Sorry, It Has Been a While...

I know, I know. I should update the blog more frequently than once every couple of years, but school has been keeping me busy. But I think a quick update on where things are at would be in order.

I am still alive, and I do want to make some content updates-- at some point. I have been saying that for years though with not much to show for it, but there it is. Maybe I will just curate memes or something. Low-effort stuff haha.

The short story I mentioned in my last few posts a couple of years ago did get published in the Vintage Worlds 2 anthology (i.e., that Kickstarter was successful). If you missed the Kickstarter but still want to buy the book, it is still available at Founder's House.

Regarding use of the blog itself, the Numenera 2 Character Creator still sees a decent amount of traffic, though because it has been a few years since I updated it, it is slightly out-of-date, lacking data from the Torment: Tides of Numenera Explorer's Guide and possibly other sources. Regardless, it has over 22 thousand all-time views currently. For reference, it passed 10k all-time views in May of 2020, and 17k in January 2021, so 2020 was the big year for it, but it's still getting quite a bit of use. Actually, I am slightly surprised it still works-- I half expected the changes Blogger has made to the site would break it, but apparently not. Looking at the graph, use of the generator seems to have peaked in March/April of 2020 and dropped off since then, but still mostly remains at a higher level than when I was actually updating this site.

And speaking of the website, the site overall is at about 58 thousand all-time views. Two years ago (January 2020), it had just passed 17k total views. Biggest month ever for the blog was April of 2020, with 2,731 views that month. Guess the lockdowns and so on that were going on at the time encouraged people to play around with rolling up Numenera characters.

Anyway, that's all for now. Happy New Years, everyone.

Updates and Milestones: May 9, 2020

Just a few quick updates.

This past month, April, was another record month for Troy Stories, with 2,493 views. Wow! That's the first time we have had a 2k+ month in terms of page views. Needless to say, it was a huge improvement over the previous record of 1908.

Also, last week sometime, the Numenera 2 Character Generator itself passed a big milestone: 10,000 page views since publication, right now sitting at 10,192. For perspective, it was about this time last year that the generator passed the 2,000 cumulative page-view mark, and it was around this time in 2017 that the generator first saw the light of day. Pretty neat, eh?

Additionally, as mentioned yesterday, Love in the Ruins is now available for purchase.

And lastly, a PSA: the mask goes over your nose and mouth. Both nose and mouth. Yes, nose included! I know, I know... it's hot and uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as being intubated by a ventilator, if I had to guess. Also, if you pull the mask down to talk to someone, you are defeating the purpose of having the mask at all -- may as well just lick that person's eyeball while you're at it. A mask is not a magical talisman. It will not block your sputum getting on other people or their cooties getting on you if it isn't between you and them, capisce?

That's all for now. Don't let the 'rona getcha.

Updates and Milestones: April 1, 2020

Hello, I'm still alive. The 'rona ain't got me yet, and I ain't even April Foolin'.

It is heartening to see that the blog gets a lot of use still. I know I say that every time I post, but what can I say? It feels good to be of service, in whatever capacity I can be. And March, interestingly enough, set another record for the blog with 1,908 views, a substantial increase over the previous record, which was 1,716 views, set in December. (Since I didn't do a February or March update, I guess I should mention that January had 1,487 views, and February saw quite a big drop-off, with 1,178 views, which was the lowest since June of 2019.)

I guess folks are stuck at home spending their time rolling up Numenera characters. No judgment -- I do the same sometimes (which is, in fact, why I went to the trouble to set up that character generator). And as usual, a bit less than half of this last month's traffic went to... drumroll... the Numenera character maker. The old Cypher System character maker and the Revised edition Cypher System character maker nearly tied for second place last month though, which is a slight change from how things normally are. Those three pages together account for about three quarters of the site's traffic. In a very distant fourth place is the printer-friendly Numenera character sheets index, with a whopping 36 views in March. No other page or post cracked 20 views for the month.

Other news: if you recall my poem "Come Home Ere Falls the Night" and the Love in the Ruins anthology project it is a part of, that seems to be moving forward at last. The publisher has sent out contracts to the various authors, so hopefully that book will see print at some point. (No doubt the 'rona will delay the timetable on that, as it has everything else.) Not sure what the status is of Vintage Worlds II, but hopefully that will get off the ground this year too.

That's all for now. Don't let the 'rona getcha -- as the Good Book says, "wash your hands, you sinners".

Updates and Milestones: January 3, 2020

Just a few quick notes I wanted to make. I'm still here keeping an eye on things. At some point I would like to make more content for the blog-- on my agenda in particular are a first-edition version of the Numenera character creator and the final installment of the two-make-three Scrabble words guide. Those are fairly low-hanging fruit and should be doable when I have some time.

Blog Milestones: December was another big month for the blog with 1716 page views, just edging out November's record of 1701. And as far as looking back at the year overall, Blogger doesn't keep yearly stats, but luckily I did do an update post last January. According to last-year me, Troy Stories passed the 4,000 all-time page views mark on January 7th of last year. (Important to note that that is cumulative all-time views, not just views for 2018-- the 4000 figure includes at least several hundred views from 2014-2017.) This year? The blog passed the 17,000 all-time page views mark yesterday (January 2), meaning the site had ~13,000 views in 2019 (after subtracting the 4,000 pre-2019 views from the total all-time views), on average more than a thousand a month. Any year in which a site more than triples its traffic is a good year, I would say.

And of course, needless to say, most of that traffic went to the Numenera 2 character creator, and second place is awarded to the old (i.e., first-edition) Cypher System character creator. No other page on the site came close to the numbers for those two pages. Since Blogger doesn't keep yearly stats I am not 100% sure whom to award the bronze medal to, but I believe the Numenera printer-friendly character sheets index did better on the year overall, even though the brand new second edition Cypher System character creator did much better for the month of December. And as far as the next tier down is concerned, the only other pages with more than a handful of hits for the year were the poem A Ruinman's Villanelle, aka "Come Home Ere Falls the Night," and the City of Heroes Monitor Window tip, interestingly. The latter two posts both had a bit over a hundred views each on the year, much more than is typical for one of my regular blog posts, which don't normally even hit double digits, let alone triple.

Anyway, that's all for now. Happy New Year, everyone.

Revised Cypher System Character Creator Update (Plus a Blog Update)

The new version of the Cypher System Character Creator (for TCS 2nd edition) is fairly close to being ready for launch. Done so far: descriptors and types. Still to do: new foci and genres. As noted in the previous post, once this is done, there will be two CS character creators: one for first edition and one for second edition.

The introduction of genre-specific species descriptors in the new book brought an interesting challenge since the generator's code was not originally designed with these in mind. After some thought, I decided not to add code that would dynamically take away or add in these descriptors based on genre selection, since it would require a major overhaul of the setGenre code for the sake of only a handful of descriptors. On top of that, many of the genre-specific descriptors could potentially work in other genres/settings. For example, space elves are a fairly common trope-- think Eldar from Warhammer 40k or Minbari from Babylon 5. Space dwarves are less common, but not unheard of. So, depending on setting (and GM approval, of course) Elf and/or Dwarf descriptors could potentially be used in a Science Fiction game. Similarly, the Half-Giant, Helborn, Morlock, and Roach descriptors could also be alien species with a little tweaking. On the other side of the coin, Artificially Intelligent could be used to represent a clockwork/automaton character in a Fantasy or Fairytale setting (think the Tin Woodsman from The Wizard of Oz or the clockwork soldier whose name escapes me at the moment from Return to Oz).

And moreover, not all fantasy settings have Elf or Dwarf characters; in fact probably most fictional fantasy worlds do not. To my mind, these species descriptors are not so much genre-specific as they are setting-specific (or perhaps one might prefer the term universe-specific).

So instead, the way it is set up now is that the species descriptors are available to all genres, but selecting one will display a brief note indicating that your descriptor choice is "genre-specific" and subject to GM approval. Obviously it goes without saying that everything is subject to GM approval, but these are definitely something you will want to run by your GM before becoming too attached to your Roach Adept Who Exists Partially Out of Phase or whatever.

Also of note, while updating descriptors I discovered that the Virtuous descriptor was missing from the existing first-edition Cypher System generator (and presumably has been MIA all this time). This has bee rectified; apologies to all frustrated would-be goodie-goodies out there.

Blog Update

The blog set another record this past November with 1701 views over the course of the month, a substantial increase over the previous monthly record of 1517, set back in August. In fact, the blog has not had fewer than 1200 views a month since last June. Most of the traffic is, as always, to the Numenera character generator, but an increasingly large slice goes to the Cypher System character generator now too. Those two pages together now account for well over half the site's total views.

Updates and Milestones: September 4, 2019

I am very happy that people still come to this site to use the Numenera 2 Character Generator. In addition to that, the vanilla Cypher System Character Generator has started to blow up in a big way as well. August, in fact, set another record for Troy Stories, with 1517 views, a truly massive increase over the previous month's record of 1217, set in July. (And weirdly, the difference is exactly 300. This is Spartaaaaa!)

Most of the traffic was, of course, to the character generators. An interesting stat though: about half of the Cypher System character creator's all-time hits came within the past 30 days. That indicates to me that my CS character creator is only just now really catching the attention of the Cypher System community and/or Google. Pretty neat.

Some news: I have heard back from Zendexor, and he indicates to me that the story I submitted for Vintage Worlds 2 has been accepted for publication. The formal announcement has not been made yet, but should be forthcoming soon. I will post here when that happens.

A personal note: I am going back to school now, trying to finish up my bachelor's degree after a long hiatus. That is part of the reason I have not produced any content for the blog lately. At some point I would like to get it going again (although I say that every month...).

Updates and Milestones: August 1, 2019

For some reason, July was a huge month for the site despite the lack of updates, with 1217 views for the month that honors Julius Caesar, straight-up demolishing the previous monthly record of 818 (set this past April). If you're curious-- though I know no one is-- the months intervening between my last monthly update and now (that is, May and June) had a bit over 600 views each, which at one time would've been huge, but compared to the expectations set in March and April, were kinda lackluster. (I'd thought perhaps interest was waning in my character generator, or even that interest might be waning in Numenera more broadly. I guess not haha; maybe the announcement of a new Numenera source book and novel has rekindled interest?)

As one might expect, a bit more than half the Troy Stories traffic in the month of July was to the Numenera 2 character creator. Another 20% or so of the traffic went to the generic Cypher System character creator. Another ~2% of the hit parade marched on over to the relatively new Numenera 2 Character Sheet index, and about the same number of hits to the Scrabble Two-Letter Word List. Other hits were scattered around the site here and there, with little apparent rhyme or reason. (Must have had a ton of hits on the front page; visits to the site's main front page count toward overall stats but doesn't have its own individual views stat that I can find.)

One announcement: though I have not had time for blogging lately, I did manage to get a story finished in time to meet the deadline for the Vintage Worlds 2 call for submissions. I sent in an 11,000 word novelette, the longest I have ever submitted to one of these contests. I don't yet know if it will be selected, but I feel pretty good about it.

That's all for now...

"Come Home Ere Falls the Night" To Be Published (And Other News)

I apologize for the recent lack of updates on the blog. Real-life has been quite full of turmoil lately. Have not had time to write anything for the handful of people who follow this site. Sorry 'bout that. =(

But, I do have some good news. The poem I submitted for consideration in the Love Among the Ruins project has been accepted and will appear in dead-tree form along with the other accepted submissions for that book. Here is the announcement of that happy fact (you will have to scroll down to the row of asterisks). Maybe not happy for the trees, but... y'know.

Not sure when I will have time to write a big update for the blog, but the occasional quick update should be doable. Again, I want to write more, I just don't have much time right now. Hopefully at some point real-life problems will settle down.

Updates and Milestones: April 1, 2019

Happy April Fools' Day. Be sure not to believe anything you read online today.

(I actually don't care much for April Fools' Day, myself. Most of the jokes and pranks people come up with for AFD fall a little flat for me. Hey! Here's a webpage that says the exact opposite of what our site says on the other 364 days of the year! Isn't that comedy gold!? Meh.)

On to the updates and whatnot...

March was another huge month for the blog with-- are you ready?-- 811 views. That's such a big number relative to what this blog has gotten in the past, I feel obligated to say that that is in fact real, and not an April Fools' joke. (February, if you'll recall, was the first month the blog broke 600 views, with 603. March blew that short-lived record away by more than a third. Woot woot!). As usual, the lion's share of this traffic was to the Numenera 2 Character Creator. Awareness of that page seems to be spreading among the broader Numenera community, which I think is fantastic. Lately I have been seeing a few referrals to that page from Facebook and Meetup, which, if I had to guess, is GMs sending links to the character creator to players of their face-to-face games. Again, I am thrilled that people are actually using this tool.

And speaking of, I do plan to make a Numenera 1st Edition Character Creator available also, for those people who want to play Glints or Seekers, or who otherwise want a first-edition experience. I am hoping to have it ready in April some time.

Tears of the Gods

You may have noticed that I finally got another installment of Tears up there. You may have also noticed that I changed Thecla's name to Tlecha. About that... As you may know, this story is based on a play-by-forum campaign of Numenera. Thecla, of course, was a player character in that game. I took the liberty of changing the name because it was bothering me that the name came from an important character in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series, which is said to be one of the primary inspirations for the Numenera setting itself. The line between an homage and simple copying is not always clear, but I prefer to err on the side of being original. The altered spelling of the name keeps the homage, I feel, but is "original enough", at least for me. Since I'm now the only person writing this story, I feel like I have leeway to make such changes. The new spelling also meshes better with the implied phonological rules I created for the Eighth World's language.

And speaking of Tlecha (or Thecla if you prefer), it's clear that I will need to go back and revise a previous chapter to flesh out Tlecha meeting the group, and explain why she chose to travel with the Broken Cage Company. This meeting up was not played out in-game; the GM just had us jump forward a few months with additional players now in the group to replace people who had dropped out with little more than a vague handwave as to why we were all together. But, for the story, it's becoming clear that Tlecha needs more of a formal introduction than what she has hitherto received. Think of it as making up for changing her name.

I don't know if I will have chapter 12 ready in April, but I have high hopes that, at the very least, the revised chapter 9 (I think it's chapter 9), introducing Tlecha, will be done shortly, like in a week or two.

Scrabble Guides

I didn't get to the R-Z Two-Make-Three guide this month like I had planned. Allergies have been hitting me really hard in the last couple of weeks, which has sapped my will to write. But I hope to have it up this month.

Miscellany

I think the schedule of four posts a month is doable. I enjoy writing, but I don't want to burn myself out cranking out more than what seems fun to me, and four posts a month seems to be working out for the time being.

That's all for now; see y'all next time, and thanks for the support!

Updates and Milestones: March 1, 2019

February was another record-breaking month for the blog-- just eking over six hundred page-views over the course of this shortest-of-all months, the first time that threshold has been reached, or even closely approached! (603 views to be exact). We also are very close to the 5,000 total views milestone, which likely will be surpassed some time in March. Woo!

Miscellaneous Blog Updates

To celebrate all these page-views (not really), I made a custom background and tweaked a few of the other customization options for the blog. Up till this point, Troy Stories has used Blogger's "Simple" theme more or less as-is, with minimal customization. It was time to try to create an interesting and unique look for my site. I kind of dig the result. The color scheme, if you are wondering-- black, dark gray, and white with bright green accents-- is loosely based on that of the Houston Outlaws, who are my favorite Overwatch League team. (Sadly they are not off to a great start this season, but oh well. They still have the coolest color scheme.)

The other blog-related update is that I want to commit, here in writing, to making at least four posts a month (including the monthly "milestones" posts, which I plan to do around the first of every month). That's, on average, about once a week, but my schedule is such that I don't want to commit to weekly posts on a particular day of the week. It will be, some weeks no posts, other weeks two or three posts, but hopefully most weeks at least one post.

Poetry

I have gotten some positive feedback in regards to "Come Home Ere Falls the Night", (aka "A Ruinman's Villanelle"). In fact, it is now the most-viewed non-Numenera post on Troy Stories. That makes me want to write more poems for the site.

The Tears of the Gods

I have changed my mind again about the Tears of the Gods story. I will be attempting to complete the novel despite the game being prematurely ended. Though I still have not heard from the former GM, I have the permission from the former players to write it according to a rough outline I sketched out to them on BGG. Chapter 11-- which is pretty close to being finished, by the way-- is partly based on what happened in the game, partly just me writing after the game had ended. Moving forward, future chapters will be just me writing, barring some kind of completely unforeseen circumstance.

The good news is, since I am no longer dependent on anyone else for content, updates to this story should, in theory, come a bit more frequently. On the other hand, since it is just me now, I have to come up with all the ideas myself, and moreover there's no accountability or incentive to buckle down and write. And, as regular readers of this blog may have noticed, I am a procrastinator.

Nonetheless, I am hopeful for this story to get finished someday.

Scrabble/WWF Guides

These posts require a lot of work to research and put together. Of course, the word lists that form the "seeds" for this content are freely available elsewhere already, but tracking down definitions is a little bit of a hassle. Many online dictionaries do not have definitions for many of these words. Of course, there's always the paper Scrabble dictionary, but that is less convenient to refer to, and often the paper Scrabble dictionary's offered definition is concise to the point of being cryptic (see, e.g., the definitions of oe or po).

I expect I will have Part Four (R-Z) of the Two-Make-Three series up some time in March, but after that, will probably put the Scrabble guides on hiatus and concentrate on writing more interesting content. (I mean, *I* think the Scrabble posts are interesting, and in fact, I myself learn quite a bit putting them together, but they don't rack up the kind of views the fiction, poetry, and Numenera posts typically get. They do do better than Esperanto posts, however, so there's that.)

That's all for now. Lord willin', we will have several posts this month and another general update April 1. (Not an April Fools post. Probably.)

Updates and Milestones: February 1, 2019

Some updates pertaining to Tears of the Gods, blog milestones, Vintage Worlds, and Love in the Ruins. Feel free to ignore the bits you don't care about.

The Tears of the Gods

I am sad to report that the GM of the Tears of the Gods PbF game has discontinued it, and doesn't anticipate ever restarting, due to personal real-life problems he is having. I am hoping to get a summary of what he had planned for the remainder of the adventure so that I might finish the Tears story, but that may or may not happen. In any event, for now, with the game on hiatus, the Tears story updates are on an indefinite hiatus as well.

(And, yes, I did say in the last update that there's probably enough material for another chapter, but the point at which the game stopped is not a natural stopping point for a chapter, let alone the story as a whole, so I am not working on chapter 11 of Tears for now either. I may make an effort to finish it at some point, with or without the GM's notes, but for now I am waiting for the GM to decide whether to part with the rest of his adventure notes.)

Blog Milestones

January was another record-setting month for the blog, with 528 page-views. That's only the second time the blog has topped 500 views in a given calendar month, the previous time being September of last year, with its 506 views. Since August of last year the blog has not fallen below 200 views in any given month.

Much of that traffic is the Numenera 2 Character Generator, of course, which is up over 900 views now (total over its lifetime), well over a fifth of this site's total traffic (about 4300 views total since the blog started in 2014).

Unfortunately though, historically, a lot of the traffic to the Numenera Character Generator has come from a forum post I left on hub.cyphercast.net, the CypherCast online forum, which has been down now for a week or two. And, while it has been a long time since there's been any non-spam activity on CypherCast Hub, it was still ranked pretty high in search engine results, so people were still going there looking for information, sometimes finding the link to my character creator, and coming here. (And presumably they looked for and perhaps found other information on that forum as well.) But, sadly, the owners/moderators of CypherCast Hub seemingly abandoned it for the last couple of years, allowing it to be overrun by spammers advertising everything from basketball video games to industrial equipment, and now it's down altogether, so I am not exactly holding my breath for it to come back. With it gone, the only way people will discover my character creator now is through organic search engine results. This blog's position in a Google search is decent when searching for, e.g. "numenera character generator", usually around the sixth result or so, but we are ranked much lower on Bing, Ecosia, and other search engines. (Though people do find us occasionally via those search engines.)

I could probably drive a good bit more traffic to the character generator by posting the link elsewhere, but I have an intense, visceral hatred for spam, and I am very reluctant to undertake actions that may come across as spammy to other people. Besides that, it's not like I make money from folks using the character creator (or looking at anything else on this blog). It is purely a labor of love. I don't want to sully my love with anything so crass as spam!

Vintage Worlds

Speaking of spam, it's been a while since I have shamelessly shilled this book that I had a small hand in creating, namely Vintage Worlds: Tales from the Old Solar System. The story I wrote for it, "The Headless Skeletons of Mercury", is, in my opinion, my strongest short story to date (though "Tiny's Legacy" from Merigan Tales is a close second).

Since VW has been out for a while now, I guess it's as good a time as any to give my overall thoughts on it. Vintage Worlds, honestly, has a solid ratio of good stories to mediocre ones. That may sound back-handed, but for me it is high praise. I read quite a lot of short fiction-- I have since I was a kid-- and I'm a pretty harsh critic of stories that don't meet my standards. But Vintage Worlds exceeded my expectations-- not counting my own story, there were seven pieces I loved, four that I liked pretty well, and five that didn't really grab me. That is a better good-to-mediocre ratio for me than any anthology of amateur writers I can remember reading (and yes, I am saying it is better than Merigan Tales, in my opinion). Does VW compare to, say, The Best of Leigh Brackett or to any given year of Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction? No, not really. But, a few of VW's stories are worthy of such comparisons, or nearly so. In my opinion, the book is well worth the price if you like short fiction at all.

Also in Vintage World news, the call has gone out for submissions for a second volume of VW, owing to the success of the first volume's kickstarter. If you are an aspiring writer, short fiction is a great place to start, and a decently good short story is honestly not hard to get published in something like this. They want short stories (2500-7500 words), novelettes (7501-12500 words), and have space for, at most, one novella (12501 words or more). Volume One of VW also had a poem, so they are probably willing to consider poetry for Volume Two as well. All tales should pertain to the "Old Solar System": think ray-guns and rockets, Martian canals, Venusian jungles, Asteroid Belt pirates, etc.

Love in the Ruins

And, speaking of calls for submissions, the Love in the Ruins project looks interesting too (you'll need to scroll down to the long row of asterisks to see the announcement). For this one, the editor is looking for about fifteen short stories, a novelette or two, and four to six poems, preferably of a traditional form (e.g. sonnets). Tales for this work should be love stories set in the "deindustrial future", i.e. after the disappearance of industrial civilization (whether due to peak oil, climate change, the natural geopolitical decline of the U.S.A., or some combination of these or other factors), though not necessarily "dystopian" in the sense that that word is normally understood. So basically it's another "Space Bats" / After Oil type of project, but with a love and romance theme this time.

Some Updates and What-Have-You

A few updates for the handful of people who follow the blog.

Tears of the Gods: The play-by-forum game this is based on is still ongoing, but there was a long hiatus over the holidays. Hoping the pace will pick back up this month. Regardless, I believe there's enough material already to fill out chapter 11, and I have started on it. I expect the next Tears installment will be ready before the end of the month.

Scrabble Two-Make-Three Words: Part Two of this is about half done, maybe a bit more than half. Probably it will be ready some time in the next couple of weeks. (I know no one cares about the Scrabble posts except me, but I care, and that's the important thing, right? Just be thankful I don't subject you to Esperanto posts, ĉar mi tute povas.) I'm estimating that there will ultimately be four total posts in that series (A-D, E-K, L-Q, and R-Z).

Character Creators: I do still want to add Flavors to the Cypher System character generator. Don't have an ETA on that, however. No plans (for the time being) to add any new features to the Numenera character generator.

Goodreads: I have an official author profile on Goodreads now. Does that mean I've "arrived" as a for-real, honest-to-goodness published author?

Fiction(al) Projects: I want to contribute a story to Vintage Worlds 2. Deadline for that is July 30th, but the idea I have in mind may end up novella length (i.e. over 12,000 words), so I reckon I'd best not wait 'til the last minute. I'm considering also making an attempt to contribute something to Love in the Ruins. Deadline for that is May 1st. I may also do a post with tips for would-be contributors to Space Bats and Vintage Worlds-type projects, something I have long threatened to do.

Blog Milestone: Troy Stories has reached over 4,000 page views as of today. My thanks to the many bots and handful of real people who suffer through reading my trite chicken-scratchings.

Milestones and Updates

Two milestones of note. Number one: this blog had just over 500 views last month (506 to be exact), the first time that threshold has been reached. The previous biggest months for the blog were August 2018, with 366 views for the month, and May 2017 (coinciding with the initial launch of the Numenera Character Generator) with 239 views. These are the only three months since the blog's inception in 2014 that have ever broken 200 views. So, that's encouraging.

I promise it was not just me refreshing the page in September! In fact, I have set an option on the admin side that says my own page views of the blog should not be counted in site stats. (I'm not convinced that option actually works as intended, but whatever. I tried.)

What are people coming here to see? The most popular thing to look at on the site, by a substantial margin, is the Numenera 2 Character Generator. No real surprise there; it is the only thing of its kind on the web, so far as I know. Coming in at a distant second are the various chapters (and Table of Contents) of the Tears of the Gods serial novel. TOTG posts consistently rack up more views over the long run than fluff posts such as this one. That indicates to me that there's an actual readership for that work, albeit small, not just random bots or whatever crawling the web and stumbling upon random bits of my blog. For some reason (if you are curious), the most viewed TOTG chapter is Chapter Four - Demons of the Deep, with 157 total views since its initial publication in March 2017. Must be the intriguing chapter title.

(Yes, I know no one cares about these minuscule numbers. But I care, and that's the important thing.)

While I'm on the subject of the N2 character generator and the Tears of the Gods, I suppose updates about both are in order.

Character Generator update: The code to have the generator show page-references for your chosen descriptor, type, and focus has been added, and seems to work, but I have not yet added the actual data. Currently it only displays page references for your type. I will be working on it this week, and hope to have all the data in before the weekend.

TOTG update: The play-by-forum game it is based on is still ongoing. Frequency of Tears updates here at Troy Stories of course depends upon the pace of that game there at BoardGameGeek. That said, it is very likely that the "Winter Lightning" chapter will be ready to publish some time in October.

The other milestone (bet you thought I forgot there were two milestones to announce today): Vintage Worlds has surged past 200 backers and $5000 pledged since I last posted about the campaign. The final 48 hours of the campaign has, in fact, seen a big bump in support, as predicted. And as of this writing there's still one more day to go, so go pledge if you haven't already!

Cypher System character generator is go!

The Cypher System Character Generator is now live-- how about that! I think it's pretty dope if I say so myself.

Still to do: Flavors. Maybe an additional genre or two (thinking about making a Weird West / Steampunk genre-- I think TCS would be a good system for it.)

Since it is the first version of the generator, there may be some bugs or missing/wrong data. Let me know if anything doesn't look right.

And speaking of missing/wrong data, going over all the descriptors and foci carefully in order to catch any changes between Numenera and TCS caused me to spot a few minor errors in the Numenera character generator, mostly pertaining to descriptors. These have been fixed now.

Numenera 2 Character Generator ready for prime-time!

The Numenera 2 Character Generator should be pretty much finished now. If you notice anything amiss with it, let me know.

Random thoughts... while going through the new N2 foci, I have noticed that some of the new foci are thematically very close to certain of the old foci, while being realized differently in game-mechanics terms. For example, Explores Yesterday is similar to Explores Dark Places. Shreds the Walls of the World is similar to Exists Partially Out of Phase. Emerged From the Obelisk is similar to Abides in Crystal. And so on. They are different enough that I will be keeping the old ones, however. Generally, though, the new foci tend to be a bit better than the old, and for sure tend to have cooler names where they differ (and that's the most important thing when rolling up a Numenera character-- a descriptor/type/focus combo that is awesome sounding).

One thing I want to add to the generator eventually would be page numbers for all descriptors, types, and foci. (So, for example, if you were to roll a Mutant Delve who Fights Dirty, it would have at the bottom of the page, Mutant: see Disco pg 397; Delve: see Dest pg 29; Fights Dirty: see CO pg 59.) Most likely, that will be the next big feature I add to the character generator. It will be a crap-ton of information to type in, but I think it would be the most useful next thing to have. (Undo? Ha, please.)