Hey, I Got Some Feedback!

And Promptly Lost It!

Go Me!

So, earlier this week, I got a message — in Facebook I think — asking a question about Earth Delta. (I almost wrote “….about ED”, but then I realized, getting spam in FB about erectile dysfunction is hardly blog-worthy.) Anyway, having received, and replied to, said message… I promptly lost it. It’s not in Messenger, not in Notifications, not in any comment thread I can see. Since I received/replied when I had just attained consciousness, my memories of precisely where I saw it are somewhat hazy. So, if whoever sent this is reading this, I can answer some questions:

The best way to reach me with ED… that’s “Earth Delta”, I, erm, wouldn’t know anything about the other thing… is either via email to mrlizard ‘at’ gmail.com (See how I am cleverly avoiding spambots who surely haven’t found the email address I’ve had since 2008 and don’t already send me hundreds of phony emails each day), or posting comments here. I generally check here every few days to see if there’s comments needing approval; once I’ve approved one, further comments from the same source should post automatically.

As for the actual question asked: “Howl” should be an Ancestry Feat, “Howler” should be removed from Heritages. This kind of thing is typical to an ongoing and iterative development process where I spend half my time trying to think of new stuff and half my time re-reading old stuff and tweaking it. Stuff gets moved around and sometimes isn’t deleted.

At this point, I am trying to focus Heritages, esp. for Uplifts, on better defining sub-species or strong archetypes, while Ancestry Feats are intended to reflect an individual’s cultural background or a focus on a particular trait to raise it above the default norm. So, to my mind, from an archetypal/gaming trope perspective, not an actual scientific one, all canines should be able to develop their howl to blood-curdling levels, regardless of their ancestral breed. (I mean, seriously, have you looked through the AD&D monster manuals? Just about everything doglike has some sort of magical howl attack, and I will never shy away from going all-in on classic tropes. Originality? Not on my watch, bucko!)

In any event, thanks to four days of extra, paid, vacation due to network security[1] locking me (and the rest of my team) out of our workstations, I got a lot of progress done on revising mutations to use “mutation points”, and had an epiphany (but I’ve got meds for that now) about dealing with higher-powered mutations like flight, shapeshifting, and teleport, and hope to have an “Alpha 2-M” (that’s ‘M’ for ‘Mutant’, in case it wasn’t painfully obvious) up soonish, maybe even this weekend. (Longtime readers[2] will note that “up soon” often means “several months from now”. (See opening of my Morrow Project walkthrough.)

PS: Reviewing the canine uplift rules helped me catch a particularly humiliating error, using “whose” for “who’s”. I’ll cut myself some slack for rules issues, or for genuine typos, but there’s no excuse for screwing up basic homonyms.

[1] “Network Security: If You Can Do Your Job, We’re Not Doing Ours”.

[2] Hah!