Greetings! Thought I'd take a moment to post real quick about the state of this game as I see it. Don't worry, there's nothing earthshattering here. State of the Tech --- Pretty good, actually? I dusted off mailing list stuff to start this, and wasn't entirely sure how it'd pan out, but I think this part is going pretty well despite the nature of email providers these days. I think some consistency in how we all author replies would probably help, but maybe that's asking a lot of said providers' default interfaces. I don't know. One thing that surprised me, or maybe not, is that the IRC channel is in use as a way to get at a dice bot more than as a vector to ping people. I think that's fine, I just didn't expect it, thinking people would be just rolling however they found most convenient and reporting on the result would be the norm. But maybe the IRC bot is the most convenient? State of Updates --- I've done PB-Post and PB-IRC before, and this is about what I expected, especially of my updates, where I had an optimistic hope that I'd be quicker on the draw, but suspected that it'd be difficult as life got in the way for the myriad reasons it does. So, I don't think I have anything to really push for differently here, but also, wow, it's been almost four months already. One thing of note is that we haven't seen ckeen since the game started, basically. I am always hopeful for a healthy set of active participants, but if the timing isn't working out, that's fair. My oldest gaming group had the concept of "the barrel", where characters who were out of action (because their players were) were kept, ready to pop out at any moment. I think of Asal that way. State of the Play Itself --- I think I'm struggling a bit to get to the action. I like a bit of mystery and exploration in my fantasy games, and maybe I'm trying to find the right way to balance it out and not hitting it yet. One thing I'm unsure of is how much combat might bog us down, or maybe it gives a clear set of things to transact in doing, so updates flow more readily? I guess we'll find out. Feedback welcome. Speaking of honest feedback, how is Cypher doing for folks? I know we haven't gotten to said action yet, but character build stuff, the checks we have done, is that all okay? I don't think State of the Union addresses normally end on a question to the audience, but I'll leave it as a call for feedback for now. TTFN! -- bss (Brian S. Stephan) | https://bss.zone/ | GPG: 0x80895FCB