I’m going to reply on this to post a quick update for anyone who’s interested!
Step 2: Review
The first post is up and we got some really solid feedback, so we are both working through that to try and spruce up the Operation, mostly streamlining it. I think we will have 3 tabs, one for each operations, and then 1-2 other tabs for ‘Supplemental’ material, background lore that ties the three ops together, detailed NPC breakdowns ect. I’ll drop a quick log here;
- Review First Operation - Lots of good feedback, and some good points made about the length of the intro and the number of NPC introduced that are not actually involved with the main story thread. We’ll work on separating some of this off into supplemental material, and keep the main mission streamlined. Once we complete the next round of edits, it would be nice to playtest it, or get more feedback from some of the experienced handlers.
- Hammer out the main entity - The name got some criticism, which is fair, as we went back and forth on it ourselves. We are exploring other names, but it also brought forward another issue - how present will this eldritch entity be? We are currently torn between keeping the creature as a vague, nebulous threat or into a fully defined creature with motivations, hopes, dreams and all those things that us mere mortals can’t comprehend, but handlers kind of need to know to work with the subject matter. This aspect might go more on the back burner as we try to flesh out the missions themselves, and then see what makes more sens as we go. We have a lot of ideas, but settling on one might be a easier said than done.
- The Stories - We had originally intended for the Grimms’s fairy tales to be the introduction, and then expand into whatever stories caught our fancy, justifying it in the ‘birthplace of all human stories’ mantra. This has proven a little confusing for the readers, and will make the actual investigation and theme a little harder, so we are going to try to relate everything back to the tales. Morganna is now the Evil Queen (Name Pending) - related to Snow White, which strengthens the connection to putting people in a coma, which is one of her big things in mission 2. As a result, we’ll probably need to do much more research before the we start work on the third mission, but that’s part of the fun.
- Supplemental Material - I’m currently working on a Timeline for the first mission, and I’ll create one for each other mission afterwards. From there we will have a Persistent NPC tab, this will have the full breakdown, motivations and progression for each NPC so that we can avoid lore-dumping in the missions themselves. (The lore seemingly being our favorite part to write) We are also still planning on including some unique content for Home Scenes, Information to discover if Agnets Stay on The Case and a kind of ritual, random table monster generator thing for the Book itself. (We will see if this ever manifests, the notes are a mess.) And handouts. We want to do handouts.
NEXT TASKS
So, lots of work still to do. Daktyl (me), is currently 75% of the way through the first draft for Mission 2, tentatively named Operation Shackled Dreams (I will almost definitely change this name). It’s set a year and a half later in a children’s hospital in Pennsylvania. Mythomancer is still plugging away at the rewrites, and I’ll be looking over some of the notes to see if there’s anything I can help out with for Black Forest oh I also made some more cover photos because I learned the basics of photo editing and can’t seem to stop myself.