The miller and his teenage daughter.

These two will provide sympathetic characters that will help provide a way to humanize the plight of the survivors. The daughter might also provide a good way to create a "rescue" type story when she turns out to have been sneaking out of the compound when there is not much zombie activity. Her disappearance (when she falls asleep creek side or some such) could result in a frantic search. Need to find out what uniquely useful skills a miller would bring to the group of survivors.

Leadership Conflict Character

I am not sure what the background of this guy will be, but he should be both likable and in direct conflict with the characters in a number of ways when it comes to leading the group of survivors (think John and Jack in lost). Will help explore the ideas of who has a right to lead if anyone and is democracy ok if it will result in more peoples death. Heavy stuff like that.

It looks like I might actually have gotten enough new blood/good old blood to form a new gaming group. We have some people relatively new to gaming so I am thinking providing a game to start with that will be both exciting and let them fall back on the game aspects rather than burying them in storytelling will be a good way to start. Time to dust off my idea for 28 Days Later meets D&D. The new D&D Dungeon Master's Guide 2 has some amazingly cool ideas for incorporating collaborative story telling and world building that I am also really looking forward to trying out.

The game will begin with the group already together. I am thinking holed up in some semi-defensible location. A cave, or a very small village with natural and some man made fortifications. It has been weeks since the last survivor has arrived.

The few people living there will be the group of adventurers and some local peasantry that are looking for leadership under these most horrible of conditions. Few excursions out of the village have returned and those almost invariably brought back someone that was infected, causing battles to break out. Supplies are running dangerously low and winter is around the corner.

In this beginning period, survival and struggles for leadership will be primary. Gathering information about what has happened and what can be done will also play an important role. The scenes will be composed of scenes related to the current situation -- getting food, securing defense, learning about the zombies. These will be interwoven with frequent flash-back vignettes laying out the story of how each of the characters struggled to survive. I need to remember to include as one of the character background questions, "You had to do something horrible and distasteful to survive. What was it?"

So what are some of the details of what is going on. The zombie "illness" is a combination of a disease compounded with necrotic energy leaching into the world as it slowly shifts into the dark dimension (can't remember the name that D&D is using for this). If you are bit and you aren't of strong enough will, the disease will take hold and will kill you, filling you with necrotic energy and re-animating you as a zombie. Only the strongest willed or healthiest can shrug it off. Best not to get bit in the first place. As the pool of necrotic energy fills the land, dying in other ways will begin producing other forms of undead, but that may be not until we reach Paragon level if at all. Maybe how you die will influence what you become. If you starved to death you become a ghoul, etc. I really kind of like that idea. If you are powerful enough and die by violence, you rise as a wight. Gotta remember this. It will make death a more serious issue for the players.

I will let the players define parts of the world (from before the plague) that are important to their characters. Perhaps we can have a few vignettes that display their characters from before the plague as well.

So what is causing this to happen? Why is the world slipping into the dark dimension? Is this some plot of a terrible necromancer? It is a natural (albeit unfortunate) occurrence? I will have to answer those questions. One idea though. What if it the flip side of those ideas. What if the world the players have lived in has always been in the shadowfell. Some one ages ago set up a barrier to create a pocket where life could thrive, and those barriers are breaking down. When the players discover this, do they try to rebuild the barriers, knowing it will break down again eventually, causing the cycle to turn again? Hmm, gotta figure out how that would all work out.

I honestly didn't have high hopes for the Ale of Ulthar. I tasted it before it went in the bottle last week and it was bitter as hell and left a mildly medicinal after-taste that was a bit off putting. I just cracked one open to taste it and see what I had to look forward to. It has mellowed a lot after a bit of carbonation and sitting alone in the dark. It is pretty damn tasty actually. It has a woody and smoky flavour that I didn't get much of before and the medicinal after taste is both shorter and a lot better, more of an herbal flavour. I am very excited about it. I was so worried that I was about to have 5 gallons of completely undrinkable swill. Oh, no, this is a good batch and I will be proud to give bottles of it to my friends.

knockabout how about that label? This baby deserves one, if for no other reason than because it had every right to taste terrible and doesn't.

The new year is almost here. Thanks everyone for sharing another year with me. That includes those of you I only really interact with through the little window into their life that is my LJ friends list. Maybe this year I will get a chance to make it up to Austin or NYC to meet and hang out with a few of you.

For me, this year was a mix bag of good and bad. The stresses of having a new-to-us house and finding out that the previous owners were skilled at hiding some serious problems from us when we bought the house has not been pleasant. Work has been a roller coaster ride at times fun and enjoyable and for long periods absolutely intolerable.

My relationship with my wife is my rock. It has been as steady and wonderful as I could ever ask for in somebody that has to deal with me on a daily basis.

This year seemed to be a great year for my brother and I. Some of you know that we did not always have the ideal sibling relationship. Throughout the years though, despite the arguments and exchanges I have cared for him deeply. I am glad that this year we seemed to be able to drop the arguments and just enjoy each others company.

Yesterday J. and I spent the day brewing beer. It was based on a Light Scottish kit I bought a while back. It will likely be an abject failure though. I used yeast that was months past date and I think it has a pretty good chance of not actually taking. I modified the recipe as well, keeping the 1 oz. of fuggle for bittering and added 1/4 oz each of wormwood and mugwort. I also added a little over 1/4 oz. of catnip just to be silly. I am calling this beer "Ale of Ulthar." See Lovecraft's story "The Cats of Ulthar" for an explanation. My hope was that it would be drinkable and would produce a nice buzz and good dreams when you finally sleep. Here is hopping!

Yesterday was my mom's birthday. We went to J. Cafe to celebrate. Not a lot gets better than eating a great meal with a great mom. Happy Birthday!

The free-form D&D intro session was a success. I won't go so far as to say that everything worked out the way I expected or that things went smoothly. I WAS able to come away with some interesting observations that will help me refine the concept some for the next game. Unfortunately, as I expected, one of the players was again very, very late showing up, and once he arrived at the store showed little to no interest in actually playing. Fortunately I had essentially written him off by that point. We went ahead with the three players we had.

My first observation was that the players seemed agitated during our initial discussion with what we(I) hoped to accomplish with this different method for bringing the characters together. Everyone agreed that they understood and pressed that we should get started. It quickly became apparent that there were some pretty fundamental misunderstandings concerning how the play would take place. One player initially began making recommendations that the token system needed to be changed to allow players to hold conversations with each other. It took some time to get across that the conversations could be had with the rules as they were now, just that the player involved wrote both halves of the conversation, leaving it up to the other players to jump in using the change tokens when necessary. We played a pre-pre game session just to try things out. My intention was for it to last 20 minutes. After my brief introduction, we quickly got to the point where pass tokens began being passed around rapidly with nobody actually taking the full three minutes minimum of tell time. That is probably a flaw, allowing everybody to continue to not participate, as long as everybody passes it can keep going.

We had to stop briefly. The players were getting quite frustrated and didn't seem to be having a good time. I encouraged them to be more descriptive. Rather than focus on telling the story as a series of plot point outlines, hold the conversations. We started again and things quickly improved. It was a lot easier to hit the three minute mark.

I noticed that only the player with some GM experience was inclined to make actual plot decisions. There seemed to be a marked discomfort with deciding who might actually be responsible for one or more of the murders. It really seems like the players involved were very trapped in reactive role playing. This became quite apparent as we went through layer upon layer of misdirection as to who was actually responsible for various incidents in the story.

In this instance I tried hard not to make use of my referee's pool of change tokens and simply left the story up to the players. One only one or two incidents did I do so. One was to change the idea that two murders took place in order to get access to a life insurance policy. I tried for a moment to figure out why inhabitants of a giant castle would need or have access to life insurance, and since I could not come up with a good reason changed it to a dowry.

I recorded the session and will be trying to put together a coherent transcript/interpretation of the story so that the players have a solid footing to work from during our next game session.

In the future I would like to see how it plays with a larger group and with a group of less reactive style gamers.

Sitting at the zendo was again nice. I got to meet a few new faces. Some of them had previously studied under the teacher we listen to on the CDs during the Saturday dharma talk. I would call them his students but I got the impression that has a particular meaning that I don't quite understand and that they don't qualify for. There was an odd fellow that was visiting from Oregon. He spent a lot of time talking up his zendo back home and their lineage. They are pretty large, with a number of teachers, and close to 200 members. Honestly, I am pretty happy this group is still small. They are talking about trying to get enough money to pay for a resident teacher. That would be nice.

S., has once again demonstrated her talents as a wonderful wife. All of the purchasing of xmas gifts was handled before I even realized she had started the process. I need to buy for my family, but the majority of the efforts are already completed for this year.

I didn't meditate this morning, but I did sit a lot last night at the zendo so perhaps that is ok. Tonight I have piano and need to make sure I do some writing and some math. Today will need to be a "no tv" day I believe.

It was a pretty bad day productivity-wise yesterday. Didn't meditate, didn't write for any games, didn't do math. I watched an episode of Heroes and and episode of Fringe. That can't keep happening.

During lunch today I am going to a local Botanica to pick up some herbs for an experimental beer I will be brewing this weekend. It will be called "Ale of Ulthar" and will contain some additional bittering agents beyond the usual hopps. It will contain wormwood, catnip, and mugwort. I am pretty excited about this. I haven't brewed in 6+ months and I have been wanting to try something out of the ordinary for a while.

I am going to the zendo tonight. I will probably become a paying member at the start of the year if things continue to be good with this group.