiers Revival site. Yes I host a bunch of different Star Frontiers sites. The Star Frontiers Network was originally mine and I’ve collected the others over the years. With the migration, all of these sites are now set up with SSL certificates and default to the secure HTTPS protocol so you should see the little lock icon in your browser.

Another thing that happened is that I was recruited to help out with the Space Kids RPG Kickstarter. I’ll be providing astronomy and science nuggets that will be littered through the rules to teach about those topics. You may notice some familiar influences. The project’s creator, Nick Landry (@ActiveNick on Twitter), is a big Star Frontiers fan. The project has funded and, if you’re reading this on the day this post drops, is still open (It closes the evening of March 1, 2020). If you haven’t already, go back it.

I also helped Trevor Holman get another module ready for FrontierSpace. His module, Gremlins, is the second in his series and is available now on DriveThruRPG. I provided the editing on the module. This is number 2 of a planned 12 modules so be sure to keep and eye out for them. I’ll be posting about them as they are available.

Finally, I was hired out to work on the index of another upcoming RPG. That’s still a work in progress and I’ll talk about it when it comes out, although it’s not sci-fi related.

What didn’t happen was any advance work on issue 28 of the Frontier Explorer. These other projects ate up my time for that. I’ll have to get cracking next month. I also didn’t do so well on working on my book, adding only ~2000 words.

Looking Forward

So what is coming up in March?

On the blog, you can look forward to the regular Detailed Frontier Timeline post in a couple of days. The second week will be a new miniature, this time the freighter from the Federations Ships boxed set. I’ve teased that one on other social media platforms and my Patreon subscribers have already received the model. I’m currently working on an agriculture ship which will be April’s model.

The RPG Blog Carnival topic for next month is Alchemy. I’m not sure how I’m going to work that into a sci-fi topic but we should get a post on that at some point this month.

Right now I suspect that the fourth post of the month will be a new star sector map. In the Detailed Frontier Timeline, one of the threads has been the voyage of the HSS History’s Hope that I talked about in the Yazirian Legends and Lore post earlier this week. I have a map of the star sector they are traveling through, I just need to clean it up. I will probably do a post about that later in the month. It introduces some new features into the maps I’m making.

March has five Tuesdays which would normally be a fifth content post. But I’m saved by the fact that the last Tuesday is also the last day of the month so this time around it will just be the next State of the Frontier post.

Behind the scenes, this is editing month. I’ll be working furiously on the articles for the next issue of the Frontier Explorer which will come out in April. I hope to get the editing and preliminary layout done early so my volunteer artists have time to create any images I might need.

I’ll also be finishing up the indexing of that upcoming RPG which will eat up some of my time here at the beginning of the month. That’s a freelance project with a deadline (and a paycheck) so it actually takes top priority.

Another thing I plan to do this month is revamp my Patreon rewards and goals. If there is a reward tier you’d like to see, or something that would encourage you to support the site, please let me know.

On the computer side, the only thing still running on my old server is my mail server. That will get moved over to the new server this month allowing me to finally shut down the old computer. Once that is done, I’ll be embarking on the website upgrades for all the sites I manage, probably starting with the Frontier Explorer site to make it more mobile friendly.

Wrapping up

That’s quite a busy schedule. We’ll see how much of it actually happens. Is there anything you’d like to see me working or or types of posts you’d like to read? Please let me know in the comments below.

Can you believe it’s already the end of January 2020? Where has the time gone? You may have noticed that this post didn’t come as a regular Tuesday post. I don’t think I’m completely back to getting a full post every week with this as a bonus post but we’ll see how it goes. In any case, this was a crazy month but things are going well.

Looking Back

I started out with the Detailed Frontier Timeline post and the post on the Sathar Assault Carrier miniature. That was all according to plan. Then the Frontier Explorer happened. More on that later. The Worlds of Origin post was planned as the third post for the month, but I didn’t have it finished and because of the time spent getting the Frontier Explorer issue ready, I wasn’t going to get it done in time. But I had already finished the UPF Minelayer model, which I had planned to save for February, so that post went up with the Worlds of Origin post following the next week. And then we got this post at the end of the month.

That’s the front end of the site. Behind the scenes, there were also a bunch of other things going on. The biggest is that I finished up and released issue 27 of the Frontier Explorer. And I just want to say that I absolutely love this cover by Jerry Boucher.

Getting the issue out actually took a bit more work than I had anticipated. Due to life events, some help I thought I would have with the issue didn’t materialize and I didn’t find out until the last minute so there was a bit of a scramble to get everything ready to go. But it all worked out in the end and, because of these events, I’m in a better situation to handle future issues of the magazine with fewer problems. So in the end it was a net win.

Another behind the scenes activity was the migration of several websites. During January, I managed to get all of my externally hosted websites, including the Frontier Explorer site, moved from the external host to the new server. This allowed me to get them all set up with SSL certificates so they use the HTTPS protocol instead of just plan HTTP. Now I just need to cancel that hosting service so I don’t get billed again.

I also set a goal to spend less time playing games on my phone when I’m sitting around waiting to pick up kids from school and activities and instead use that time to work on writing my book. The program I’m using to write and organize the book has an Android app and can connect directly to Dropbox. So I can write on my phone, tablet, or computer and have it all synced up. While I wasn’t completely diligent about not playing games, I was much better than I have been and managed to get another ~3000 words added to my novel in my spare moments.

Finally, I spent some time working on the fighter miniature models. The ones I have work just fine on my high resolution printer but I wanted versions that would work on lower resolution FDM printers as well. I think I’m happy with the new variations. I don’t know that I’ll do a blog post on them (unless you really want me to), but they will be released at some point in early February.

Looking Forward

Coming up next is the usual post on the Detailed Frontier Timeline. I kind of dropped the ball a bit on that project here in January with the work on the Frontier Explorer and missed a few days posting on Twitter. And then yesterday I realized that I had dropped a couple of the storylines so I had to go backfill them and post the missed updates to keep everything in sync. I’ve fixed that and will try to be better going forward. I need to take a day and work out the next few weeks of events to get the stories all advanced. For the past month or so I’ve been barely staying ahead and with all the storylines going on, it’s been a bit too last-minute.

After that will be a post on the Pirate Frigate miniature. That was the last ship from the Sathar Ships boxed set of miniatures that needed to be recreated. I finished the model last week and sent it out to my Patreon supporters. The write up will happen on the second week of February.

The RPG Blog Carnival topic for February is Legends & Lore. If all goes well, the third post of the month will be on that topic. I don’t know what I’m going to write about yet, especially since I haven’t seen the kickoff post for the month, but I’ve got some ideas percolating. I’m leaving the fourth week post open right now. I might have content or it may end up being the State of the Frontier post but I think it will be the former.

Behind the scenes I will be continuing to work on an number of projects. I’m already mostly done with my next ship model which is a recreation of the freighter miniature from the Federations Ships box of miniatures. That will be the last ship from that boxed set. That will be posted about at some point, probably in March or it may end up as the fourth week post. After that, I just have the six ships from the Privateers box to recreate.

I’ll also continue to work on my novel. We’ll see if I can get the time spent on it increased. I wrote about 14k works in November, writing 15-20 minutes a day. If I can get back up to that rate each month, I would probably have the first draft done late this year or early next. I’m ~74k words into it and about 1/4 of the way through the outlined story. I also plan to start spending a little bit of time on issue 28 of the Frontier Explorer as well but that will be very low level in February as I also have an editing project to work on another module for FrontierSpace being written by Trevor Holman.

Finally, I’ll be migrating more websites to my new server. I still have four websites and my mail server running on the old server and I want to get those moved over this month. These will either be really easy to move or much trickier than the sites I’ve already moved. We’ll see how it goes. But these include the starfrontiers.us, starfrontiers.info and starfrontiersman.com sites so they are directly relevant to this audience. I also have my old programmingspace.net blog to move. Once those are moved, the real work of upgrading all the sites will begin.

Final Thoughts

I think that about covers it. If you have feedback on the types of posts you’d like to see more of, please let me know in the comments below.

It’s convenient that the last Tuesday of the month also happens to be the last day of the month so that this post falls on it’s usual day. I hope everyone had a happy holiday season and have fun and exciting plans for the new year.

As I did last year, I’m not going to do a big yearly retrospective and look forward. I’m going to keep this to the typical monthly perspective and save the year-long views for the anniversary post in May.

Looking Back

In November I predicted that December would be pretty hectic. It turned out to be even crazier that I expected. So much so that a few of my posts didn’t quite get up on time to be posted at their usual 8am Mountain Time schedule. I still managed to get them up on Tuesdays, but some were a little later in the day. I don’t know if anyone other than me even noticed.

The craziness also spilled over into my timeline posts on Twitter. There were a few days right around Christmas that I was just never really near a computer and I got way behind on making the posts. Next year I’ll have to remember the schedule those posts in advance instead of doing it the day of. Part of the problem there was that I had a block of days that I actually hadn’t made entries for yet and so not only did I have to post. I also had to create the entries as well. I’ve gotten a bit behind in that and need to take a day and get the next few months of the timeline sorted out. In getting caught up I found I missed a few entries for one of the threads so the summary post next week will actually contain a few entries that never went out on Twitter.

I finished up the UPF Assault Carrier this month although like everything else it took a bit longer than I expected. I had planned on it being the second post of the month but it ended up being the fourth.

In the meantime I posted another organization, Obar Enterprises, that I use in my games. This is a follow-on post like the Streel post I did a while back.

I also tried something new in the third post of the month by recording the prologue to my novel Discovery as an audiobook to play around with that format a bit. I got a really helpful review from someone on Facebook that gave me some ideas going forward. I had fun doing this so I’ll probably record more of the book in the future, especially if people would like to hear the rest.

Last month I mentioned that there were be a bunch of behind the scenes technical stuff going on with the websites that I’m hosting. I started that process this month moving this site and a couple of my smaller, low-traffic sites from my web hosting provider that I’m not completely happy with to my new server. Progress on this suffered due to the holiday activities but I was able to move one of each of the different types of sites I host (WordPress, Drupal, basic HTML) over to the new server so moving the remaining sites should go fairly smoothly. One of the advantages of moving is that these new versions of the sites will have HTTPS enabled instead of just HTTP.

The other behind the scenes effort that was going on was working on the next issue of the Frontier Explorer. I started strong but then fell behind due to the holidays so I’ll have to put in a bit of effort this next week to get caught up. With any luck, we’ll have the issue out by mid January.

Looking Forward

So what’s coming up in January? We’ll start next week with the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post. The following week will be a post on the Sathar Assault Carrier. I started and finished that model on the 26th so it’s ready to go, I just need to write it up. I don’t know what the third post will be but I’ll likely do the write-up on another corporation. And we’ll end the month with the State of the Frontier post.

It is also possible that the third post may also be on a completely different topic. I’ve volunteered to host a month of the RPG Blog Carnival this year and while I don’t know what month I’m hosting, I’m going to make an effort to participate more in the topics of other hosts. My main issue in the past has been that a lot of topics have been either areas I don’t usually dabble in, or they’ve been topics completely unrelated to sci-fi games. I’ll by trying harder this year to twist the topics to sci-fi so we’ll see where that goes.

Along the way, I’ll be putting out another issue of the Frontier Explorer as I had just mentioned above. We release the Winter issue each January so that will be a prime focus this month.

I also plan on moving all of the remaining sites off of my remote hosting provider. I have four left, including my personal site, the Frontier Explorer site, and my New Frontier Games site. The fourth is a personal site for one of my sons. Once those are done, I’ll just have a few sites to migrate from my old server to the new one, although some of those will take some work and that probably won’t start until February. Or at least until this month’s Frontier Explorer issue is done and out the door.

Finally I’ve also started working on a UPF Minelayer miniature. This one is going to look a lot like the official Sathar Cutter miniature since that’s the silhouette on the game counter but it will have the stylings of the other UPF ships rather than the sathar stylings. Once that is done, I’ll have miniatures for all of the standard UPF and Sathar ships. From there I have a few more of the original miniatures to reproduce and then I’ll going to start on some new ships. I’ll probably finish the minelayer model this month but it may not be written up until February.

That’s it for now. Keep gaming and have a happy new year!

This post should have gone up a couple of days ago but I was completely swamped over the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s a pretty busy weekend at our house with my wife running a half marathon, Thanksgiving dinner, Black Friday Christmas shopping, and buying and decorating our Christmas tree. Along with all the regular weekend stuff like grocery shopping and laundry that had to be done. There wasn’t much free time to get the blog post up. But the craziness is behind us so let’s get to it.

Looking Back

The month started with the regular Detailed Frontier Timeline post, the next of which will come tomorrow. After that I finished up the Module Based Campaign thread and wrapped up that series covering all the Knight Hawks modules. I have to admit, it feels good to wrap up a series like that.

The last two posts of the month were the UPF Battleship and Heavy Cruiser models. I’ll admit I didn’t expect to get the Heavy Cruiser done last month but it took considerably less time than I expected to create the model and so the post was ready before the end of the month.

There were some other things going on behind the scenes last month as well. First, I’ve been having some issues with my web hosting provider and made the decision to bring all my web hosting back to my home server for the time being. That said, the computer I’m using as my home server is an old laptop that is about six years old and showing its age. To that end, I used some of the Patreon money from both my Expanding Frontier Patreon and the Frontier Explorer Patreon and purchased a new computer system to serve as a new server for my websites. That computer arrived this month and I’ve been getting it configured and set up. A big Thank You to all the Patreon supporters that made this possible.

The second thing that happened was that, given November is National Novel Writing Month, I decided to participate in a reduced #NaNoWriMo challenge. The normal event is to write 50,000 words on a new project. I knew that I didn’t have time for that, so rather than do the full challenge, I set myself a goal of writing for at least 15 minutes each day working on my Star Frontiers novel. The other part of my goal was to complete at least 10,000 words by the end of the month. And also posting my daily progress on Twitter.

I ended up not writing anything the last three days of the month (see the intro paragraph about how crazy those days were). Despite that, I more than met my word count goal with a total of 12,751 words written this month bringing the total word count of the novel up to 70,243 words. I figure the story is a little more than a quarter of the way finished so expect somewhere between 200k to 250k words when the rough draft is finished. If I had been able to write those last three days, I would have most likely had just over 14,000 words based on my writing rate through the month. Despite not getting to write the last three days, I think this was a success.

Finally, I started putting my miniature model files on-line on DriveThruRPG where people can download them if they want copies. I created a 3D Models product page in my New Frontier Games account where they are being made available. I haven’t quite gotten all the models I’ve created up yet but most of them are there. All future models will appear there as well. The model files that are recreations of the old TSR miniatures are listed as free, pay-what-you-want products while the new models that I’ve created myself will typically have a price of $0.99 or $1.99.

Looking Forward

Going forward, at least for the next few months, there are going to be some changes to my postings here on the blog. I’m going to try to get a post up every week but that may not happen. I’ve been going strong for a year and a half and I don’t want to break the streak, but if I do, you’ll know why.

The main change in posting is going to occur because I’m going to be spending a lot of time working on the websites that I maintain. And there are quite a number of them. Besides this site, I also maintain the Frontier Explorer website, starfrontiers.info, starfrontiers.us, and the Star Frontiersman website. Plus a website for New Frontier Games, an old blog (Programming Space), a website for a OSR gaming magazine that hasn’t launched yet, and personal websites for myself (I’d link to that one but see below) and two of my kids.

Initially all of these sites will just be moved over to my new server. With more memory, (much) faster disks, and a (much) faster CPU, you might even see a performance improvement. For the most part, those migrations should be seamless. There will be a bit of downtime but it should be small. Once I have them all up and running as is, I intend to start making some much needed updates and improvements to many of the sites.

You shouldn’t see any major changes to this site. I’m happy with its current design and so don’t have any major plans for it. The one thing I will be doing is enabling HTTPS and installing SSL certificates on the site to allow that. That’s one of the things I’ll be learning how to set up in the next month or so. That will be happening across all my sites.

The starfrontiers.us site is going to get a major overhaul. It is still the same site written by Bill Logan back in 2006/2007 and needs some major updating. That is going to consume the majority of my spare time over the next few months as I work on it. There will also be some updates to the Frontier Explorer site to make it more mobile-friendly. I’m also going to overhaul my personal site. It’s currently configured as a blog but since I have this one, I want to make it more of a profile site that links to all the various projects I have going instead. The other sites will be much lower priority.

In addition to the website work, I also have an editing job coming down the pipe for a FrontierSpace adventure, and a job doing the index for a new RPG coming from DWD Studios. Plus I’m hoping to continue my novel writing. And it’s time to start working on the next issue of the Frontier Explorer. As you can see, I’ve got a lot going on.

What this means is that I may not have as much time for specific blog posts. Here’s what I see happening for the next few months.

The Detailed Frontier Timeline posts will continue, both here at the first of the month, and daily on the Star Frontiers Twitter feed. I’m continuing to work on that project and intend to keep it going for a long time to come.

I’m really enjoying the modeling and miniature creation. (I think I’ve mentioned that in the past). As such, that is going to be a major part of this blog going forward, at least for the foreseeable future. I’m currently working on the UPF Assault Carrier and that will get posted in December. After that, you can expect to see the sathar assault carrier, a new UPF minelayer, and then recreations of the pirate assault scout, the freighter from the Federations Ships box, and finally recreations of the six ships from the Privateers box. That should keep me busy for a while and those will probably be released one a month for a while. I don’t think I’ll get to them any faster than that. And after that, I have ideas for a whole bunch of more ships.

This State of the Frontier post will probably become the regular last Tuesday post of the month for a while instead of just being an extra post the last day of the month. In it, I’ll update you on progress on the website updates, Frontier Explorer status, and any other projects that haven’t reached completion but which I’ve been working on. It really won’t change much, just go from an extra post to a regular one. Although if I do still have a lot to write about, I’ll bump it back to its extra post status to give you more content.

That leaves me with one or two other posts each month to keep the one-a-week schedule, depending on the way the days fall in the months to come (Dec and Mar have 5 Tuesdays, Jan and Feb have 4). I don’t know what I’m going to fill those with, although I’m leaning toward fleshing out more corporations like I did with Streel a while back. If people are interested, I could also post excerpts from the novel, although most of that is really rough and subject to great change when I get to editing in the future. The other thing that might end up here is bits of a new adventure I’m planning on starting (I know I need to finish the ones I’ve already started so they may show up as well). I hope to go to a con next year and run some Star Frontiers games and need to develop the adventures for those. I’m open to suggestions here for content. If there is something you’d like to see more of, please let me know.

That’s it for now. There is a lot coming up in the next few months so I’d better get to work. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions in the space below.

This is going to be a fairly short post as there really isn’t much to say. This month’s posts had a fairly focused theme: miniatures.

Looking Back

October was the month of miniatures. We had the Detailed Frontier Timeline post to start off the month and then it was miniatures, miniatures, miniatures with posts on the Armed Station, the UPF Light Cruiser, and the UPF Destroyer. I ended the month with a post providing the spectral types of all the stars on the Extended Frontier Map.

There were some things going on behind the scenes as well. Most notably we were hard at work on Issue 26 of the Frontier Explorer, which was just released late last night. It took longer than I planned. I’m still struggling with the distributed workload. It just takes longer than when I was doing it all myself and I keep forgetting to account for that. Hopefully I’ll get that figured out for the January issue.

I also worked a bit more on my Star Frontiers novel. This was mostly at the beginning of the month before work on the Frontier Explorer and my current miniatures obsession took over. But I still managed to get ~5000 words added. Not as many as I wanted but creating the miniature models ate into the time I had planned to spend on writing.

Looking Forward

I’ll have to admit, I’m having a blast creating the miniatures and I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon. Although the rate will definitely slow down. I’m nearly halfway done with the UPF Battleship and will finish that here in the coming month so you can expect a post about that.

As I’ve mentioned in the posts this month, I’m working on filling in the gaps so that there are miniatures for all the ships in the Second Sathar War game. After the battleship, I’ll have recreated all the original UPF and sathar miniatures. With the destroyers and fighters done, the only ships left are the UPF Heavy Cruiser and the UPF and sathar assault carriers. Those builds will be completely from scratch and may take some time. I expect that those will be coming at the rate of one a month for the next little while. They may come faster if I really get bitten by the modeling bug but one a month is the plan.

I want to finish up the module campaign project so I’m going to force myself to write another post in that series this month and then finish it off in December. We’ll also have the regular Detailed Frontier Timeline post. As to the fourth post this month, I’m going to leave that open and not make any predictions or promises. We’ll have to see what project grabs me this time around.

Your Thoughts

What did you think about the overabundance of miniatures this month? Do you want to see more of those? Is there something you’re missing or you’d like to see more of? Is there a project or topic you’d like to see me tackle (or finish)? Let me know in the comments below. And Happy Halloween!

As I was getting ready to write this, I noticed that it was post 100 on the blog. That definitely marks this as the most successful single blogging endeavor I’ve ever undertaken. Back when I was blogging regularly on the Arcane Game Lore blog, I had a total of 91 posts. I’ve considered pulling those posts over to this blog to consolidate but have not done so yet. My old Programming Space blog only had 16 posts before I stopped posting there and my really old Star Frontiers Lives On blog only had 25 posts before it died. (Another set of posts I’ve considered importing here.) To be fair the cause of death of that one was the Frontier Explorer magazine, it started eating up all my time. I’ve also tried off and on to run a personal blog but the most recent incarnation (there have been others that have been lost to time) only had 6 posts and one of those was a test post. So this has definitely been my most successful endeavor so far and will so exceed all the others combined.

Looking Back

I started out with the now regular timeline post which was followed by the map for a small space station location, the space dock crew lounge. This was part of an adventure I’ve been meaning to write up for a while now so I officially launched it as a new project, Asset Recovery.

And then this month took a right turn and went off in a completely different direction that I hadn’t planned on. About two weeks ago I really got bitten by the bug to do some more 3D modeling. This really shouldn’t have come as a surprise given that I just got my new 3D printer and enjoy modeling, but still. It started with me setting up a page on the site where people can order custom printed miniatures using my new 3D printer. I can print any miniature they want or they can choose from the selection of models I’ve created.

When I posted about this new page on the Star Frontiers Facebook group, someone (Andy) suggestions that I make “scenario packs” with the minis needed for the various modules and battle scenarios in the books. I had been thinking along this line already and I guess Andy’s comment was the push I needed to move more in that direction. To do that, however, I needed the rest of the models. That’s when everything went off the rails. I started by sitting down and whipping up models for the UPF and sathar fighters, miniatures that are lacking in the originally released sets. And then I launched into some more miniature models that I’ll get to in a moment.

Behind the scenes, there have been two major projects going on. The first is issue 26 of the Frontier Explorer. I’ve been working on editing the articles for that issue which comes out next month.

The other is I’ve been working on writing my novel set in the Star Frontiers universe. I’ve added over 7500 words (which is half again as much as I added in the two previous months combined) to the manuscript bringing it up to ~52,500 words total. That is now longer than my entire previous novella, Discovery, which clocked in at just over 48,000 words. And I’m only about 1/4 of the way through the story.

The other thing that happened is I got the first round of Extended Frontier Maps shipped out to those that ordered them. There was a bit of a hiccup with the printer but we got that sorted out and the maps shipped. As as far as I know, with the exception of the one going to Germany, they have all arrived. The upside to the hiccup was that I discovered that it’s actually easier to me to order these print-on-demand style rather than having to order them in batches. So I’ve turned the ordering page back on and will leave it open. If you still want a copy, you can order one anytime.

Looking Forward

This month is probably mostly going to be about miniatures. We’ll start off tomorrow with what has become the regular first post of the month, the Detailed Frontier Timeline post. And if you don’t want to wait until the beginning of each month for the timeline events, I still post them daily on Twitter from the @StarFrontiers account.

The post the following week will be a post on the space station mini I made. The picture at the right is a bit of a teaser for that. Continuing on the miniature theme, I’m currently working on reproducing the UPF light cruiser miniature. You can expect to see a post on that before the end of the month, probably on the 22nd. I don’t think it will quite be done by the 15th as I’ll be focusing a lot on the Frontier Explorer between now and then. As these new models become available, I’ll be adding them to the Order Miniatures page so that you can order them if you want. I plan on putting all my miniature files up on DriveThruRPG for people to purchase if they like although all the ones I’ve developed recently and going forward are sent to my Patreon supporters at the Surveyor ($2/month) level or higher as I finish them. I’ve already sent my supporters the fighter and space station models. They’ll be getting the light cruiser when it’s done. Anyone at the Crafter level of support ($30/month) will be receiving a printed space station and light cruiser miniature in November as those models will be released this month. In addition, anyone that joins that support level in October will receive a set of 8 UPF and 8 sathar fighters as well.

October is a five post month so I expect that the other two posts will be one on the module campaign and another related to the Asset Recovery project. Since the next miniature after the light cruiser will be the battleship, I don’t think that will get finished this month. Those will be my regular Tuesday posts.

As I mentioned, this month sees the release of issue 26 of the Frontier Explorer and a lot of behind the scenes work will be going into that. You can expect to see an out of band post announcing its release towards the end of the month. I’ll also continue to work on my book.

You may also see more shorter posts coming in the future. I often post small snippets of things I’m working on on Facebook or Twitter. Since my posts here are posted there as well, I’m toying with the idea of posting those small bits here as short posts instead. We’ll see how that pans out. Let me know what you think of the idea.

One other idea I’m toying with is expanding the scope of this post each month. While I call it “The State of the Frontier,” to date I’ve really only used it to talk about things I’ve been doing. I think I would like to also include other things going on related to Star Frontiers and FrontierSpace that others are doing as well. We’ll see if that come to fruition but if you have news and want me to help disseminate it, let me know.

Your Thoughts

Thanks as always for reading my blog and especially to those that support me on Patreon. Let me know if you have any thought or suggestions on current or future projects.