Spelljammer Week
Writing Journal 64 15-21 August 2022
Well, I named this one after a D&D Setting… so I might talk about a bunch of gaming.
But I promise I will talk about my word count, and thinking about it now, I probably won’t talk much about Spelljammer at all, but rather I will turn the talk around to world building in D&D/ novels.
That should put things to rights.
Words
We’ll dive right into the writing this week. I’m slowly getting back into the pattern of things. Trying to write multiple days in the week.
I managed two session and this next week should be good for 3 again. In any case, my goal is always 2000 words in a session and I prefer to get about 6k a week if I can.
This week the word count is 5894 words, bringing the manuscript up to 82,554 total words. I finished chapter 13 and 14 this week, both chapters were part of the A-Story, and chap 15 returns to the B-story.
I’m still worried that I spend a lot of time talking, arguing, and deep in character thoughts. Like maybe the action sequences in these books are not like my older work. I don’t know if this is a product of me aging/changing or just my tastes evolving. But looking at my outline chapter 15 is going to be a big talking episode with a whole bunch of the storyline and events laid out. It might almost be a lot of exposition.
In short, I’m worried and full of self-doubt.
But that’s normal.
Worries
So, it’s not exactly exposition, or is it.
I have a character that has received intel on a number of events. This intel is in the form of cryptic data, with some facts thrown in the mix. He has a pattern of events, basically pin points on a map of where things are happening and what those events might be.
Now, some of this information was in the previous book, so I’m kind of reiterating it because there is always the chance a reader picks up the second book first. I know that’s weird to me, I always try to read a series in order… and yet I have read later books first when I was young and owned only that book.
This once again rolls around to needing readers and seeing if they are bored, or if the fact that I’m rendering it all in dialogue with arguments and counterpoints is interesting enough. The one thing I am not doing is dropping blocks of text to explain things…
Well, I kind of am here, aren’t I?
Releases and Big News
To change the subject….
This week Spelljammer released, and it is really cool (with a few quibbles). We also got a massive news drop that will affect the next few years of my gaming career.
But first Spelljammer.
Back in the old days Spelljammer was just an interesting thing that had cool ships in it. But I never really played it much until we adapted it to 3rd edition. And when we did, we took it very seriously. Running low on oxygen, using very serious Sci-Fi for our stories. Making edgelord characters (I was young).
Hell, my longest running character in Spelljammer ended up as the security officer on a space station who ruthlessly put down rioters by opening airlocks and lunching them into space with no remorse. It was pretty dark.
But, over the last three months I have watched a bunch of YouTube where DnD peeps talked about the fun. The whimsy and motely crews. They were more Ice Pirates and less Dune or Babylon 5.
It slowly infected me… what if we played Spelljammer and we created FUN characters. And for months I have been thinking of pirate crews, misfits, and fun characters.
I do have a Quibble…
There is one thing wrong with the Spelljammer release.
It came out as a slipcased set of books. Three slim volumes and a screen for $70.
I will admit that the paper quality is quite high. The pages feel really thick and books are well built. BUT… if you add all of the pages together you get a book that is smaller than Tashas (or other similar splat book) about 194 pages. A splat book is $50.
In short, we’re paying an extra $20 for a screen and 2 more covers.
Now, I do like that it’s split into three so I can put aside the adventure or just look at the monsters. But at the same time, we could have had a PHB size book (248 pages) with even more monsters, ships, and rules and that could have been $50.
My issue is that a lot of things going on right now feels like Hasbro is squeezing WotC to gouge money out of gamers. They’re doing some things which bother me as someone who runs a comic/gaming shop. With the amount of profit they make, and the acquisitions they’ve made and now movie money coming in, they could be cutting costs for gamers and bringing in the community and instead they keep shitting on stores and people.
Moving on Other News
This week DnD also announced One DnD, a revision and update to the rules that are going to happen over the next year and half through a bunch of playtests.
I am both delighted and annoyed with this.
I love the chance to playtest things and see some updates and improvements to things. But I also hate some of the changes, but really this is when I start to really dislike the general (or the loud part) of the community. All these people come out of the woodwork and start yelling about rules, but they only read half the rule and they make bad faith arguments. The old school a-holes come out and talk about how they want to create multiple accounts to basically review bomb everything so they can get their way.
Sigh…
Part of me wishes that WotC never did open playtesting… but the other part of me loves to see the iterations and the behind the scenes thoughts that created them.
In the last two days I have already had to stop talking to several people I used to look up to because they just have thoughts antithetical to my own. Just a sheer difference in philosophy that sometimes comes across as abhorrent to me.
People say, ‘it’s just a hobby’ but in reality, it is a massive part of my life. It has been part of my life since I was 10 years old. I have been inspired to write based off it, I made art off of it, I’ve maintained friendships and weekly games with people off of gaming. I’ve been able to go to cons and places and sit down and play with people because we had this in common.
On Topic…
I planned to talk about world building here. About how the new changes to the One DnD rules would affect my world again (you can check links here to see the genesis of my world). But the short version, is that the world I write in was used over multiple editions of DnD and the characters were informed by what edition they were created in, but then changed to the modern sensibilities. The first novel I wrote, pre-thesis novel and probably never going to see the light of day, was started during fourth edition and several of the characters have abilities that could be traced directly to that.
But at the same time, I try to divorce my narrative from actual DnD rules. Like there are characters that are defined by “class” in my notes, but I do magic completely differently from the norm… though the effects of the spells in my narrative are often based off DnD standards. Like my warlocks are eldritch blasting all of the time.
Outro
Since this post went longer than I expected (sorry for the rant) I will push the world building off to a later date. Maybe next week, or some time… it is my favorite topic and I come back to it often so I’ll bring it up again.
Thank you again for reading and making it this far.
