Back from Golden Week

Happy Tuesday to You All!

I'm back home and ready to continue working on Illevar! I spent last week on vacation with my partner in Osaka. We took a trip to Universal Studios Japan, saw some friends who moved there, and ate Taco Bell!

We're going to start with a quick recap of my trip before transitioning back into Illevar.

Osaka

Osaka is a neat city. It has a much different feel to it than my current home city, Nagoya. The Japanese is slightly different, the people more open, and there feels to be a bit more freedom there (including crime and life). Graffiti covered the walls of the side streets that surrounded our hotel, there was a little temple tucked away amongst the skyscrapers and concrete highways, and the people spoke more openly, or at least louder than in Nagoya. 

We travelled on our second day to USJ. Neither of us had ever been there before and it was a lot of fun. It felt like we were back in the USA. A 50's themed diner served up burgers, fries and shakes; a boardwalk filled with small food stands echoed to a 00's playlist of hit singles; and, for some reason, Waterworld was still an attraction.

Hogwarts and Super Nintendo World were highlights for us. Playing around with magic wands, casting ridiculous sounding chants, and living out childhood fantasies were truly spectacular. I highly recommend visiting if you can, especially after the pandemic subsides.

Love the guy, "nyeuuuming" by us. Also the only time my mask slipped...

Back to Reality

Both of us have returned to our normal working lives now. There are always students to teach, bills to pay, and food to be cooked. Returning to our normal lives, healthy eating, and passion projects feels great after vacation, though getting a hint of tex-mex was a highlight for both of us. 

Oh sweet, generic Taco Bell! How strange it is to be so happy to see you...

Illevar

I spent my last days of vacation with friends and working on Illevar. I finished typing up and crafting some more test cards for the other classes and have begun to work on crafting some monsters for playtesting. This process of building a monster takes a few steps and has been really fun so far. 

I took to my other TRPG books to look into the attacks used by monsters and placed them in a spreadsheet with their base damage die. Thanks to reddit user u/tqomins I was able to get a summary of monster stats based on CR from Pathfinder that has functioned as my base for Illevar. 

Next steps are to create the biomes of each region and begin thinking about the types of monsters that would inhabit such areas. 

Wrap Up

Thanks for reading this week's blog post. As always, I really appreciate everyone's support and feedback. It's good to be back and working on projects again. 

That's all for today's post. You can always tune in again next week. Don't forget to follow me on Twitter.