Welcome to our website. At Catnap Capers, our sole goal is to make products that help gamers serve their stories creating story compelling experiences that matter. Stories can make us laugh, cry, or hope; and if embraced can take us on journeys that not only entertain, but profoundly affect us. We are forever changed for the better having been there. This is our mission to create tools that help each gamer find and nurture their inner storyteller, and in so doing to create and sustain a deep and reliable wellspring of purpose, inspiration, drama, joy, and awe. We embrace the value of stories.

Dream Factory is everything you and your friends need to tell a story but nothing to get in your way. An easy and rules-light system that nevertheless preserves drama and creativity. No complex tables or formulas, just pen, paper, and normal six-sided dice.

Some of the unique features include:

• Safeties: that keep the story from crossing pre-arranged boundaries.
• Lynchpins: that incentivize specific story mood and feeling.
• Quandaries: the main challenge facing each player’s hero.

To learn more about this game, see a free excerpt, or buy the book, click HERE.

“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.”

I was entirely prepared to leave well enough alone with Dream Factory Second Edition. And then I saw a typo. Then I saw a grammar error. And then another typo.

Grrr…

I want this to be the final edition of the game. I think the DF2 mechanics work so well that it’s hard for me to imagine any changes to them. And yet, how can I call DF2 finished and complete when it still has so many typographical errors in it, despite our previous meticulousness?

And so Second Edition Revised, also known as 2.1, is born.

There will be no mechanical changes. The text as a whole will be exactly the same, apart from the typo corrections. I just want Dream Factory’s likely final form to be a little more polished.

If anyone sees any typos they would like to call to my attention, this is the time. Also, anyone who can provide proof of purchase for DF2 will of course get a free digital copy of DF2.1 – use the Contact page to pursue that, and be sure to include your email address.

And so begins the ?final? chapter of Dream Factory, Second Edition – Revised.

News alert! Dream Factory debut at CarnageCon!

Mark your Calendars, because November 3rd is the day that the new Second Edition of Dream Factory is debuting in Fairlee, VT at Carnagecon! After a year of revision and polish, play-testing and editing, the day has come – and this version is the best yet, possibly the ultimate version of this game. The author will be there running DF as well as handing out copies for a debut sale of ten bucks each, so be there!

Well, my choices are paying off.  The first pass rewrite is complete, and the second pass editing is almost complete.  As far as the writing and editing of Dream Factory, Second Edition, I would say I am at least ninety percent there.

Of course, even after that’s done, there’s all the art and publishing to handle, that that is a lot less…  tiring to do.

With a little luck and a lot of Hard Work(tm), DF2 seems to be on its way.  And for the record, it is my current intent at that time to resume regular blog posts here.

Some people game the system.  I game myself.  (grin)

No, he did not.  I have been absent for a couple of weeks for one reason – and one reason alone.

As you know, I have been struggling to get myself to buckle done and do the actual rewrite of Dream Factory for the Second Edition.  And time is growing ever shorter, with it’s debut at CarnageCon merely two months away.

All my other strategies to get myself to focus were failing, so I am employing one more:  I am temporarily cutting out of my life all distractions from the goal – apart from a certain amount of sanity saving fun time of course, and what is required to both earn an income and keep a happy household.

This means no dorking around in Python or Google SketchUp.  No new projects, like trying to scan in a translation of the Art of War.  No hours on the phone killing time with friends, unless work gets done first.  And no more blog post updates for now, apart from this one.

The results so far are  encouraging.  I have finally gotten this rewrite underway.  I have rewritten 30 pages, with another ninety or so to go.  I will also of course have many other things to do as part of this process, such as re-paginating the book, redoing the cover art, getting a new ISBN number, etc.

In the meanwhile, I am going to have to put this blog on hiatus.  I like to think that over the last few months, I have proven I can blog consistently – and when this is over I look forward to returning to that rhythm.  But for now, don’t expect to see much as I keep my energies focused on getting DF2 done.

Thanks for your understanding and support.

If you have been following this blog, you are aware of the various life problems that have been assailing me over the last several weeks, the latest being the utter crash of my entire hard drive.

Well, I am pleased to report in this Getting It Done post, I have almost completely recovered from that crash.  I have purchased and installed Mozy.com’s backup service.  I have reinstalled the majority of my core software programs.  I have transferred my saved data back into the new installation of my machine, and I have replaced said data back in its correct boxes on my hard drive.

I think I am back in business – and none too soon, as now August is well underway.

And while I have been blocked until now on doing any actual writing or editing on DF2, that hasn’t stopped me from thinking and planning, and one of the thoughts that occurred to me is the need to write a new and expanded Preface to explain why I am writing a second edition to this game in the first place, and perhaps to (in broad strokes) hit the highlights of the major changes that made it necessary.

Other thoughts I’m having about structural changes to the layout and presentation of the book include breaking apart the subject of Karma into its own chapter it is an important topic, and the rules for using it have deepened and expanded – as well as a short chapter at the back for people to jump to if all they want to do is find out in black and white what has mechanically changed from the last edition.

Of course, I will be doing more than that – I will be rewriting any and all sections of the book that upon reflection I feel could be improved and/or made more clear.  I will also have the benefit of a further year of play of the system under my belt, so that I can, for example, stress how important it is to use Totems in play, although character-sheet tracking of Traits remains a viable option for long distance gaming, such as by phone or internet.

For the coming week, I am setting an ambitious goal for myself of redrafting the Preface and the Introduction before next Monday.  I am a little frightened to be biting off such a large chunk in such a limited time, but I have to force myself to take it on, because I really want to have this wrapped up by CarnageCon in November.  If I fail, I fail – but it won’t be because I did not dare!

So, with a little luck, hard work, and annoying but helpful ribbing from one of my friends who keeps lighting a fire under my ass, come the Get It Done post next Monday, I will have some actual and real progress to report.

Given no further flood, fire, or famine, of course.

What are the odds?

When it rains, it pours.

I often quote this saying:  Before people take backing up their data seriously, they need to get bit by data loss first.

Oh, everyone knows you should have a backup plan.  It’s obvious, amirite?  I mean, there’s no debate.

And yet, despite the fact that we all know this, we all generally do one of the following things:

1)      Have a manual backup system that we swear we will faithfully run every week… and then realize we have been putting it off for nine months when we have the inevitable crash.  D’oh!

2)      Don’t even have a backup system in place at all because although we know we need one, we’ve been meaning to get around to setting one up for years now – and crash!!

3)      Don’t even stress about backups – admit they are a great idea and that only dumb people don’t have one, but utterly forget to apply that thought to one’s own data.

I picked choice number 3, the dumb one.  And crash!!

My hard drive went kerplunk this past Thursday – that’s why I missed Friday’s blog post.  What was on this drive you ask?

• My latest notes for Dream Factory II.
• All my Outlook email, correspondence, and calendaring,
• And a host of irreplaceable things

I was perturbed, even crazed – most of all because this was my own damn fault! Not the crash of course, but the aftermath.  However, I did have some saving graces – some partial safety nets that saved my ass.

First, I had a lot of sideloaded data.  You see, my 4 year old laptop died a few months ago, so I bought a new Dell and went on.  At the time, though the laptop had died, the hard drive was still functional, so I offloaded the data for reinstallation into the new machine.  So I still have the offloaded data from two months ago, because though I didn’t do backups, I was (and still am) a packrat when it comes to data, saving every version and use of data as I go.  So at worst I was losing two or three months’ worth of data – which sucked, but might be manageable.

Second, I had other places I could do some data scavenging.  I synchronize my Outlook Calendar with Gmail’s calendar in order to have it on my Android phone, so I wasn’t going to actually lose my calendar data.  I also keep 2 weeks’ worth of inbox emails on the server, so I could save that.  I also could request people to whom I had emailed certain documents to send them back to me.  But I really got lucky with the next thing:

I was, out of sheer dumb luck, able to get the crashed hard drive mounted long enough to save ALL my important data.

You see, when I plugged the drive in (an SSD, not a platter drive, if you care about such things) I got it to read once, but then after a minute it stopped.  I tried another twenty times and no luck – but the twenty-first time it again came back, but again, just for a minute.

So I lined up all the factors as best I could.  I mounted it to a live Ubuntu DVD to bypass security checking that would waste precious time.  And I spent hour after hour, day after day trying again and again to make it work.

I got lucky.  I made it work.

My next action: purchasing and installing the online backup service Mozy (mozy.com).  Done and done.

So that’s why no blog post on Friday, and why no progress on DF2.

I am now putting my data back together.  Do not expect a blog post on Wednesday (although it may happen anyways) but do expect both a post on Friday and a Get It Done post in a week with hopefully some significant progress on DF2.

Entropy willing, an’ the crick don’ rise.