Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.
A concerted effort to finish up the four remaining encounters in Elegy Chapter 2.1 ("Tarakh'ga") took place this past week. Work continued on the tenth-level battle map for the previously finished Flight Deck encounter from the previous weekend, and as I had hoped I was able to knock it out very quickly. I added the map and made a few adjustments to the encounter to account for changes due to the addition of the map that same day. I finished Monday out by working on the Elevator encounter's problems section, working through all details except for Bloodeye's first encounter with the Dya'a'ji character. Tuesday I was able to knock out the few remaining details that needed to be added to the Engine Room and Bridge encounters, wrapping those two up and leaving only the Elevator encounter left to do. I had set things up so that a tracking device was disabled as part of the Bridge encounter, but I realized Tuesday night that putting it there was a bad idea - logically, if the tracking device went offline, it'd signal the station that something was amiss, and even if it didn't then the maintenance crew that had just installed it would turn around to see what the problem was (provided the characters skipped the Elevator encounter and said crew was still alive). So, I decided to move that sequence of events into the Jump Point encounter; by then, the ship is underway and there's nothing any outside force could do about it. That work happened on Wednesday, and it was a pretty easy thing to do although it did require some major restructuring of the Jump Point encounter. After adding a final note to the Engine Room Encounter, it was full-bore on the Elevator encounter, the last one requiring work in the sub-chapter. On Thursday, I finished up the details of a scenario involving the use of pressure hatches during that encounter, leaving just the details of the encounter with Dya'a'aji to finish. I had the damndest time coming up with something for the Dya'a'ji character to do in the Elevator encounter, though I did wind up coming up with a reasonable motivation for him to stick with Bloodeye's group (with the help of my lovely wife). In the end, I went with a random tripwire mechanic; I figure since he had stowed away to get aboard the ship he'd have to make due with materials at hand, and those are a very basic trap readily made with materials that would've been on the ship. The way I set up the mechanic, it could work on both Terrans and the PCs, so in a way it became another way of penalizing players for ignoring Irgu's advice and winding up in the Elevator encounter in the first place. With some adjustments to the Bridge encounter to match the details of Dya'a'ji's introduction in the Elevator encounter (since the character could be introduced in either place), I can happily report that the final details of the Tarakh'ga mission are at long last completed. After updating the map captions to include legends and scales, I have resumed work on the mission prologue and epilogue, which at this point are the only pieces of work remaining in Chapter 2.1.
So my Plan at this point is to work on the mission prologue and epilogue in ElegyChapter 2.1. The epilogue is near completion as of this morning, and I believe I will be able to begin translation of that text into Kilrathi in the very near future. It's a short enough passage of text, so I imagine the translation work there will not take more than a week or two. The prologue is a different story - there's a lot that goes on in the prologue (owing to the fact that it's part of the overall campaign plot exposition) and while I do have a nearly-coomplete dialogue there, I don't have a cogent narrative binding it all together just yet. I will be working on that as soon as the epilogue is completed to a satisfactory degree. I have the next two missions, "Dekh aq T'kon H'hra" and "Bharg'Yi'nargrast'hra" to begin planning as well. I don't think the mission details of the first of these two will require a great deal of work, but I know I'll need battle maps for the latter, and those will probably be quite involved (I'll need to try to figure out the layout of a Terran mining base ala Privateer). Priority is on Tarakh'ga, of course, but it doesn't hurt for me to be thinking ahead a bit.
Well, that's all I've got for this update. Owing to the fact that this week is Spring Break locally, I probably will not get much done this coming week and so I will schedule the next update to post on the WCRPG site two weeks from today, sometime between 11-15Z on Monday, March 28th. Y'all have a pleasant couple of weeks.