Reasonable behind the scenes work going on.

Game Development

Venture Beyond is heading towards a complete manuscript, with some darn nifty concepts threaded through. Took note of recent threads about how old games could fairly easily port in a reader’s favorite authors’ works, and how too-detailed settings and starmaps can eat the wonder from a setting because there’s nowhere for your cool stuff to go. So noted. And easily accommodated. This game is designed to have enough help to make it coherent and playable, but enough empty space to somewhere between encourage and demand improvisation and GM/player control. We’ve had great discussions like “Pirates are awesome, and space piracy is awesome, so how do we ensure piracy isn’t precluded by setting assumptions?” If we have tramp freighters and independent agents in ships that are not so expensive that the ability to buy one is the ability to live like a zillionaire, how is that viable at the same time as the equivalent of a container ship is viable? We want to emphasize the sheer fun of getting out there in the fringe, and making your own way. The feel of Firefly but with a much bigger scope, Traveller without quite so much inertia of pre-existing (though frequently cool) canon to fight if you want to tell stories that are more your own.

Anyway, I really like how things are shaping up, and we’re taking the time to do it right.

For Dragon Heresy, editing is happening. Art is also happening, and I have started to make the banner graphics with help provided by Michael Clarke:

So I have the outline for what I want to do, and now I just have to write the pitch. Should be easy with 425,000 words under my belt, right?

Not a huge update, but not every one will be. By the end of April, things will start to pop, I hope.

The Blog

I’ve been good – or at least better – about populating the blog with actual content.

It’s been fun writing again, and as any author will likely tell you, it’s a skill you have to practice. And as you practice, you get better, and it comes more easily. It’s been good to get back to some ballistics stuff, and I owe y’all a post from yesterday on 5e . . . and since I saw a thread on facebook on Guns and 5e (“No, no, please, no!” was a fairly typical response), I thought I’d indulge in a bit of “what if?”