Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. Going to start by giving a shout out to the CIC staff for covering WCRPG this past Thursday; I certainly always appreciate it a lot when the game makes the front page.
Once again I find myself having to apologize for skipping an update; I didn't bother to think "gee, there's a major holiday coming up this week and I don't have a functioning laptop at the moment, so maybe I'll want to announce that I'll be skipping an update", so that didn't happen. I'll try to be more cautious in the future. In the meantime I can report that I made up for last week by being very productive this week owing to the onset of end-of-the-semester overnight shifts. I fell ill with a stomach bug shortly after posting the last update on November 24th, so not a great deal else was done that day, though I did make a few revisions to Naj'bakdor's history as it had been written to that point. The next day, my last working day of that week, was spent working on Le'a'he's history, where I did do some work and finally buttoned up the last of his activities prior to the end of the Terran-Kilrathi War. He still had a fair amount left to go, however, and that's where I picked things up when work resumed this past Monday. The work done that day was substantial; I had had a number of thoughts about both his and Naj'bakdor over the Thanksgiving break and that led to substantial development of both characters. Very early Tuesday morning during the first of a series of four overnight shifts in a row, I finished up Le'a'he's history at long last and moved into work on Naj'bakdor in earnest. I also made a number of notes regarding how the members of the Demon's Eye Pack will join the group. After taking a day to work on some administrative things on Wednesday and to come up with some final ideas on the character, I resumed work on Naj'bakdor's history on Thursday and had it complete by the time I went home for the day at noon. At this point there is only one member of the Pack left to compose: Najekh, who has been giving me trouble for a while now. I have had a number of thoughts these past few days about him, though, and by taking the character in a different direction a lot of what few notes I did have for him (general grumpiness and a large number of enemies made) have now clicked into place. I need to develop the notes but I anticipate making good progress on him in the very near future (as in hopefully enough to finish him up by the end of the week). I did go ahead and make a change to B'de's history; I had used the K'sthak system as the setting when I wrote K'chodyapaki's history and the two usages were incompatible with one another, so all I did there was change the reference to a different system. That final change happened on Thursday.
As mentioned, this past week I worked four overnight shifts in a row at the library where I work (which was open 24/7 in preparation for final exams). This is not my normal waking time frame by any stretch of the imagination but as I didn't have much to do in terms of assigned duties, I had more time than normal to work on WCRPG-related things. Composing characters can lead to drowsiness if you do it for long enough stretches of time, and to break things up a bit I decided to take care of some "administrative business" that has been waiting to be finished up for a while. The first piece of business was a redesign of the wiki's Main Page; at the top there is now a dedicated download section with images of the covers of the four published WCRPG works to date. Clicking on any one of them will bring up the corresponding PDF. I originally designed this with all four covers in a single line across but changed it to a two-column table on Thursday after looking it on both an iPhone browser and an older computer with a CRT monitor; the 2x2 works better all around, IMHO. In the same vein, I added the corresponding cover image and option to download to each of the three extant campaigns on the wiki. I also corrected the introductory paragraph and compressed the project link sections via use of columns; the Project Gateways section is now more compact. One of the big things I worked on specifically in the Gateways section was to add direct links to some of the side projects that have come up recently in the wiki's forums, including the work done on Saga characters, the Holding the Line Aces craft and the "Killer Capship" discussion. The page works much better now but I do wish there was an option to turn off the ads on Wikia sites; some of the larger advertisements successfully hide the content of the page when it first loads up. Speaking of Saga, I created a page containing a compilation of the character profiles as they have appeared in WCRPG Updates over this past summer as I said I would do roughly one month ago during the November 17th update. For good measure, the page includes the grand total of three profiles I was able to complete during the summer of 2013 as well as the Prologue profiles as they appeared in the Core Rules. The initial page creation took place on Wednesday and some time was spent throughout the remainder of the week making adjustments to the profiles based on the feedback I've received on them to date. I've still got changes to make; some of the feedback was a little vague and I've since asked for additional clarification. I do know I have a major re-write to conduct with the character of Admiral Rumley, which I hope to attend to soon. Finally, on Friday I created a page for "Late Entries"; this page is intended as a new spot for people to make contributions to the WCRPG project if they wish to do so. My intent there is to prepare for the first rules "Annex" and to provide a spot for things that don't fit well anywhere else. I added a couple of craft designs I've been sitting on for a while to that page. I had also intended to add my notes on a new type of vehicle chassis - Fighterdrones, essentially a combination of the Aerodrone and Fightercraft chassis - but, to my annoyance, I have so far been unable to find my notes on them. I'll get those notes up as soon as I possibly can. Minor activities for the week included the addition of a couple of new terms to the Kilrathi lexicon and an effort to clean-up and reorganize my personal log and notes text file.
The Plan for this week is to build a profile for Najekh and then to work on Bloodeye himself. They are the only two major characters that still need work right now and their completion would allow me to move on to other things. Speaking of which, I still need to finish up the faction descriptions in Chapter 6.0; if anything will detract from work on the plot after those two are done, it'd be that. I still need to work on corrections to Saga characters and I have got to pick up work on Aginor's campaign as well. This is a pretty busy time of year and yet with two more overnights this week and with the amount of actual work I'll have next week (owing to a software migration going on at my workplace), I anticipate it being quite productive. Which is good, because I'm liable to take the week of Christmas off just like I did for Thanksgiving...
That's it for this week; next update between 11-14Z on December 15th.