The Boring Stuff
Sometimes the most important jobs are the most tedious
10/17/20232 min read
Took some time today to increase parity between the DNDBeyond stuff (mostly spells) and the stuff in the SR documents. It's tedious and a job I have been putting off for a long time. Other than that I did a reread of some of the older items and freshened them up, reworded some awkward phrasing or just tried to bring the wording in line with 5e proper and my own stuff, then added in the manual pagebreaks and columns to make the PDFs look a little nicer soon as Firefox and Chrome display the layout differently. On the wiki side I reorganised and categorised the deities into the Concord of Immortals, Pantheon of Sacrifice and Outer Beings.
I've been having a chat with Haggard Clint on his Discord about making/publishing D&D content. His book Chronomancer's Guide to the Future is a personal favourite of mine and he's a talented layout artist. I really appreciate his suggestions and explanations of methodology, especially like that he's a fellow Aussie at that. A few others in the Discord have published to varying degrees in various game ecosystems too, which I appreciate. I feel like the time for me to start trying to learn layouts is approaching, unfortunately.
Other than that, I've used my ongoing Spelljammer game as an excuse to make some further details about Shatterspace, most important of which is the planet's name that Lakesht, Aelerion, Mortaria et al are on: Artiya. Also provided some backstory to set the stage of territorial control as this campaign continues to spiral far beyond the humble 64 pages of Light of Xaryxis. I've introduced two additional factions as well as reviving the Imperial Elven Navy, with the illithid-run Principalities of the Most Eminent Mind clashing alongside the mysterious Dominion of the Last Star.
The principality are set to be fairly standard illithid slavers, but the Dominion are my intended endgame. After the players deal with quelling the siblings mayhem on Xaryxis I will provide the players a few options, one of which is an epilogue that eventually leads the players into direct conflict with the Dominion, resulting in a shunted portal taking the party to Zenith and witnessing the Veil fall on Lakesht. Southern Reaches in meatspace? It's more likely than you think.
As always, a strong undercurrent of finding interconnections between the existing articles is a big focus for me, though I have also been experimenting with expanding factions or points of interest using player options because I just dig that kind of context. Always get a little thrill whenever Luke invites me to splash a little SR lore into his Mortaria campaign, most recently it was about the tears of Kajsha that fell to earth as she mourned Dhatom, followed by his Lizardfolk PC from my Tides of Sin campaign making a cameo and explaining he was here testing his mettle in order to undertake the Rite of the Dragon with Tiankoatl. Next up: I really need to hammer out (pun intended) further details of the world and ramifications of the Forgers. Richard and I have had MANY discussions but little of it has been cemented or put into the wiki as I've always been somewhat unfocussed on them.