Another Update-

As the Player of the Khem, Yirinn, and the character Kitsune will be away tomorrow, there's no weekly game.

I am presently working on the Vrun alphabet as a True Type font.
--It is a bit of a hit-or-miss process, as it isn't always exactly WYSIWYG, but a far cry better than that freebie that was linked to around the OS blogosphere some time ago.
---Perhaps the best part is that I can map the entire standard keyboard output to meaningful Vrun equivalents, including the mathematical operators and non-standard punctuation marks.

With the four-month to print-in-hand deadline very clear in my mind, I am doing my best to write, edit, and simplify all at one time, which isn't the best way to do anything of this sort, but fortunately, I have multiple proofreaders, game editors, and veteran RPG developers on my side.
--I'm not proclaiming typos or inconsistencies won't creep under the wire, rather, that it won't be a jumbled mess.

I have an excellent Classic OS artist producing the (TBA) Referee's Manual cover, and was fortunate enough to have garnered two artists in Minneapolis due to Jeff Berry's kind assistance.
--My sweetheart has also provided a few illos so far, and one is the Urutsk logo which I hope to release in the not-so-distant future.

A Skype UWoM game with both Milwaukee and Minneapolis players is in the works, and will consist of a number of the Players who attended my game in the Tekumel dungeon. ;)

Reed Decker of the Watchsun novels has written an early draft of an article on Diceless Gaming for inclusion in the Ref's Manual, but don't hiss and make X's in the air at me, it won't be the standard mode.

The beta documents from LuLu look pretty nice for what they are.
--I expect the VPM will be many times nicer if only by way of the artwork and actual layout-work.

My Father in Hospital; My recovery; Retrograde or ?-

* My father is at hospital but it may not be for a long stay, depending on what they find. He has been on dialysis for about a year now (3x weekly 3-hour sessions), and has recently shown signs of more rapid deterioration. He would be 88 this June 16th.

* I was lovingly scolded by dear friend, Reed 'ThirdRail' Decker, for not advancing the art of role-playing games with my Retrograde activities. I was specifically called out on the ridiculousness of actually rolling for long falls (such as my inelegant but simulationist accounting for lower atmospheric density of 32d6+1d4+32 for a terminal velocity impact).

The back story to all this involves our full-time, dual design sessions in Gainesville, FL. back at the dawn of the 90's as we literally were squatting in an apartment with an extension cord plugged into an active outlet in the building. Reed was working on a really marvellous Supers rules set ('Full Clock' if I am not mistaken), while I was writing my acid-inspired multiversal system which used (still in my parlour of tricks) colour logic to operate the engine. We (I) even woke poor Jack Herman of V&V (and Bill Willingham's Plotter/Scripter for the early Elementals issues) fame one Saturday or Sunday morning, not taking into account the time-zone difference to ask about V&V's rights status, etc.
Since our parting, Reed has not only abandoned dice in his games (yes, they are still games...cops & robbers didn't have any), but has chosen some really ... high-brow subject matter as the setting basis/bases.

So, I don't know if I ought to feel elated that I'm more, um, OS than not, or ashamed that I have become such a retrograde after reaching a pinnacle of RPG design nearly two full decades ago.

Dunno, can't care. I've got work to do...