>I just finished reading Michael Connelly's The Black Ice and have moved
>on to Dorothy B. Hughes' In A Lonely Place. While I found myself in an
>LA noir mood, I thought I'd check out the FFE group.

The usual caveat: If you're in an LA noir mood, Fly From Evil will _not_
satisfy. :) It'd be something like watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and getting
really in the mood for non-visceral, near-future in-solar-system hard SF with
slow-moving spacecraft and a thin layer of trippy surrealism under a hard-SF
exterior ... and then grabbing a copy of WEG's "Star Wars" RPG, hoping for a
fix, because it has spaceships and quasi-mysticism, too :)

>So here is my obligatory annual request to find out how my eventual
>favorite role playing game is coming.
>
>What do you say, S.J?

Other projects are taking precedence at the moment, so while not a day goes by
(and I mean that) where I don't spend at least a little time pondering FFE or
poking at the draft or adding an item to the timeline or tweaking (and
re-re-tweaking) some paragraph in the guts of the combat rules, or something,
FFE is currently back-burner again. My hope at this point is to get everything
else done and then just vanish completely from the scene for a while, working
solely on FFE like some kind of monk scribbling away at a personally-copied
manuscript of the Bible. Trouble is, I already spend enough time on it that it's
made it almost seem like I've dropped off the map _anyway._ :(

Even the related reading continues to dominate my casual time ... Right now I'm
burning through a copy of "The Heavenly City Revisited" for example. Whee :)

On the personal front, one of my long-running core playtesters - a guy you'll
eventually see given a VERY prominent place on the credits page - has left Texas
for a job somewhere in the snowy jungles of Canadia. We had intended to do a
"one last job" run where we'd visit the PCs decades later at the height of the
1960s, but the scheduling fell through :( It would have been grand. That
campaign (including those characters remaining behind) has been retired, now, so
my next FFE run will probably return us to the height of Prohibition.

As it is, we last left 'em on the brink of WWII, and I guess there they'll stay,
enshrined - for now - as the longest-running FFE campaign characters, with
nearly three semi-steady years of gaming under their navel-high belts.

I do sincerely intend to give others the chance to blow that record out of the
water. Even if Cumberland's schedule becomes so desperately mired that I have to
start jettisoning projects, it is my intention that every OTHER project would
get the axe at need, and that FFE never would. FFE has become something of a
"life's work" thing without my meaning it to :) It's also gotten even larger ...
keeping it under 400 pages (which is a kinda-sorta goal for me) may prove
impossible, which may mean some of it gets carved off into a supplemental
companion and may not ... it's too early to ponder that kind of stuff without
knowing the final bulk of it.

And I'm keeping it as dense and lean as is my normal habit.

For those who have followed the Free Stuff of the Moment page and wondered: Yes,
I'm also working on an FFE text-game thingy, as a lark. Such larks do not add or
subtract from my real work-time ... I use my "farting around playing video
games" hours for that stuff. Unless I'm farting around, playing video games with
them.



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn