Blog of Silence – Writing and Stay-at-home Dad

Been quiet this week, so I apologize for that. The cause? My wife is in Italy for the annual Hwa Rang Do world tournament and black sash seminars – in addition to being a PhD in Wastewater Treatment, she’s also a martial arts instructor. 

Yes, she’s a badass.

What that means, though, is I have the 2yo and the 6yo for ten nights, and much of the time, I’m keeping them occupied. The eldest has camp from 9a-4p, and the little one gets daycare three days a week, but Tu/Th and the weekends it’s keeping her entertained. And since she dropped both her naps, but still gets cranky as all get out when she’s tired, afternoons get rather interesting. Yes, this is what my wife has to deal with every single day. I get that. We usually trade duties so we can each get some free time. Mine is usually used for blogging, gaming, and working on Dragon Heresy. Hers is training at the dojang at night.

But it does mean that my time is limited, and I am using that time to go nose to the grindstone on Dragon Heresy. I have basically four things left to do.

1. I need to finish the subclasses. There will be, I think, 37 of them, which of course includes a whole bunch of divine domains, a few flavors of paladin, and less-evil pact lords for Warlocks. Plus four categories of Wizard. The hard part for me is getting the level boosts right. 
2. Once those are done, I will whip up about a half-dozen “explicit multiclass” options. These will likely look fairly familiar, such as a Fighter/Bard, Fighter/Wizard, Rogue/Wizard. Plus three more. They will be thematic for the game, borrowing from stories and character types common to the legends I’m pulling from.
3. I need to come up with a short set of rules for spells – one of the “features” of the game rule design for Dragon Heresy is that I’m looking at Wounds and what I’ve called “stress” in a prior post, but has since been renamed as vigor. But some spells go right to wounds, others go to vigor, and wounds are far nastier than vigor because they don’t go up much with level. But once I get the if/then done for how to determine spell effects, my playtesters and I can rip through this. Tedious, but should be very programmatic.
4. Finally, the fun part – the setting. A lot of worldbuilding has been going on as part of the writing of the subclasses. Who you are is very much a product of where you grew up, after all. But this can just be “Doug writes stuff,” and doesn’t have the rules mechanics “must check to see it’s all not insane” parts of it in the same way. Sure, I can do stupid stuff, but it’s not stupid stuff that will break game play.