“Turn back, ye dog, the Sun Lord still lives among the Hyperboreans in his three-month exile,” the Pythia snarled as an answer to my beseechments. “But I have brought a fine heifer for the sacrifice,” I retorted.
“Yeah, yeah,” came the cryptic answer from the sibyl as she hurriedly entered her trance, “2012 will be the Year of the Hydra.”
I shuddered as I parsed the meaning of the oracle. “I must ready my ready my plans for the ordeal ahead,” I thought to myself.
Yes, I have been reading entirely too much Mary Renault over the past two weeks, but who am I to deny the voice of a god? Dear reader, I thus posit my Big Kahuna goals for the coming year:
The Hydra Cooperative. I have been quiet the last couple months about the project, in the main because we have been doing some sorting and reorganizing after a number of passionate discussions and debates about the vision and structure of this foul beast.
Long story short is that we will have two “heads of the Hydra” as we trundle into the new year. The first of which will remain the loose, mostly unstructured network of projects under the banner. The second will be a more formal (but democratic) non-profit publishing cooperative. See here for more news as we get closer to that point.
Hill Cantons: Borderlands. Time to let go. No more rewriting, no more finessing and obsessing the big goal is to get that weighty tome of domain-play variants and rules for classic D&D out the door by February 1.
By This Axe I Rule. Thanks to many of you I am starting to get some playtest feedback coming in, better yet I will meet across the field of painted-lead battle with the Desert Scribe in a few short answers. While this will be less of a priority than the back monkey above, I expect to put final touches on it by mid-February.
REH, the game. No title yet, but I have been working on an open content game with some fine folks that will be taking cues from an elegant and fun, if incomplete and somewhat abandoned Swords & Sorcery rpg.
Play More Face to Face. Self-explanatory. The holiday chaos and adult scheduling have played hell with the HC home campaign, I hope to get a more regular rhythm for that in the coming year. Hopefully I will get a chance to get in as many mini, board and other games with my compadres here as I started to do at the end of last year.
Play Broader. One of the great advantages of the Google Plus boom is the opportunity to play all kinds of obscure games. Games I want to play (or replay): Runequest, Small But Vicious Dog, Pendragon, Boot Hill, Top Secret, Hawkmoon, etc. And so I don't look like a total reactionary may be a few of the new boys like Microscope—and what ever weird and wonderful things some of your cooking up out there.
Those are the big ones, undoubtedly more will grow out of the ground as the year rolls on. What's coming in your new year?
Sounds like some good stuff to come. I had wondered what had become of the second head of the hydra since I hadn't got a post-Schism update.
ReplyDeleteThe automated voting system is still in development for the separate Hydra 'heads'. Once that's in place, the current Stage One group can be somewhat 'self-governing'. This should be done in January.
ReplyDeleteOnce that's in place, I'll set up the second Stage Two (formal non-profit) forum with the voting already in place from its inception.
The holidays basically put me almost a month behind on Hydra related programming.
I would really like to hear more about REH the Game!
ReplyDeleteI'm taking a month or so off of gaming-related work myself. Family and day-job have both amped up a notch and I'm not able to spend adequate time firming up my database of characters for multiple game systems.
ReplyDeleteI'm still planning to play when the chance comes and will prep for refereeing a Stormbringer session or two.