Digression: What the World Needs Now

Last night I was looking through old stacks of whatever self-written gaming material has survived from my teens and 20's. I realized a few things. For example, what the world needs now (from me, anyway) is not:

* A big, jam-packed dungeon written by a high school sophomore with encounters and dressings seemingly rolled at random from the charts in a certain book. Especially considering that none of the surviving maps have keys and none of the surviving keys have maps. Especially considering that my wife won't stop teasing me about that 2nd level female paladin chained to the wall wearing a "torn, revealing, dirty garment."

* Another hex map for a campaign world.

* Stats for the following "monsters": the whole angelic host of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite; Slug-men; the Braintree (hm ... beaten to the punch by Neopets, anyway); the entries in Borges' Book of Imaginary Animals that the Monster Manual missed.

* Arcane ramblings about the genesis of whole hierarchies of made-up gods.

* The role-playing system I used in a number of memorable home-brew improv games, that, as neat as it is, is not really doing anything more or less than its 500 or so competitors.

What the world needs more is material that addresses real needs of gamers. I managed to dig up a few things that I hope to gussy up and present to the world in the coming months:

* The pretty neat d6-based random dungeon generator from my later years of DMing.

* A few good monsters, some of which I'm already including in the nearly done Varlets & Vermin pdf - because what the world really needs is lots more low-level monsters. A few of my adaptations also sparked the idea for another, small monstrous compendium based on the worlds of art.

* Project X - a fairly short and manageable release, based on another realization about what some old-school approaches to gaming in particular assume but don't always provide ...