That’s a mouthful. Let’s break it down.

• Narrative: It’s formatted like a story – specifically, like serial fiction.
• Solo RPG: It’s a role-playing game I’m playing my myself
• Actual Play: I’ll be reporting on what’s going on.

So juggling those definitions around, basically I’m going to be playing a solo game and then formatting what happens as a serial story, posted over on taoscordian.com.

So what’s the premise?

A group of (more or less) average teenage gamers find themselves drawn into roleplaying scenarios, with no clue as to why they’re there or what’s going on.

On the one hand, this is blatantly an excuse for me to use disparate role-playing materials without needing to worry about how it all fits together.

One the other hand I do actually know what’s going on and how I’m going to work it into the plot, revealed over the course of their adventures.

How it Works

Essentially I’ll be playing the game out using commercial modules and a party of characters. I’ll be mostly serving as GM, and letting the dice decide what choices the “player” characters are making. Their game stats will likewise determine their success and failure.

The challenge, for me, is interpreting the results in a way that makes cohesive sense.

The Protagonists

Our characters are going to be teen gamers who are all part of the same group. That’s our basis. Beyond that, who knows?

We’re generating our characters randomly using the book Casting Call: Heroes Now. It’s a book of random charts and processes used to come up with characters. Generally useful for fleshing out and getting inspiration, we’re using them from the bottom up beyond the few basic foundations.

We roll some bones, and come up with the following characters.

• Nick Perkins is an artist from a wealthy family, educated in the humanities and interested in attending art school in Europe after graduation.
• Vera Novak is a Serbian immigrant with a strange and often tragic past, currently attending a tech school. She’s maybe the most physically imposing member of the party, or at least, in the best physical shape.
• Ashly Najm is a former child star who took a few wrong turns in her past. She’s trying to put her life back in order, and is the newest of our group members to role playing games.
• Marco Anderson is a true rags to riches story, a refugee that went from street kid to millionaire philanthropist through a series of coincidental and lucky events.
• Josh Orwell is a suburban white otaku japanophile whose company is tolerated more often than enjoyed.

That’ the deal. If you’re interested in reading it, you can check it out here – I’m aiming to post new episodes Mondays.

1982 is the last year before the crash that brings the console market to its knees, the last year the Atari VCS isn’t called the Atari 2600, and the year the Apple II finally gets a strong contender in the home computer market.

1982 Arcade Games

We definitely see some strong entries in arcades as the golden age continues, notably one of my favorites in Donkey Kong Junior, where we see Mario as the game’s villain. Robotron 2084 gives us our first twin stick shooter, and Joust defeats the competition as the first successful co-op game. Other big releases this year are Popeye, Burgertime, Bump n’ Jump, Moon Patrol, and Pengo.

1982 Atari VCS games

Atari seems some highs – Pitfall – and lows – E.T, the game that perhaps epitomizes the terrible licensed rushed-into-production game that brings the video game giant down. Atlantis is another release popular with video game tournaments, and the console gets competent ports of the arcade hits Wizards of Wor and Venture. Games for the console, with a few exceptions, continue to offer increased gameplay as the programmers learn new tricks to get around the system’s limitations.

1982 Apple II Games

In 1982 the aging Apple II has to compete with some younger competitors with superior technology, but its audience base is still enough of an edge that most developers will target it as their primary platform. Many of the games released this year are largely forgotten, like the adventure games Blade of Blackpool, Apventure to Atlantis, and Caverns of Freitag, but others like Miner 2049er and Choplifter will eventually see ports to more advanced systems.

1982 TRS-80 Games

The TRS-80 has been a trooper, clinging to relevance as a machine largely designed for business applications, forever inferior to the technological specs of the Apple II, competing as a budget alternative. However, as more challengers enter the field – some of them both more affordable and more advanced – its time comes to an end and we’re forced to bid it farewell.

Goodnight, sweet prince, you were too pure for this world of 8-bit sin.

1982 Commodore 64 Games

The C64 would eventually grow to dominate the home computer market through a combination of advanced technology and savvy marketing, but its launch library is lackluster compared to what’s been available for the Apple II. An arcade port of the Midway title Kick is a highlight, along with the surprisingly accurate Night Mission Pinball.

1982 ZX Sinclair Games

Iiiit’s the Speccy! The UK’s answer to the Commodore 64, filling a similar market niche with, perhaps, tighter graphical restrictions and a stronger launch-year library.

The Hobbit is pretty good, at any rate, a text adventure game incorporating real-time elements. What I’ve always loved about the Speccy is the very distinct color pallet.

1982 Dos Games

If you had to guess which of the last three microcomputer systems would have the most longevity based on their launch-year titles alone, PC MS-Dos probably wouldn’t be the safest bet. These games are… well, they’re just awful.

I started writing novel-length fiction in 2013, and have published ten such books in the past six years. Each time the process has been different, each time I’ve basically had to re-teach myself the process of what it is to write a novel based on my fuzzy recollections of the last time.

Writing Lighter Than Aether has been no different. I feel, again, like a novice working on his first book.

The Implication

It only feels like I’m starting from scratch, though. Each time I write something new, I’m starting from a firmer base, I avoid mistakes I’ve made in the past, and I construct the foundation of the story a little more strongly. The uncertainty comes from the fact that I’m trying something new with each novel. It’s always an undiscovered country.

Of course, if each book is better than the last, this means that each book is worse than the one that comes next. This means that the earliest available book I have for purchase is also the worst introduction for new readers.

And of course, in my case, that’s Bartleby and James, the first book in my soon-to-be-seven-book-long Galvanic Century Series.

Yeah. I won’t contest this. It’s a perfectly fine book, but bereft of the lessons I learned while writing it. And the lessons from the next book, and the next, and the next… let’s be honest, it’s the most bereft book I’ve written.

That doesn’t mean I think it’s bad. Not at all. I’m quite fond of the book.

Just a pity that for many readers it’ll be their first impression of who I am and what I have to offer.

Book 7

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately as I write Lighter than Aether, the seventh book in the series. I’m quite fond of it. I think it’s the best thing I’ve written to date (I always think that, and for the above reasons, I’m usually right.) However, the only people who’re going to read it are the people who’ve read books 1-6 and enjoyed each one.

That’s just the nature of a series. I write my books as fairly stand-alone, but most readers are unwilling to jump into the middle of something.

And that’s too bad. If I had to go back and change things, I probably would have turned Galvanic Century into two or three trilogies. And I could, too… rebrand them that way.

But hey, I got another book to write.

Every month I’ll be giving away two novels in the steampunk Galvanic Century series to my supporters on Patreon leading up to the release of book 7, Lighter than Aether. Last month I gave away the first two.

This month it’s March of the Cogsmen and Dreams of the Damned.

March of the Cogsmen

A wedding plagued by the unholy fusion of dead flesh and hot brass

At long last, gentleman detective Alton Bartleby is set to wed his fiance of almost a decade, Aldora Fiske. The wedding is off to a rough start with the bride still recovering from a kidnapping in the middle-east and the groom showing up drunk, and matters only get worse when powerful half-man half-automatons mount an assault on the ceremony.

While Aldora protects the guests barricaded in her ancestral home, it’s up to Bartleby and his detective partner James to discover the source of this menace and discern the cogsmen’s weakness… or forever hold their peace under an unending assault of brass and flesh.

Dreams of the Damned

With his partner married, brilliant engineer James Wainwright is at a loose end. When Scotland Yard asks for help with a hostage situation at a mental hospital, he’s only too eager to lend a hand – particularly after he meets the winsome Doctor Loni Teague.

His partner socialite Bartleby, however, has a personal connection – Bedford is the institution into which he had his embarrassment of a father committed a decade ago, and now the old man has asked for him personally. The director, Paddock, has been murdered, and Bartleby the elder won’t relinquish the asylum until the true killer has been found.

The Home Office has allocated the detectives a scant few hours before the Metropolitan Police mount an assault on the asylum – if the detectives fail to get the answers they need from the madmen holding it, many innocent lives will be lost, and a murderer may go free.

So there you go. If you’d like to get these two titles free this month and books five and six free next month, simply sign up to support me on Patreon. It’s inexpensive and it means a lot to me.