Fall of Night, Transyltown, and, of Course, 'Wisdom from the Wastelands'!
This is the last blog for the month of October. And that also means that next week I will have completed a full year of writing blogs with only two weeks where I did not write anything at all, and only 2 weeks where I was late getting the blog up.
Considering that Halloween is almost upon us I have also decided to talk about a couple of things that are related, but as always they will be touched upon at the end of this blog.
First however, to my usual updates!
This is the last blog for the month of October. And that also means that next week I will have completed a full year of writing blogs with only two weeks where I did not write anything at all, and only 2 weeks where I was late getting the blog up.
Considering that Halloween is almost upon us I have also decided to talk about a couple of things that are related, but as always they will be touched upon at the end of this blog.
First however, to my usual updates!
This week has seen little change. Work is still a pain in the ass and trying to find the time to write can be a real bitch. But I did manage to finish the short story ‘Traders’. It was just over 14,200 words in length. It turned out to be a little longer than I had originally planned it to be. I even ended up skipping over a couple of minor scenes that I wanted to write because it was so damn long!
That’s okay. Friday night I began work on the final of the series of short stories that I had planned. This one is called ‘Meeting’ and my goal was to write at least 6,000 words this weekend and I am only a thousand words shy of that particular goal. I will continue working on it later today or maybe tonight and I have a feeling it will hit around 7,000 words or more. This short story HAS to be finished by Friday this week.
The reason is simple. I am going to participate in the national novel writing challenge next month. I am going to start my sequel to ‘Sword of Kos: Dark Inheritance’ after all and I’m pretty damn sure that I can polish off 50,000 words by the end of November. After all, it is quite easy for me to write an average of 2,000 words a day. If I only wrote Sunday through Thursday I would still write 40,000 words without working on the weekend.
After I posted my blog last weekend I took the time to write up the bonus material for the remaining two issues. Wisdom from the Wastelands issue 38: Radiation Sickness now has rules that cover several types of drugs, medical devices and nanotechnology from previous issues, and the effects they have on radiation sickness. I even wrote up a couple of new items as well. The bonus material for these items can be found here.
Luckily for me I had written up an additional race that I ended up cutting from Wisdom from the Wastelands issue 40: New Races 2. This race was cut because I felt that it really did not fit into my vision of the game.
See, there was a series of issues that I had been contemplating writing for the game. These were aliens, and they would have been heavily inspired by the Archons, Tuatha Du Danaan, and the Annunaki. All three are races that appeared in Mark Ellis’ Outlanders series, but it goes further back than that. Supposedly the Annunaki had a hand in the creation of the human race and between them and the Tuatha Du Danaan, they helped shape Humanities destiny.
But in the end I decided that I would not bother with these – they would do in a pinch in a science fiction game, a space opera, but not in the Mutant Future game.
The end result is that one of the new races, the Hybrids, was cut from the final release of the issue. I decided at the last minute however to add it as purely bonus material, which can be found here.
So I am now officially caught up with all the bonus material for my issues that have been released. The thing is I’m not done, not yet. I have another two issues coming out in the very near future, one filled with new high-tech weaponry, and the other covering rules for underwater adventures, greatly expanding upon the material provided in the core book.
My editor Greg suggested that I write up rules covering ‘the bends’. After doing some initial research, I discovered that there was 17 pages worth of material covering the basics behind decompression sickness on the Wikipedia alone.
It is a pretty simple thing for me to write up the symptoms and how they affect the victim in game terms, but the real kicker is trying to figure out a way to deal with the incredibly complex chart covering depth, time on the bottom, how quickly to ascend, and how many breaks are required and the length of time with each stop.
Trying to come up with a workable system covering that without resorting to writing dozens of charts is daunting to say the very least!
I had told Greg that I would work on it this weekend, and the basics have been written up, but it’s that damn chart that is kicking me in the balls!
Those of you who have been following my weekly blog will remember that I mentioned a series of Wisdom from the Wastelands issues that I wrote up while I was overseas. They involved harvesting materials from monsters to be used.
After putting a little bit of thought into it, I have decided that there will be some bonus material written up for each issue. What I am going to do is come up with some basic rules covering combining different types of armor to gain bonuses from each, as well as possibly combining different materials from the monsters to combine both together to make something entirely unique.
Finally I plan on going through Derek Holland’s various monsters that he has created for the WftW series and come up with harvestable material for each.
I really do believe that I should write up an issue covering underwater equipment as well. After all, I did write up spear-guns! Not sure where those went, which issue I sent to Greg that has those in it. If they were not sent to him in either of the high-tech weapon issues, I’m going to have to make sure that I include them in the underwater equipment issue.
Last week I posted the links for another company that produces quality Mutant Future material. This week I am changing things up a little bit and I’m going to post a link to an artist that I met back in May at Comicpalooza. Isaiah Broussard. He did a commission for me, one of my best friend killing a zombie using a bow. It was a late birthday present for my friend.
Since that time Isaiah has had a successful kickstarter campaign for his webcomic Transyltown, which I was happy to be part of when it came to supporting.
You can find his material by clicking on his name above, or use this to go directly to his deviantart page.
Oh and I almost forgot. If you haven’t had a chance to read any of Jonathan Maberry’s work, I cannot recommend it more strongly! I just finished ‘Fall of Night’ earlier this week, and it turns out that this is the prequel to his excellent ‘Rot and Ruin’ series. Yes, they are zombie novels but they are also some of the best out there. I have yet to meet anyone who has read the books that was disappointed in them.
Zombies in his novels are more than just mindless undead, terrorizing and feeding off the flesh of the living. He goes into great detail to bring out the actual horror of what has happened to these poor unfortunate victims, and what some of them are going through as they lose utter control of their bodies.
The best thing is he keeps this view of the dead as victims, not monsters (with one exception and I won’t spoil it for you). And this continues through his Rot and Ruin series. I should also mention that this series is now a comic available through IDW.
And that pretty much covers it for this week. I hope that everyone has a save and fun Halloween next Friday!
Until next time, peace!
