Steady Work (and Corrupt1on)
Freebie: The False Acreage - A horrific, hidden megafauna
This month’s missive is two shorter pieces. I ended up re-working some aspects of my original topic, Tacticians of Ahm’s Corrupt1on mechanics, and I had a large freelance project come my way and wanted to write about some of the pacing I put in place in order to tackle it in a small and steady way. Plus, there’s a missive exclusive: The False Acreage, a hidden and horrific megacreature for your favorite fantasy roleplaying game.
Steady Work
I recently took on my largest freelance editing project since going full-time. At first blush, going from 2,000-7,000 word projects to a manuscript that’s nearly 70,000 words was daunting. Lots of thoughts went through my head: Is this something I can do within the given time frame? Should I dive headlong into it right away and push other projects off to make sure I don’t get behind schedule? Do I have the bandwidth to add this to my existing slate of projects?
Before the pandemic, I used to endurance run a lot (10k every other day). Going from being a fairly sedentary person to a fairly active person over a few years taught me a lot about managing big goals, long distances, and generally having a “marathon” mindset. Whenever I encounter something in life that feels BIG, I approach it the same way I did those physical challenges.
So, I broke the project down piece by piece and day by day. I took the word count and split it up by the number of weeks I had from now to the proposed deadline. From there, I broke it down into the number of days per week I’d like to work on it. Since I still work a part-time gig for insurance (typically 2-3 days a week), I decided on 3 days of editing per week (this is typically what I get in terms of stand alone writing/editing days per week). From there, I calculated my editing budget for those work days that would allow me to finish the project on time. The number was smaller than I thought: ~1,800 words per day (at 3 days a week for 13 weeks).
Using my previous experience as a gauge, that number felt VERY do-able, but given the size of the project though, I wanted to be sure. I typically use a time clock app for my development hours so I used this to track my time spent on the first week of edits. I found that hitting my rounded-up goal of 2,000 words takes about an hour of head-down, focused work. After the first week, I was nearly 10% of the way through the manuscript, suggesting a total project time of ~30 hours (for this first edit pass).
Suddenly, the entire project feels vastly more approachable, right? An hour of work three days a week for 13 weeks. It’s slight enough when broken down in that way that it also feels much easier to increase my pace on good days. For long-term goals, even slightly increasing your pace can mean big differences in your final completion time. Just 3 extra hours of work here and there could mean turning in the manuscript weeks before the deadline (or buying myself time off in future weeks without falling behind).
This is all to say that editing, writing, art, whatever work you may be doing for your projects or as part of freelance opportunities like this is work, and as such, it pays to schedule and plan and analyze your process from time to time.
Orbital Debris Now Available!
Orbital Debris is a moon-spanning junkyard hex-crawl for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG 1e. A sprawling, debris-collecting moon sporadically warps through space as its ancient core malfunctions. Centuries of troubled travel have left the moon a crumpled world of junk housing the remnants of great wars, catastrophes, and the memories of countless civilizations.
Created as a community collaboration between 13 authors (including me) and 5 artists, and coming in at 98+ pages in an A5-sized format, Orbital Debris is perfect for any Warden looking for their next campaign or looking to add more junk to their universe!
Available now in digital and premium print-on-demand at DriveThruRPG!
Tactician’s Academy: Corrupt1on
In Tacticians of Ahm (my upcoming rules-lite tactics TTRPG set in an aging digital world), there is a spreading corrupt1on, a bitrotten blight shifting and tearing away at the fabric of the reality inhabited by the characters. It’s the force that brought about the creation of the Tacticians, by order of the Empress. In play, it starts as a distance threat that shows itself more and more over time (typically not encountered until character level 3 and beyond).
From our vantage point as players who know that the world of Ahm is a digital one whether that be an aging video game cartridge wearing down over time or a forgotten MMORPG server erroring out over time, we know that the code at the heart of the character’s world (and our game) is breaking.
So what does corrupti0n do? Here are some examples.
“10% (d20, 1-2) chance of duplicating every round.”
“25% (d20, 1-5) chance of dodging an attack, flashing out of existence just in time.”
“Corrupted Catamounts flicker and rotate quickly in space, appearing to be several creatures all existing on top of and within one another. As such, they cannot suffer backstab damage.”
“Whenever a Tactician is downed and takes a Death Pip, a copy of their body flickers into existence inside the mass of B0NEBYT3. The creature is healed 5 points for each Death Pip.”
If you’ve been following along with my Tacticians designer diaries, you know these abilities look a lot different than anything else in the game (and may look more in line with traditional TTRPG mechanics seen elsewhere). Corrupt1on, at its core, is a broad mechanic intended to break the rules of the game. Functionally, that means taking the guaranteed hits, set damage, and more ordered aspects of Ahm’s combat system and injecting chaos into the center of it. In play, this leads to exciting reveals, unpredictable encounters, and more as the players come to terms with the c0rrupt abilities and enemy may possess and how to combat them.
Most enemies in Ahm are not corrupted so facing off against one should feel special and scary and exciting (since they may well drop tainted loot that the tacticians could use to employ these same chaotic elements on their enemies in the future).
Randomness, unforeseen effects otherwise outside of the bounds of the standard rules, and more are all at play when facing off against corrupt3d enemies, and a big component of Ahm’s long term play will be deciding how much (or how little) your character chooses to take up corrupti0n as a weapon to wield in defense of their own world through c0rrupt3d equipment, strange mag1c, and more. It’s my take on TTRPG’s classic alignments, Order and Chaos, but brought to bear on the mechanics directly, showing the cracking and shifting of Ahm’s world.
Next Up: Enemy Design 101!
Missive Exclusive
This month’s freebie, The False Acreage, is a system-agnostic creature encounter for your favorite fantasy roleplaying game. It answers the age old question: What if a mimic, but big (like REALLY big)?!
I used it as an opportunity to break in Explorers Design’s wonderful Classic Explorer Template for layout and included some great art by Perplexing Ruins (available for use via Patreon) to really bring the beast to life.
I haven’t delved too deeply into traditional fantasy (for my published work) so it feels nice to start stretching my legs in this arena again.
More Cool Stuff
I wrote an adventure for Disaster Tourism’s GUILD: Sword and Magick for Hire, and it’s now available as part of the game’s Adventure Diary #0. Luke Gearing, Amanda P, Stella Condry, and the Disaster Tourism game also all have great adventures in this book that plays well with nearly any fantasy system.
In “The Tomb of Mother Vix,” an annual ritual requires the blood of a long dead god. Followers of the Mother are willing to part with their gold in return for your aid in delving into her tomb, navigating the dangers within, and retrieving some of their dead god’s ichor.
I wrote a small and sad lyric game and hid it away on my site.
If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can find it here.
Progress is continuing swiftly on Tacticians of Ahm with two more playtests coming next week alongside building out the GM-facing sections of the core rulebook. I am planning to launch a text-complete, early access edition here in the next few months, and I’m so excited to get it out to y’all.
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From time to time, I’m still making TTRPG videos over on TikTok.
I finally read Troika! and did a read-through thread on Twitter following my thoughts as I worked my way through the game’s newest edition.
Earlier this month, I finished the first drafts of a duo of in-universe sci-fi pamphlets I’ve been working with another great TTRPG creator on, and I’m really excited to say more about them in the future. They’ll be coming (as part of a bigger project) later this year!
If you’ve made it his far, you are a true Knight of the MeatCastle. Thank you for your time and your support! See you next month! - Christian
I wish that I could work methodically this way. I operate in fits and starts and bursts, a very emotionally driven workflow for writing. I’m always writing in my head, and I need lots of smaller projects that I can work on while the big ideas churn in the back of my mind.