This Week

Best Sales Week of the Year. That was last week. The week before was in the top 3. In retrospect, the new Magic: Eventide release sales are way slower than I expected. I'm told Summer Magic releases are like that, but man. I know it will pick up later. Also not helping sales this week was the re-paving of the parking lot; half on Monday and half on Tuesday. I'm guessing sales are down about 20% from that. Luckily they finished before our evening rush.

Spamalamadingdong. The more tight it gets for game manufacturers, the higher the frequency of their emails. Some of these companies send me so much stuff that I've stopped opening the mail. I want to tell them "I'm sorry, but my level of interest in your company, based on my sales, doesn't allow me to spend the time to read these." If they called on the phone that often, nobody would think it was acceptable. If you want a guess at who they are, check out the companies that are down from a year ago on my Sunday post.

40K. I'm painting up my additional Apocalypse infantry squad while I await my Forge World order. I allow myself to order stuff if it will take a while, but I require that I paint what I have before something else arrives. After the squad and the Forge World Hellhound, I get to pick up the Hellhammers. I don't have the money anyway, so it's a good rule.

Traveller Character. I'm making a character for Fulminata's RPOL game. It's not quite as confusing as Mutants & Masterminds, but I couldn't have done it without the narrative in the book. My first attempt was flat out wrong. My second attempt was mostly right. My third attempt for someone else was WAY broken, but fixable. My fourth character was juuuuust right. One problem is that if you follow the flow-chart for generation, you only age when you bail out of a career. If it were software, many Traveller characters would be 18 year old supermen.

In case my computer blows up and Carbonite fails:

Petty Officer 3^rd Class Rendell Farseer

Age: 42, 6 terms, 37,000 credits starting money

Str 5 (-1), Dex 7 (+0), End 6 (+0), Int 13 (+2), Edu 4 (-1), Soc 6 (+0)

Retirement Pay (Navy): 10,000 cr. Year.

Ships Shares: 3

Credits: 1,480

Skills: Computer 0, Deception 1, Drive: Wheeled 0, Engineer: Manoeuvre Drive 1, Engineer: Jump Drive 1, Engineer: Electronics 1, Engineer: Life Support 1, Engineer Power: 2, Flyer: Wing 1, Gun Combat: Energy Rifle 0, Gunner: Turrets 0, Mechanic 4, Pilot 1, Sensors 2, Survival 0, Tactics (Naval) 1, Vacc Suit 1, Zero-G 0.

Equipment:

Plasma Rifle

Auto pistol (210 cr.)

Dagger (10 cr.)

Flak Jacket (TL8) (300 cr)

Wafer Jack (TL12), Expert 2: Life Support software on wafer, Expert 2: Electronics software on wafer. (total 30,000 cr.)

Engineer Toolkit (1,000 cr)

Mechanical Toolkit (1,000 cr)