Kia Ora tātou,

If you've been playing along at home, you'll note a conspicuous absence of Kiwi-ness in the wider SWM Community. While it can be blamed partially on *that thing that's going around* ...bloody COVID-19... some of that absence can be placed squarely on my shoulders. Let me elucidate!

Yeah, yeah, when COVID hit and NZ went into Lockdown, it changed some of the landscape of social interaction and it meant that some our ideas and dreams of the 12020 SWM season were delayed. The planned Nationals which were to happen in the middle of the year were moved to the end and all of the events that were leading up to it were dropped.

SWM in NZ, for better or for worse, rises and falls on my state of mind at any given point. Any system that is tied to one individual is probably not so good, so when I stopped organising things, official Save11 business ground to a halt. At large, NZ SWM didn't really seem to notice. Those of us who were busy on BlooMilk remained so, my high-school group of about 10+ students kept playing at school (when we came out of lockdown), and a large number of our wider group Nationally had already begun to move on to other games (Flesh and Blood, anyone?).

I got busy and when I get busy things on the outside of my thinking disappear into the nether. At the start of 12020 I was doing a lot of music (therocklords.bandcamp.com!) and when Lockdown hit, I decided to spend that time finishing my second Novel. By the end of 12020 I had finished it, printed it, and many people had started reading it. During this time, I focused on little else!

Then my latest project hit and ALL else, including my SWM, my music, and my third novel fell away into nothingness...

What was that project, I pretend to hear you ask? Well, many, many years ago there was TacRPG - a Tactical RPG-based variant of SWM, then came SWM:CE (Campaign Edition) which I found and then tidied up and modified. (You see, I will SWM till I die, and when I first discovered the game, my first thought was I'm gonna RPG this somehow!) Then, a few years ago, in an attempt to make it work swish, I started on SWAG - Star Wars Adventure Gaming. I created a framework for it and had some pretty good rules for it, but it was clunky. I then revised it as a 2.0... better, but still clunky in places. Then. End of last year till now, I started working on SWAG3.0 (now, SWAG3.1) which is, if I say so myself, freakin' awesome.

I will, sometime over the next few days, I'm gonna post as much of it as I can. It's nowhere near as pretty as SWM:CE or even the ruleset I wrote up for SWAG1.0, but it runs pretty well. I'll explain more in other posts soon.

Anyhoo - that's the story of SWM in NZ. We've got plans now to do some more stuff, although I think the season of ultra-competitive SWM has perhaps done its dash. We've still got a good number of players though and we're gonna keep rolling d20s until we collapse!

Kia Kaha, Kia Maru!
kez

Go Darth Oli!

Can't wait to try out SWAG!