Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.
Not that it may matter much to y'all, but this morning's update is being "simulcasted" (probably not the right word but it's close enough). After last Monday's update, I received a request from Chris Reid, one of the main administrators of the Wing Commander CIC website, to go ahead and begin placing a second copy of the updates on the CIC forums. Apparently, some folks have been having issues of late with all the advertising, videos and extra crud that Wikia insists on putting on their hosted sites, and it's gotten to the point where it slows down their web browsers to a crawl. I myself have noticed this when I'm not logged in; they don't blast me with ads when I'm logged in (except on the main page). I have an ad blocker turned on in Chrome which pretty effectively blasts whatever's left, leaving just the side crud, which is usually pretty manageable. I plan on accommodating the CIC's request for the time being; if it turns out to be more trouble than it's worth for me, I'll revert back to the single update at the WCRPG site like I've been doing for these past few years, and perhaps investigate the possibility of paying to have the ads removed from the site (which may also turn out to be more trouble than it's worth...).
If those of you following the updates at RSI, Twitter or Facebook are having similar issues, now would probably be a good time to let me know about it...
This past week began in Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy Campaign. A lot of the time there was spent finishing up the remaining route calculations between the T'kon and K'nag Rha systems. I also was able to work in an additional penalty for taking the "red herring" route during the process of making those calculations. Work was also done on the encounter Introduction statements and the Results sub-sections of each encounter, with the introductions completed for all encounters except Valgard and Kabla Meth and all of the Results sections completed except for the T'kon Meth encounter. I've found that I still need to set a few more details and slice the plot a bit more on a few of the planned encounters for Chapter 2.2, particularly for the T'kon Meth encounter, which has yet to really properly gel up. The rest of the week was spent working on syntactic reviews of the mission prologue in Chapter 2.1. I had found a sentence parser site late last week when I was working on the same thing, but hadn't properly learned what was involved with its use then. Since it's looking more and more like the sentence diagrammer I'm currently using isn't going to be an option in the future, I decided I should figure out how to use the parser. For someone who isn't a linguist, I found the new site somewhat confusing at first but ultimately very much usable - especially once I managed to find the user guide - and handy in that it shows the definite limits of different phrasing types (noun phrases, adverbials, etc). The syntax of the Kilrathi language as I have it is fairly dependent on knowing where and in what order such varying phrases are supposed to occur. My log shows that I completed a grand total of 54 syntactic reviews before the week was out with work in progress on another one. Another three were completed somewhere along the line that I didn't account for in my log; chalk that up to trying to do simple addition at 4:30 in the morning when you're already running on a pretty significant sleep deficit. The total number completed of completed syntactic reviews as of this morning is 68, with one in progress and no work done so far on the remaining 34 text blocks - almost exactly two-thirds complete overall. I did have an annoyed-grunt moment on Thursday when I thought that I might not've had a translation for the possessive pronoun "yours" in the grammatical rules, something that came up during the syntactic reviews. After a review of the rules on Friday, though, I realized I had the specific situation at hand well covered. I did make a small change on Friday that would allow a pronoun in the formal voice to be the object of a sentence. Such a thing may be socially awkward but it may have some use later on in the story.
The Plan for the coming week is to continue the syntactic reviews in Chapter 2.1 and move onto the formal translation work when that effort is complete. Since I've made such good progress this past week, I see no reason to halt the momentum I've built up there. I doubt I'll actually finish it up this week, but if I do, Chapter 2.1 will be completed and I can start devoting my full attention to Chapter 2.2. In 2.2, I need to do some serious plot slicing of three encounters and make notes there, then try to finish up the few bits that weren't done this week. I can begin work on setup and encounter specifics after that effort is completed. I've also got the story portion of 2.2 to work on - both the prologue and the epilogue - and I still need to finish the preliminary design of the Demon's Eye base. I've also begun thinking about how Elegy is structured; with as much work as has been put into it, I'm wondering if the end result is going to have to be split up into volumes (as what happened with the Core Rules). If that's the case, each individual adventure could become an "episodic module", with the campaign setting (which is already largely finished) becoming its own volume. I'm really only just now thinking about this and there's still the fact that I'd need to find another print-on-demand service if I want to make hardcopies in the future, but I'll be sure to let y'all know what I decide to do.
Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next update will post to the WCRPG site sometime between 11-14Z next Monday, May 23rd. Y'all have a pleasant week.