Look What I Found In My Catastrophe
The fun parts of writing the kinds of things I write are essentially threefold:
* Coming up with something wild, either out of my own head, or out of sadly unknown other works that I can lift ideas from without recrimination.
* Coming up with new, exciting architecture; better or cooler ways to present those ideas for an audience.
* Discovering new things about the topic once I'm doing the research anyway, things I can add like pinches of saffron and lemon peel to wake up the book's core flavors.
All of those things take time; none can really be done on schedule. For The Day After Ragnarok, my "Conan the Barbarian: 1948" Savage Worlds Savage Setting, it's the second and the third that are making the project such a joyous hell right now.
I've come up with a kind of neat idea for that most dire of creative challenges, presenting setting: the "Savage Shortlist," in which I reveal "The Top Five Places to Get Mercenary Work" and "The Top Five Places To Find A Remote Castle Ruled By A Madman," and so forth and so on. And on the subject of new, exciting things to add to the book, there's nothing that makes a game designer happier than discovering a half-million Nazis legitimately wandering around a setting where you hadn't thought you could put any.
It's painful to have to stop all this fun right in the middle (or, I devoutly hope, right in the 85th percentile) but I really have to write another "Lost in Lovecraft" column for Weird Tales before I go to London for Dragonmeet.
But if you're planning to be at Dragonmeet, in addition to doing proper obeisance to the mighty robin_d_laws, and buying a Rare Preprint of our new Trail of Cthulhu adventure book, Shadows Over Filmland, and watching us divagate on GMing Tips and Investigative Game Design in seminars, and playing wonderful other games run by wonderful other people, ask me about Iowa State A&M. It's totally worth it.
* Coming up with something wild, either out of my own head, or out of sadly unknown other works that I can lift ideas from without recrimination.
* Coming up with new, exciting architecture; better or cooler ways to present those ideas for an audience.
* Discovering new things about the topic once I'm doing the research anyway, things I can add like pinches of saffron and lemon peel to wake up the book's core flavors.
All of those things take time; none can really be done on schedule. For The Day After Ragnarok, my "Conan the Barbarian: 1948" Savage Worlds Savage Setting, it's the second and the third that are making the project such a joyous hell right now.
I've come up with a kind of neat idea for that most dire of creative challenges, presenting setting: the "Savage Shortlist," in which I reveal "The Top Five Places to Get Mercenary Work" and "The Top Five Places To Find A Remote Castle Ruled By A Madman," and so forth and so on. And on the subject of new, exciting things to add to the book, there's nothing that makes a game designer happier than discovering a half-million Nazis legitimately wandering around a setting where you hadn't thought you could put any.
It's painful to have to stop all this fun right in the middle (or, I devoutly hope, right in the 85th percentile) but I really have to write another "Lost in Lovecraft" column for Weird Tales before I go to London for Dragonmeet.
But if you're planning to be at Dragonmeet, in addition to doing proper obeisance to the mighty robin_d_laws, and buying a Rare Preprint of our new Trail of Cthulhu adventure book, Shadows Over Filmland, and watching us divagate on GMing Tips and Investigative Game Design in seminars, and playing wonderful other games run by wonderful other people, ask me about Iowa State A&M. It's totally worth it.