Third Week of August Begins!

Looking for Motivation

Life 

I've spent most of last week recovering, a mixture of a lot of sleep, massaging my calves which had huge knots in them and a large amount of tiger balm. I'm still not used to third shift but if I tell that to anyone they think I'm whining or they say, "It is not that bad" so I stay quiet and get sleep when I can. I really think you could call last week "the week of sleep" for me.

Kung Fu

Last week, not a lot of Kung Fu/ Training was done but this weekend I have discovered my body is healed enough I can begin normal training again. While recovering I thought a lot about what I want to do for training, like my training "goals" and what I came up with was simple:

• Do the Splits
• Do Butterfly Kick
• Do Kick Up
• Learn New Forms/Moves

I'd also like to include more of my spiritual beliefs back into my training. Starting and ending each training session with prayer/meditation. For tips and exercise ideas I've been watching Sifu Yan Lei and KungFu.Life to get ideas. Other than that my workout is mostly the same but I would like to get bigger/stronger so change might be coming again or more intense workouts.

Study

Nothing much has been going on with studying...

My Chinese is probably getting worse but my knowledge of Taoism and Zen is increasing. I'm still reading my 365 Tao, Dancing Mind/Thinking Body and more. Reading books really took over my time this week.

Gaming

I've been reading a lot of game books and adventure modules recently since my body was feeling terrible last week. I've found it quite easy to use the Zweihander ruleset with D&D adventure modules. You only have to change a couple things with the encounters (since combat in D&D and Zweihander are very different) but it still runs smoothly. Rereading the Zweihander ruleset has also been fun for me as now I'm reading it from a "world building" point of view as I begin slowly building my own campaign world. It's different for me as I'm used to swords and sorcery style of play but this isn't that.

There is gun powder, guns, some machines but also the ever constant threat of demons and magic all while you are simple adventurers. Not heroes, just adventurers trying to make it in this world. My material I use for help with ideas has been the Stronghold lore, "Season of the Witch" movie, my medieval knowledge and the Zweihander book itself.

I found a cool way to build a world using adventure modules (and I really wish I had all my other adventure modules), just skim through them and on your world map begin laying out the key locations, towns, forests, etc.

Example:

I'm using the Zweihander's Starter Adventure, D&D's Lost Mine of Phandelver, and John Wick's Thirty (Heavily modified) to build my world. From D&D I took Phandalin, Thundertree, Cragmaw Castle, The Sword Mountains, Old Owl Well to start my world, then began adding Swanzi, Vorberg and Horned Monk Mountains from Zweihander and finally from Thirty I've added Alvaray, City of Lights, Great Forest, and more.

A large chunk of my world is already made and populated with challenges, characters/ monsters without me having to do much. Then all that I do after is fill in the blanks with my own creations. Creating a few characters with backstories help me populate the world even further.

How have you all been doing?

-Johnny