Not Quite Dead Yet…

First of all, to anyone reading this, welcome back, and my sincere apologies for being gone for so long.  I’m incredibly grateful to see that people are still coming to our site and even commenting when we’ve been silent for so long. Our last post was back in 2017, and since then a lot has happened. We noted we’d be posting less, but we hadn’t intended to disappear like we did.  As with so many things in life, it just sort of happened. We haven’t been idle, but our focus has been on professional issues.  I’ve taken a new position at my university and have written or worked on four books in the last two years. 

Our other founding contributor, Graham Scott, has also been busy building a following for his spectacular fiction.  You can see two examples of this in the short speculative fiction stories he’s published in the prestigious journal Nature.

“Cold Comforts”

“Last Contact”

He also now has his own homepage where you can follow his writing and read some great works of short fiction. Check out Hemicyon.

We also have a forthcoming collaborative speculative fiction story that will be published next year. I’ll post information about it once it comes out.

We’re still gaming, too.  The campaign I’ve been running since we started this site, set in the Vault world, is still going strong.  I just wrapped up the middle arc of the main plot and it’s on hiatus while a friend runs a game in the same setting and with the same players, but with a different set of characters and its own plot.  Graham and I are also sharing the DM duties in a weekly Roll 20 D&D campaign set in an entirely different part of the Vault. That campaign has been running since January.  All of us participating have been playing D&D together for over 30 years! As a result of these experiences, I’ve been working on articles about the advantages of collaborative DMing and also about the importance of life-long gaming habits.

Graham won’t be contributing as much to the Ludus in the future as he continues to concentrate on his fiction writing.  He’s always welcome to return, and I’m fortunate to get to keep collaborating with him on short story projects, which we’ll also let you know about here from time to time.

I’ll be taking the lead on the site reboot, with our dear friend Andy Teaff doing the heavy tech lifting when I’m stumped, though almost all the old material will stay intact.  I’ll be trying to get in a few guest contributors from time to time as well. There won’t be a big change in focus. I’ll be revisiting some of the more popular “Get Medieval” articles and adding some new ones.  I’ll also be bringing in more of the material I’ve developed for my “Vault” campaign, which is still going strong and has even spawned a separate campaign run by a friend. There will also be some new material, such as a quick review of some my favorite works in the fascinating and relatively new genre of Lit RPG, along with some commentary about what the conventions of the genre can tell us about what does, and sometimes doesn’t, make games work. But for the first foray back into posting, I’ve gone with a simple article on two potions we’ve added to our own game to deal with an issue that was causing some narrative pacing troubles. Looking at out site stats, the magic item articles enjoy enduring popularity, so that seemed like a good place to start again.

Thank you again for sticking around, and I’m glad that some of this material still generates interest.

Wallace Cleaves