TC here. This is about my Gamer life, rather than my writing which doesn't require banishing part of my soul and replacing it with some other guy instead of me to keep writing ;)
This is about my experience with Holistic Design. When I first got to Atlanta, I didn't have a lot of friends. I wanted to find a gaming group and looked on a local site and found out about an Empire of the Petal Throne's game since I liked the email game I'd originally played several years before. Turned out the system was so complex I didn't really understand it but I made a fighter called Huff who maxed his skill out with a Habbard and hit things when the party told him too. The rest was more of a reading experience but an awesome one.
Only it turned out I didn't get an EPT game, I got a Fading Suns game, by the games who invented the thing, but I didn't know any of that when I went to the game. Two sessions of roleplaying as the weird noble / engineer Helix Justinian and I was invited to game night. For the next ten years, I made friends with the lot of them, and friends of those friends became my friends until about 60 percent of my entire social circle in Atlanta became people from that single positive experience.
It was, literally the adventure of a life time and despite losing so much of my life and time to the LDS church, I still look back in fondness to those years because of the many fantastic experiences I've had as a result including a secondary introduction to the amazing Mythic Journey's/Mythic Imagination institute. There were good times and bad times at Holistic, but one of the 'it almost could have beens' was Noble Armada, a game that was a sequel to their best selling Empire of the Fading Suns, that they owned, that they controlled and now ironically if they were making it today could do it on steam.
It's funny you should say that because...well,
they are. I pledged $50 for it, not just because it looks like a cool game and they are my friends but because this is full circle on a Quixotian level quest to try by hook or by crook or any means necessary to make the thing happen, and this is the closest they've ever come to doing just that. I highly recommend checking it out.
At one of the darker times, I wanted to help by any means necessary which ultimately led to me working with them to write four RLR books, including one of which I did the majority by myself D20 FBI. It was long before I'd done my self published novels, and quite frankly I really loved how they came together. It also later led me to do my own Fate of Inglemia supplment. In my thinking, because of how much time was stolen from me, I try to live not one life but seven, and thanks to the RLR books and the Fate of Inglemia, I feel one of them is completed. My "Gamer' life as it were. I'm 'retired' not that I don't game but I have done what I consider potentially worthy of at least "A life" of accomplishment, it's my own arbitrary standard, with writing the seven novels being the second one. Working on #7 now.
As you can guess, with a name like Tossing Grenades at Windmills, I'm all about lost causes, but this is a cause that is no longer lost! The amount they are asking for is very small for a very worthy product and they're already half way there!
