A friend asked me "what I do all day" as a game designer/writer, and I told him that I would post it on our blog (As I haven't posted anything in a while).

Between 6:00 and 6:30am: Wake up to the sounds of Conor wanting to be out of his crib.
6:30am - 7:30am: Monitor Conor in the living room, maybe watch half a movie with him.
7:30am - 8:00am: Have breakfast/feed the boy.
8:00am - 10:00am: Play with Conor until the nanny arrives.
10:00am - 1:00pm: Work in my office on whatever Mongoose Projects I have on my docket at the moment.
1:00pm - 1:45pm: Lunch, or errand running
1:45pm - 5:00pm: Work in office until nanny gets off work.
5:00pm - 6:00pm: Keep boy entertained.
6:00pm - 6:45pm: Feed boy dinner, try to eat as well.
6:45pm - 7:45pm: Play with Conor until he gets tired.
7:45pm - 8:15pm: Bathe, bottle and put the boy to bed.
8:15pm - 10:00pm: Work some more if I can, or just relax if my brain is pudding.
10:00pm - 11:30pm: Play some pre-bed xbox or paint on a few models.
11:30pm - 12:00am: Change the boy's diaper one last time before bed.
12:00am: Sleep...the most treasured resource ever...until it's time to start over on the next day!

See folks...a game writer's life is not ALL fun and games. So, please be kind to us when we seem stressed, crazy or a little punch-drunk! :)

Cheers all,
Bry

I am rooted firmly in Traveller-land at the moment. Which is no bad thing.

The new Traveller Character Pack has come in this week, and it looks spiffy. We did something similar in the old D20 days with the Ultimate Character Record Sheet, and once I started using it in my own games, I never went back. This booklet contains oodles of entries for you to record every detail about your character - what equipment they have, what armour they wear about town and when engaged in battle, enemies, contacts, allies, vehicles, ships - there is even a last will and testament (which, given how rich some Traveller characters can get, is a big Plus).

We are trying the pack out for real tonight at the office game.

Which is another story in itself. The office campaign is about to kick into high gear, and there are going to be some surprises tonight as various skeletons come home to roost for the characters (as I said in the last entry, Traveller is great for lazy GMs, and contacts/enemies/allies generated during character creation can lead to scenarios that practically write themselves). After completing Project Steel and One Crowded Hour (both Comstar adventures, available from the Mongoose part of Drivethru), the players have been trundling across the Marches, trying to reach the Scout ship that was promised to them. Along the way, they have completed Research Station Gama, and run into an Al Swearengen clone at the Somem Grand - that caused some 'issues' for the Aslan player, though the psionicist spent most of her time on medical tourism, trying to find the best deal for the augments she was after! Anyway, they have just arrived at Wardn, and are about to pick up their ship. Fun will commence.

In other Traveller news, Strontium Dog has been approved and will be off to print this week. I have been reading through it today, and it is going to be a cracking game. SD has the kind of universe where just about anything can fit in, so if you have all the core black books for Traveller, you can be sure that you will have a setting that you can use absolutely _everything_.

Will is working this week on the Judge Dredd update to the Traveller Character Pack. The idea here is that whenever we do a new Traveller setting, it will get a page or two of updates for the Character Pack, allowing you to just print the relevant sections off and add them to your book. The Judge Dredd addition, for example, contains sections on informants, new skills, techniques and, of course, the Lawgiver and Lawmaster.

In February next year, we are releasing a new setting for Traveller (which we are saying nothing about until the State of the Mongoose, so don't ask!), and while development will be carrying on for the next couple of months, I have been working on a scenario that tests various rules and concepts for the game. Now, being a lazy Games Masterm, this is the first 'proper' scenario I have written myself for nearly two decades! It took a while to get back into the swing of things and, unfortunately, I started treating it as I would a novel - so, instead of a straightforward scenario to test the required concepts, there are twists, and new characters, and side plots... it never seems to end (though it better, as I am supposed to be running it through October...). Anyway, it should prove to be a real change of pace for the players, and I can't wait to see everyone's reaction when we announce this puppy. It is a good 'un.

We have also been discussing the forthcoming Secrets of the Ancients campaign. Written by Gareth Hanrahan, we were planning a big mega-campaign, filling 256 pages of Ancients goodness. We had a few ideas on what we wanted to change foer this campaign (or rather, what perceptions of the Ancients we wanted to change for veteran players), so we contacted Marc Miller - and he was well up for it! What we got back was a document sprawling over several pages with his views and ideas on the subject - and all of a sudden, I could see us doing three, four, five, or more 256 page campaigns, all interconnected, all burrowing just a little deeper into the true mysteries of the galaxy. Needless to say, Secrets will reveal a lot about what has happened/is happening, but it will be a long time before all is revealed.

Almost as an aside after that, though it has had me very excited, is the Spinward Marches Map Pack - we have outdone ourselves on this one, as this will be a huge 40" poster of the Marches, with as much information as we could squeeze onto it. Trojan Reaches is following - and, incidentally, if you have not picked up Aslan and seen the Reaches, do so now! It is not just about cats. As gareth described it in the book, if the Marches are the frontier, the Reaches are the badlands. If you want a real Firefly type campaign, you cannot do better than set it here.

And now I have to start collecting notes on the Traveller Campaign Guide, released next year - this is the book designed specifically for lazy Games masters and the aim is for someone to be able to run a complete Traveller campaign with nothing more than this guide, the rulebook and perhaps a sector book (like the Marches or the Reaches). Not a scenario in sight and yet, for the players, it will feel as if it is all scenario led. A lot of Mongoose staffers are piling into this one with ideas, so watch out for it. You'll be able to approach any game session without any preparation, and yet be completely confident of its outcome.

Starting to weaffle now, but we certainly have a lot of Traveller goodness on the near horizon, without having to worry about all this 2010 material - Bad Moon Rising came out this week, and Strontium Dog will be appearing soon. They'll be joined by the Character Pack and Referee's Screen, then before the end of the year, you will see the Judge's Manual, Vargr, and three map packs.

It is certainly a good time to be a Traveller player!

I have never worked out whether I am an 'odd' games master, or a very common one.

On the one hand, I hate going into a game unprepared. I like to know what will happen if the players do X, what city Y looks like, and the entire layout of dungeon Z. Hate winging it.

On the other hand, I am also a very lazy games master. I run a company as a full-time job and my spare time tends to be taken up with, well, running the company! This means I have very little time for writing adventures, and I find published adventures (or campaigns, even better) to be an absolute blessing. So long as I can get round to reading them.

At the moment, we are playing Traveller in the office campaign, Spinward Marches style, and last night's game underlined to me, once again, how great Traveller is for the lazy games master. I had absolutely no adventure prepared or planned and, in any other game, that would have had me stressed, thinking about cancelling the game because of lack of preparation, and so on. Not with Traveller.

With Traveller, I have all the UWP codes for every world in the Marches (and it is no accident that the next sectors we worked on were all bordering the Marches, just in case players decided to go off-map!). I have a pile of patrons to pull out at any time. And, in any case, all the players were trying to do was travel from Somem to Wardn in order to (finally) pick up their Type-S. Simples.

However, this is where Traveller's character background started to kick in. All of a sudden, there were arguments flying across the table about which worlds they could or could not go to en route because of enemies or rivals that, last they heard, were in residence on those worlds (honestly, refusing to go to a world of ten billion people because _one_ of them does not like you - on the other hand, I suppose there is some validity to that if the person in question is the ruling military governor...). The players themselves were constructing detailed plot lines of what they thought might happen if they strayed within three parsecs of such planets (not _that_ is paranoia!).

There is more than just that for the lazy games master though. Some worlds in the Marches have been quite well documented. Others haven't. So, when the players are trying to decide which system to go to next, they are rattling off UWP codes - and I am scribbling them down behind the screen (the brand new Traveller screen, very nice looking!), coming up with ideas of how the world might look. Hmm, population of a few hundred at best, tiny airless world, high tech level, zero law level - I reckon we could have a corporation effectively owning the world, and running it as they see fit. So, lots of armed guards in combat armour to greet the players as they get off the ship, and very restricted in where they can move around the starport. Just so happens that this also means that Kat won't be able to the Battle Dress she has been after, and if we make the corporation Ling Standard, Sandrine will start getting worried when she finds out her former employers (who she shafted) are running the show. Add in a ship just departing when the players arrive, and that will get the Aslan worried that bountty hunters will arrive at any moment.

Endless fun, just from one UWP.

Early next year, we are giving lazy games masters a real boost, with the release of a new supplement currently entitled Campaign Guide. This is a book I am really looking forward to, as it will provide every tool a lazy games master needs to run an entire Traveller campaign - without needing any adventures at all. It will contain all sorts of encounter tables, starport descriptions, patrons, random passengers, and so on.

So, if your players decide to go pirating, it is a few seconds work to decide what merchants they encounter, and how often they get chased by a military destroyer. If they decide to make some extra cash by taking passengers on board, a few more seconds will tell you whether any of those passengers are 'interesting' and worthy of a little description. When they go to a new world, does it have certain services, TAS, or a ship selling that new fancy combat armour they have been hankering over? All sorted. It is a vertiable mine of plot hooks and random tables, all designed to push the lazy games master on and, with just a little added imagination on his part, construct an entire campaign with recurring enemies, friends, disasters and triumphs!

I can see me playing a lot more Traveller in the future. Now, how do we go about doing the same thing in RuneQuest?

As I type this, we have just broken up for lunch on the first official Traveller Open Day. The event is well attended, and everyone seems to be enjoying the different ways of playing Traveller that we are showcasing. The Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog (the first time this game has been let loose on the outside world) are proving very popular - jump on our forums, find someone who was here, and hassle them to give you the inside story!

I have been playing rather less than anyone else, mainly because I have just spent the past seven hours revising our 2010 production and release schedule.

On the face of it, this is an easy task - after all, just work out what we want to release, assign a writer, wind them up and watch them go, right?

Oh no, so wrong! It might have worked like that in the old days, when it was just me writing and Alex laying books out, but these days we have to herd (they'll forgive me using the term) five writers, three editors and one layout chap all in the same direction, and get them working on projects so there is no downtime - like, for example, an editor not having anything to do (oh, what they would give!) because a writer has not yet finished a manuscript.

Then you have to consider what a writer or editor will most enjoy writing, then you have to take into account that Game Line C has not had a supplement for quite some time. It never ends.

And then a new licence comes along. One day, you are working with the current schedule, and everything is fine. The next, Big Licence comes along, demanding huge books, lots of supplements, and dire amounts of editorial time.

The term 'holiday' is a dirty word at the moment. . .