Objects in mirror

48!?  Who's been touching my lucky dice?

Well it's been almost a year since I started this design blog for Beacon and I just noticed I just posted my 100th post on September 1st.  Last September I was busily working away on my own little fantasy heartbreaker and I had just gone from reading blogs about role playing and playing Microlite with the kids to starting this blog and signing up with a local game group, getting ready to play some real grownup RPG.  Since then I've been introduced to Savage Worlds, Atomic Highway, and Hero system.  I've also had the chance to run a good play test of my Beacon d20 rules.  Ya 100 posts in a year isn't a lot really but then again I tried to keep this about Beacon and not so much about all the other things I like.  Maybe if I could come up with a good name I'd start an alternate blog and post about books and video games and other things.  Maybe that would be too much work.

Next Friday will be the first anniversary of the Beacon site and serendipitously it will also be the last in this series of Beacon play tests.  Now we're going to play some other games and even though I have really enjoyed the DMs chair again, I'm excited to get back into the player seat for a bit.  We will have played 7 sessions and all the characters will have made level 3 or be near enough that it makes no matter.  I am hopeful that we will return to Beacon again later on to continue the fun testing, either with the existing characters or new ones starting out at level 3 - or some mix of the two.  I also hope to release the 5th draft of Beacon this fall and incorporate the lessons learned from this play test.  A lot of the work I have been putting in this summer has been in the setting of this play test and even though much of it is sandbox, I've grown fond of it.  I believe I am going to try to put together something in the vein of a sandbox guide to the world appropriate for use with Beacon and hopefully easily adaptable for any low level d&d based campaign.  I don't expect it will be a hefty grimoire in the vein of THE WORLD OF BEACON! but it might be a nice PDF.  I really enjoy the sandbox full of plot nuggets campaign approach (for some reason I'm thinking of a catbox now...ugg) but I'm not partial to the pure hexcrawl.  I find that unless I have a general knowledge of the area the players are running about in, it's hard for me to run a decent game.  Maybe putting together some short world overviews and a couple maps will appeal to those of a similar bent.