Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. Typing this one up this morning on account of being out of town all of this past weekend, so I'll have to try and keep it short. This is also the first update in the past two weeks, so that job's going to be all the more difficult as likely as not...
Work continued in Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign these last two weeks. As I indicated in the last update, my initial focus was on the translation work of that chapter's epilogue, and as I had anticipated I was able to complete that work later that same day. A total of 21 new terms were generated and 38 were re-purposed for the 26 text blocks that comprise the epilogue, and once again thanks to thesaurus bloat that wound up corresponding to 141 reverse terms. I was able to add those terms to the lexicon tables before the day was out on the 27th. From the 28th onward, my focus was on the encounters in the chapter, work on the narrative of the first scene of the prologue and work on the dialogue of the second scene of the prologue. SI calculations took place for the final portion of the Valgard encounter on the 28th, and similar calculations were made for the encounter at K'nag Rha on the 29th. Significant re-writes to the K'nag Rha encounter (required due to plot slicing for that encounter, which I alluded to in the last update) also took place on the 29th. The SI table for the Orestes encounter was re-worked on the 30th, and I also filled in specifics of the Valgard encounter that day. On July 1st, I was able to complete all remaining work on the Valgard and K'nag Rha encounters. Work continued on the the Kabla Meth encounter this past Tuesday after the break for Independence Day, and after taking a bit of a break, work continued there this past Friday. As of this morning, work on the encounters in Chapter 2.2 is complete except for the specific details of the T'kon Meth and Kabla Meth encounters, both of which I hope to be able to attend to during this coming week. I'm still not entirely set on how tough I want the Kabla Meth's climatic encounter to be, but considering what the players may have to face in Valgard, it's liable to have to be a doosie...
One of the items that's been on my to-do list for a while now has been to finish generating images for the various craft that are in Chapter 7.2. This always has been something on the back burner, largely because several of those craft are brand new designs that have never appeared anywhere else. After CIC member DefianceIndustries posted a model of the Martina Nostra Razor a few weeks ago, though, I approached him about designing a "kitbash" for the other three Martina Nostra designs slated to appear in Elegy, namely the Dirk, the Falchion and the Claymore, all three of which will be needed if - as I've also talked about recently - I go ahead with plans to build a space encounter map generator. He said he'd be willing to help me out with the understanding that while a kitbash would be easy to do, new designs would take longer. Those were terms I was comfortable with, so on the 30th, I sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil and began sketching the designs for those ships, work that was wrapped up during the Independence Day break. I'm pretty excited about getting DefianceIndustries help with the Martina Nostra ships; he's done some pretty amazing work for the Homeworld Remastered Mod, and his Razor is downright gorgeous. The work on these ships also inspired me to do some 3D modelling work of my own, in this case on the Drayman-III model, again a new design specifically for Elegy. It's been a very long time since I've done any kind of 3D modelling work, and the modeller I prefer to use is at least 20 years old at this point. It's still a good piece of software - the only issues it has these days have to do with the unusual features of unicode fonts, which are easily bypassed by temporarily uninstalling them. I had forgotten how time consuming modelling work was, and how much I enjoyed doing it. I do think that my model still has a bit of a "juvenile" quality to it, but I've defered that opinion to the CIC crowd. I have yet to receive feedback on it; hopefully soon.
I mentioned some administrative tasks taking place these last few weeks. I spent time on July 1st adding categorical listings to each of Elegy's pages on the wiki, something I'd been needing to do for some time. Mainly that was done for the sake of my mobile users, assuming there are any out there other than myself; I've had issues getting to some of the individual pages from the wiki's top navigation of late, and this provides folks with another way of navigational access. I also updated my to-do list in the game's Index; it'd had been building up for a while now, and I felt the time was right to get the full list of things to do back out where folks could see it again, especially given that it's what I intended to do with the Index page until I have something more substantial to put in there (in another 25 years or so). I've been updating the Index page fairly consistently these last few days as things have been buttoned up.
One final thing that happened this week was some preliminary work on Chapter 5.4, the final chapter of the campaign. I don't know why I did that; I suppose I felt the need for a change of pace, and having thought about some items to add to the end of the story I decided to drop in a template and work out the ideas I had for the campaign's final mission. I realized that my initial idea - Ni'Rakh ultimately being attacked by the Nephilim in H'rekkah at the same time Bloodeye is executed - wouldn't work, since Bloodeye's execution takes place four days before the initial signs of the Nephilim incursion are detected according to Waypoint!. I'm going to have to come up with some adjustments to the structure of the chapter if I still want to do my final idea for it, which is to try to kill off the players in a final desperate fight against the Bugs. I'll probably go back to my initial idea, which is to have the story officially end with Chapter 5.3 and to have 5.4 as a bonus "epilogue" mission. A dark ending, to be sure - but then that's always been my intention...
My Plan for this week is to continue work in Chapter 2.2. I still have the T'kon Meth and Kabla Meth encounters to finish and work is continuing on the prologue as fast as I can manage it - which is not really fast enough given that in all likelihood that'll all I'll have left to do there by the end of this coming week. I'm finally coming back around to where I need to work on the details of the Demon's Eye Base again for Chapter 2.3, and if I get stuck with a case of writer's block after the encounters are buttoned up, I'll probably work on that in all likelihood. I have considered adding sub-categories for the Main Plot and Side Plot sections of Chapters 2-5, but I'm not sold on the need to do so just yet.
Well, that's all I've got for this update. the next update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, July 18th. Y'all have a pleasant week.