Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the first Weekly WCRPG Update of 2016. I hope all y'all had a very pleasant holiday season.
It's been a while since the last update, and I'll have to admit that as normal, I wound up not doing anything related at all to WCRPG over my extended break. I mainly spent the time with family and relaxed for once. Christmas was thoroughly enjoyable; I mainly received socks (I was in fairly desperate need) on the holiday proper but in between Christmas and New Years I picked up a copy of Pandemic. I like the game mainly because I can play it with my wife and eldest son and every time it's been played we didn't come away from it hacked off at one another (we've been annoyed by the game itself, of course). I'd highly recommend it to any of y'all that like to play board games / multi-player solitaire-type games / cooperative games at all. I also spent a fair amount of time immersed in the Star Wars universe; my eldest son has gotten into Star Wars of late. As a Christmas present I bought him tickets to a matinee of The Force Awakens on Christmas Day, where he got his first experience with sitting in a theater balcony. He also received a toy T-70 X-wing for Christmas (which my middle son takes great delight in disassembling as often as possible). I've also been playing Empire at War again of late, which my eldest enjoys watching. Finally, I've found myself trying to adapt the TacOps rules to a Star Wars-type hex-and-counter game (which ate into the time I should've spent working on Elegy a great deal this past week). The adaptation has gone reasonably well and I'm thinking about making some actual counters so I can play it with my kid. My wife may not necessarily like the idea (mainly due to the production cost of making counters - which may be higher this time around on account of the fact that some of my hardware is missing), but it would give me another thing that my oldest and I might be able to enjoy together.
I didn't really do anything Wing Commander-related over the break until January 3rd, when I watched the WC movie from stem to stern for first time; my wife received a Roku streaming stick from her parents as a Christmas present and a few days later my family found itself (at long last) with a Netflix account. Since I went into the Movie knowing everything that the fan-base has complained about since its release, I didn't expect it to be a stellar experience. I'll say that the movie was okay; I liked it as a piece of space opera. I did find the sudden switch of scripts to that of Das Boot (complete with J¨rgen Prochnow in command) more than slightly jarring, and of course I didn't like the design of the Rapiers, but these are things every WC fan/movie-basher complains about. My own unique complaint (as best I can tell) was the music; the fanfare got old after a while. Don't get me wrong - it was good for the opening, but once the movie got started it probably would've been served better with something more "brooding"; I didn't like it as a leitmotif. That's just my opinion, of course; every WC fan that's seen that movie has an opinion of it, and now I can at least now I can say I've joined those ranks.
Work on Elegy didn't continue until this past week, and has been mentioned already it was heavily curtailed due to ongoing work on the little hex-and-counter "still-can't-sell-this-crap" game I'm working on. On Tuesday I focused on details of Kilrathi architecture and made some very rough floorplans of Kilrathi dwellings. I have a few adventures later on down the road where such details could become important, though the little utak-type dwellings I was building aren't likely to make it into the game. Some work of the narrative of the prologue of Tarakh'ga (Elegy Chapter 2.1) took place on Wednesday as well as some work on the fifth encounter, work that continued on Thursday. Friday was the most active day, spent largely doing clean-up tasks: namely, I added a rules addendum to the late entries page to add more precision to height and weight rolls for new characters, added a correction in regards to asteroid damage, consolidated a few of my notes with Tarakh'ga, dropped in a few notes on Dekh aq T'kon H'hra (Elegy Chapter 2.2, the next campaign mission), added a few template character DCs to the second encounter of Tarakh'ga and made a little progress on the narrative. Work has been exceptionally minimal this past week - when I say I've worked on something, what I mean is maybe five minutes of bonafide work before my mind wandered off on some tangent. It's getting annoying, frankly. I also took the time to answer a question regarding the Arcadia-class carrier on the Holding the Line Craft page for Doc Wade, which resulted in some preliminary adjustments to the craft's statistics.
My main Plan this week is to make better progress with Elegy and not go off on so many tangents. The actual work to be done remains the same as it has these last few weeks - to build deck plans and fill in mission details in Chapter 2.1 of the Elegy campaign. I think the deck plans are going to have to take priority - I'm to the point where I really need maps for the remaining encounters, and for that I need to work on an art set (something I've needed to do for quite a while now). I also need to start getting back to writing the narrative of the mission's prologue. I've been suffering from some serious writer's block early on in that narrative, and I'm still not happy with how the prologue currently ends. I am hoping to get that buttoned up, though; I've been chomping at the bit to do more translation work, and what's there is almost to the point where I can get on with that effort. All in all, things are going slower than I'd like with Tarakh'ga, and I'm hoping things will pick up soon.
Well, that's all I've got for this week. The next scheduled update will be between 11-14Z on January 18th. Y'all have a pleasant week.