April Fools

Well, I finally got the latest update posted. Took long enough. The Inner Demons novella itself was started way back in December of 2006, when my wife Tracy and I were brainstorming ideas (and of course after watching the film Aliens). Needless to say, the fiction pays some serious homage to that classic. Still, over a year is a long time to work on something…add in the new characters, various re-writes of the fiction and of course the artwork produced for it and you’ve got a lot of work that went in to the latest update.

I rarely get much good solid feedback on the updates these days. I attribute it to a lot of factors, including, but not limited to:

The decline of interest in the D6 Star Wars system.
The shrinking online D6 community
The shift in Roleplaying to more “stats-heavy” systems.

Of course I realize that these reasons tend to tie in to one another, still, it’s certainly not like it used to be back in “the day.” I won’t go on an “I remember when” rant here…it’s not like you are that interested and it’s not like I really have the time to waste. Suffice to say, things were a bit more friendly and supportive a few years back. Back before most home brewed campaign sites died off. Back before everyone you talked to on a message board seemed to have a chip on their shoulder and an axe to grind (heads up partner, sporting this kind of attitude doesn’t impress anyone, and only goes to make you look like a spineless punk). Back before…well, back when folks actually seemed to give a damn about the work other folks put into sites for the community by the community.

But those days are gone. Now, “Megasites” exist to either pimp products or are nothing more than soulless stats archives, void of any real creativity and nothing more than page after page of crunched numbers that amount to little more than a variation of stats someone else has already drummed up and posted elsewhere.

In short…the online RPG community these days, especially the Star Wars RPG community has no Soul. Nothing that makes it live and breathe. The home brewed campaign sites used to be a staple of the community, sites that excited and impressed visitors with original campaign settings and heroic tals of larger than life heroes who threw caution to the wind and carved out their own distinct niche in the Galaxy Lucas Built…but now, now we are a dying breed, shadows that skirt the outside of the community like some Roleplaying equivalent of The Flying Dutchman…it’s crew forever posting to message boards just to let others know that we still exist…that we are still out there…creating and building. Not for us, no, but for others who might one day decide to pull themselves away from pages and pages of soulless stats and boring, monochromatic message boards where people are as quick to railroad you as they are to offer a kind word, and come looking for something different…something original. And simply something you won’t find in most other places-creativity that doesn’t come with a pricetag attached.