Zornhau Forums

So, it's been a couple of weeks. I understand that editing such a big document is time consuming, but I was wondering how things were going thus far.

Fixing continuity errors mostly. Shoring up places where more description would be useful to communicate intent. The most time-consuming bits have been restructuring the character creation areas. Fixing traits, making it easier to deal with "buying stuff at character creation" and so on.

Well, you gave me the forum title for a reason . How are things coming along?

Hell, even I´m looking forward to see an updated file...

hector wrote: ↑15 Sep 2018, 23:38 Well, you gave me the forum title for a reason . How are things coming along?

Six-thousand words were added during cleanup last week.

Agamemnon wrote: ↑22 Sep 2018, 16:40

hector wrote: ↑15 Sep 2018, 23:38 Well, you gave me the forum title for a reason . How are things coming along?

Six-thousand words were added during cleanup last week.

Agamemnon, when can we expect an updated version on the download section?

Weekly update:

Last week was a mess. On Tuesday I realized I had an ear infection brewing and lucked out in getting a doctor's appointment for the next morning. Wednesday morning, the infection had become swollen to the point where I couldn't close my jaw to chew. They gave me some meds and sent me home. By Wednesday night, I was swollen to the point where I couldn't speak properly. By Thursday, I was in the ER. I wound up in the hospital until late Saturday. I'm home now and mostly recovered, though the itching may drive me mad.

Nonetheless, prior to angering the ear-gods, the draft picked up a few thousand words. We're over 60k for the doc in total, not counting the additional 10-15k word count that has been cut and rewritten or shoved aside for the moment. I'm on the last bit of editing and fiddling now and I'm hoping to release everything this month. The timing will work well for that, as Barb will have some time off work coming up which is probably necessary for the coding updates to the roll20 sheet and such to bring them in line with changes made to the draft.

I realize the forums have been kind of quiet of late. Some of that is probably because a lot of the day-to-day shitposting has moved to our discord server, which is ideal for inconsequential shitposting. I suspect the larger part of that just the time between updates. If you aren't a discord user, don't feel like you've been abandoned, or that you're missing out on anything too important. When the update hits, I'll be doing all of the major Q&A stuff here and mirroring any important info that comes up on discord. Despite the satisfying real-time nature of the latter, forums are still a far better medium for any information you might want to reference after the fact.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to medicate myself into unconsciousness for a little while.

Agamemnon wrote: ↑02 Oct 2018, 18:20 Despite the satisfying real-time nature of the latter, forums are still a far better medium for any information you might want to reference after the fact.

Glad you're on the upswing, and I'm glad that (thank the gods) someone in the RPG community has woken up to this fact. Few things cause me to cringe more than say, backing a Kickstarter only to be told "join the Discord for updates".

I can understand why people might default to discord for everything. It's the same reason a lot of games now use reddit as their forum. Running a private forum is an investment in time and money, and it requires you to convince people to come out to and sign up for that forum as a separate service in order to participate. It's way easier to piggyback onto an existing service like reddit or discord. It costs nothing to host and people already have accounts there, so it's easier to build communities. That said, neither setup is as easy to reference after the fact as a proper forum and I personally just like having a space that we own and can do what we want with with.

Your (not so) patient community will still be here when you are ready... looking forward to the upcoming release!

Thursday Update:

The last week was mostly spent catching up on all of that day-job work that I fell behind on during my ear-infection debacle. On the up side, I'm basically all caught up there. On the down side, all of that writing hasn't left me a lot of time for writing. Ironic, I know.

All is not lost, however. The main stumbling block in the last round of rewrites has been trying to work out some of the math for character creation. Specifically, the "what does my character start with at character creation" question. The previous setup proved to be unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, particularly when it came to buying fiddly bits. I've now managed to work out an alternate setup and my current rewriting has been adjusting the rules text accordingly. The last time I opened the doc up, I was giving the armor section some more love and attention, increasing that chapter's text by about 2k words.

I know you guys are waiting and hoping. Just know that no matter how badly you think you want to see the update, it's nothing compared to how badly I want to have this thing released into the wild and off my desk for a few days. I've been burning the candle at both ends for entirely too long now. The silver lining of this, of course, is that this is also the most complete manuscript I'll have ever released. More than that, it's also the largest single document I've ever written. I can't imagine how long this thing will be once I eventually have to write in the GM section, magic rules, and the various planned core book bells and whistles.

That's my two cents for the day. I need to get back to work-work. I will, however, try to make it a habit to post something each Thursday, even if it's just me telling you which part I'm fiddling with. It'll help keep me accountable and offer some transparency to the process. I probably should have been doing that all along.

We're almost there, scoundrels. Wish me luck.

Good luck to you on this massive endeavor. Do you think the update will be out before the end of the month?

Yeah!

thorgarth wrote: ↑11 Oct 2018, 13:56 Good luck to you on this massive endeavor. Do you think the update will be out before the end of the month?

That's the goal. Hopefully, the roll20 sheet will be updated by month's end as well.

The real rough spot with all this is that once I finish this draft, I still need to do layout, update the basic character sheet, update all the scripting on the pdf one, and have Barb deal with the roll20 sheet.

I´m really, really, curious about magic. If it´s half as detailed as the combat mechanics and weapons and armor we could actually have an Awesome rules set that enables the player to have a satisfying freedom margin when it comes to casting and its effects.