Mid November, Let's See How It Snows

Dear Heroes and the Reading Public!

A public post for a change!

Welcome to November. The last two weeks whizzed by. By now I expect it ... the blues after a project finishes. I suppose Let Us In was quite quick, so I got over the blues in a week.

Over the last week I returned to Seacat 0.77 (in progress) and some project maintenance. Although Seacat is the big white whale tiger I am riding at the moment, some other things also needed to be written.

• The Lastlands as a Metasetting. I know, this was 3 weeks ago, but it fits in a cycle of writing about Longwinter, Witchburner, Let Us In, and all the others. I went into the themes those claustrophobic small town adventures and pieces imply.
• Never as Written: a post musing on how roleplaying works necessarily cannot work as written because of the divides between writer, work, runner and player. It's long, and that's a very summary curt summary.
• How to Use the Lastlands. The important one, where I summarize how I see the different pieces fitting together.

There is also a cool post by my collaborator, Saker Tarsos.

• The Joy of Cards. On the creature cards for the F54 card decks. It's starting to look like we'll have five decks of Seacat cards ready soon-ish. In a few months. The locations deck is basically finished - I still need to review it and prep it for the  first test prints. That'll happen when it does. Anyway, the dive into cards is nice.

These posts all felt important to me. The Lastlands are smaller and didn't get the kind of coherent treatment the UVG and the Vastlands did (will, do)—but Let Us In reminded me that they deserve a little bit more coherence.

A New Thing: Xenon Elasmotherium

A new thing I've been planning since springtime was launching a substack to complement the patreon. Behold: Xenon Elasmotherium (https://lukarejec.substack.com) 

Substack is an elegant email newsletter platform that's really quite slick. But I struggled with figuring out what exactly would be the point. I tried an email newsletter on mailchimp, and that went very poorly.

After stewing over it for a while, I came to a useful model. Fiction sans system.

If you want some of my fiction writing, never more than one post per week, never more than one link per post, then the xenon elasmotherium might be the thing for you. Some will be tangential to products I make here. Others will be stuff I've written here, too (like the current story from Longwinter). Yet others will be something completely different, doomed to never becoming a game.

The Longwinter story there isn't a coincidence. I've got a small cycle of stories stewing away, linked to Longwinter and Let Us In, and since my game writing and art will be focussed on seacat for the next few months, that's a good place to start them off.

Let's be ambitious and pretend I'll end up with some sort of epic metapoetic Wormhole Wreath. I probably won't, but let's pretend.

I mean, the name xenon elasmotherium already suggests it, right?

What's Coming in Seacat 0.77

And now back to our regular programming. The maintenance handled, here's what you can expect in the upcoming update:

• Gaps filled. I'm going through the document, taking care to fill in the gaps where I mentioned "things to be added". Well, they're being added now.

This includes things like the Example Defences (above), which give players a better idea of what a defence value means and what to expect.

I'm going to see how far I get this week—so no promises—but I do hope to get the consumables finished, too, as well as professional gear. There's a good chance I'll cut a chunk of the worldbuilding content from the 1.0 release, just to make sure it happens ASAP ...

Expect the next .pdf update next week or so :)

That's All For Today!

As always, thank you a thousandfold for your patreonage.

Your heroic contributions to the stratometaship make it possible for me to draw and write. I remain your most devoted fan.

Peace and health, every hero one of you!

—Luka

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P.S. - Heavy Metal Heroes. I've really enjoyed how some elements of Let Us In turned out. There's a very good chance you'll see some of them in HMH (final name TBD -- if you have a good suggestion, happy to listen!). Particularly the special actions. There's something interesting in there.