Wild and Wahoo, Steampunk, and Urban Fantasy…

My novel Sword of Kos: Dark Inheritance keeps growing and growing. Last week I went on a serious writing spree and was able to add an additional 10,000 words to the book, bringing the total word count to just over 110,000 words.

At this juncture I am done with additions for the time being. For the next week (maybe more, maybe less) I am going to edit the new material I wrote and continue with the edits where  I left off before adding all the new material.

I do honestly believe though that this book will break the 120,000 word mark once I am finished with the edits. And as I have mentioned previously I fully expect it to change yet again as Michael Varhola edits and makes his suggestions.

Maybe it’ll be finished by the end of December. Truth be told, I really HOPE that it is. I have been working on it for over four full months now and I want to see it finally come to its true end.  Don’t get me wrong, I have been enjoying the work that I’ve put into this novel. I just want to get onto other projects that have been put on the back-burner because of this book!

Anyhow…

One of the projects I’ve been asked to work on is fairly simple for me. A few years back I had a huge thread on the old Skirmisher site. In this thread I took critters of all make and manner from television, movies, novels, comics and video games and wrote up Mutant Future style statistics for each one.

It was fairly popular and at my last count I had just shy of 120 monsters. Michael Varhola asked that I breathe life back into this old thread on the new D-Infinity site. Of course I agreed and I have already started to comply with his request. The past two days I added one of the old entries (after a brief edit and some minor clean-up).

So unless I’m quite ill or have internet connection issues I will continue to add one creature per day until they have all been reposted.

And I am going to try to add at least one new monster per week as well. Currently I am going to take all the wonderful creatures that were presented in the Metro 2033 series of games. There is a wealth of mutants available for me to write up.

After they have been added I think I’ll work on the Necromorphs from the Dead Space series. I absolutely loved those games!

So there, with the Wisdom from the Wastelands issues that I wish to write up as well as the free material I will eventually be posting for each of my issues, I will be contributing even more NEW and better yet FREE material for your games.

As always, stay tuned.

I don’t know if any of my readers will have noticed but I am trying to tie several different themes in the background story that I provide for the material I write. I refer to the ‘ancients’ whenever I talk about the ancestors of the characters. I have created the ‘uplifts’ (see Wisdom from the Wastelands issue #4: New Races) to describe the intelligent mutant animals and plants.

There are also other minor bits and pieces I hint at such as how various nations were stuck with lower technology levels or resorted to biological or terror weapons.

Every one of these tidbits tie in with MY personal vision of a mutant future campaign world. Many people love the wild and wahoo version of the old ‘Gamma World’ games. Others prefer the serious and deadly version that was presented in the most excellent ‘Darwin’s World’ campaign setting.

From the material published by other companies that I have purchased and read, I tend to believe that many prefer the wild and wahoo style. That just isn’t my taste, and that is fine. The more material I write for the game, the more a possible campaign world will grow in my imagination and my notes.

I would like to say that someday I will write up a full-borne campaign world, but if I am honest not only to myself but my readers as well, that is not all that likely to happen.

I just don’t have the time!

Just understand that I like my games to be a lot more serious. I try to use pseudo-science to explain things, and where tech came from, how mutants appeared and so forth. Of course I am no scientist so I’m just making this stuff up on the fly.

At least I’m honest!

Another trend that I have noticed is the exploding popularity of the ‘Steampunk’ genre. Now that is something that I can’t get into. I’ve attempted to read a little steampunk fiction and I know that the whole genre was started many MANY years ago by Edgar Rice Burrows and his Barsoom novels. And yes I have read a couple of the books during my childhood.

I simply can’t get into it.

I thought that would have been the case with the Urban Fantasy genre but that one did grow on me to an extent. One of my personal literary heroes is Harry Dresden, created by Jim Butcher in his incredible Dresden Files series of novels. Over the years I have picked up on a couple other series that I enjoy and follow, such as Kim Harrison’s Hollows series, Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid series and more recently Myke Cole's Shadow Ops.

Sorry I digress.

Back to my original topic. Honestly the closest thing that I have seen in recent years that I was able to get into was Avatar: The Legend of Korra series. Anyone who has watched that series cannot deny how steampunk it is. Hell, even the original Avatar series was very steam punk if you look at the Fire Nation.

I do believe that the reason that I was able to get into that style of steampunk was due to the fact that it involved martial arts – as many of my readers know, Shaolin Kung Fu is a passion of mine and it reflects in what I write.

So the whole purpose of this? If anyone was ever to come up with a steampunk game that mixed martial arts and the Orient in it, then that is probably a game or a novel that I could easily get into.

I know - kind of a long winded way to get to the point. Sorry about that.

And I guess that is all for this blog.

Finally, here is the rough pencil draft that I might end up using for the cover for my novel Dark Inheritance. The artwork once again provided by the talented Giorgio Alfonso Maesa.

Peace!