Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.
Well, I am happy to report this morning that, after four months of work in earnest, Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign is finally 100% complete. The week began with the effort to finish generating new and re-purposed terms in order to finish translating the second scene of that chapter's prologue into the Kilrathi language, work which took most of my day on Monday. I was in a position to begin filling in blocks by my afternoon break. I was rather annoyed at the end of all of my work on Monday to discover that I had missed a term (specifically for 'sow'), but not as annoyed as I was on Tuesday when I discovered that I hadn't finished translating a block of moderate-size and as a result needed to come up with translations for several other terms. I was able to come up with translations for the missing terms relatively quickly, however, and made a concerted effort to finish the translation work. By the end of my lunch break on Tuesday, I had the remaining terms in place and, after a quick review of the Chapter's contents, I felt comfortable removing the Draft block at the top of the page. I'm still considering adding space battle maps to the individual encounters, but that is something that can wait for the time being and I've already placed a note in the game's index to that effect.
With the translation effort completed, my focus turned to getting all of the newly generated terms into the lexicon in Elegy Chapter Eight, which began Tuesday afternoon and didn't finish up until the tail end of my lunch break on Wednesday. A total of 54 new terms were generated during the final translation effort in Chapter 2.2 with 105 terms re-purposed, corresponding to 331 reverse terms. This brings the reverse lexicon up to just over 4,500 words; for some reason I thought the Kilrathi language already had many more terms than that but apparently not. The language is still continuing to grow in its robustness, and while it may sound more than slightly pessimistic of me to say so given the effort I've put in the translation of Elegy to date, I have no doubt that the translation effort that will take place in Chapter 2.3 will undoubtedly once again grow the lexicon substantially.
With the lexicon work completed, my efforts now turn to Chapter 2.3, entitled Bharg'Yi'nargrast'hra ("The Conquest of Demon's Eye"), where Bloodeye and company are scheduled to take the Demon's Eye Base from the Morgan's Raiders pirate clan. I've mainly been reviewing the notes that I have for that Chapter already as well as some of the text I have written for that Chapter up until this point. I had hoped to sit down and finish hammering out the stats for the Demon's Eye Base late this past week, but I never got around to doing it. I'm finding that I'm having difficulty with this mission's design. I mean, I know what is supposed to happen, but I'm having a tough time figuring out the how of it; how will Bloodeye and company take the base? My aim is to have a different experience than the one the players have already gone through in Chapter 2.1, where the goal was to takeover Ni'Rakh. I have sought some feedback from the CIC community as well as from a local game designer's group. I am confident that I will be able to hammer out the difficulties I've been having soon and that work in earnest will be able to commence on the chapter in the very short-term. I still need to finish generating the stats of the Demon's Eye base, begin mocking up battle maps, and slice the Chapter's plot some more - the same things I've been needing to do with the Chapter for the past several months. My Plan for the coming week is to begin with the generation of the base stats and to at least come up with the basic shapes of the main locations of the station - of which I've identified 14 potential sites - which may help me to generate rudimentary battle maps. I suspect that building the battle maps may help me tremendously when it comes to slicing up the plot; I know it did when I was working on Chapter 2.1.
Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, November 7th. Y'all have a pleasant week.