July: Demiwarlock Watches The Horizon

Dear heroes of the stratometaship.

Welcome to a third of the way through July and a bit of a personal update.

These last few days have been a little harder than expected. I thought that after finishing the move and sorting everything in the new apartment, I'd be raring to get back to writing and arting. I planned to treat myself to a little side-trek, and you all to a bit of a surprise. I decide to take a week and get the haunted house adventure game-shape and ship it to you, before returning to SEACAT and Red Sky and the related ultraviolet lands. Well. Well, well, well.

Layers. Mice. Men. Plans.

It turns out moving house is exhausting and draining, and even if I didn't admit it to myself, this week has proved to me that I was exhausted and drained.

Monday, I set to writing. Instead, I waffled the day. Dissipated it away. Tuesday, I set to writing. Two hundred words at five p.m. and nothing more. Wednesday, I set to writing. Nothing.

Today ... I decided to just ... step back a bit, and draw a bit, and see what comes.

Thus this post.

Where to? Where to?

First, one of those dang reminders. If you haven't yet, please to be voting ennies yes yes

Second, I've frankly got too many projects in my kanban bins. Again. I thought I'd trimmed the bins, but I guess I haven't.

The Loose Notes

• This High House — the mildly Agatha Christie and Longwinter themed haunted house module & modernist house generator. I wanted to turn it into something solid this week, but my spirit quailed.
• Let Us In — the slightly Nietzchean, moderately Kafkaesque survival-horror module
• Zu Kompleks — the UVG-related space fortress module
• Golemkraftwagon aka. GKW — the UVG-related vehicle and golem module, much like ZOA. Plotting to add some actions and random generators to make Mad Max scenes easy to run. And more starter caravans and so on.
• {Twelves} — a minimalist d12 rpg system targeted at being simpler to play via discords {name is provisional}
• {Heavenmaker} — the UVG & Terraforming Mars derived board game

The More Advanced Stages

• SEACAT Rules, Archetypes, and Things — the d20 game tying together UVG and Red Sky and VotBO. Currently a harsh labor, because I'm adapting it to the UVG layout in Affinity Publisher as I go, so it combines a lot of layout with a lot of writing. I've been putting it off a bit because the next section of Rules deals with the conflict mechanics, and that's always a bit of a tough thing to put together.
• Red Sky Dead City — the big one, that I'm scared of tackling again, because I have to rebuild it in Affinity Publisher. Again, that cost of switching away from Adobe InDesign is real. I just dread spending time on rebuilding these elements. Then again, once a file is set up in Publisher, I'm just so much happier to be free of Adobe. Right now the book is disassembled in chapters, waiting to be put together again, so I can return to writing and arting it. One thing I also want to do is tackle ... some moral problems the game brings up.
• RRYPO — edited - I've received the edits, and need to review and adjust. I ... I don't know if I have the energy to tackle it right now. It feels like it should just take a few days and a bit of new art, then be ready for publication, but I keep putting it off.
• Longwinter — I'm waiting on the editors to start.
• Voyages of the Black Obelisk — well, finally started that one, and the layout is a joy to use. I hope you enjoy the layout that debuted in ZOA, because I'm finding it pretty nice. But I do worry that it is too minimalist and modern. So many rpg books come out with lovely, curly bits and bobs and textures ... and I just have these modernist books heavy on the Helvetica*. O_O

And a few other projects

• Slumbering Ursine Dunes Omnibus — Anna's doing an amazing job on the layouts, but there's a fair few bits of art I'll have to do here.

What all this means.

Well, part of the reason I wrote them all out is because this was also part of my journey back from the edge of creative dissolution. My idea to tackle This High House before I finished SEACAT (not to menton RSDC) was pure madness. There are already enough moles I'm whacking, adding another would be pure stupidity.

A few days of procrastination actually proved deeply helpful because they reminded me that the reason I was putting off work on the next chapter of SEACAT was not that I didn't like doing it, but that I was just rather exhausted.

So, with a bit of perspective restored, it's back to wrapping up the game. Then RSDC. Just as originally planned. :)

Step by step, with onions.

Oh, and for all of you reading, a wallpaper version of the softcover edition of UVG that we're putting out Exalted Funeral just in time for the Ennies!

Thank you for the patience, everyone!

—Luka

*well, not exactly heavy. Just a bit of Helvetica, really.