Finding my way in all this stuff I have created.

As the quarter comes to a close and leaves me to spend a winter break cuddling up with Bourdieu and Foucault to find a way to develop an theory of cultural and personal resiliency that explains how marginalized students create agency and places of resistance within culturally hegemonizing forces (can you tell I'm a graduate student?), I also find myself with relatively more time to work on Athanor.

I think that with Athanor, I am not interested as much in pure hexcrawling sandbox play (though I have been working on material for hexcrawling in Athanor) and I don't really find megadungeons as compelling (and I have maps for that at least). Instead, I want to find a way to "map" out interesting social settings, roleplay opportunities, and chances for adventure. So I have been thinking about the kinds of thing that feel like they are part of the right genre:

• Love interest of the hero kidnapped, heroes must pursue.
  
• Pursuing villains into ruins filled with terrible monsters.
  
• Weird science gone amok in the hands of a mad scientist.
  
• Intelligent but barbaric alien war-bands.
  
• Averting war between kingdoms.
  
• Sky-pirate raids.
  
• Death-traps.
  
• Gloating villains.
  
• Villains who are actually guardians of a secret history of Athanor.
  
• Exotic locales.
  
• Strange fauna.
  
• Getting lost far from home.
  

I need to put this stuff together into a set of possible encounters and come up with a relationship between all the pieces.

And then, I need to stop thinking so much about it all. Maybe run a game.

I just got my Google Wave invite. At some point in the near future, I'll have to start recruiting players. Right now, I need to do present a pilot study for my dissertation, revise my written report for the quarter, and then take a long nap.