{"id":842,"date":"2022-05-29T20:30:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-30T00:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/?p=842"},"modified":"2023-12-11T20:59:44","modified_gmt":"2023-12-12T01:59:44","slug":"tomb-of-the-purple-man-the-late-middle-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/?p=842","title":{"rendered":"Tomb of the Purple Man: The Late-Middle Years to Now"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

2008 to 2011 was a very, very productive time for this game, somehow. Although my hands were really full with my son and my technical support job for a satellite company, I also had a razor focus on this project. I had written a number of sections up and kept on top of the sections that I still wanted to write. Slowly, the whole thing was really starting to come together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It helped that I was in the habit of keeping a stack of note cards with me at all times. Everything I was working on (Villain rules, Hometown rules, adventure ideas, and so on) I could categorize onto index cards, each one going into some kind of detail about a single power, ability, or description of an effect in the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Describing it here, it’s not really showing what it was like, but I wound up with stacks and stacks of these cards that slowly migrated their way onto the PC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Each of the little entries in green was its own index card, and wound up getting plugged into the book.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I had an idea brewing in my mind at this point: create a full website with a PDF file with a self-contained ‘adventure’ every week. One page would have a town or location, with several buildings with events. Then, the following page would have interesting items or equipment that was tied to the town, plus some local NPCs. A page dedicated to villains, one for unique spells, magic items, or tactics, and then, there’d be a page dedicated to a special dungeon or in-depth monster encounter. In my wide-eyed days of hyper-creation, I believed that I could create fifty-two such entries, to give people incentive to buy the book with a ‘free year subscription’ to my development page to give additional updates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got far enough into that to realize I would not be able to make 52 entire adventure documents. It was a good project and while it took several months to come to that conclusion, I got some nice artwork as a result. I still consider how the website would have looked after everything was said and done, I even put together a small business treatment for the various projects and website games I had in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my defense, it was a time when Neopets and other ‘game’ sites were popular and I wanted to make something just as immersive, and I was really excited to learn how to program in regular, ordinary C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book continued to grow. I moved back to New York in 2013, and the project had to be put on ice again. My job changed to a support role for Microsoft, and the 45 minute commute to and from took away almost all my free time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To bring this to a close, the last ten years or so were somewhat uneventful, for the Tomb at least. I had about a dozen complex sections that loomed like swirling sharks, like damage and healing, guild creation, and so on, and every year or two I made myself write up at least one section to completion. Had to shoe-horn them in between my other writing and programming projects, but one by one they made it on paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still have several sections to do: a magic item archive, a monster archive, and I plan to tie all the rule sets together with a massive adventure story (building off the ideas I squirreled away when I was making the ’52’ adventures). I also have a list of things to edit and ‘beef up’ and I know some of the original rules I wrote in 1996-97 would be really cringe for me to read now… but I think that now is the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tomb of the Purple Man is my Mangum Opus, my huge, glorious project that has spanned decades. I know I have a lot of different things going on, but I think with several of my other projects starting to wind down, I want to really see this the rest of the way through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So come join me for the fun!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2008 to 2011 was a very, very productive time for this game, somehow. Although my hands were really full with my son and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":843,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,53,22],"tags":[50,10,54,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=842"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":864,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions\/864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/serioustangents.com\/SeriousBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}