Congratulations Blaugustians! Holy crap, 168 participants?!? That’s nuts. Sadly I haven’t been keeping track of anything in the Discord or the posts.

Health Update

I have some good health news to share for a change.

I got the results of my first post-treatment CT scan and I can report positive progress in the molecular battle against my overzealous cancer cells.

After two and a half months of various treatments, here is the score card: 1 brain tumor was physically removed in early June. The surrounding tumor bed and 2 additional brain tumors were zapped with radiation in late June (via. something called Gamma Knife). 1 bone metastases in the left femur neck (hip) was zapped with radiation as part of a trial study in early August.

And now, the new CT scan shows that the 1 large tumor in the right lung, presumably the root cause of everything, has shrunk by almost half its volume after the chemotherapy started in July. (It’s still pretty big, it’s just significantly smaller.) Several smaller spots of metastases in the lungs have also shrunk and/or disappeared from the scan.

That means the treatments are working.

Which is pretty good news, if you ask me.

I’m editorializing here with no medical training, but this feels like especially good news, because I was told this combination of pills and chemotherapy is only effective for a maximum of two years before the cancer cells adapt to it. So these results after only a month and a half still gives me another 22 months to work with.

Basically everything has improved EXCEPT… one area of metastases in the T5 vertebrae has grown a bit. I don’t feel any pain or symptoms from it, at least not that I’m aware of. It’s concerning but not that concerning, according to my oncologist. They’ll keep an eye on it. I’ll have another CT scan near the end of September.

In short, this is the best news I’ve heard since I heard that I qualified for the daily EGFR pills. This is the first time I’ve had scientific confirmation that all this work is actually doing something.

I’m by no means out of the woods, and treatments will continue for the foreseeable future, and a “curative” outcome (as they say in the hospital biz, meaning eradicating every cancer cell completely) is still unlikely, but I feel some confidence now that I could end up in the portion of lung cancer patients that have better outcomes than not, which is about as good as it can get.

As a point of comparison, at one point, I was told if I had done no treatments I might not have lived another six months.

Anyway, physically I feel okay and remain able to work and function independently, within certain limits. I’m not running any marathons, for example, but I can go to the store and handle all of the basic necessities. I’m even coughing less, so I may actually be able to make a return to game videos someday.

From the outside, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell anything’s wrong with me. The biggest visible change is I’ve lost 10-15 pounds since last year, and I have some mild rashy spots here and there from the drugs. Also, I just buzzed all my hair off so I don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Gaming

Gaming notes written earlier on my phone while getting pumped full of chemotherapy drugs for the third time:

I think I mentioned I was going to try Balatro on my phone a while back. I did, and its pretty fun and engaging. However it’s not a long term kind of game for me. After a while, you start to understand the patterns and it turns into a game of trying to get bigger scores, which isn’t really my thing. But its definitely a good little game and I understand why it’s so popular.

I fell off of playing Death Stranding 2. I got through the first boss fight and remembered how annoying the boss fights were (it always feels like you’re playing with one arm tied behind your back while wading hip deep through molasses). With no compelling story hooks (yet?) I don’t feel much incentive to continue. The magic of experiencing the first game for the first time is long gone.

While I was getting Death Stranding 2, I saw the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster on the PS5 store for around $5, so I got that as well. I’ve only played a little bit, though. It’s quite a lot like the original, which I already played. Everybody says 2 is the best one of the series but I always thought 1 had a much stronger story, even if the gameplay was weaker.

I’ve missed a lot of the gaming zeitgeist over the last several months, but I saw some mentions of Funcom’s new Dune game. It never occurred to me to try it, because I assumed it was a re-skin of Conan Exiles, a game I enjoyed (solo) when it first came out in early access, but grew tired of as I became able to build enough gear to go wherever I wanted. So I assumed Dune: Awakening would follow the same progression. (The same progression as most survival-type games based off of the ARK model, honestly.) Maybe I’m wrong. What would it hurt to try it? Solo, of course.

What else? I haven’t played any more Nightreign, which was the last pre-cancer game I remember getting. Its just not very solo-friendly unless you like a lot of repetitive work, and the rogue-like elements aren’t that fun for me.

What should I play next? I think there were some other games I was looking forward to this year. Pathologic 3 is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Oh, and Solasta II, but I fear that might not arrive until 2026.

Otherwise I have an assortment of partially-finished CRPGs I can return to. And I have a bit of a hankering to go back to Roll20 and find a virtual tabletop campaign to join. I’m tempted to find a paid game in the hope it would encourage everyone to take it more seriously, but I see a lot of mixed reviews about paid games, so I feel like it would do little to reduce the complete random chaos of finding a decent group.

Here ends the phone notes.

Dune: Awakening

I did, in fact, try Dune: Awakening. It’s exactly what I thought it would be. I rented a private server, played the tutorial up to the point where you’re supposed to use some kind of tool to zap a rock that’s blocking the entrance to a ship, spent five minutes trying to figure out how to do that with no instructions, got frustrated and annoyed, then quit.

I played a grand total of 40 minutes. Maybe I’ll go back someday but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The sad future of what passes for MMORPGs these days still looks pretty bleak to me.

Solo TTRPG Play

A random side rant.

I see this floating about in the ether now and then: Play D&D without a Dungeon Master! Simulate Dungeon Master decisions so you, the solo player, can play without finding someone to do all the hard work!

For example, I saw Jeremai doing a series along these lines.

But these solo RPG endeavors are always wrong. Wrong, wrong, and more wrong. They’re basically choose-your-own-adventure books.

What I want to do is play solo D&D without the players. I want to be the Dungeon Master, and simulate the player actions and decisions. I want to do the hard part. The fun part. The creative semi-improvisational storytelling part. The exact opposite of what everyone else wants to do, apparently.

It’s frustrating. Every time I see a “solo TTRPG” thing, I have a brief moment of hope, but it’s always the wrong way around. Why is everyone always wrong about everything?

TTRPG Campaign Creation

I saw Scopique talking about making a The Secret World TTRPG adventure, which reminded me about my own fantasy campaign setting I’ve been dabbling with for a year or so.

I assume this is a thing that basically everyone of a certain age–us people who memorized every page of the original, antique TSR D&D books as a kid–does out of regular habit. It’s a holdover from back in the days when the most fun part of D&D was creating your own worlds and maps to play in.

Anyway I got out Obsidian recently and started plunking away at my sandbox world full of quest hooks again. Obsidian is quite well suited to creating a campaign setting, if you didn’t know. I’d like to see better export options, though. I sprung for the Sync subscription so I could work on it from my MacBook, my Android phone, or my Windows desktop, wherever I happen to be sitting at the time I think of something. It’s cool stuff.

I also sprung for an Inkarnate subscription so I could play around with making some maps. It’s not as fun as drawing on a piece of paper, though. Someday I need to figure out how to use handheld drawing implements again.

I kind of want to make it a fairly system-agnostic campaign setting, one that should work with D&D 5e, or 2024, or 3.5, or 1e, or especially one of the new-fangled OSR offerings like DCC or Shadowdark. That’s my goal, anyway. There’s no magic to it, it basically just means trying to keep the worldbuilding elements separated from the stat blocks.

The key to homebrewing a campaign setting is not overthinking things and getting too far into the weeds. There’s no point in spending days fleshing out the deep, dark backstory of the butcher’s wife and her ties t