What’s happened so far
I had hoped for December to be at least marginally productive, but sadly it was not to be. I mean, in hindsight why was I thinking it would be? It’s Christmas and New Year’s after all. I tried to do some writing, but I just wasn’t able to get into the right headspace. It’s like that sometimes. I got a little writing done, a few ideas and thoughts here and there, but I just haven’t quite been able to make them gel. Still, one doesn’t give up. One keeps grinding and trying…
What’s happening next?
Well there’s a few things. I need to write the 2023 goals and get those posted. I’ll aim those for the February update; there’s not a lot that’s really groundbreaking so I don’t think it deserves to get a post all on its own talking about it. I’m also going to try and put some more attention towards completing Scenario Book 1. I still need to get some playtesting done to confirm what the scenario balance is (at least that it’s as unbalanced as I expect it to be). But at the same time, I think I’m getting close.
The other thing (the big thing, really) that is quietly looming as I write this is that WotC is apparently hard at work screwing around with making a new Open Gaming Licence. The one that’s been out in the wild for the past twenty-odd years is the 1.0a version, and it’s VERY flexible. And also very small. It’s what let companies like Paizo become what they are, as well as a whole host of other smaller writers and publishers get their start in the world. A start that I was quietly eyeing for some time (once this Scenario Book 1 finally gets completed!) But it may not be so. At least for D&D-derived works.
The new 1.1 “OGL” that has provisionally leaked is barely open, and at a glance seems laced with a whole poison pill factory. It severely restricts people from what they can do with related work, it applies a fairly painful licence fee based off of gross income (I can understand the use of gross instead of net, as net IS manipulative), and most egregiously grants WotC a perpetual right to distribute, use, exploit, and profit from a 3rd party’s work. Irrespective of their own wishes.
So yeah. I’ll pass on that. I might end up doing completely rules-agnostic supplements that are 100% fluff with some broad character descriptions that basically read more like a character sheet from Dwarf Fortress than a single game system… hmm… that’s actually NOT a bad idea…
2022 Goals
These goals are approximately in order of priority and in order of precedence (IE have to do #1 before you can do #2). There’s some goals from 2021 that are coming back, but a some of them are going to be brand new ones as well. As before, some of them are one-and-done, while others are big projects. There’s a couple more tasks on it this year compared to last, but a bunch of them are more housekeeping tasks; easier one-and done things that can be pounded out sometime in the year.
So enough banter. On to the list!
1) Complete turn processing for all empires up to turn 175
Sadly I only made it to 151 this year. Not anywhere near as good as I would have liked to, but as they say it is what it is. I’m still going to aim for 175 in 2023.
2) Update/Archive all the Sketch Sunday Worldbuilding
This is going to become a 2023 goal I’m afraid.
3) Finish playtesting and balancing for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War
As discussed in the November Sitrep, I’m going ot be looking at doing a second pass of requests over on the Discord server (hopefully I’ll have some bites) and then also running some playtesting at the local game club events. Mixed in with some demos and intro battles of course.
4) Finish the writing work for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War
Not started yet.
5) Introduce and post completed artwork
Those two Sintillan pictures (three actually!) have been finally written up and posted. No other artwork remains that needs to be posted, so this task is actually fully complete!
6) Go do a second pass on the artwork for Scenario Book 1, incorporating new details and design concepts over the past year
Sadly no new updates from my artist as of late. I’ve sent out another message to them, just asking how they’re doing. We’ll see how this goes. Fingers crossed!
And even so, I’ve got to do some more work to absorb the various details that have been added to the ship designs thanks to their stellar work already.
7) Start fishing in my contacts to find someone who can do proofreading for Scenario Book
This task is sitting low on the to-do list for fairly obvious reasons. Need to be done writing and my own edit pass before the work can get handed off to an editor. Need to reach out to some of my friends/contacts, see if they know anyone.
8) Rename systems/planets that do not fit the universe setting
A few of the systems/etc. have been identified, and renames have been worked out for a few of them, but this requires a full pass from down the whole stellar database.
9) Look at the Solar Starfire Freight Handling Rules
Not started yet.
10) Set up a redundant deWulf data backup
I have the NAS set up and operating. I need to go and set some time aside to properly have it run some redundant backup mirrors of my Starfire data… as well as a few other things. There’s a fair amount of drive space, so might as well use it. Given that I’m just looking at some incremental backups for now, it shouldn’t be that bad. After that’s been done, I’ll look into potentially setting it up as my own personal cloud to provide better remote access. Then I might look at finally decommissioning my DNS server.
11) Update the deWulf Story Document
The currently available deWulf story document on the website is, to be honest, really old. It was originally done as just a backup log, but with it out and on the website it does have some amount of actual attention. So the plan is to split it into three parts and then give it some short synopses on the website to explain (and more importantly warn) readers what’s going on in each of them. Mind you that’s not warn them of anything really questionable…. it’s more like my early writing is kinda… rough.
Which is another reason why this is so far down the to-do list.
12) Review Sketch Sunday
Sketch Sunday was a really good idea, and I’m happy that I did it. I’m hoping that I get to do something else in the future, as it really forced me to stretch and be able to write reasonably good content on a short time frame. Even as it started to get some bloat and the sketch descriptions got rather substantial.
A version of this task was on the 2022 list, and it’ll be carrying onto the list for 2023, as all that writing made for a LOT of setting background work. It just needs to get indexed, referenced, and given a second pass to make sure it all fits in nicely.
13) Designing a Space Navy series
This was an interesting experiment, and I’ll see about potentially doing something like this again in 2023. Another thing I’m thinking of doing is “Trope a month” or something similar where I look at various relevant tropes from the TV Tropes website and comment on how they tie in to the deWulf universe.
Dollarton Proxima Shipyards 