Playing Again

Well, Alexis is running a new set of online campaigns, and I was fortunate enough to get a slot. This is exciting on a number of different fronts: not only am I playing again for the first time in years, but I'm playing with a DM I greatly respect and a respectable group of players. I am also quite excited to see how a lot of the rules Alexis' has mentioned actually work in practice.

This comes at a particularly welcome time as I've stalled a bit on developing things for both this blog and my world - without a game to drive me, my output has slowed to fits and spurts.

One of the things I've been working through is the bestiary project I outlined a while ago.  I was rather unhappy with what I churned out initially and decided to take a somewhat different tact (especially with regard to the voice of Patrick MacAlan. I'm sorry about that.). Because the ultimate goal of the project is to sell it, spacing is an ever-present concern. I've decided on page sizes (6x9, which makes for a very handy book), but this makes space an ever-present concern. Fitting at least two paragraphs from different authors simply requires too much space, so my current mindset is to write out each author's descriptions in full and then quote them to communicate their voice and information without losing all of that space.

Additionally, I've significantly reworked the shard magic spells to incorporate a more science-fantasy vibe, the results of which I'll post later this month.

Lastly, I'm still tinkering with the bardic artwork tables I outlined a while back. What I presented was an excellent first draft, but it fails in two counts. Some of the abilities are not presented within the psycho-magical framework that underpins the whole endeavor, and much of the abilities require a fundamentally Judeo-Christian worldview, something that does not jive with my aggressively multicultural setting. I've finished editing a couple of them, but I want to get the whole series done before posting it.