Bagnas Creative Solutions

By now you can see that I am making much better progress on the stories rather than the illustrated comic. You'll also realize that the story is a bit better because I can add more details to prose while sequential art isn't verbose (at my skill level). Another point, I am out of the published and partially pre-written stories I had pent up on my computer. These are straight to the presses so to speak. Now that I fixed the reasons for my delays before, I have new reasons for delays. Ha ha.

When I first envisioned the web comic, I thought of it as a comic saga. During one of the drafts of the web site, I even used the term web saga. This comic version of adventuring logs didn’t pan out well with my schedule. I work. I have a family. I attend graduate school. And I volunteer. Perhaps I need to make choices and not be so involved in things. Anyway, what I want to say is this. I won’t be able to get a regular schedule for a while. Here are my new goals:

Today marks the second anniversary of publishing my stories either as prose or serial art. I almost didn’t realize it until today when I was writing a check. “Ten-ten, hmmm that sounds familiar.” I hope the three fans I have enjoy the stories so far. The change in format, style, and content is a product of this experiment being, well, an experiment. The blog is just a journal of my thoughts, struggles and decision making regarding how best to present something interesting to somebody.

Several years ago, I was frustrated with the new revision of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). I had played 3.0 and the updated 3.5 for nearly ten years. As many of my friends know, I didn’t like the changes they made to the new fourth edition. To me, they changed all the stuff that worked great and left all the stuff that seemed broken or ill fitting. Without belaboring the point again, I thought I might rant about a related topic. The publisher of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition didn’t fully flesh out and develop the true potential of the system they created.

I came up with this series of stories that link together and play out as an adventuring saga for a home group of players. These stories are in reality just adventuring logs of my original home game. That said, I have several pretty well mapped out. I did stick one extra idea in the series. Back when the Kelwyn portion of my stories was an actual RPGA module, I had an idea that never got to see the light of day when the RPGA decided to end their successful Living Greyhawk campaign. That was a bad idea in my opinion. Regardless, I had to ditch this story.

As I write many of the combats, I base the mechanics of the fight on the old d20 or new Pathfinder Role Playing Game. Several of these early issues involving the goblins come from a series of adventures I wrote. I have the stat blocks of the villains and can draw inspiration from their spell lists and equipment. However, I am now moving away from these pre-written plots and encounters, moving into a realm of ephemeral ideas.

By now you have noticed that I have changed the webcomic into a webstory with occasional pictures. This is working out much better because I can write faster and I’m getting the characters into situations I wanted to share with my reader (or readers). Drawing the comics was so slow that it pained me after two years of limited progress. My goal is to produce an issue once a week but every other week might be a better expectation. I think I’ll post it Monday morning so you all can enjoy reading them during the week.

The strengths of classless systems are their use of advantages and disadvantages to give characters some personality and flavor. D&D and other games like it attempted to include a type of disadvantage but never really got it right nor made it seem part of the overall game mechanic. The d20 SRD provided a variant called Flaws that was really tough. First, there were few flaws. Second, the flaws were really tough. This may be to balance the reward of a free feat. It wasn’t the best implementation of disadvantages.

This is one of my favorite optional modules to include into the 3.5/Pathfinder RPG. I first saw its use in T20, the Traveller implementation of d20. It reminds me of the Hero System’s Stun and Body mechanic. Overall, I think it works very well for Modern and Future d20 campaigns because it makes guns and other high tech weapons more lethal without the hindrance of Hit Point hoarding at high levels. When used in a Low Tech or Fantasy setting, it provides a grittier setting where death is a more common possibility.

Pathfinder does a good job of making item familiars a part of the core game. They call it a Bonded Item, allowing the caster to use a spell from the spell book that’s not currently memorized. It has some other nice features and drawbacks. It is a better implementation of the Item Familiar option so I won’t give a lot of review. The most interesting element of Item Familiars is they gain abilities and sentience. Could this be the origin of intelligent weapons from bygone eras? It deserves a look, but if you play Pathfinder you might want to move on and enjoy bonded item better.