Wherein I Ramble About Recharging

Pumpkin being Pumpkin.

In between bouts of work (2 jobs) and child care, I've been trying to recharge my creative battery.

I recently read a zine called "How to Be Creative More Often: even if you have a job, responsibilities, & need more than three hours of sleep each night." (Kind of  wordy, but you can't deny that it is descriptive). One suggestion the writer gives is to have "feeding periods" where you try to fill yourself up with inspiration: movies, art, books, etc. I'm not sure what, or if any, scientific data backs up this suggestion, but it sounded right to me.

So that's what I've mostly been doing. 

I recently finished reading The Castle of Iron by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt and loved it. One book is not enough to judge either author, but I enjoyed it far more than Jack Vance's The Gray Prince, which I had read prior.  Magic and science co-exist in parallel universes, logic and literary verses are the keys, and oh yeah, they have somatic components to the spells.

Currently reading The Eternal Savage by Edgar Rice Burroughs (originally titled "The Eternal Lover"). I should have gathered from the original title more of the plot of this book than I got from the newer title. 

Burroughs is my guilty pleasure. I don't think he's the greatest writer, but for whatever reason I enjoy reading his books. The premise of this one seems exceptionally dubious the more the plot unfolds. Still, I'll keep reading it as I'm curious as to how he'll attempt to explain it all.

I've been re-watching Ken Burns's WWII documentary, The War, on my Kindle - it's free to Amazon Prime subscribers - during my workouts and here and there. I've seen it in its entirety once prior, when it aired originally and find it riveting, tragic and inspiring.

For my much ballyhooed feudal Japan social campaign, i added a tons of free movies  to my queue, including When the Last Sword is Drawn,which was fantastic. The campaign is likely to have a high level of fantasy, but the drama here was so gripping - a samurai caught between clan, family and duty. What more could you want?

Demons and magic, of course.

I imagine the game will probably be more like Moyeo Ken (anime). Watched one episode so far and thought it was pretty terrible, but I admit there were some cool ideas. 

Some plastic did make it to the table the other day for a DHC7B game - my umpteenth play through of the first scenario in the Nuts!2.0 rulebook. The dice were hot and it played fast, with mt US half squad taking out the Germans rather handily.

Finally, this battery charging thing has paid off in that ive got an idea for a 9Qs adventure for The Ever Expanding Dungeon, as well as some  ideas that will end up here or in the next issue of 6 Iron Spikes & a Small Hammer.

And looking ahead, at the end of the month, it's Dragon*Con. It's no GenCon but it wil have to do. I'm signed up to play OD&D and DCC and  I'm pretty excited about it.