Yes this fiction update is late, but with not for the reasons you may think. The core Conquest of the Gods fiction was completed by Tracie McBride early this year and with the countless hours of revision work and the complex discussions via telemeetings we undertook to nurture it through to completion it has evolved into a fantastic portrayal of what I envisioned when the project started several years ago. Since then a few things have happened; my day job has been very busy, our 2 year old has been going through toilet training (anyone with kids can attest to how much time and patience this takes) and my wife and I learnt that we will be introducing a new little person in to the world later this year. All of this is wonderful and exciting news but has meant that ‘life’ has got in the way of a few things with the broader project as I continue to work on it in my ‘free’ time after work hours.
The other reason, and probably the main reason for this posts delay is that I wanted to get the fiction laid out in the Core rule book before posting this. Tracie and I knew that when we starting working on the fiction, I would be splitting it in half, and publishing the first half in the front of the book, and then the rest after the game and model rules sections of the book. This meant that I had to divide the story into two ‘acts’ as well as do my final draft of the core rules and final draft of the models ‘beta test’ rules, furthermore the other 4 short stories needed to be laid out in the book. Well I am just sitting shy of 230 pages and we have a draft book! I now feel ready to show off two excerpts from the core rules, one from Act I and one from Act II.
So what’s next for the book:
I need to finish the ‘filler’ items; these are small pieces of writing that accompany each unit section of the rule book. Anyone familiar with most of the popular wargame rulebooks/army books/codex’s will know what this is. Some of these are simple quotes, others are as long as a paragraph. Im about half way through these and once they are done then we can do a final edit of the book and prep everything for a closed ‘beta’ test (more news on this will be forthcoming as we approach crowd funding).
I have 3 other items on my to do list: Complete the books index, glossary and ‘printables’ (tokens, templates, army roster sheets and so on). The printables are under control and are pretty much done as I have already prototyped the physical versions of these. The index is a few eveings work as tweak where I want each index item to appear. Thankfully the software im suing will generate this for me, so it’s a matter of culling the instances of certain works I done want in the index. The glossary is a little more work but will be completed alongside a players cheat sheet, this is a double sided A4 abbreviation of all of the rules. These kind of cheat sheets were common 10 years ago but have started to disappear from games and that’s a shame as I have found as I get older, the more I need one for reference during game play. So from a writing end things are very close to the end, certainly the light is at the end of the tunnel on the book, and thankfully its not a freight train.
The other thing that needs doing before the book can be published is that more art work needs to be commissioned and we have a handful of very talented artists working on this as it can be afforded. The other thing we need is capital to do the initial print run, and for that we need people to support the kickstarter campaign.
So in sum, yes there is a fair bit to do but its all achievable and when compared to the work that has been done, these are all small (except for the artwork) menial tasks that I will chip away at over the next few weeks whilst the final draft of the Kickstarter campaign is being worked on.
Next time I’ll be providing an update on the models, an update on the art is also in the pipeline.
