Hi everyone, it’s been a minute.
I was supposed to be done with the Schattenkrieg novel earlier this year, but it’s still in rewrites and edits. It’s honestly been on the back burner a little since I’ve been working on the setting itself. Does this mean I’m stuck in world building hell? For a bit, maybe, but I’ve gotten through most of that.
To that end, there now is a much more fleshed out world than there was when I began the novel. I had been going off general concepts from ~30 years ago, which was not always the best plan. I ran into quite a few spots where I found holes in the internal logic of the setting. I’ve since fixed those and gotten it all pretty squared away.
There is a lot more to the setting now than there ever has been in the past. Which is a good thing overall. It will allow me to add a bit more flavor in the novel rewrites, and in the potential future novels as well.
The TTRPG took some of my time. I stopped messing with layouts until I got all the core stuff done and ready for layout. As it turns out, I was much further away than I thought. The current design doc is 250-ish pages, though, there’s a big mess in there… some pages of nothing but me talking to myself, and trying to work through problems. It’s also filled with a lot of single column white space. But there is much more to add in before it’s ready for public consumption.
I’m still not 100% on the system/mechanics themselves. But I’ve continued to go all in on my 2d10-roll under system. It works great for translating old 1990s rules forward, as well as working with all the math I did to make derived values come out right. I’ve pondered changing things up, but I’m not sure how to, without breaking everything and having to start over. I really don’t want to do that, so, yeah.
Also, there’s a fantasy spin-off/different era now. I didn’t really mean to dive as far as I did into that, but it’s a thing.
Ultimately, I’m having fun working on all this again. At least as much as I’ve been able. My kiddo is staying up later and getting up earlier (and sometimes not napping during the day). So, I’ve had less time to sit down the plug away. Parenthood is weird.
-Anthony