Musings & thinking ahead to the next campaign!

Setting search
I am wondering what setting I’d at some point like to run some non-generic fantasy in. As much as I am enjoying Kingmaker, it is a generic-quasi-Greyhawk setting (magical Europe)…. And in that respect it feels limited/ limiting… and even non-magical…. (no worries to those playing it - it is still a blast - I am just aware that I need to also slowly plan ahead - it is How I Am ;)
But what next (as in in 2+ years time)…. Various settings interest me:

• Shattered world concept – SW have a setting for it ‘sundered skies’ – but it is not quite what I am after (don’t like linear paths to start with)
  
  
• Swords and Sorcery concept – ala Conan/ Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, with low magic (Iron Heroes perhaps?)

Post-apocalyptic world – taking some of the ideas from Dark Sun – but in a different political setup.

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• Steampunk – early age – ala Defoe (the comic) meets New Crobuzon from Mieville’s work (but I am aware an rpg is apparently been made for this). Iron Kingdoms d20 has some classes and gear which could be nicked for this purpose.
  
  

1600s Europe – ala Solomon Kane (but not a replica of that) – Gothic – black powder weapons, clockwork, think Sleepy Hollow.

Party concept
I also have another conundrum –what kind of adventuring party concept? I like to set up a game, in liaison with the Team, as to what kind of party angle they would like a stab at, as well as what kind of game….. Having made the guys I game with play good pcs, and with Stuart chomping at the bit to play more of a ‘grey’ moral pc, (ala the anti-heroes of old, as well as Conan/ Fafhrd being heroes who were also pursuing self interest)… I am keen to have a party set up which captures those possibilities…..

Thus possible party structures:

1. Mercenaries - like Conan was for part of his career - in the sense they are members of a merc group, have a code of honour, are not evil, but neither are they good - but certainly would be united against the hordes of chaos etc. Could be any pc classes & pure sandbox - although they could seek out missions (for money), as well as developing their own ways of making hard cash - works in low magic S&S/gothic/planar settings OR
2. Thieves Guild - they could start off as lowly scum in the city's Thieves' Guild - and the first arc is them rising to mediocrity in the ranks: rogue, fighter, ranger, wizard/ sorcerer - play it out like GTA - with missions, as well as with sandbox - think the Sopranos meets Fafhrd & Grey Mouser here - works in an urban adventure setting - and events could see them having to leave it for a while.....(eg falling out with their bosses).... works in gothic/ S&S/ planar settings OR
3. Witch Hunters – they could be members of a religious order & hangers on: inquisitor, paladin, cleric/cavalier, wizard and rogue/ranger - again like GTA - a mix of sandbox and missions from your bosses. Think Van Helsing & Solomon Kane here - works in the gothic/ planar setting

Obviously some party concepts may work better in a certain campaign. Here's one example:


Witch-hunter setting/ campaign - fleshing it out a little
Reasons for joining the witch hunters: personal gain, joy in hunting, with one party member possibly playing the role of a believer in the cause, but also believing in using whatever tools (eg other pcs despite their greed), and methods they can (since they can rationalise anything in their warped ethical code)

Style of game....thus you have a party moving through the countryside, like in The Witchfinder General, hunting down trouble - for gain (honour, gold, power, women's favour, fear of locals, etc). It could also be part urban - Gothing up Ptolus for example - its backdrop of the Spire, and all the undead in the graveyards is a perfect backdrop for a Gothic witch hunter game for d20.

Development. Of course - as pcs progress, the game could explore how the pcs develop - or otherwise - a broader perspective - eg morality etc - but initially - for 5 levels or so – the game could encourage them to act it out as immoral basterds doing pursuing self interest in the name of their gawd.

Technology levels: I am thinking the backdrop would be airships, guns, etc - but these would add flavour initially - rather than being the centre of attention, eg the party could have either a pc or maybe better npc arcane mechanik in their mercenary band who helps upgrade gear - so long as the pcs get them the resources they need to do the work on their portable workshop inside their steam-wagon. Defoe is of interest here - with the zombie-apocalypse as the backdrop, and the famous scientists of the day pressing fast-forward on the tech levels as they try to create better guns and tech to beat the zombie hordes - applying ideas from Deadlands to 1669 England.

System: either
Pathfinder – with classes such as the new ones from the APG: inquisitor, alchemist, cavalier (?)… as well as old ones: paladin, cleric, rogue – with tech levels – I prefer those of 1600AD-ish for this .. OR

WFRP could be the other setting/ system for this game of course. 3e or 2e this is the question!!

Plenty of loose ends here - assuming I stick with this concept:

• what system? WFRP (2e/3e) or Pathfinder (I know there are others - but these will do for me)
• tech levels: Solomon Kane of 1600 - black powder only; or the more souped up stuff from Defoe, or even New Crobuzon, with trains..... Renaissance/ just pre-industrialisation/ industrialisation - all of these choices have profound consequences!!what world? Do I modify/ modernise an existing one - what would happen to it if.... (advantages - people may be familiar with it, eg WFRP - but in an industrial age, so some things would be strange), or start from stratch? (won't upset people, but involves more work!) This partly depends on 'what system'.
• What world? Do I want to modify/modernise a familiar world - what would it look like with these new technologies/ if a zombie-apocalypse happened etc or create a new one from scratch? Each has stengths and weaknesses.
• Is this the game I want to run? (ie I still need to explore the other ideas as well!

More musings another time. Time to bust a groove now and do some work!

Urban Arcana

I played a lot of Shadowrun in my teens, and most of our games were set in a futuristic Seattle, so I'm no stranger to urban role-playing games. I've never played in an urban setting in a fantasy game, though, and that's an itch I'd like to scratch one day, perhaps by visiting one of the following fine destinations:

Port Blacksand: Long before Freeport, there was the City of Thieves. After the ancient coastal city of Carsepolis was destroyed in the wars against Chaos, it was abandoned for decades, until pirates and thieves started taking refuge in the ruins, and things developed -- some might say worsened -- from there. The settlement passed through many hands over the centuries, until a bold pirate named Azzur sailed into port, conquered the city and installed himself as ruler. Now Blacksand is a chaotic place, with a single ruler but untold numbers of factions, great and small, vying for power. It is ostensibly a civilised human settlement, but ogres and trolls wander the streets wearing the uniform of the city watch. Lord Azzur himself is rarely seen, and may no longer even be in charge. A grizzled hermit lives in a shack under one of the city's bridges, a man claimed by some to be one of the world's most powerful mages, but if so, why is he there? And below the busy, grubby streets of Blacksand lie the ruined, haunted streets of Old Carsepolis, complete with forgotten temples to strange gods of the sea...

Honourable mention goes to that other great city of the Fighting Fantasy setting, Kharé. A Lankhmar-esque place that is easy to enter, but difficult to leave, Kharé may not be a city at all, but rather a prison in disguise.

Irilian: Published in White Dwarf #42 to #47 -- before it became a miniatures catalogue, etc, etc -- as an ambitious and elaborate attempt to map and detail a complete fantasy city, something they would later try again with Marienburg for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. What makes Irilian interesting is that it is no list of locations and NPCs, an approach which could quickly become dry and dull. Rather it is presented as a small campaign, with the players being introduced to various parts of the city as they progress through a series of linked adventures, so one scenario might occur in the merchant district, while the next would happen in and around the temple district, and so on. It's a fascinating and effective approach, the city as a sandbox, and one which makes it easier to absorb the sheer volume of information presented in thirty-ish pages of the Dwarf's then-characteristic 6pt text. My only criticism is the insistence on inventing a local language for the city that is the same as English, just with annoying alternative spellings -- "Commandere Aef Hors" for the city's cavalry leader -- that will have the GM reaching for the glossary every five minutes during the game.

Sigil: The ultimate port city, sitting as it does at the heart of the multiverse. The interesting thing about Planescape for me is not the dimension-hopping crossover aspect, as I tend to think that Spelljammer does this in a more evocative manner. Rather the point of interest is the central hub of Sigil itself, a place literally at the crossroads of everything. I see no reason to jump about the many planes of the D&D cosmology when there's such a rich, thriving and unpredictable setting right there in what could so easily be discarded as a mere base of operations. One gets the feeling that anything could happen in Blacksand, but in Sigil the safeties are off, and "anything could happen" takes on a whole new meaning in a city in which gangs of street thugs go to war with each other over matters of epistemology and metaphysics.

Those are my favourites. What about yours?

What's On Your Game Table?

Al asks, I answer.

Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition and Eberron Campaign Setting (3.5e version), because I'm putting the final touches to a Savage Eberron game I'm hoping to run this winter, the follow-up to a one-shot I ran earlier this year.

B2: The Keep on the Borderlands, because I've never read it, and I feel I probably should. I haven't had time to read it in the couple of months since I bought it, but I live in hope.

Aside from various sketches in various degrees of completion for Fight On! -- tenth issue out now, by the way -- that's the lot. Since most of my gaming stuff is in storage in another town, my gaming table -- which is a couple of shelves and a pile on the edge of the sofa, really -- isn't exactly groaning under the weight of stuff.

Imagining D&D

This post over at Grognardia seems to have spawned a meme, as a number of gaming bloggers have posted their responses. Here's mine.

This is the cover image that, more than any other, makes me think of Dungeons & Dragons:

This image was plastered over the comics of my youth, so before I even had the slightest idea of what a roleplaying game was, I was aware of D&D. As such, this image has a lot of nostalgic pull for me, although not enough to make me pick up the the new edition of D&D4 masquerading under this image.

Still, even this isn't the image that defines D&D for me. That image isn't a cover at all, and it's arguable if it's even an image as such:

To this day, I have a preference for landscape character sheets in D&D, purely because of this one document.

Return to the Campaigns of Elemental Evil

Not counting the Savage Eberron one-shot I ran back in the summer, it's been a while since I sat behind the GM screen, and even though I'm enjoying playing in a regular game, I've started to get that itch. I want to run Savage Eberron again at some point, perhaps some kind of loose sequel to the earlier game, so I'm throwing together some ideas for that, but most of my thinking of late has been on two possibilities: a continuation of my Rogue Trader campaign, and a return to Call of Cthulhu. The latter would be something brand new, not connected to my previous effort, and I'm thinking about a short - three or four episode - and self-contained site-based campaign, either set in the modern day or the gaslight period, and using some ideas I've pinched from a couple of indie games. I may end up running neither, or even both. We shall see.

My D&D

I have no plans to run any D&D any time soon, but if I did, there are some tweaks I think I'd include, most of which would alleviate the problems I have with the original game.

One of the things which struck me most about Dragonlance: Fifth Age was the abstract experience system. Instead of totting up points, a player would get a single "Quests" statistic, which would increase by one with every adventure completed; Quests also determined a player's hand size, and since the game had a card-based resolution mechanic, the more experienced a character, the more options they'd have when attempting tasks. The grey area, of course, is in defining an adventure, but that's easy enough to figure out. I'd use something similar in my D&D, which would alleviate a lot of my pedantic gripes with the old system.

I'd use JB's alternate combat system, not because I have any real problems with the existing mechanic, but simply because I like the ideas behind JB's streamlined approach. I'd tweak it to use ascending armour class, because I've never understood the descending type.

I would also borrow the thief skill mechanic from James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess rpg because it's neat and clever, and not a million miles away from my own thoughts on the matter. I'd probably also use his "only fighters get better at fighting" rule, although I haven't given much thought to how that would gibe with the above combat system.

I quite like the way that Pathinder clerics heal and turn undead using the same power, so I'd use something similar, although I'd consider simplifying it a little. I might also borrow an idea from the Final Fantasy games and have any healing magic cause damage to undead creatures.

There are probably some other minor bits I'd fiddle with (I like the elegance of Swords and Wizardry's single saving throw), but those would be the major rules changes I'd make for my D&D. Would it still be D&D? Well, that's a question for another day.

Ahead of the Game

I find myself in an interesting situation. The Pathfinder campaign, sorry, "Adventure Path", is going well; we're almost to the end of the first book, and the inevitable confrontation with the mysterious Stag Lord. This fellow is the mastermind behind the local bandit problem, and is the main obstacle to the settling of the area by civilised folk.

The thing is, I think I know who he is. This isn't through having seen spoilers, or even worse, cheating, but rather that the authors of the first adventure book have laid a number of, to my eye obvious, clues. Which wouldn't be a problem, except I think I know, based on those same clues, how the entire campaign, sorry, "Adventure Path", will turn out.

So that's the interesting situation. It's almost as if I've played the scenario before, so I'm going to remain quiet about what I think I know, in part to not spoil things for everyone else, and in part because my character, the tengu monk, is unlikely to have figured it out. And yet it's not quite like having read the scenario, because it's very possible that I've misread the signs, and the whole thing will go in a very different direction. There's almost another game going on here, a bit of narrative cat-and-mouse, as I find myself trying to out-think the authors.

We should meet (and very quickly eviscerate, if our barbarian continues to prove as effective as she has done so far) the Stag Lord in this week's game, and his unmasking will tell me a lot about the accuracy of my predictions. I can't wait!

Team Benny

One of the things I liked about Shadowrun was the Karma mechanic. It was a combination of experience points and an ahead-of-its-time action point system, so you could spend it between adventures to improve your character, or use it within a scenario to add dice to an action. The best bit about it, and the bit that was really ahead of its time, was the Team Karma concept. This was a pool of points which was used to boost actions, much like individual Karma, except that it was donated from the personal stashes of the player-characters, and could be used by any member of the team. Not only did it have an effect on game mechanics, but it also tied the group together.

On Saturday, I finally ran an Eberron game, using the Savage Worlds rules; I might post a summary of that game later, but there's something else I want to discuss first. Savage Worlds also has an action point mechanism, called "Bennies" in the game's terminology, and these Bennies have multiple uses. There are no hard and fast rules for awarding these points, and they're more of a general award for good play.

Each player starts with around three Bennies, depending on the setting, and can pick up more through the session, while the GM gets one for each of the players, plus two for each main villain. The interesting thing here is that the first set of GM Bennies are kept in a pool which can be used by any NPC, while the latter set can only be used by the NPC to which they're attached.

So what happens if you use a similar system for the players? The three Bennies with which they start the game are theirs to use alone, but any Bennies awarded during the session go into a Team Bennies pool, which can be tapped by any player. Furthermore, any player can donate any of their personal Bennies to the pool should they so wish.

Note that this does cross over somewhat with the Common Bond Edge, although that can be used on any Wild Card, whereas this rule only applies to player-characters. Next time I run Savage Eberron, I'm going to give this a go.

Living in a Box

Back in my youthful gaming days, I remember a collaborative game of Dungeoneer in which we'd take turns to GM the thing as the rest of the group wandered about a world map. Dungeoneer is a very broken game, but we had fun with the aimless format, perhaps because everything else we were playing at the time was quite plot-focused.

With the rise in interest in such sandbox gaming sweeping the gaming blogs over the past couple of years (which has even led to both Paizo and Wizards of the Coast releasing sandbox scenarios), I've been itching to have a go at such a freeform game again. I made an attempt to run something of the sort in Call of Cthulhu, but the players resisted it, with good reason I think, and so it didn't work out. Later, I had another go with Rogue Trader, and this was much more successful, as the game is much more suited to exploration and poking around at the corners of the map to see what's there.

That campaign's taking a break (oh, and such plans I have!), but I obviously did something right, as we moved straight into another sandbox game, this time using Paizo's Pathfinder rules. I think the plan may have been to use D&D4 at first, but we've had a good go with that ruleset, and I'm not sure it's to our tastes as a group; this suits me, as I was out of gaming for the entirety of D&D3's lifespan, so Pathfinder gives me a chance to see what the game is like.

I was a bit concerned, as I've seen and heard many horror stories about the pernicious crunchiness of D&D3, but we're about four sessions in, and it seems no more fiddly than D&D2 was, and is much less of a hassle to play than the overly tactical (to my mind) D&D4. It does strike me that something like Swords and Wizardry would be a more appropriate to a hex crawl game, but we've invested too much money and effort to switch now!

We're playing through the Kingmaker series of books (how Paizo's Adventure Path format translates to a freeform game, I don't know, so I'm keen to have a look at the books once we're done), and so far it's been great fun; we've got a proper old-school hex map, and we're wandering around the wilderness, investigating points of interest, fighting wandering monsters, and all that great retro goodness.

Three Things I Have Learned From D&D Fourth Edition

I pretty much bypassed Dungeons & Dragons during my gaming "upbringing". My original group played a bit of everything, but mostly Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu. We did have a brief go at AD&D2, running through the first book of Night Below, and we played a couple of sessions using the "Black Box" basic D&D set, and it was this version of the venerable game which caught my attention more than any other, although we never played it again after that.

My current group plays the fourth edition of D&D quite a lot, and while I enjoy it well enough, I do find myself longing for a simpler, more pure version of the game, and I keep thinking back to that black box. Of course, it is unavailable now, except through eBay and the like, but there is Labyrinth Lord, which is more or less the same thing (albeit based on a slightly earlier version), and completely free too. I've talked about the game before, but that was more of a discussion about mechanics, and today, I'm more interested in the more philosophical side of things, specifically how my experiences of the newest edition of D&D would now affect my appreciation and play of an older version. So here are three random musings of that nature.

1: Interesting Locations are Important
Fourth edition emphasises combat environment right from the outset, with player-character abilities often involving moving opponents from square to square, or making use of different kinds of area effect and so on. This isn't hardwired into the rules of older editions in the same kind of way, and as such, I think it can be easy to assume that it can't be done, and to thus overlook the importance of the shape, size and nature of the battlefield. So if I ran or played LL now, I would take time to created unique settings like this, and even though there are no pushing or pulling powers in the rules, they are a light enough framework that nothing breaks if a players wants to, say, forego damaging an opponent to instead push them down a hole.

2: Different Monster Roles are Important
This is related to the first point, as the older editions of the game gave, in most cases, a single block of statistics for each type of opponent. There would be one type of orc (AC: 6 HD: 1 Damage: 1d6), and that again makes it easy to just fill dungeon rooms with identical versions of that orc. Fourth edition makes a big effort (too much perhaps, forgoing the elegant third edition concept of the template in favour of a completely new stablock for each type of each monster) of showing how that same group of orcs can instead be made up of front-line bruisers, nimble archers and lightly-armoured skirmishers, and it is a good reminder that there is no reason at all why this cannot be imported back into an older version of the game.

3: Different Mechanics are Important
This is the biggest epiphany for me. For the longest time, I did not like the percentage-based thief skills of older editions, or the way finding secret doors varied based on class, and so on. As such, the universal mechanic approach of third and fourth editions appealed to the neat freak in me. Then I had a conversation with another gamer about how fourth edition perhaps goes too far in this other direction, and almost flattens the class differences out; what I came to realise was that although the specific mechanic will vary between a fourth edition At-Will fighter power and a fourth edition At-Will wizard power, they're both At-Will powers, and they both have the same kind of effect on the opponent. In an older edition, the fighter rolls a d20 to do what she does (hit an opponent, mainly), the wizard usually doesn't roll at all to use his abilities, but has a learning/resting sub-game built into the class, and the thief gets to bust out a whole different set of dice to use her skills; I had previously seen this as untidy, but now I understand it to have a positive effect on the game, because it emphasises the different roles and abilities of the classes at a more emergent level than raw rules mechanics. In other words, these are opportunities for the player themselves to do something unique at the table, rather than have the class differences be relevant only in the imagined space of the game.

None of these are rule changes as such, although the first two do lead to a bit of tinkering with what is already there, and I think that, for me, they would enrich the playing of something like Labyrinth Lord, capturing what I like about fourth edition and combining it with a ruleset which is much more to my tastes.

Some Labyrinth Lord House Rules

I've not been gaming much of late, and my Call of Cthulhu campaign seems to have withered, hence the lack of updates. So I thought I'd instead share some ideas I had for a Labyrinth Lord game I was going to run, and still may one day if there's interest. Labyrinth Lord is more or less a clone of Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons, one of my preferred editions of the venerable game but even so, there are some bits I don't like so much, and these are my changes and additions.

• Armour Class is flipped, so AC0 represents no armour at all and AC14 is as armoured as you get, which makes much more sense to me. Essentially, this means that at first level, a character's to-hit target number will be 10+AC. I won't go as far as a 3.Xe unified mechanic, but I like high rolls to be better, and the old add/subtract AC/to-hit system hurt my brain; I think THAC0 may be the main reason behind me abandoning AD&D 2e for other systems.
• "Skills" are similarly amended to roll high, so an elf, for example, detects secret doors on a 5+ rather than a 1 or 2. Same probability, more sensible to my mind.
• The Big d30 is an idea I've stolen from Jeff Rients. Once per session, each player may roll a d30 instead of the normal die, whether it be a d6 to discover a secret door, or a d20 in combat, or a damage die for a weapon or spell. It must be declared beforehand, and is not a reroll, and it cannot be used to roll for statistics or hit points. It also only replaces one die, so if a player wished to use the d30 on a 2d6 roll, they would instead roll 1d6+1d30.
• Thief Skills are rolled on a d6 instead of a d100, mainly because I've never liked that d100 chart. I've converted the probabilities, which has led to a bit of fudging, but it's close enough. A thief can use The Big d30 for these rolls. As an aside, I subscribe to the school of thought which says that any character can attempt to pick a lock, or climb a wall, and so on, but only a thief can pick a lock without leaving signs of entry, or climb a sheer surface.
  
  
  
  
  

  Level	PL	FT	PP	MS	CL	H	L
  1	6+	6+	6+	6+	2+	6+	5+
  2	6+	6+	5+	5+	2+	6+	5+
  3	5+	6+	5+	5+	2+	6+	4+
  4	5+	6+	5+	5+	2+	5+	4+
  5	5+	5+	5+	5+	2+	5+	4+
  6	4+	4+	4+	4+	2+	5+	3+
  7	4+	4+	4+	4+	2+	4+	3+
  8	3+	3+	3+	3+	2+	4+	3+
  9	2+	3+	3+	3+	2+	3+	3+
  10+	2+	2+	2+	2+	2+	2+	2+

  
  
  
  
  PL is Pick Locks, FT is Find Traps, PP is Pick Pockets, MS is Move Silently, CL is Climb, H is Hide, L is Listen.

The latter is the change of which I'm most wary, since the probabilities have been changed; I don't think it breaks the game, although I do think it will change the way thieves work in play. Until I actually see it in action, I won't know for sure, so if anyone wants to use this (or any of the other bits) in their Labyrinth Lord or D&D games, and would like to let me know how it works out, I'd be grateful.

Why I Don't Use Published Scenarios

As we were packing up after my most recent Cthulhu game, I blurted out, for some reason I forget now, that I'm not using any pre-published materials in the campaign. Stephen asked me why, and I gave a rushed and garbled reason. Since then, I've been thinking about it a bit more, and I thought I'd put it in writing, since that's what blogs are for, after all.

I told Stephen that I don't use published Call of Cthulhu scenarios because most of them are "rubbish", and that one of the regular players has read or run most of them anyway. The latter is more or less accurate, but I at once regretted my sweeping statement about the quality of the scenarios.

A big problem with most published CoC scenarios is that they follow a pretty standard format. The players are called in, they do some investigating, then BAM! they run into some big wibbly thing from beyond space, usually a Great Old One or Outer God. Back in my first run as a CoC GM, I had one book, The Stars Are Right!, which was a bundle of six or seven adventures, all but two of which involved such large scale threats. Azathoth turns up at the end of one of them, for crying out loud! Now this mimics Lovecraft's fiction quite well, as Randolph Carter aside, he wasn't very interested in continuing characters and ongoing narratives. That's not so good for a campaign, though, especially if you want a slower, more subtle curve from blissful ignorance to full cosmic horror.

A related problem is that there is often little invention involved in the published adventures. The entities encountered are almost always straight from the rulebook or one of the stories, which is nice and authentic, but causes disappointment at the table when you go to lots of effort to describe the strange sound of flapping alien wings, just so one of the players can go "Oh, it's a byakhee; these are easy to kill!" Yes, you could change the entities encountered, but in the well-written scenarios, things are tied together in such a way that swapping Y'Golonac out for some minor servitor would make nonsense of the story, which would require a total rewrite, which would make using a published scenario pointless. As for the weaker scenarios, there's no reason to use them in the first place.

So that's why I'm writing my own scenarios for the current campaign. It means that I'm in full control of the pace of revelation, which is what CoC is about, after all. I've also tried to steer clear of using the iconic monsters, or at least to avoid using them in obvious ways, so as to keep both newcomers and veterans speculating on just what that is crawling around on the roof. All in all, it seems to be working out well so far.

All that said, it is only fair to give credit where it is due, and a lot of the published adventures are quite good. The campaigns are also, for the most part, strong pieces of work, and their pacing is much more to my liking. I don't discount their use in the future, but I can't do much with them at this point, and to be honest, I'm having lots of fun writing my own stuff.