... now with 35% more arrogance!

Friday, February 6, 2015

Works In Progress

Good news, everyone!

A couple people -- Pippin Strano and Justin Alexander -- asked about some material I had removed from my blog. I took down a lot of stuff that planned to rewrite and put into PDF, to make available for download.

There were two hold-ups to this plan. One was no longer having access to my computer. I solved this problem last month, but discovered the second problem: the stuff I thought was on the computer was missing. OK, not truly missing, since I had done a blog backup and still had all that on the computer. But Blogger's backup process gives you some crappy XML files, one per post, and trying to sort through that to find all the subhex wilderness posts, for example, would be a nightmare.  What I i did last year was write a Perl script to crudely convert the XML into Markdown and even group by tags, so that all the stuff tagged "subhex" wouls be gathered together in a single plain text file.

But I lost those files. Couldn't find them on my computer.

Surprise! It turned out I'd put them on Dropbox, which I haven't used in a year, so I'd forgotten where they were. Found them now, so I can get to work on those PDFs. Already started editing the subhex material, in fact.

So here are my plans.

  1. SubHex Wilderness Crawl PDF: Quick edit to make a coherent version, minor procedure changes. Will be available as free download.
  2. Revised Thief and Talent Class PDF: Started this already, too. Might be a Fight On! article or a free download, or both. Not sure which.
  3. Ranks of Undead PDF: Another quick edit of blog material sorting undead into three types (corpse, skeleton, spirit) and filling in the undead "levels". Will be available as free download.
  4. Last-Minute Game Master #1: Rewrite and expansion of the SubHex material, with lots of tables. About 32 pages. Probably will print and sell. More on this and other LMGM booklets later.
  5. Ranks of Infernals PDF: Quick edit of blog material from the "Our Infernal Neighbors" posts (re-written demons, devils, hags, etc.) Probably will also include my alternative "one-plane" cosmology in simple form. Will be available as free download.
  6. Dungeon/Adventure Modules: Have some general ideas on stuff I want to do, some based around redone geomorphs (geomorphs are already available for download here.) Will probably be at least one free download dungeon, but I'd also like to do some commercial printed modules. For example, one focused exclusively on a colonization campaign.

I'm not clear on what blog material I'll re-edit after #5. The text-to-dungeon stuff would be in there someplace. I do have some ideas on bigger books, like The Last-Minute Wilderness, a complete rewrite and expansion of the random wilderness material, and The Last-Minute Menagerie, a random monster-maker system I haven't even described.

2 comments:

  1. Goods news!
    Looking forward to it!

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    Replies
    1. I may change the order of #2, #3 and #5. The Ranks of the Undead and Ranks of the Infernals are mostly clean-up projects, with maybe only a bit or two of new material. The Thief/Talent rewrite is a major revision connected to a rewrite I did of the Leech Class for Fight On!, so it may be delayed based on whether that article gets accepted and whether it seems feasible to do Thief/Talent as a follow-up article.

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