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Last year I almost finished the elf book, but then I got totally stuck on the magic system. I didn't have a great feel for magic in general in HeroQuest, and I didn't understand how to make the magic system interesting and distinct enough to make it worthwhile for them to have their own magic system. The book got fairly complete in its original incarnation other than that (and the homelands that depended on them) but then fizzled out, and it didn't really matter because the whole HQ line was on hiatus by that time. And after that the new iteration of the elf book expanded by 35k pages and several races of elves.
On Friday I looked over what I wanted to write this weekend, I felt like I was increasingly getting down to the nitty gritty, but one of those issues still hanging on was the magic system, which was a 13k hole in my book, and meant that I could write the Homelands, polish up the creation pages, finish up the hero bands ... and probably do a few other things. So I sat down with my HeroQuest book and my printout of the Lunar Magic system, and started trying to puzzle it out.
And I finally had a breakthrough! It was partially based on Robin Laws' simple statement in Glorantha: The Second Age that said that elves were somewhere between animistic magic and divine and partially based upon some new diagrams I drew of how all the elf gods related. Suddenly I had everything split into "maternal songs", "worldly songs", and "spiritual songs", and combining that with some ideas about interacting with the landscape I came up with a model for elf magic that's at the same time reminescent of divine magic, gives elves some powers related to landscape spirits, and is deeply interconnected to the way elves see the spiritual world.
I'm quite happy with the results and I wrote the first 5k words this weekend. The majority of what's left are the elf gods, and writing that sort of thing just takes time. (Writing game mechanics is always very consuming.)
I have no idea how much of the 13k I'm going to actually fill, but I'm sure it'll come in somewhere in the 10-15k range, which should be close because I've still got slush elsewhere in the book.
However, with the main hurdle now overcome I can clearly see the end of the book in sight. I'd ideally like to finish the book by the end of Thanksgiving weekend, which will require pushing harder than I did last month, but it's very doable, particularly with that four-day weekend at the end. (We don't do most holidays at Skotos, but that 4-day is always one I take off.)
Counting everything up it looks like I have 20-25k left to write.
On Friday I looked over what I wanted to write this weekend, I felt like I was increasingly getting down to the nitty gritty, but one of those issues still hanging on was the magic system, which was a 13k hole in my book, and meant that I could write the Homelands, polish up the creation pages, finish up the hero bands ... and probably do a few other things. So I sat down with my HeroQuest book and my printout of the Lunar Magic system, and started trying to puzzle it out.
And I finally had a breakthrough! It was partially based on Robin Laws' simple statement in Glorantha: The Second Age that said that elves were somewhere between animistic magic and divine and partially based upon some new diagrams I drew of how all the elf gods related. Suddenly I had everything split into "maternal songs", "worldly songs", and "spiritual songs", and combining that with some ideas about interacting with the landscape I came up with a model for elf magic that's at the same time reminescent of divine magic, gives elves some powers related to landscape spirits, and is deeply interconnected to the way elves see the spiritual world.
I'm quite happy with the results and I wrote the first 5k words this weekend. The majority of what's left are the elf gods, and writing that sort of thing just takes time. (Writing game mechanics is always very consuming.)
I have no idea how much of the 13k I'm going to actually fill, but I'm sure it'll come in somewhere in the 10-15k range, which should be close because I've still got slush elsewhere in the book.
However, with the main hurdle now overcome I can clearly see the end of the book in sight. I'd ideally like to finish the book by the end of Thanksgiving weekend, which will require pushing harder than I did last month, but it's very doable, particularly with that four-day weekend at the end. (We don't do most holidays at Skotos, but that 4-day is always one I take off.)
Counting everything up it looks like I have 20-25k left to write.