Derik Badman's Journal

Another Saturday morning sitting in the parlor waiting for Lianne so we can go have breakfast at ███'s and hit the farmer's market for produce. But it's also game day, so I need to make sure I have enough material prepped for the session and I'm making a second attempt at macaroni salad as my snack contribution.

Two nights in a row of vivid dreams that linger a bit through the day. I hedge a lot on how much significance dreams have. I've had very active, memorable dreams for like half my life now (at some point in my very early twenties I noticed I was dreaming a lot and for awhile kept a journal of them), but I've never really attempted to gain anything from them. I do notice some of the repeating themes, like driving a car where the brakes stop working. Had that one again two nights again, though this time, oddly I realized after a while the breaks were working I was just looking at the RPM gauge instead of the MPH gauge on the dashboard. That's the first time that's happened, usually there's no resolution to that situation at all, just stress and worry then the dream stops (it's never about crashing into anything as far as I remember).

Anyway, I've probably already written about my game prep issues and related matters. As usual, I did have a few ideas come together at the last minute (yesterday mostly) on some larger elements of the campaign, but I'm still always worried about the smaller scale stuff at the moment. How do engage the players? How to add suspense or mystery, how to make sure I am offering the players choices. Feels like someone should have written a book about stuff like that by now. My main remaining prep is to find a decent spaceship map in case we get to the next scenario. If necessary I'll steal a dungeon map and try to adjust it, I guess.

Still need to get the site up, I've been too slow at it, and these entries are building up and it's going to be a pain to post them. I'm getting close to 2 months of entries now. I also still need to archive my old Wordpress site so that it is just static html pages. The tool I was using was crapping out on me, I think because there was too much content, probably because of images. Hoping I can do something to move all those images over to S3 and then find/replace the links in the static html. That should make the site content itself a lot more portable.