July - And then sometimes life happens.
almost 6 years ago
– Wed, Jul 22, 2020 at 08:28:01 PM
Last night, a few hours after I went to sleep, I woke up to my cat meowing. She’d caught a mouse. Awesome. I dealt with that, and went back to bed. Five hours later (and more than an hour before the earliest alarm clock) she was meowing again for food. All of which to say, I didn’t sleep particularly well, so please forgive this update perhaps being a little more rambling than usual.
Work on the book continues, but these last few weeks have taken a turn for the slowdown. Partially due to other commitments coming due, including things like money for rent and in my own case, preparation for grad school that starts this weekend. And also partially due to a combination of important familial and community issues, which for privacy’s sake I am not going to go into detail here.
But we’re still here, and this week is marking a return to the project. Brennan is working on writing move examples for the water chapter this week (which was delayed over the last several weeks). Mendez has asked for help with the Earth chapter and he and I are scheduled to talk on Friday to see about working out the sticking points there. By my estimates, work on each of those chapters is about 80-90% complete.
So let’s talk a little bit about writing game book chapters. Generally, we figure out ahead of time what we want the chapter to be about, and agree on an outline. Some writers use a really bare bones outline, others make additional detailed notes in that outline about what the core concept of that section is about.
Here’s roughly what the outline looks like right now —
Nearly all of this is written!
But in realizing that large portions of this overlaps with information in the roles and alliances, we’re reluctant to put all of that into the setting chapter. So we need to deduplicate content, prioritize the information that is important for communicating the world of 16th Century Japan, and then figure out what writing needs to be done to fit that all together.
Why change it now, though? Well, because we realized that in moving the allegiances to be more table-facing devices, as opposed to just a thing that the player picks, we are actually communicating a lot more worldbuilding detail with the allegiances. And importantly, it’s focused worldbuilding detail. Is it important that you re-read all the different details of farmers if your table wants to focus on a courtly intrigue? Probably not! Pick the alliance(s) that you need to be involved in your courtly game and dig deep into those details, rather than reading about how rice is grown. We think this will provide focal points that are useful to everyone, in a shorter chapter. This will help put everyone on the same page more quickly and distribute the cognitive load of learning about the world vs. learning about your character’s place in the world.
So here’s what we’re up to for the next few weeks:
- Water chapter examples and collation of text
- Earth chapter restructuring and finishing
- Character sheet conceptual development and first phase of design
And it's last call for asking questions about the setting, to make sure we're answering them with the Earth chapter.
-Tim
Fire, Part 2.
almost 6 years ago
– Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 06:09:04 PM
Character creation is a beast. Growing out of the seeds of face/heel multi-part character playbooks as originated by Nathan Paoletta's World Wide Wrestling, we’ve built upon that framework and expanded on that idea to bring you what may be the the most option-filled PbtA framework game to date. With at least 13 allegiances, 8 roles, (and we’re not even counting options for starting moves), that’s already over a hundred different character options.
Want to play a secret agent allied with the clan who wields enough political power to pick the next Shogun? How about a simple farmer who’s trained in incredible complex and deadly fencing styles? Perhaps a courtier who intends to utilize their position and prominence to stick it to the man? We got you.
Speaking of stick it to the man…
Galileo firmly supports the Black Lives Matter movement. We have actively been in the streets protesting police violence. And we’d like to make really explicitly clear that our products, to the best of our ability, represent antiracist philosophies and actions. We’re minority owned, and pledge to keep doing our utmost to raise folks up along with us.
...back to our regularly scheduled update.
Grab the character creation docs here: https://www.dropbox.com/t/jgeyCwbroe02bRtf
By request, this also includes the previously released part 1 which goes over how to create your character in detail.
Also, this is still a pre-editing release so there are certainly still errors and omissions. You can feel free to comment on anything you notice, but it’s also cool to not worry too hard about it.
We’ve also begun to start developing ideas on how to construct a character sheet for this model of character creation. Let me tell you, this is one of the substantially more complex sets of information we’ve dealt with in our collective history of developing, and playing roleplaying games. We want it to be easy to make a couple of choices, pick up and use (per the PbtA framework) as opposed to a massive manual transcription of data from page to page. We want it to be easy to reference, and to readily support the narrative of your character. We’ve got some cool ideas on how to do this, and are hoping those ideas play nice with the reality of things like common paper size and readability.
As soon as we have something to show off, we’re going to ask for your feedback. Usable character sheets are one of the most important parts of a game, and we want to get this one VERY right. Stay tuned.
The immediate next handful of steps in the pipeline:
- (Fire) Character creation process to be edited.
- (Water) Wrapping up the moves chapter, and writing lots of examples.
- Character sheet design
- Layout work, continued.
Stay safe everyone.
-Tim
Fire, Part 1
about 6 years ago
– Sun, May 17, 2020 at 07:07:08 AM
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Quick note...
about 6 years ago
– Thu, May 07, 2020 at 01:25:55 PM
Hey folks,
We're putting together a bigger update as edits get integrated into the Fire Chapter. That should be coming as a Backer Preview around the end of this week. Here are our rough timeline estimates for the next little month and change:
- 5/8 Wrap up Fire Chapter edits and post an update
- -> Get Fire Chapter into layout
- 5/30 Wrap up Water Chapter edits, post an update
- -> Get Water Chapter into layout
- Earth Chapter, etc. etc.
We're still taking questions for what you would like to hear about in the setting chapter, it's already in great shape. So while it still needs some finishing touches and we want to make sure that you're getting what you're interested in. Post your questions here!
Progress in the time of Coronavirus
about 6 years ago
– Sun, Apr 05, 2020 at 02:39:17 AM
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
