Vintyri™/Jörðgarð™ - Where are you?

edited November 2022 in General Discussion

We're starting to get E-Mail messages asking if Vintyri™ and Jörðgarð™ are alive or dead.

We're alive and back at full activity since October 1, but we had to take a four-month pause rather than our usual two-month summer vacation because:

1) Trevor caught Corona 2 years ago and as a zany side effect, the use of his right hand was impaired. The doctors at the crippled British NHS say it's permanent and they can do nothing for him. It doesn't get in his way a lot, but he no longer can type. He has a program with which he can dictate text material, which in turn comes out as a Word text. It's slow, and it requires a lot of editing on our part.

2) When Carl was promoted, he was assured that work never would take him out of Milwaukee again. But when Corona took his successor as the company's project manager in Thailand out for about two months, Carl had to go back temporarily. They're working on a classified military project in a remote area where there is no Internet or Smartphone access, so he was unavailable for two months.

3) My wife Gerdi is doing fine now, but on May 27 she managed to fall out of one of our apple trees, feet first (fortunately) to the ground. The result: A fracture of the shinbone cap in her right knee, three weeks in the hospital with operation and then more than a month in a wheelchair and on crutches. While this was happening, the Steigerwald here in Northern Bavaria was in the middle of a two-month drought with high temperatures. We have a densely planted garden of more than 1,400 square yards, and I had to take care of all of it while Gerdi was recuperating, spending a lot more time than usual watering too, because of the drought.

That's behind us and we're back, but we aren't producing maps right now. We finished the 4th part of our Fallen Empire Trail adventure a while back and are working now on the 5th and final part. This part takes the PCs northward into winter and a land with many ruins. You may have noticed that our cartographic collection, Bogie's Mapping Objects, the CSUAC and the Dundjinni Archives offer only a few mapping graphics for winter or in the way of ruins. So – again to be able to fill our own mapping needs – we're producing a large set of new symbols and fills for winter and settings with many ruins.

We hope to release in late January or in February, but no guarantees. As with all of our products, the new material will be free, open source, open gaming software for Fractal Mapper 8 licensed for private and commercial use. This probably will be released as Version 2.0 of the Vintyri Cartographic Collection, with an update available for those who already have the original collection. That about brings you up to date on what we're doing.

Servus!

Mark Oliva
The Vintyri™ Project.

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