First big news thing. Houses will not be at GenCon.
I’m not done yet and if I wanted Houses to be at GenCon, I should have been done a month ago.
This also means I won’t be at GenCon. Frankly, I have too much repair work to do on my life to get up and leave it right now. Debt and illness, as a tag team, will not let me tag in.
Now, this is a Good Thing in a lot of ways. Yes, I’ll miss seeing many people I enjoy and a few that I love dearly. But we’ll all be patient. Patience is my Virtue now, the Virtue I must exercise. (I have Spider’s Patience.) Getting myself healthy and wealthy again are my primary goals.
Second big news thing.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on pre-Atlantean cultures for more than a decade now. My current obsession–the ven–are one of the most obscure. I’d like some help with the research materials, and frankly, I don’t have enough time, money or energy to do all the work myself. Therefore, I’m going to open up the field to other researchers so we can get all the information on the ven in one place. To do that, I’ll be opening up Houses of the Blooded as a creative commons project. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll explain.
The game mechanic itself will be released under a Share-Alike Attribution License. This means anyone can use the mechanic for any reason just as long as they credit where the original mechanic came from.
The ven and their world will be released under a slightly different version of the Non-Commercial License. Anyone can publish their own research for the game as long as they don’t sell it. I’ll also be approving research done by other folks as “official,” and ask their permission to publish it–with suitable compensation.
There is so much to be known about the ven and I can only do so much. So, like H.P. Lovecraft did with his own research into the Cthulhu Mythos, I might as well let others play in the same sandbox.
Those are the two big announcements. Maybe I’ll hold some kind of “Aw Shit, I Can’t Go To Gen-Con Party.”
Hey… that sounds like a pretty damn good idea.