Why even bother creating today and publishing?
As an outgunned individual, whose skills in life are rotting due to consecutive redundancies, I'm publishing my bespoke gaming content in blog format after having an existential roadblock. The futility of making things has come to a point where I either give up and rot in darkness, or I make it available to the public and hope someone shares it and gets inspiration from it. The idea isn't materialistic or money grabbing. It's really about the attempt to validate my own value as a creative I suppose. I know other artistic people have experienced redundancy through various causes; my own experience has come through deskilling and being replaced by cheap labour, numerous times, to a point where my main skills have been replaced by Ai. My place as a CAD based design engineer and CAD Based architectural technician are under threat, my skills of writing novels, short stories and poetry too, my ability to craft undermined by the incredibly high prices of materials and very low prices of factory made equivalents; the list of things is large and also, things move on quickly, to the point that any adjustments I might make are invalid before I've even re-calibrated.
So giving up means rotting in darkness. Publishing regardless means being plagiarised to hell and back, having work stolen (literally lifted wholesale) and never getting credited, messaged "wow that's neat!" and simply farmed like some cabbage growing in a field. That's not much of a choice.
At my advancing age, socially things are getting grey and lonely. Old gamer friends have begun dying off, their characters vanishing from the table until now, there's no game sessions. The shelves are full of dusty tomes and boxes full of old campaign notes. In one way, this is going to be my way of keeping the dream alive.
Software Used
Well, I'm going to use plenty of Ai generated images along the path because I'm a very slow, substandard sketcher who turns out ten pieces of junk for every decent (passable) image I can make. Just realise that if I was capable, I'd do all the images with a set of coloured pencils. At least, I did pay for the creation of the Ai images with my time and subscriptions. There are many tens of thousands of Ai images on Pinterest, most of them are as good and better than mine. As for technical drawings done in CAD, those are mine and I will say so. These tend to be castle floorplans and maps. I use AutoCAD for these, and occasionally TurboCAD. There are some old coloured maps that I made ages ago (Glofeyne has been in process since 2004) and these were done with pencils painted up with poster paints. These were then digitised, and form most of the large coloured maps I have, especially for world, continent and national sized areas.
For other maps, I'm using Wonderdraft and Dungeondraft, perhaps even Canvas of Kings. I have access to some very old (but nice) software on the Core Rules 2 Expansion CD (from what 1998?) but rarely use their mappers these days. We might see one or two inclusions just for novelty sake. My resident under the bonnet game system is old ad&d 2.5 (which I use for my own tabletop games) but this isn't going to appear here as this isn't for actual gaming. I guess I stuck with 2nd edition as I'd invested thousands in it and my game data was integrated with it, a swap to the later editions would require a vast rewriting of stuff that would never get finished.
For writing I'm using LibreWrite, basic art from Corel Paint (very old). I keep a large personal wiki using an app called Zim. I swear by Zim. It works so well for me. I went through phases building with World Anvil and Obsidian Portal before settling on a non cloud solution. So this blog isn't me doing my world-building. The building is done offline, and this is just my way of getting it out there.
Well, hope you enjoy the journey. As of making this first post, Glofeyne is about 20 years old. There's going to be a huge amount of material to post. Add on top the stuff that's developing as I move onward.
Live long and prosper!
O.G.Osborne (Ozzy)
Aka: Vorgentah Panzerhand
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