All I Want for Christmas

All I want for Christmas is to get a few things accomplished.

While this here is more for me to keep track of everything I am adding to my plate, I think there is interest for you in what might be upcoming these last four months of the year. In rough order of excitement, “blessed are the list-makers:”

• Concerts! Especially electronic and metal shows. Live country bands every weekend, silent disco every first Sunday, Beast in Black this September, Dragonforce in November… I am getting out!
• Speaking of country, learning to line dance! This kind of dancing is much less principle-based and more memorize-the-patterns.
• Play a tabletop roleplaying game again, but with the BITS / 4M / BMWS / Hand-Head-Heart-Habits system to address missing rules or clarifications, e.g.:
  • Warhammer 40K misc.
  • D&D
  • Cy_Borg
  • Mork Borg
• Mods for the TTRPG Cy_Borg:
  • Cyty 17, a Half-Life 2 Combine city, faction, NPC, weapon, and mission outline.
  • Cy_Super, Super-Cy, Cy++, whatever I end up calling it, an introduction of truly next-gen super-punks. Introducing (anti-)heroic templates like Master Chief from Halo, WH40K Space Marines, Samus Aran from Metroid, Iron Man, DOOM Guy, Alien‘s Ripley, and the ever-useful “wizard with a gun.” Add power armor, personal mecha, plot armor, lightsabers, chainsaws, chainswords, and more.
  • Introduce the Mork Borg Basilisk god-things into Cy_ in many forms: land-ships, air-ships, floating sea fortresses, sunken weapons, space stations, orbiting craft, hidden super-computers, buried smart-cities, mythical creatures long dead, actual twin-headed god Basilisks of prophecy…
• General TTRPG mods:
  • Faction sheets, one-pagers that bring any fictional faction into any system, any game.
  • Land Ships (giant vehicles, like those from Bolo, Deserts of Kharak, Gundam, and Star Wars), both as single entities and as game dungeons unto themselves.
• Take another “death walk” to really focus down important things and people in my life.
• Bottom Half(ish) Below:
• Explore my neighborhood, trying out new restaurants at least once a week, getting onto the beach and into the water every morning I may.
• Break into V5 for my bouldering gains 🙌
• Go hiking somewhere in / around my new digs.
• Play Mork Borg solo, playing by “rules as written.” I think Solitary Defilement will be my best entry here.
• Read all of Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans (been sitting on my desk for months, owned for years…).
• Review a backlog of old journals, summarizing and collecting ideas for more projects.
• A “Market of Mecha:” A manual of system-agnostic (or BITS-based) mechs where buildings are like boulders, bridges but fences to mount. Including examples from Gundam, Battletech, Pacific Rim, Warhammer 40K, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. (Which others should I include?)
• To go along with mechs, “Monster Mayhem,” the kaiju equivalent: Godzilla, the Angels of Evangelion, a kraken, World Serpent Jörmungandr, a Mass Effect Reaper, a straight-up city-destroying UFO, and Cthulhu.
• More Cy_Borg mods:
  • An alien invasion of the city Cy, combining elements of Independence Day, War of the Worlds, and little-grey men. (Could combine with the XCOM mod below.)
  • Stranded factions from Star Trek: what happens when a technologically superior but diplomatic and non-cooperative (i.e. the Prime Directive of noninterference) group gets dropped into the end of the world?
  • Hunger Games in the a district of Cy.
• Some Mork Borg mods:
  • Bring the DOOM Guy as a playable ultra-character in the MB world.
  • Bring Guts from Berserk as both a playable and NPC ultra-character, randomizing different items like the Berserk armor, The Egg of the Perfect World, superior companion followers, a band of soldiers, and more.
  • Create a “downfall” prequel to Mork Borg. Start as a fantasy super society of gods and heroes, slipping more and more into wretchedness as the prophecy of the Twin-headed Basilisks comes to manifest.
• Make a Cy_Borg-like “end of the solar system.” Lightly base it on the Warhammer 40K universe, setup players to command strategically (space ships, planets, armies) and tactically (singular super soldiers) to search for some kind of salvation before the “Last System” bastion is overrun by deadly and multiplying enemies, internal and external.
• Convert the videogame XCOM into an alien-busting TTRPG with base-building and ever-present escalation.

Left out a few private goals – those are fewer and easier to track. Will I get to even half of what is here? Unlikely.

Regardless, time to get after it before the holidays demand a refocus and glimpse into next year. Cheers, y’all ~