One more scene done, one more to go.
The last scene is The Battle of Dhanapal Dome and takes place on Mars. This means I need to sit down and sketch out a map of the dome and the junction stations that connect it to the other portions of the Hellas Planitia Colony. That's a long way of saying that the last scene is going to take longer to write because I need to make up what the place looks like to a reasonable degree. Most of the other battles scenes in the novel were on Earth and there Google Maps is your friend.
Current Word Count: 71,473 words
With the novel almost done, I've started allowing myself to think about running a campaign next year. It's been just over a year since I closed down the campaigns I'd been running and I'm really ready to start running a game again. I'm playing three games right now, a weekly Mouse Guard game, a bi-weekly Artesia game, and a monthly Champions game (using 5th edition). This has kept my gamer ADD in check (mostly) while I've been concentrating on the novel.
This past week I put up a poll for my gaming group, asking what game they would be most interested in seeing me run once my novel is complete. I have three ideas and really only enough time to properly put together and run one campaign at a time, so I wanted to see what my player base was interested. Here is what I listed:
The Bold and The DeterminedThis is a revival of my Champions
game where players have two characters - one in a privately funded
Avengers-like super team and one in the street-level group banding
together to for help grinding their personal axes. Both groups operate
in the fictional Capital City, Maryland. The Bold group is more
standard superhero fare in a world where superheroes are a very
new thing. The Determined are desperate people with a beef against an
enemy too big for the individual to face, but as a group can team up
against each foe one at a time. Needless to say, the Determined
actively try to avoid any official or press attention.
Lustria Sandbox
This is a new Fantasy Hero campaign
similar to my Southern Reaches campaign [a Western Reaches-style game], but lizardmen and jungles full
of ruins will feature heavily instead of gnolls and plains. They
players can be colonial agents hired to keep the new colony safe or
entrepreneurial explorers looking for "interesting things". The setting
will likely borrow a lot of setting dressing from Warhammer Fantasy
RPG. I have not decided about firearms yet.
Battletech Mercenaries
I've had a long hankering for
trying out a campaign where the PCs are a mercenary company of
mechwarriors out to make their fortune and honor. Some may just want to
fight in giant robots, others seek for enough legitimacy to become part
of the nobility. The RP aspect would be handled with the Hero System,
mech combat with the War of the Mecha system, which has the flavor of
Battletech but not the complexity. The basic rules are one page long.
That's it.
After a week, the Lustria Sandbox campaign had the most votes (although it was close). Answering questions from the players expanded the base concept a bit and provided me with several ideas. I'll start writing on it in earnest once I finish my novel and take a couple months to properly build enough into it that I don't run out of things for the players to do or investigate for a while. This will be a bit more ambitious than my last Western Reaches campaign as there will be a major port and several minor ports already established rather than a single town for the PCs to fall back to each session.
That's it for this week. Later!
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