Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.
I've got some really good news to report to all y'all this morning. Thanks to a concentrated effort on my part and a decision early in the week to knock out all the smaller blocks of translation that still needed to be done first (a reversal of the decision I mentioned in the previous update), on Wednesday I crossed the halfway point of the remaining translation work in Chapter 2.0 of the Elegy campaign. And then I finished it all up late Friday night - as of this morning, all work in Chapter 2.0 is complete, the twelfth section of the Elegy campaign to see completion (just have another forty-one to go at this point). As might be expected from the massive amount of translation work that took place this past week, a large number of terms were generated for the Kilrathi lexicon - a total of 40 new terms were generated with 42 terms re-purposed, corresponding to 143 reverse terms. Included in this week's terms are the names of all of the Sectors in the Wing Commander Universe except for Kilrah, Vukar Tag and M'shrak Sectors since those are already essentially Kilrathi names already (you just tack the name onto the end of the words kn'ga ja'lgaga and you've got the name). A fair number of terms were already in use - I was just making things official in those cases. My older son also challenged me to do a couple of pieces of translation work - the Scout Oath and the Scout Law of the Boy Scouts of America. I actually had most of the words already to do that work; I wound up only having to generate words for "thrift" and "reverent". I have yet to post those translations to the CIC, but I'll likely do that sometime in the near future. I figure when I do that I'd post a picture of a Cub Scout with Thrakhath's face superimposed on it...
(Of course, Thrakhath says "H'inmas maks hath, Terran'hra" in response to that idea).
Work also progressed reasonably well on the dialogue of the mission prologue in Chapter 2.1; it's pretty close to completion at this point. I say that; I could easily decide a full re-write is needed once I get to writing the narrative bits (which happened more than a few times in Chapter 2.0). A big problem that I was able to resolve this week was determining why all these guys would follow Bloodeye, a commoner and pariah - especially when a few of the members of the Demon's Eye Pack are noblemen. I decided a show of skill and strength was necessary, so there's now a bit in the story where he beats Thrakyaga (a well-known pit fighter) with his own blade. That led to a new problem, though - determining why these same guys didn't just up and leave when Bloodeye started talking and they learned he was a pariah in the first place. That one puzzled me for several days, until I bounced the problem off my lovely wife. She came up with an elegant solution - have Bloodeye block the door with his sword drawn. It was such a simple solution, and yet it fit what I'd written for the scene so very well. I don't pay her enough...
I also got started on work on a section for "plot points" this past week, an idea I'm stealing borrowing from the Serenity Role-Playing Game that should give players an extra cushion as they play the game by allowing them to change the outcome of certain events. My original intent had been to add that section to Chapter 1.0 of the Elegy campaign, but at this point I'm considering making it an Annex One change to the Late Entries page, so that the rules I ultimately settle upon can be applied to all the campaigns and Core Rules as well (let's face it - getting through the climactic battle of Enyo is pretty tough as it is when all you've got to work with is the dice). I also added a very brief section in Chapter 1.0 to provide pointers for character biographies, something that I've really glossed over through the years.
Well, that's all I've got for this week. So, here's what's going on - this coming week, my wife is due to deliver a baby (our third) and when that happens I will naturally not be in a position to continue work of any kind (including work on Elegy) - since y'all are reading this this morning, it means we made it through the weekend without a delivery just yet. Since I can pretty much guarantee that I won't have much to talk about WCRPG-wise next Monday, and since the week after that is Thanksgiving (and I'll have a new baby to attend to), I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to be skipping the updates for a little while. The next scheduled update will be between 11-14Z on December 6th. My Plan during that time will be to get as much work done as I can in Chapter 2.1 of the Elegy campaign, probably focusing on the text of the mission prologue and later the epilogue and the translation that will come with it, and then working on the mission details, all of which is dependent upon when we ostensibly receive a visit from an over-sized fish-eating bird...
I wish all of you a very pleasant Thanksgiving season. See y'all on the 6th.