Welcome to the seventh writing club update!
Happy new year!!! 🎉🎉🎉 I was just getting used to drawing the “4” in “2024” in my notebooks, and now I have to get used to a whole new number. I always liked “5” though, so hopefully we get along alright.
As always I hope everyone has had a good month (but not so good as to leave nothing to stoke the fires of creativity).
Anyway, on with the important part - the Writers!
- @grrgyle - January goal
- @hazeebabee - January goal
- @JacobCoffinWrites - January goal
- @okasen - January goal
I can’t wait to hear from you all. Your updates no matter how trivial always manage to motivate me for the next month.
As always, anyone and everyone are welcome to comment or share their own work in addition to the club participants above.
I’ve been having a great time running the Fully Automated campaign and working on the guide for running it. We just finished session 10 and it looks like next session will wrap up this story, hopefully with time for a little epilogue.
Overall I’m very pleased with the players’ arc through this campaign. They hit a bunch of locations and events I was hoping they would, and also surprised me a bunch of times with creative, thoughtful, and community-oriented solutions. I’m a huge fan of games that let the players stack the deck in their favor by being smart or creative, and I’ve had a great time watching them short-circuit potential conflicts before they could begin, rally an investigative effort in the region that’s essentially too big and public to stop, and assemble a small army to help them confront a villain while stealing damn near all his weapons out from under him before he could use them. Their community-first approach has felt like a really solarpunk way to play this solarpunk campaign and their concern for my NPCs has been very sweet.
In running it I’ve found that I have enough of the setting and NPCs (and even some pre-set triggerable events) all established well enough that I can let the players do whatever makes sense to them and let the world sort of operate around them. The only time I’ve really weighed in rather than just reacting to them is to adjust certain NPC actions to keep the story’s pace engaging and narratively satisfying.
After it wraps I’m planning to do a second playthrough with some IRL friends (where I’ll be introducing them both to the game system and solarpunk as a genre) but I’m also looking forward to really digging into the campaign doc with some of the devs and doing some proper editing. General consensus so far is we should be ready to publish it in a few months through their usual channels (website, itch.io, and drivethruRPG), libre and gratis. They’ve already made some great suggestions so I’m looking forward to seeing what else they come up with!
Wow that sounds like such a great group (of people, as well as players).
It will be really interesting to see how a fresh group differs in their approach, especially if they’re more used to the somewhat nihilistic style of D&D et al, where you don’t often question how many beings are killed or who you’re stealing from, etc.
Sounds like the campaign is going amazingly for you! I’m glad to hear about it being played and published in the semi near future :)
Thanks! I’m very excited about the reception it’s received so far! @andrewrgross@slrpnk.net, who is a dev for the game and a player in the campaign has been making a set of recordings of, I think it’s fair to say, okay quality, (we’re no Dice Friends or Crits and Critters) as we’ve played it, in case that’s interesting to anyone. And I’ll definitely post about it when we release the campaign guide.
I would definitely be curious to give that a listen!
Sounds good! We’re just double checking that all the players are cool with it - they said as much back when we started the campaign, but we just want to make sure. I’ll let you know once there’s a place to grab the files.
Ooooo cool! I’d definetly be interested in listening to a podcast of the playthrough. I’m always looking for new things to listen to while I’m at work :)