✍️ Writing
A community for writers, like poems, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, long books, all those sorts of things, to discuss writing approaches and what's new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing.
Rules for now:
1. Try to be constructive and nice. When discussing approaches or giving feedback to excerpts, please try to be constructive and to maintain a positive vibe. For example, don't just vaguely say something is bad but try to list and explain downsides, and if you can, also find some upsides. However, this is not to say that you need to pretend you liked something or that you need to hide or embellish what you disliked.
2. Mention own work for purpose and not mainly for promo: Feel free to post asking for feedback on excerpts or worldbuilding advice, but please don't make posts purely for self promo like a released book. If you offer professional services like editing, this is not the community to openly advertise them either. (Mentioning your occupation on the side is okay.) Don't link your excerpts via your website when asking for advice, but e.g. Google Docs or similar is okay. Don't post entire manuscripts, focus on more manageable excerpts for people to give feedback on.
3. What happens in feedback or critique requests posts stays in these posts: Basically, if you encounter someone you gave feedback to on their work in their post, try not to quote and argue against them based on their concrete writing elsewhere in other discussions unless invited. (As an example, if they discuss why they generally enjoy outlining novels, don't quote their excerpts to them to try to prove why their outlining is bad for them as a singled out person.) This is so that people aren't afraid to post things for critique.
4. All writing approaches are valid. If someone prefers outlining over pantsing for example, it's okay to discuss up- and downsides but don't tell someone that their approach is somehow objectively worse. All approaches are on some level subjective anyway.
5. Solarpunk rules still apply. The general rules of solarpunk of course still apply.
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Sorry I'm late! I think I've made pretty good progress so far on the campaign - I've been spending most of my writing time on organizing the document, moving sections around, and getting the layout right. I've had some good suggestions on section additions from Andrew Gross, such as creating an Adversaries and Escalations subsection for each major part of the campaign. These consolidates information on the people who will (or might) try to interfere with the players' investigation. Previously that information was sort of scattered across locations, character profiles, and assorted scenes. Getting it all in one place for each potential adversary and making their motives clear has felt good.
I've also continued running the second playthrough, and have had a great time making it a more cloak-and-dagger campaign for this investigator-heavy group of players. They uncovered the cold case murder mystery at the heart of the conspiracy to stop them much earlier than the first group, and there's been some tense scenes even though I've been striving to avoiding any outright combat because I don't think it fits this group.
This has been really helpful in planning and describing other ways the campaign can go, and TBH proving that the open world sandbox design is fairly solid! My goal was to make sure there was enough information, locations, and opportunities that you could spin a decent adventure out of it no matter how the players decided to pursue their investigation, and it feels like we're pretty close to that! In terms of writing all this info into the guidebook, I'm trying to hit a balance between making the information available and not driving myself insane trying to write a choose-your-own adventure book. I'm recognizing that once they get to the main location, basically all bets are off and I'm making sure that any overarching plot and adversary tactics read as branching suggestions from that point forward.
I've also been working on adding additional Non Player Character profiles though there's still a handfull left to make.
I'm glad the second campaign is going well and providing additional insight :)
That's a struggle in any creative context. What to fill in with detail, and what to leave open for the player(s) to fill with their (potentially wrong) intuitions... I'm reminded (often, lol) of "The Lens of Imagination" from Jesse Schell's The Book of [game design] Lenses. Basically it states, what do the the players need to understand to actually play the game, and what should you leave up to them to fill in? Kind of separating areas into hi-def and lo-def. Too much definition can even stifle imagination, rather than inspire it!