What I am reading

There are 8 intresting articles that I am currently digesting from a number of different sources:

• Gnome Stew Dungeon Crawl Check List  and Prep Lite Manifesto - The Template 
• Telecanters Receeding Blog the One Session Dungeon Template  
• Chatty DM's Re-examining the Dungeon: Section, Factions and Fronts 
• Robert J Schwalb Reexamining the Dungeon 
• Playing D&D With Porn Stars (caution content) Artifacty NPC's - the NPC is decent, it's how you expand on it with every visit the players make that was fascinating. 
• ChicagoWiz's RPG Blog Dead Ends and DM Pit Traps - Avoid 'Em.
• RPG Blog II A Fantasy Sandbox in Detail Part XVII  - I have really liked the rest of the series. Yes, it is a bit dry at times, but as an example of setting forth a series of steps and then following up with an actual demonstration it rules. 
• Dungeon'sMaster.com Adventure Builder Workshop: Rewards  this is another good series.
• Jeff's Gameblog rather old but still very relevant How to Awesome-Up Your Players with my new maxim "Your NPC's suck and they are all going to die". 

And countless others.

Now to throw them all into a blender and see what comes out....

What Gets Me Started

The problem that I have had with maintaining this blog as not be a lack of ideas, but getting started. About 80 days ago I discovered 750 words. Its a simple site with a simple goal: to get you to write, every day, at least 750 words. As it is not a blog and nothing is visible to anyone but you, all the writing that you do is for YOU. It is supported by user contributions so it is "free".

Now, this alone would not have been enough to keep me going but then the sight adds monthly competitions (write every day for a month), and these silly little badges for making various goals and achievements: I am personally only 47 days from my phoenix and withing a couple ten thousand words of making my flock of birds. In some cases, failing to make your words for the day will cause you to loose a badge: I have found this loss aversion to be very, very motivating.


How I Use It

• I try and find a time where I will be distraction free for at least 20-25 minutes
• I the first line is todays date and any goals that I have (usually expressed as a word count)
• Then I put the current time.
• Then I just start typing until I hit the daily goal (at minimum the quota).
• Now to make this gaming related: I often put in snippits of encounters, characters or even blog ideas using the sites meta data notation of GAME: here is a game idea or BLOG: an idea for a blog post. 

Latter in the day, once I have passed the quota, I will go back an expand upon or add additional ideas there. Or, if I am pressed, I will search past daily words for ideas or topics to write about.

Give it a try, come on, for the first three days, you have nothing to loose... however, once you make your Turkey badge... you are hooked (hopefully).

I Feel Properly Chastised

 I found this little rant and was personally chastised for my, somewhat sporadic posting habits: the last post was on May 13, 2010. Alright, maybe Mr Porter was scolding some other people aside from just myself.  
I have, however, taken this to heart and I will endeavor to maintain a at least every other day posting schedule with content that related, if tangentially,  to gaming.
The sad part is that the rant was posted more eleven days ago...
(sigh)