Announcement: Sufficiently Advanced Dragons

This will not be the real final cover.

Sufficiently Advanced Dragons

In talking to people, I decided that the idea I liked the most of the ones I'd proposed in my last update was the "Sufficiently Advanced Magic" one. So, I'm starting work on the book which I am tentatively titling "Sufficiently Advanced Dragons."

I'll be attempting to jumpstart a lot of it through Camp NaNoWriMo. You can follow the effort here: http://campnanowrimo.org/campers/goal-entertainment/projects/sufficiently-advanced-dragons

That said, I've never been very successful at Camp NaNoWriMo, and I am not sure how much time I'll be able to focus on novel writing.

Dragons...in SPACE!?

Credit to Lori Howe

I've been talking lately with fellow writer and publishing partner (I'm not really sure if that's the proper term.), Kit Bradley, about preawareness and some thoughts on what I'd like to write next. (Don't worry, I'm not abandoning Heroism and Other Lies, although there will be at least a gap after the end of season 1.)

Preawareness

Property of 20th Century Fox

If you check out Kit's blog, preawareness is a topic that comes up there a fair bit. The simple idea is that people are more likely to buy a product if there is something about it that they are familiar with-particularly if that thing is a prominent element of the thing that people are buying.

Maps and Minis

I read a lot of webcomics. One of them is called "Up to 4 Players" and is about a group of tabletop gamers. Their current series focuses on a campaign playing Savage Worlds.

With today's post, their blog entry that accompanied the comic talked about tabletop maps and use of minis. It's an issue that I've considered for a while, with differing thoughts on it. Here's the part that stood out to me:

"The group is using an erasable play mat (I personally use this one, from Paizo), with some meeple-like things to indicate who’s who. That’s not very high-tech, but that’s intentional – I find that if I use maps of specific settings or miniatures of specific creatures, the players’ imagination is fixed on these forms and go back to them even if I say “this orc-like mini represents the one-armed bandit”. If there’s no mini, but just a red token, their brains know it’s a representation of something, not an example of it, and so they can imagine whatever it needs to be."

Episode 109: The Champions Eight

The Toybox crew come out of the shadowpaths and explore a mysterious facility. In doing so, they find an extremely powerful entity built by the ancients. Is it a force for good, or a threat?

What follows is an account of the events during a session of my Toybox Campaign. This summary is written out in a prose format which may, for the sake of telling a story to a wider audience, take liberties with the events.