Seacat 0.71b -- Back From The Forêt

Dear Heroes,

Hello! I'm back. Thank you for your patience while I wandered the red forêt of meditation and relaxation. I wrote a whole honking glob post about the experience and what I took away from it: https://www.lukarejec.com/2021/as-the-morn-so-the-day/ .

I can also summarize a TL;DR: it was a good place to work.

Seacat has breached 200 pages and 120 pieces of art. And with now both more pages and more art than the UVG, I suppose it's time for me to start thinking about how to title it ...

Ok, so what's the new content over the last couple of weeks:

• Gear has expanded further. I'm following a simple axiom here: only describe and stat interesting gear. If it's just a 1d6 sword ... I don't need to repeat that. We're all gamers. We've seen that before. So, there's now some quite interesting gear. Not yet done with it, but getting there.
• Creatures, animals, and monsters have expanded. There are more now, and will get more art soon. I've also added the first level 9 epic creature ... to give a taste of how those things could look ... and it's some kind of holy whale. There's also a terror bird mislabelled as an ostrich by an unscrupulous merchant.
• Gave all the mutations ranks ... they're basically all like creepy traits now.

And what's coming next on the stratometaship and otherwise?

• I'm pondering a small restructuring of Seacat, pushing the axioms and some content on how to adapt the different rule modules to adjust the tone of the game into the Playing the Game section. That's going to be ... quite a step, but it'll get the game much closer to completion.
• I'm thinking of adding a selection of "sample heroes and characters" to the beginning, sort of as a "quick entry" to the game and the themes behind it.
• I'm thinking of spooling out the "Creating the World" section into its own thing. At this point it might delay completion too much, and I really do want to get around to working on some adventures and characters (cough Red Sky cough) again.
• Might need to tweak some section titles.
• More gear and creatures to write out. Including vehicles.
• And, of course, magic :) still waiting on me, still demanding that I finish it.
• And more art.

Hope you're enjoying the ride ... the content is only going to get weirder from here on out, as I leave the safe shores of mechanics behind and stride into filling out the Vastlands of the UVG :D

Finally, let me also greet all the new heroes of the stratometaship! I saw that a few of you joined this week and the last, so let me welcome you politely aboard the server, too: https://discord.gg/2p3m6ws -- welcome into the depths of the ship!

>>~~~~~~<0>~~~~~~<<

Peace and health, every human and human-level artificial sapience among you!

And to the aliens: neat trick!

—Luka

PS - this version is called 0.71b because I had a working pdf output called 0.71a for my own use. You're not missing anything!