![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kingtycoonBack in April when everyone was still at home all the time I got motivated to write another book. It's been a while so it seemed like a good time. I'd been playing around with the idea ever since I came across this image which I've modified with a title. My games all have absurd long names. I like it that way.
Well, nobody is in the mood to playtest my GotN stuff Game of the North - see long dumb names. I like it that way. So I ended up running some Shadowrun and then when that lost steam I switched to playing - now pulp Cthulu which actually is tonight, I get to be ashcan pete the mumbling drifter. And on sundays me and Balthazar and Melchior have been reliving past glories with the new L5R version. Both of these are a lot of fun actually. Meantime Agatha has a couple of games she does and we're all over some games. Games. It's all online now so it's more accessible. I'm reminded of long-ago days when I lived with Antonio and the Darklord and we'd just fire up some 3e whenever, all the time, constantly. I've heard of some people who play every day. I can see that. The way it's done online now, you can play at will all the time if you're avid enough on messageboards. Which is a weird new way to be but it is the way.
Anyhow after A had some bad sessions and I had a particularly poor experience playing Mass Effect 5e with strangers I decided to bend the knee and run this jungle for D&D players.
This jungle
In the OSR community these hexcrawls are all the rage. I paid near $100 for Cacossa which - well it's a nice book with some charm, but it's just okay contentwise. By my estimation. Maybe I want more specific things, or more things. Probably More Things. So in April I got it in my mind to write up each and every one of those 820 hexes. It's September and I'm at about 250. It's an interesting exercise. Kind of what it must have been like writing old Choose your own adventure books. I worked up a few separate threads that you can just bumble into if you travel. The abandoned assassin cult, the mad science enclaves, the trails of the ghost-elephant people, the cursed people holding a demon at bay. It goes on. It's, again, a pretty fun exercise. Examples:
747 Blooming Paradise - This region is a stand of dragon trees braced by large flowering hedges- mainly rose bushes. The forest is not dense & there is no real canopy here. The abundant flowers sustain the bees in the nearby Wax Palace. The whole hex has a fascinating, amazing scent that clings to anyone who's been through it - the mixture of resin, flowers & ocean breeze is intoxicating & persists upon a person for d6 days following a visit. One can find the NPC Apilliard Goze here - they are scouting the territory in the hope of raiding the Wax Palace for honey & to try to capture a queen for his own experiments. He is eager for help & will discuss his plan openly with anyone as he is very trusting. His camp has little in the way of loot & he will flee rather than fight if outnumbered.
So this will end up being a 100 page book is what I'm saying. Anyhow we've done 4 sessions and already I'm having to set up additional scenes -a dungeon here and there. I guess I'll finish that up and put it on my patreon? I've neglected it so. Maybe put it on drive thru rpg. They pay me a little every month. It's neat having even minuscule residual IP income.
And then... Somewhere I got it in my mind to revisit my old novels. Not much of novels. I think I eventually understood what I wanted to do. After my fourteenth or fifteenth reading of Moby Dick I think I realized I don't have a proper novel in me. Story? Plot? Focus? Characters? Instead - fictional scholarship. I got that. So I realized that I would assemble documentary references in a pattern organized by the actual main character who appears only in prefaces and footnotes. She's pretty well realized and I'm content to use her as a quasi-narrator. Plus she kind of works as an audience because when I put together a fake historical account of such and so battles being waged over such and so bridges she can comment favorably or sarcastically on my competence at describing it. The fun of the project is breaking up styles and sneaking in reoccurring characters in widely separated fake primary sources. I spent last month mainly rewriting my first book Raindrinker which - on the basis of its title I always believed deserved a better quality book.
So that's that. My typing is all more ambitious than introverted. I'm not quite to where I was in '17 by any stretch, but I think maybe in '21 I'll burst at the seams, really up my volume.
Well, nobody is in the mood to playtest my GotN stuff Game of the North - see long dumb names. I like it that way. So I ended up running some Shadowrun and then when that lost steam I switched to playing - now pulp Cthulu which actually is tonight, I get to be ashcan pete the mumbling drifter. And on sundays me and Balthazar and Melchior have been reliving past glories with the new L5R version. Both of these are a lot of fun actually. Meantime Agatha has a couple of games she does and we're all over some games. Games. It's all online now so it's more accessible. I'm reminded of long-ago days when I lived with Antonio and the Darklord and we'd just fire up some 3e whenever, all the time, constantly. I've heard of some people who play every day. I can see that. The way it's done online now, you can play at will all the time if you're avid enough on messageboards. Which is a weird new way to be but it is the way.
Anyhow after A had some bad sessions and I had a particularly poor experience playing Mass Effect 5e with strangers I decided to bend the knee and run this jungle for D&D players.
This jungle
In the OSR community these hexcrawls are all the rage. I paid near $100 for Cacossa which - well it's a nice book with some charm, but it's just okay contentwise. By my estimation. Maybe I want more specific things, or more things. Probably More Things. So in April I got it in my mind to write up each and every one of those 820 hexes. It's September and I'm at about 250. It's an interesting exercise. Kind of what it must have been like writing old Choose your own adventure books. I worked up a few separate threads that you can just bumble into if you travel. The abandoned assassin cult, the mad science enclaves, the trails of the ghost-elephant people, the cursed people holding a demon at bay. It goes on. It's, again, a pretty fun exercise. Examples:
705 Wax Palace - Here, the vast & beautiful trees are not girded by much in the way of undergrowth - in fact the forest floor is peculiarly bare. Instead the trunks of the trees are connected by enormously large & sophisticated bee hives - hives which drip, overflowing with honey. The wax walls that connect the tree trunks are a yard thick & tough - with AC 12 & requiring 8 HP of damage dealt in order to breach them. Breaching them is the best way to traverse the hex at a normal pace but otherwise travel through the hex requires 2 d20 INT checks - given the relative ease of traversing the maze. Naturally the bees are a major consideration. Players can retrieve up to 10 doses of honey apiece before rousing the bees to anger & may breach one wall before provoking the bees to swarm. Swarming bees are formidable & pursue characters out of the hex & no farther. Characters who are attacked must save vs. Death or suffer a d8 poisoned effect every turn that they remain in the hex. There is a single queen for the entire massive colony & she lies in the heart of the hive in an underground chamber - likewise made of wax but buried under the ground. It takes great care & knowledge to find & enter this chamber, but doing so allows a party to capture the Jeweled Queen - a rat sized bee made of jewels who will produce hives in similar size & quantity in any hex over the course of just one month.
747 Blooming Paradise - This region is a stand of dragon trees braced by large flowering hedges- mainly rose bushes. The forest is not dense & there is no real canopy here. The abundant flowers sustain the bees in the nearby Wax Palace. The whole hex has a fascinating, amazing scent that clings to anyone who's been through it - the mixture of resin, flowers & ocean breeze is intoxicating & persists upon a person for d6 days following a visit. One can find the NPC Apilliard Goze here - they are scouting the territory in the hope of raiding the Wax Palace for honey & to try to capture a queen for his own experiments. He is eager for help & will discuss his plan openly with anyone as he is very trusting. His camp has little in the way of loot & he will flee rather than fight if outnumbered.
So this will end up being a 100 page book is what I'm saying. Anyhow we've done 4 sessions and already I'm having to set up additional scenes -a dungeon here and there. I guess I'll finish that up and put it on my patreon? I've neglected it so. Maybe put it on drive thru rpg. They pay me a little every month. It's neat having even minuscule residual IP income.
And then... Somewhere I got it in my mind to revisit my old novels. Not much of novels. I think I eventually understood what I wanted to do. After my fourteenth or fifteenth reading of Moby Dick I think I realized I don't have a proper novel in me. Story? Plot? Focus? Characters? Instead - fictional scholarship. I got that. So I realized that I would assemble documentary references in a pattern organized by the actual main character who appears only in prefaces and footnotes. She's pretty well realized and I'm content to use her as a quasi-narrator. Plus she kind of works as an audience because when I put together a fake historical account of such and so battles being waged over such and so bridges she can comment favorably or sarcastically on my competence at describing it. The fun of the project is breaking up styles and sneaking in reoccurring characters in widely separated fake primary sources. I spent last month mainly rewriting my first book Raindrinker which - on the basis of its title I always believed deserved a better quality book.
So that's that. My typing is all more ambitious than introverted. I'm not quite to where I was in '17 by any stretch, but I think maybe in '21 I'll burst at the seams, really up my volume.
