Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="defendi" data-source="post: 3682123" data-attributes="member: 53467">So, I haven’t quite finished the d20 version yet.  There was a lot more checking numbers than I anticipated and PCGen slows down after a few characters so I lost some time to that (it might be JAVA, not PC Gen).  Anyway, all the monsters are rebuilt as characters so the math is all on the up and up.  Tonight after this I start actually building all the stat blocks.  I expect that to take longer than I have tonight.  I’ll finish it tomorrow night or Tuesday (currently my big work day.)  By Tuesday night bedtime, I should have d20 put to bed as well.    On the Lulu front, I’ve had Josh (my editor) proof all my back covers.  I’ve built wrap arounds for the paperback and hardbound version of the d20 copy.  I haven’t sent those to Josh yet.  They had a baby last week and I think it’s lousy to give a guy work for his moonlighting job the same week he gained a new addition to the family.  Gotta gaze into those baby eyes before they change color.    I’ve already reread the entire d20 version of the first book hunting for typos and those inevitable tiny inconsistences that crop up over the span of a year’s worth of products (“I said they were what?”) I’ve typed those all into the raw pagemaking files but that screwed up all the formatting.  So I’m spending a little time (about an hour) every day I’m home adjusting the formatting back to the original pagination as much as possible (it’s easier than when I have to make new pagination and move artwork around).  I did the first three chapters, but chapter four is a big project for another reason.    See, I did all the art for Chapter Four in Campaign Cartographer.  I then output it as one huge bitmap and chopped it up for individual countries.  For the large countries like Uzarâg and Ludremon, this is pretty good.  For little countries, the resolution came out terrible because you’re more zoomed in on the page.    A bigger output would crash my computer every time (I’ve tried), but CC3 has a neat little feature that helps.  Basically, I can output a bitmap of a specific rectangle with a specific resolution.  So I’ve been going through all the art in Chapter Four, figuring out how big the images are in inches, rounding up a half inch, then outputting that size at 300 DPI (I can do 600 in Lulu, but the blur I put on the rivers fades them too much.  You’ll lose them completely in black and white interiors).  I’ve done through F and also redone DD3 versions of all the dungeon maps so they look a little snazier.    Essentially, in building the print versions I have to first fix any niggling issues in the PDF versions.  When you see the PDF versions updated, you’ll know I’m in the final leg of getting the Print ready for Lulu.    At the same time, I’ve been reading through all the mechanics sections of the other versions.  HARP is done (although there might be an edit or two I haven’t typed in yet).  RM and HERO are both done through Chapter 7 of the sourcebook.  I’ll probably give a new version a complete re-read when the first print proofs come in, but I think they are pretty clean.  Honestly, almost all the typos are inhouse formatting violations.  Many of them Josh can’t even spot because they are just me being picky about something in the pagemaking (he picks them up and checks them whenever I have one lying around to see if it was something he missed.  It almost never is).    The expanded Appendix II for the d20 version has been edited but not proofed.    So that’s where all that stands.  Now I’m going to wax poetic about Dragonlance.  Give me a moment.    As you probably know Margaret Weiss lost her license to produce more roleplaying books for the product line.  So I’ve been buying up every book they produced before they can’t sell them anymore and I have to swim with the sharks on E-Bay.  I’ve been reading and rereading as they come in and I’ve fallen in love with the story again.  But I noticed something.    It’s a truism of writing fiction that often the more you want to pull away from something, the more you shouldn’t.  I wrote a chapter in a book that’s sitting on a desk in Tor right now which involves a woman handling two children who have just lost their mother.  When I wrote that, I had the hardest time, because I had experienced a great deal of loss between ages seven and eleven.  I was, essentially, writing about this fictional woman dealing with me.  I don’t know how much you’ll like the scene if it’s ever published, but for me, it was cathartic.  I got great positive feedback on it.  The reason is, I hit this great block of pain while I was writing it, and I forced myself not to turn away.    This is fresh in my mind because one of my readers objected slightly to a part of adventure four, The Tainted Tears.  He felt that part of the tragedy was too much like what we experience in the real world and might be too much for certain players.  I take suggestions like that as reason not to change it (especially since you can change this one at your table very easily) and so after much deliberation (because I take this reader’s advice very seriously) I left it alone.  Product Four is meant to generate big emotions in the players.  When one of the characters screams the penultimate reveal to the party, it usually shocks everyone silent (of course, that could be my fabulous acting. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ).  If a GM wants to back off because it might cause a player to relive something painful, he should, but it’s easy to pull back from something that’s in the text.  It’s hard to add something that isn’t.    So it’s in.    What does this have to do with Dragonlance?    You might want to stop reading if you aren’t familiar with the basic Dragonalance story.  There are spoilers below.    That said:    Dragonlance is an incredibly spiritual story.  I don’t remember the novels as well as the adventures, since I’ve done the adventures two or three times since reading the novels, so what I’m saying likely does not apply to the fiction, but the original adventure writers completely chickened out. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Think about the basic plot of the series.  Man finds the gods, save the world from dragons through his faith, bringing a golden age.  The golden age is ruined when man tries to command the gods in his arrogance, causing the Cataclysm.  Man, feeling abused, turns from the gods, telling himself the gods turned from him.  Then evil creeps back into the world.  Right when it’s about to destroy everything, the gods lead a group seeking the truth back to the information that will restore all the good churches.  Just in time.  The knowledge of the true word spreads before the evils of the enemy, and where it touches, it takes root and the enemy finds strength, not weakness.  Essentially, Dragonlance is about man finding forgiveness from a supreme being and in doing so, saving the world.  But it’s more than that.  Man didn’t need forgiveness.  He already had his punishment and the gods were waiting patiently for him.  Beyond forgiveness from a supreme being, it’s about forgiveness for one’s self.    I think Hickman was the one with this vision (I’d bet all my money on it).  As I said I can’t speak for the novels, but in the adventures, this is all glossed over.  The disks of Mishakal are little more than cleric making machines.  The new adventures mention stuff like this in passing in the themes, but even they hold back a little, maybe allowing a GM to find it on his own.  It might be a good call.  That might not be a story a GM can tell unless he feels it enough to find it for himself.  There’s one scene in Dragon’s of Autumn where it’s all spelled out and where one character takes on the role of all humanity symbolically.  I won’t say who or when (I’ve spoiled enough, but I assume you all know the basic plot), but the author is kind enough to draw attention to the fact, pointing it out as a potentially intense roleplaying moment, should this be the type of thing your group might like.    I’ve thought of writing a story like this for Echoes, long before I got back into Dragonlance.  If the Herald returns during the campaign’s history, I don’t think I can avoid it.  On a more personal level, I’ve thought of doing a personal version of this story for a group of PCs, but I haven’t convinced myself I can present it in an original fashion.  Still, the theme of redemption is common in the fiction I have planned for the setting.  That might be enough.    We’ll see.</blockquote>

Verification