Ezine Progress

I've been hard at work on the eZine lately. Here are my discoveries:

 - It's a good thing I'm splitting the Last-Minute Hexcrawl across three zines (terrain, settlements, exploration.) Because just the terrain article is turning out to be huge. It's all the careful explanation and examples, and the fact that, when I was writing it up as blog posts, there were a lot of nested links, which made some blog posts deceptively short.

 - I may have to do a lot of illustrations for this. I always worry that things like "read the dice from left to right", while sounding simple to me, may be difficult to understand without visual examples. That, of course, makes the article even bigger.


 - Because of the size, I think I may drop the idea of including races, classes, and adventures, although I am thinking of doing a colony scenario as a good example of how to use a random geography map in play.

 - I was planning to include the hunting and foraging rules in issue #1, but I think they fit better with the exploration rules in issue #3. Instead, I'll be including a reworked version of my weather rules, since it's logically connected to climate.

Cover Image: In Progress

This is a concept for the cover image on the ezine (Last-Minute GM #1: Wilderness.) Not the final image, because there are still some other elements I want to add, and tweaks to the composition I want to try... plus, it's going to take a lot of work to keep it from looking too "rendered" or too muddied.

The eZine and the Kingdoms

I've been debating whether to include 9 and 30 Kingdoms setting material in the ezine. I've been getting the urge to write up some of my campaign ideas as material to be used by others, particularly the elf and goblin material. But it doesn't quite fit the focus of an ezine I plan to call "The Last-Minute GM". I'm conceiving it as being mostly practical tools, rather than campaign-specific interpretations.

Perhaps instead I should plan one or more modules/adventures, each focused around a specific 9 and 30 Kingdoms-related concept, plus additional material related to that concept. For example:

• A goblin dungeon built around my idea of insane, semi-intelligent goblins instead of a " savage humanoid race with a legitimate, if primitive, culture", with a section on the goblin backstory from the 9 and 30 Kingdoms, which can be adopted by others as the backstory for all goblins in their campaign or just one small tribe.
• An adventure to find/loot one of the lost elven homelands destroyed by the worms, again with the material on elves and other backstory that can be adopted for your entire world or just for that adventure area.
• An adventure that features both neutral and chaotic orcs and chaos druids, plus backstory for the cult of Red Orc.

It's very tempting, but I have no idea how interested people are in really divergent interpretations of the traditional races.

Last-Minute Labyrinth

The latest news on the zine front is that that there may be several kinds of installments of the zine, each one to be collected eventually in separate products: The Last-Minute Menagerie being one, but others would include The Last-Minute Cohort (tentative title for a PC/NPC supplement based on the class stuff I've been posting,) The Last-Minute Wilderlands (outdoor map generation,)  The Last-Minute Kingdom (town/settlement building, based on town generation material I've posted previously.) And a dungeon generation system called The Last-Minute Labyrinth.

The good news is that this means a zine may come out sooner than expected. I've been writing stuff for the Last-Minute Menagerie, but it's been going slow. It occurs to me that I could write what would essentially be a chapter from The Last-Minute Menagerie that would be room types to use instead of an "empty" room. And this will probably go quicker. Even with the planned 120 rooms in one chapter.