Dragon Heresy: Deadlines, progress, and the end

Here we are. August 1st. I’d posted a hopeful schedule two weeks ago on what I had to do and the timing it was supposed to do down on.

Yeah. I’m behind. But maybe not by that much. And the last two weeks have seen me get a yuuge amount done.

What’s the Status?


Two weeks ago, I noted what I had left to complete, and here it is in brief:

Monsters and Foes.

I had what I thought was 90,000 words of grunt-work. I was really thinking this was going to be a slog. And it was, but thanks to Emily Smirle and her coding skills and Luke Campbell and his tireless approach to reading my stuff, I got the grunt-work done.

It’s not completely finished, because the SRD has bupkiss, mostly, for monster descriptions and information.

But every monster has a Dragon-Heresy specific stat block that makes it very easy to just look at the entry and fight with the monster. 

We also did a lot of re-jiggering names and monster types so that they go better with the setting. Trolls are now fey, because they are described that way in the setting. Monsters that are notoriously non-Norse have been eliminated, while those that are mostly non-Norse but too cool to leave out have been retained but renamed, often with helpful parenthetical reminders.

Example? Pegasus is a unique flying horse to the Greek mythological set. Not only is he Greek, but there’s only one of him. That was expanded to a type of creature rather than just the one horse Bellerephon rode. But again: Greek.

And yet flying horses were very much a Norse thing, even if not Pegasus. So a quick rename to Hofvarpnir (flying horse) and boom, done.

Oni is a magical Japanese Ogre. But the power set is much (!) closer to the Norse troll legends than the actual 5e Troll is. What did we do? We called the Ogre, the Oni, and the Troll all trolls, and renamed them something like the brute troll, the magical troll, and the tough troll (that one has the regeneration). 

And the Norse legends are full of serpents and dragons, with little to distinguish them. So a lot of things like giant lizards and worms got slid over to the dragon subtype. Plus, the winged flying dragon of Beowulf is not the only dragon in Norse mythology, and thanks to Luke again, I have 15,000 words of additional nasty dragons to compliment the chromatic and metallic dragons of the classic SRD. 

Total wordcount of the Bestiary is currently maybe 95,000 if you include Luke’s portion. So mission accomplished there – mostly – and the book is better for it.

Setting

The main map of the “starting kingdom” has been finalized, and I got some great help from the folks on the Iceland reddit on making sure that my cool ethnic names weren’t stupid. Most were OK, but my name for “High Lord” suffered from a grammar error and would have been “Hair Lord,” which really needs to be an 80s Cover Band.

The map of Etera, the continent on which everything takes place, is also done.

The map of the sandbox is proving troublesome, because I don’t want to define too much, because each GM should have freedom to do what they want, but I also don’t want to do too little, or else why bother with a setting at all.

I think I have a compromise in mind.

Also, I realized that the Races chapter of the characters book (which now has a name) just said things like “DWARF” and then right into the stat block.

Well, that wouldn’t do.

I am expanding the entries there to talk culture, appearance, size and weight, and important traditions. Plus how each race deals with magic and religion. That obviously crosses over with my setting information, so every word spent on Races is also a word spent on setting and worldbuilding. So good progress there, and I hope to finish that up in the coming week.

Once that’s done, then I need to get my CIA Factbook done for each country/kingdom/political entry, plus the different factions and regions in Tanalor, my game-play sandbox.

Oh, and I got permission to include a well-known set of domain building and management rules into my own game. It was OGL to begin with, but I thought it would be polite to ask, and he said “sure.” This was a major coup, in my opinion, and it enabled me to write more into the next section on GM advice.

So setting isn’t done. But it’s been much advanced, and if I can put nose to typewriter this week, I should be able to polish that off. Finishing the Races chapter will truly put the bow on the player’s book.

GM Advice

I have three sections left to do here, and they’re all C-HEAD/Topic level, meaning they can be pretty short. These sections are Combat and Tactics, Lethality and Challenge, and Converting from Other Source Material.

Then that’s done.

Environments and Hazards


I have some free-form sections on Dungeons, Wilderness, Settlements and Ruins, and Unusual Environments to write. Again, those are Topic level, so they can be as short or long as things require.

The Setting


Back to the setting. Here’s the outline:

THE CONQUEST OF TANALOR
KINGDOMS AND TERRITORIES

• Settlements
• Languages
• Foes, Factions, and Organizations

THE AESIR, WINTERFEY, AND ELDER DRAGONS
YGGDRASIL AND OTHER PLANES AND WORLDS
MAGIC

• Basic magic
• Ley lines and leyferths
• Enchantment and permanent items

I can’t say if I honestly expected to come this far. The project will likely be released as two 250-275 page volumes, and I think people will like the mix of rules and setting. 

As you can see from my various playtest reports, the game seems to play well, and has some very interesting outcomes that make sense to me.

Story: I have been reading Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword for the first time. In it, the protagonist and an ally do battle with a mighty venomous serpent (an ormr; we’ve got 15,000 words of those in the book now). Despite many close calls, the two emerge victorious and mostly unscathed, and the ormr retreats.

This outcome is very, very possible in Dragon Heresy through emergent mechanics. This was somewhere between designed in and a happy accident, but I’ve seen it more than once, and most recently with the 3-on-1 battle with the Hill Giant in the last playtest session.

So I’m very much looking forward to finishing the draft, and then getting it in front of folks. I think you’ll like it.

Schedule

I’m behind on finishing the draft, but mid-August seems reasonable.  The book has been split in two, with a Character book and a Campaign book, and I think people will get a lot of use out of both.

Layout has started, and I hope will get major effort over the next three weeks. After that, my layout guy has life thing starting up, so progress would either stop or slow down a lot. We’ll see.

That means art holes and direction is the last half of August.

September, then, is “fill in the art holes and prepare for Kickstarter,” which would push to October.

The length of the overall manuscript means the KS will need more money for indexing, editing, black-and-white, and color artwork – in that order. November and December would be taking delivery of the art as it’s done – but that’s hard to predict, because I’m going to need a LOT of art. 

Still thinking Q117 release.