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[As usual, two weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]
Didn’t shoot this morning. Going Thursday. Piper texted last night and wanted to work on engine mechanics for the game, so did that after breakfast. Probably building characters and starting arena combat testing next week, to see how things balance. Kinda nifty cool there, because we’re close to the basics, which means moving on to the context of magic next.
Got some interesting ideas on how to handle balance there, while keeping things as wide open and modular are possible. Will require players actually do more than have a set of numbers on a page, but min/maxers like that tend to either annoy or bore me, depending.
“You can do it, but it’s going to cost you” is our mantra for building things. And the Piper doesn’t mind me ripping out as much Tolkien as I can from fantasy roleplay because there is more to fantasy literature than that. MUCH MORE. And we’ll get to come up with our own settings to go atop context (and atop engine) for folks to play.
If you haven’t been paying attention, I asked my group that I GM what Contexts they’d like to see/play. Piper is always all about fantasy. One guy wanted to see Cthulhu as an option, so I pointed him at my Space Gods story from “After The Fall” and Stoyko, if he wanted something post-apoc. Otherwise, it would be more 1930s pulp, which is coming up on a century ago. Yikes. We’ll see what he has to say this week.
The fun part was the one player who wanted “Harry Potter Meets Star Fleet Academy” as a thing. And she’d like that.
Worse, as I thought about it, I figured out how to do it.
Worse, had a chat with the Fabulous Publisher Babe™ over the weekend and got some clues from here about Epic Space Fantasy™ as a genre. Not one I write in. Not one I read, but she’s all over the map and had things to consider.
And, to stretch myself, I’ll write at least the one I’m about to start after this in First Person, something else I rarely do.
Then, because me, I have spent the weekend worldbuilding something massively epic, just in case I decide to write a 7-volume epic space fantasy series. Because, I can.
Finished the 12th Last Stand (end of Season One, but not the end, as I have more to write). And started the fourth Marrakesh, but putting that one aside this week as I write some short stuff to get ahead again and give you folks your monthly fix. (and me places to experiment, as one does.)
Marrakesh should be Jan-Apr of 2024, followed by Air Pirates, with the third and maybe fourth Corsac Fox tucked in there somewhere. And maybe the third and final Kincaide’s War (Eden Package) after #2 comes out this summer.
Thanks for keeping me in business. Gotta GM tonight, so the Anti-Stodgy Newsletter comes out tomorrow and lets me start Holden Barick’s middle story. (in media res.)
Catch up next week.
Shade and sweet water,
b
West of the Mountains, WA
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