With the novel currently not taking up very many computational cycles now that I have dispatched it to the beta readers and with my gaming group gaining immunity as we get vaccinated, I am turning my thoughts to my Space Opera RPG that will soon resume.

This will be an intensely bitter-sweet. I look forward to hanging out with friends I have not gamed with in more than a year and picking up the campaign where we suspended it, (Rescuing the cousin of a constitutional monarch currently trapped on a post-apocalyptic fallen world.) but it will also be quite sad as the pandemic stole one of our members from us.

It has been a very long time since I have had to deal with the death of a friend and active member of my gaming campaign. While sadly in recent decades friends have passed, the march of time does that to us all, it hasn’t been since the early 80s that death took one of my friends that was actively gaming with us so unexpectedly. We will remember Craig and I will give his character a respectful exit from the story of my campaign.

On a more nuts and bolts level this will also be a chance for me to implement the spreadsheet tools I created last summer to help me manage my Space Opera Campaign.

FGU’s RPG Space Opera has a lot of detailed calculations and data that needs to be tracked for the characters and their vessel. During the pandemic I had a flash of inspiration on how to manage some of it with a continually updated spreadsheet and one the first worked I devised several more of other aspect of the game. I now have tools to track the progress of skill training and to compute to odds of skill advancement, distance between star systems along with travel times and fuel consumption, and current calendar dating.

I miss my friends and Craig I will miss forever.