We should record the entirety of sbcon
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pls no
Yesterday session was crazy and a lot of fun. I decided to drop the color and just do lineart in the session and put the color later. And with that the amount of pages I draw per session exploded. I will post once I finish with the color. But damn, this was the funniest and silliest session so far. We even told tales to a monster.
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i was a little burnt out on the book for a few weeks (plus iām on vacation) but iām starting to get back into the swing of things.
worked on a new format for the spellbook today. not completely satisfied with it yet but itās progress.
edit: in particular i am still not satisfied with this sans serif font (looks too much like arial, still) but everything else compromises readability so idk
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nerd
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#owned
spent hours writing another one of those too-clever takes-up-a-page-and-a-half high level spells (it involves time travel, brokering deals with alien civilizations, growing a bonsai tree from your skull, and hats). immediately got praise for it but am still perpetually unsatisfied with the quantity/quality of my creative output because depression.
after some pruning the spellbook is sitting at 36k words (probably gonna be close to 50k when done). the perks list is 20k words. not going to try to get a wordcount from the spreadsheets of rollable tables, which still need tons of work anyway; my guess is theyāre at around 5k and will be 20k+ when done. everything also needs a couple more passes for flavor + editing + consistent style + proper formatting for print.
the rulebook hasnāt been started yet. art has barely entered the concept phase and i worry about applying my self-hating perfectionism and constant dissatisfaction to other peopleās work.
it is 2 AM. i am on vacation.
who knows if this nightmare project thatās been the last two years of my life will be done by the end of this year. iād still like it to be. it would be a lot of work even if i was satisfied with what iāve gotten done so far, which uh, nothing is ever going to be good enough, iām a mediocre writer at the best of times
the current plan is, rather than try to compile everything into one massive and massively expensive book, to have a flat cost for a digital download of everything and print-to-order individual components of the system. so the spellbook will actually look like a spellbook, the bestiary will be a xenonaturalistās pocket journal, etc, and you can buy whichever things you care about having physical copies of. this is the solution that lets me feel the least guilty about charging people for things and doing a capitalism in general
iām gonna go to bed i guess
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Havenāt worked on my system or either of my settings in a while, but I have some ground to cover this month. I just put out a document with the playable races for the podcast players, which include Steven universe style gems, elemental people who sculpt their bodies into whatever they want over time, kitties and stuffed animals that die constantly, living comets, and narcissistic beautiful douchebags.
Still need to make all of the death racers for the cyberpunkish campaign, and finish the gods for the podcast, and finish updating the ruleset because theres a new player to the system on the podcast. Plus doing artwork for Haleyās book. But itās all still very fun so thatās good.
the perks list (basically the heart of the system) has gone through a ton of editing passes at this point and is maybe 80% of the way to being print-ready.
the spellbook is still about a billion years from being done but i cleaned up the formatting a little over the last few weeks to bring down whatās there from 114 B4-sized pages to 93
iām thinking about commissioning internet friends as guest artists even though i donāt expect to sell more than thirty copies of this thing max ~_~
there are multiple spell schools that could be considered like 75% drafted except that they donāt meet my own standards anymore and iāll probably end up scrapping and redoing them from scratch
it is not a good feeling
e.g. i had a solid beginner-friendly d&d-style clerical school and now itās morphing into this bizarre mish-mash of mechanics where you deckbuild your spell list and cast spells by playing blackjack with tarot
nothing will ever be good enough, itāll just become more esoteric as i fuck it all up in pursuit of having like, one good original idea eventually
it is 3 AM
all of my ideas lately have been risking turning my rpg into calvinball
āokay i came up with a way to make Sea Singers not boring. what if the spells were words of power that you string together like in that one kawazu snes rpg, but you had to assemble the words with scrabble tiles you drew every roundā
āhoney we are not going to use scrabble tilesā
āokay well what if it was one of the perks you could takeā
ābabeā
āand any words you assemble cast that spell as a free action and if words overlap then you cast both spellsā
āā¦ā
āalso i want to make that jenga sanity system from Dread into an entry on the random insanity tableā
āplease stopā
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(iām still going to write that perk, no one can stop me, i am a misunderstood genius)
something very similar was done in one of the supplements to Over the Edge.
There are rules in Weather the Cuckoo Likes to replace the main dice resolution system with a cut-up word technique. To prepare, you cut up a bunch of newspaper articles, taking all the interesting single words you want and putting them into a bowl. Now, whenever someone does something that requires a die roll, they instead draw a number of words equal to their pertinent rating and have to describe their action using the words they drew.
Also thats not a sanity system from Dread, thats the entire system!
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You havenāt gone full calvinball until youāre building mahjong hands from tarot cards to resolve a lockpicking check.
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Haley I personally feel like the pre-cards Yugioh manga should have been handed off to you.
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th-thats the nicest thing anyoneās said about me ;~; 
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eventually more spells will have flavortext hopefully? that would be nice? this water spell came out okay i guess:
ideally the flavortext for a spell should give players and GMs
- ideas for how to use it in interesting ways
- reasons to get invested in the setting
- joy
but i am not especially good at fantasy writing and also trying not to overdo it, idk
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