Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.
I want to start this week by thanking all of you who voted for WCRPG for the CIC's Web Site of the Year, and to express just how absolutely thrilled I was to have been awarded as the runner-up for 2014. I honestly did not expect the WCRPG website to show up at all this year; there was some extremely stiff competition for that category and every site on the list deserved to win it in my opinion. I am both honored and humbled by y'all's support for the ongoing work of the WCRPG project. I also want to take a moment to congratulate the Maslas brothers for their win in both the Web Site of the Year and Fan Project of the Year categories; Flat Universe is a very exciting project and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the finished product some day.
As I mentioned in the previous update, I spent this past week working on a campaign tree for the Elegy campaign. This largely required me to take a moment to pause, go back and look on what I had written about the full Epsilon Sector setting up to this point, and hammer out some adventure ideas. I started this process last weekend by reviewing the personal histories of each of the Demon's Eye Pack characters and continued the process on Monday by taking the time to review what had been written about the existing faction descriptions (which I still need to finish up, particularly in regard to the corporations). Generation of adventure hooks continued into Tuesday along with a review of several articles on the Great Plains Indian Wars of the 19th Century as well as a few other articles regarding piracy (mainly in regards to history). I read those other articles to hunt for ideas, which is generally the first step in creating adventures (it even says so in Chapter Eleven of the Core Rules...). I ended the day on Tuesday by beginning a review of the star system overviews I'd written for Elegy Chapter Six, a process that I continued on Wednesday and finished up towards the end of the day that day. On Thursday I created a list of adventure hooks for the campaign based on the ideas I had gathered up. Right now the total number of hooks is sitting at 41. If I go ahead and make adventures/missions out of all of them, I would generate a good-sized campaign (for comparison, there are 40 missions in the original Wing Commander, 44 in WC4, 47 in WC2, 49 in WC3, 50 in Standoff, 51 in Prophecy and 55 in Saga, assuming I counted them correctly - which I probably didn't). In the interest of tying up loose ends on Friday (which was a shortened day owing to events in RL), I spent the single break I had that day making age adjustments to the stats of some of the Demon's Eye Pack characters. I wasn't able to finish that process but I did get an even two-thirds of the ones that needed the adjustment finished up and I will probably complete the process next Friday.
So the Plan for this week is to organize my adventure hooks into a proper campaign tree. This will let me know roughly where any single given adventure will fall in the whole series of events, which in turn will let me know into which of the four "Acts" a given adventure will fall, which in turn will let me begin making wiki pages for each adventure and start hammering them out. It'll also show me if I need to add some additional adventures. I'm actually pretty excited and looking forward to this whole process - for a while now I've struggled with what will be in the campaign's middle, and it'll be nice to finally have something there. I do have an even dozen plotline missions planned at this point; it would be nice to get that up to a multiple of eight (for no reason other than to keep with the whole relationship between the Kilrathi and the number eight, really) but I don't yet know if that will be necessary. I have given some consideration as to whether or not I'll need "trap door adventures" for members of the Pack, which would give a mechanism for the GM when he's got a player that needs to drop out of an active campaign in progress for whatever reason; I remember something about J. Michael Straczynski doing something like that when he wrote down his initial ideas for Babylon 5 in case an actor left the series and that it was something that was implemented at least once (in the case of the Talia Winters). I don't know if some of the adventure ideas I have already will fit that bill or not (for example, I do have an idea where the lak B'yaga family - Ku'a K'le, Mo and Qith'rakoth - will go back to Corsair to find a missing daughter/sister, after which they may not have reason to stay with the Pack). I'm still considering that notion; it may mean yet more adventures will be generated. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing - it'd just mean a little more work would be involved in bringing work on Elegy to its final conclusion.
Well, that's all I have for this week; next update between 11-14Z on February 23rd.