Monster Commute RPG progress?

by Daniel on October 1, 2009 at 2:51 pm

This week I’ve been traveling for work. No biggie, but it allowed me some hotel downtime where I couldn’t do much else but write in my newly acquired moleskin. (It was my wife’s but she kindly gave it up for me for the trip.)

I was so inspired about the Monster Commute RPG (MonComRPG) that I went nuts on the flight from PHX to Spokane with a layover, and knocked out the core structure of the game. I wasn’t 100% by any means, but I had a good idea of where it was going, how it was going to work, and the limitation of what I was going to put together. In short, it was going way better than my GyrFudge Combat and GyrFudge Magic rules that I attempted to create years earlier, much because I’m embracing simplicity.

They were rough notes, but good enough for me to brainstorm the races, the gifts, the faults, the “attributes”, and how character generation worked, and all of that. All in red ink, and written in the hand of a madman. On a plane. During takeoff.

Then on Monday night after work and dinner, I got on the laptop, and started dumping it into a google doc, refining here and there, and clarifying with a little more detail.

I continued doing this every evening, as much as I could. I think I was able to get a couple of hours into each night, before falling asleep at the keyboard.

Knowing me, I have to work on stuff like this when my interest is hot, or I’ll lose interest. Not something that I wanted to do with this.

Then today, on the flight back from Spokane, I wrote in the Moleskin on the plane, and then transcribed more of it on the layover in Oakland. In fact, I almost missed the plane and only caught it after I heard myself being paged to the gate. I was just totally engrossed working on the game, and filling in the details.

I got most of my thoughts from the Moleskin into Google docs.

This is good, because now that I find myself at home, I see that I’ve lost that frikkin moleskin.

(Episode 3 Darth Vader goes: “NNoooooooo!”)

I made it off of the plane with it, but from there, it seemed to have disappeared. It must have fallen out of my bag, or been left on a seat or something. I was clutching the damned thing when I got off of the plane, I know that for certain. But not it’s gone.

Thank the gawds that I was so inspired to get much of this into the computer, because if I didn’t, I’d be so sick and angry about it that I’d not be able to touch the project for another 3 years.

Long story short, I’ve lost some of the data, but nothing so critical as I can’t add to it again. I may not have a lot of time to work on it in the next month, but I’ll try to dabble here and there.

I have to admit that I was becoming rather fond of the Moleskin, as it was a cool symbol of manic inspiration to me. Heck, if I can finish this game (I know I can, I know I can) it would have been a really cool artifact of the process.

Have you seen my little moleskin?

(I did write steamcrow.com in the inside front cover; maybe someone will come forward and mail it back to me.)

- Daniel