Tag Archives: status

State of the Frontier – Mid Oct 2018

Things have been pretty quiet lately here on the blog as non-game related things have been keeping me away.  I won’t bore you with the details but it includes fixing a garage door, repairing a furnace, and replacing a dead smartphone among other things.

On the plus side I also got my internet service upgrade and to my surprise, instead of going from 10 Mbs out to 100 Mbs out, I’m regularly measuring 600 Mbs in bandwidth.  What that means is that once the site starts loading, it should be very quick and the large image files should not take much time to download.  I was going to be happy with the 10x increase but getting 60x is amazing.  I suspect that as more people in my neighborhood upgrade to fiber that might go down but we’ll have to wait and see.

What I’m working on

Despite the quiet, I have been working a bit.  Here’s what’s happening and what you can expect to hear about in the future.

Ghost Ship Osiris

I’m currently working on writing up the details of the adventure that take place on Outpost Osiris now that I have the map in place.  This was going to be my focus over the past couple of weeks but all my free time got chewed up by home repairs.  I have made some progress and it should go quicker now that most of the issues are (hopefully) behind me.  Unfortunately, there isn’t much to share here on that project until I get to the next section and start designing the Pursale ship.  Although I will be sharing the write-up with my Patreon supporters once it’s finished.

Death at Rosegard

I have a few more maps to create and post for this adventure (the Streel mine complex, a different old mine system, and Trey Mulden‘s compound).  I also need to provide a write-up on the NPCs at the Streel mine.  And then there is lots of writing to make it into a coherent adventure.

Other stuff

I’m currently running a Star Frontiers game on-line that is set at the beginning of the Second Sathar War (Death at Rosegard was the opening adventure).  There has also been a lot on interest expressed in having an on-line play-by-post game that I would set in the same time period.  Which got me to thinking about the actual events of the Second Sathar War.  I don’t use the timeline in the Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space (at least not completely) but have my own ideas about how that would work.

I’ve dabbled a bit with that over the years but never actually sat down and come up with a comprehensive outline of what the sathar would do. And so that has started taking over my brain as I look at logistics and such from the sathar point of view.

I have a map of the expanded Frontier that I created before I ever owned a copy of Zeb’s Guide.  I’ve posted that on-line in the past but not here so I’m including it for your enjoyment.  This is the “player” version so that everything beyond the Frontier is unexplored.  It does include most of the systems from the modules (and apparently a supposedly secret jump from Cassidine to Truane’s Star that is part of my universe, not sure how that got on to this version 🙂 ).

star map of the expanded frontier region
Digital version of my original hand-drawn map of the “Expanded Frontier”.  Shown with where I placed (almost) all the module systems (the one from Dark Side of the Moon isn’t there).  Click for full size image.

I’m currently working on tweaking this map slightly so that the location of the star systems match the slightly larger Frontier map from Zeb’s Guide.  I’ll be keeping the module systems where I put them (Zeb’s moves Sundown and Rianna and has a slightly different location for Belenafar) and adding in the Rim systems.  I’ll probably also add in the Saurian systems from the Frontier Explorer and possibly the Se’sseu systems too.  I had obviously seen Zeb’s Guide before I made my map because I placed a few systems (most notably that cluster to the upper left of the original Frontier) in nearly the exact same place as the Zeb’s map.  Luckily none of those changes affect where I had put the Sathar systems. 

With the star map in hand, I’ll begin working on the logistics and timeline for the Second Sathar War.  I have a number of adventures in the back of my mind that would allow the PCs to directly intervene and affect the outcome and there will be write ups for those in the coming months (years at my current rate of production 🙁 ).  But first, the map, then an outline of the Sathar attacks on the Frontier that will serve as a background for the campaigns.  I should probably do a project overview post for this stuff.

Suggestions?

Is there anything you’d like to see more (or less) of in the coming months?  With winter coming, all the sports activities are winding down and I’m doing less chasing and should have more time for these projects.  Let me know what you’d like to see.

State of the Frontier – End of July 2018

This month did not go as planned.  I had really hoped to get a little further along than I did.  I managed to get the three Star Frontiers posts from Death at Rosegard out that I had planned for the month but did not get as far along on the FrontierSpace Ghost Ship Osiris project as I had hoped.  I definitely made some progress but it was all behind the scenes and not anything that is in any condition to post here.  I’ve put the Sathar Assault Transport project on hold for now simply because I know that if I get started on that, it will draw in all my time and attention and I really want to get the other two projects done first.

A major part of the delay is the fact that I’m currently teaching a computer science class at the local university and that has taken up more time than I anticipated (and will continue to do so for another two weeks).  It’s the first time I’ve taught this particular class, and while I thought I was well prepared, there have just been a lot of things come up that have taken extra time to deal with and that has eaten up the spare time I had to work on these projects.

Another small part is that I’ve gotten distracted by another project that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now – create a complete index of all the Star Frontiers articles published in the Frontier Explorer and Star Frontiersman fanzines, as well as all the original “official” article published in the likes of Dragon, Imagine, etc back in the 80’s.  Once the initial compilation is done, I’ll be posting it here.  After collecting the articles from the Frontier Explorer and up through issue 7 of the Star Frontiersman (of 25), I have nearly 450 articles.  There will probably be about 600-700 once I’m all done.  Eventually I intend to put all of that into an on-line searchable database.  But that’s a longer term project.

And finally, I’ve picked up a commission to edit an upcoming FrontierSpace module by another author and working on the first part of that has eating a small slice of my time as well.  Despite that I am making progress and we should see some new material appear this coming month.

So what’s coming up?  Well, the very next item on my docket is an alien robot for the FrontierSpace adventure.  Although in thinking about that, I realized that I probably need to flesh out the alien race that built it first.  Once that’s done, I’ll have everything I need to finish one of the 5 sections of the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure and will get that all written up and shared with my Patreon backers.  So the plans for August are:

  • Alien race description
  • Alien robot description
  • Adventure section (first draft – Patreon only)

If for some reason I finish that early, I’ll probably continue working on the FrontierSpace adventure and mapping out the next part of the adventure (literally, I need to draw a map).  That section encompasses the PCs’ interactions with the Osiris mining complex.

So that’s were things stand.  One thing that has really stood out the last few months is that there is much more involved in generating content for others to use than material just for personal use.  I’ve always known this, but the work in getting the Death at Rosegard material ready to go has really driven it home.  I’ve been converting bullet points in my personal notes into prose and formatted text and realized it’s going to take a lot of words to get it all down.  But progress is being made.

That’s it for now.  Remember to always keep exploring and expanding your frontiers!