Tag: Modiphius

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Goodbye and Hello

2018 has come and gone, and as the dust of the year passing settles, it is time to look back and examine what I set out to achieve, and how I fared against that target. It is also time to take pause, and think about the things to come, the things I would like to accomplish by the end of the year ahead.

At the start of the year I set out a number of goals I wished to achieve on my other blog, Castle by Moonlight. There I wrote down a number of somewhat lofty goals – to keep up the freelance work, to blog twice a month, at least, and to draft a novel. Hmm… Let’s start with the negatives, and hopefully end on a better note.

I completely failed at my goal of writing a novel. I have outlines for two novels, wrote a novella, and a couple of short stories, but I did not make tangible progress on a novel. Why? It is partly due to vacillation. Not picking a story idea and running with it. It is partly due to prioritising freelance work, and not making time for my own fiction. It is partly due to procrastination, not using the time I did have effectively. All of these are things I need to change for the coming year, because yes, writing a novel is going to feature in my goals for the coming year. I’m like a moth to a flame… as they say.

My blogging goal was to write at least two blog posts a month, and then I went and starting this blog, splitting my attention between Castle by Moonlight and here. It did not go well. Sure I wrote 18 posts on Castle by Moonlight (petering out in July), and 19 posts here. Sure, combined that is well more than two posts a month. But I haven’t felt settled. I’m not sure still whether to maintain both blogs, abandon this one, or that one, and focus on the one remaining. I get more readers on Castle by Moonlight, but I also wanted to start a blog that was less gaming orientated and more the beginnings of a vaunted ‘Writer’s Website’ (capitals required). I’m not sure what to do on this front, perhaps me posting this here is a subconscious clue I should pay heed to, but I’ve never been much good at introspection.

Freelancing. This fared better in 2018, and I submitted somewhere around 135,000 words all told, pretty much all for the Infinity RPG from Modiphius. This included a campaign of five adventures, and various contributions to about seven books. How it will fare in 2019 is anyone’s guess, the list of books to be written for the Infinity RPG is nearing completion. I have work (I hope), for Red Scar that I am looking forward to immensely, but as for more, who can say.

Unforeseen projects… Somewhere around November last year I was wanting to role play some more, I was between projects, nothing to playtest for Infinity, and the prospect of work for other companies upcoming, but unsecured. I didn’t want to start a new campaign (though I have plenty of unplayed games on my shelf), in case work did pop up that required testing… what to do? Ahh, the obvious answer: write your own setting and role playing game!

Well, I didn’t see it coming, but around mid-November last year, in whatever fit of madness took me, I started to write my own RPG. I have a number of complete and semi-complete games sitting on the shelf, but this is a project that draws on the experiences of the last five to ten years working in and around the games industry, and particularly the last three to four in the role playing sphere.

Within a short space of time I hammered out about seven or eight dice systems (I have finally settled on one, though further testing may change this), and developed a setting I rather like. I wrote the system, some setting notes, and the character creation system, and have managed a test session with my local group. I am thrilled with how it is coming together, and there are some aspects of character creation that tie to world building that I am particularly proud of. How this will develop, or where it will go, is something I haven’t decided as yet, but it is in development, and I look forward to developing it further.

Well, that is the introspective stuff done, the goodbye to 2018. I think I’ll save my look forward, the probing prognostication regarding the coming year, till the next post. I hope you don’t mind, gentle reader, but you will have to wait with baited breath…

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A Map…

I posted previously about how nice it is to see your writing all laid out, surrounded by nice graphics and looking good. One thing that I have enjoyed a lot, once the draft has been approved, everything laid out and the book shipped off to print, is seeing the maps and artwork that accompany and give life to the book. I have written or worked on a number of adventures for the Infinity Role Playing game, and for each of these I have submitted the word document, and a number of relevant hand drawn maps – scribbles on paper really. The adventure in the Infinity GMs Guide, E Pluribus Unem, is one I wrote, and I thought it might be interesting to post a picture of the map I drew compared to the finished product from a professional.

Infinity has a distinctive visual style that matches its futuristic setting, and the maps the cartographers, N. R. Bharathae and Richard Gale, have made for this book are really nice. They reflect the setting well, and it’s fun to think back to my playtest sessions and remember how they started as rough drawings on a white board for my players to knock about in, to sketches in my note pad to go to Modiphius, through to the final product.

Photo 1-10-18, 11 59 19 pm

Sybaris Church
The cartography in the GM Screen Booklet was done by N. R. Bharathae and Richard Gale.

E Pluribus Unem was a fun adventure to write, it tackles some interesting ideas about a society where death isn’t always the end and the concepts of post-humanism, and it also has plenty of action. I hope the gamers out there who play through this adventure have as much playing it as I did when writing and testing it!

If you’re interested, the Infinity GMs Guide can be found on the Modiphius store here.

 

Edit: The Adventure booklet comes with the GM Screen, and this is not available on the Modiphius store yet. The other available books in the Infinity line are available here though.

 

 

 

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A kick…

I’ve contributed to a number of games and game books at this stage, in the last five years these have been for Spartan Games and Modiphius Entertainment, but it still gives me a little kick to see the final product. These are two books I wrote for, both for the Infinity RPG, and both now available from Modiphius.

GM
Cover art by Ho Seng Hui

Haqq
Cover art by Ho Seng Hui

As much of a kick as it is to see my name listed in the writing credits, I think seeing the final piece, a product owed to many hands, is what is particularly pleasing. The covers for both these books look fantastic. I particularly love the cover of the Haqqislam sourcebook, because as much as I love a good action scene, I am a sucker for space ships, and the one on the Haqq cover looks great.

Scrolling through the PDF I love seeing how it has all come together, the interior design and layout, the art, the work of all the other designers, writers and people involved in bringing the book to fruition. I wrote some 20,000 words or so for the Haqqislam book, but reading through it is only one small part of the larger whole. Sitting at the keyboard into the wee hours can feel like an act in isolation, but seeing something come together, from a team spread all over the world, for a company based in the UK, and the licence from a company based in Spain, is a pretty neat thing to ponder.

 

 

 

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It’s been a while…

Wow, I had originally intended to maintain this blog by adding something here weekly. I really let that goal slip in a big way this last two months. I haven’t posted anything since the beginning of April, but I haven’t been idle.

Infinity Banner

Over the last two months I have finished off three pieces for the Infinity RPG totaling around 27,000 words. It’s also been awesome seeing some of the pieces I submitted a while ago making it into layout, getting artwork, maps, and all the other things that make an RPG product look great. It’s a good reminder that while you toil away plugging at the keys in front of you, pulling a project together requires a whole team of people working away to produce something great. I have been very lucky to work with a fantastic group of people at Modiphius.

Due somewhere around the start of July I have a piece of about 24,000 words due. It’s been a little mind-bending, trying to wrap my head around the early stages of the first adventure, tweaking details here and there. This is because this adventure ties neatly to an existing story within the Infinity setting, but I am excited to get rolling. Writing background material is great fun, writing an adventure is more involved. Getting all the mechanical things tuned correctly is one thing, making sure we also have all the maps and resources a GM needs to run the thing is another. Both of these aspects makes writing an adventure more work than developing and writing out pure background. In some senses, once the details are hammered out an adventure seems to get written more quickly, and background material feels a little slower to get onto paper. This might be due to the fact that setting material needs to be checked and rechecked, and often requires significant research, as well as creative ideas that fit within the established oeuvre, while adventures less so, but it could also be perception bias, and not be the case at all!

One of the things I have rather enjoyed is seeing the adventures I have worked on as a finished product. Every aspect ties back to the story you have developed and written (or helped with), from the art, to the maps, and so on.  Adventures in the Human Sphere contains two adventures I worked on, and scrolling through the finished PDF, with all the pieces in place, from words to art, is rather pleasing. Fingers crossed that GMs and players out there have as much fun with the adventures as I did!

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Infinity and one…

Freelance writing for the role playing industry is a funny thing in my limited experience. Flurries of activity, followed by periods of waiting. I have loved it though, and have loved being a small part of the Modiphius Entertainment team; supportive, geeky, gamerly beasts that they are.

The quiet of the Christmas period has in turn given way to the busy season again. I managed to get a novelette written in the downtime (and begin a short story), as well as blog a bit, but now the clarion call to action has me looking carefully at my schedule and blocking out time to get my freelance obligations completed.

Infinity RPG Core-Book

The next two months are going to be busy, I have three projects queued up, with the prospect of more at the end. I will be receiving sections already drafted back from Corvus Belli and my editors with notes on what needs changing, fixing or removing, and I have also had to turn down a project or two for lack of time.

Last year, around September, I tested myself by writing as much as I felt I could manage over the period of around a month. I wrote somewhere close to 50,000 words that I was happy to submit. It’s not a huge amount for those who are experienced, but it pushed me, and pushed me hard. I wanted to test myself, to see what I could put out, what I was comfortable with, what sort of word rate I could manage in a day, a night, an hour. All told I worked out I can typically manage between 1000 and 2000 words a night. Not a huge amount for many, but comfortable for me. I have a job to go to during the day, and a family I’d like to see, so I need to be careful not to burn too much time, or put myself under too much pressure.

The deadlines, though, are closing, and over the next month and a half I will need to get somewhere close to 50,000 words written to meet them. It could have been more, it could have been much more. But thanks to the month I spent pushing myself I have a better grasp of what I am capable to achieving. There was a time when I would have said ‘yes’ to every opportunity, and even now responding with the occasional ‘no’ hurts. But it’s something I need to do, I recognise that. The one thing I do not want to do is to put myself in a position where I can’t hit a deadline.

Now the challenge is to get my routine up and running again. Last year it was writing at least 1000 words a night, every night. After my schedule throttled back over the Christmas period, and has been slowly ramping since, I need to get that back. Getting my routine going again means only one thing: putting my backside into the seat and typing…