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90s Design: On Canon
George Lucas banned people from describing Yoda’s species or home planet, because he was smarter than you think. Canon is now a Thing. Nerds fret over it and creators hate wrestling with it, but it...
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Enoch’s Logistics, Realism and Stories
Do you know why they call him the Count? Because he loves to manage the logistics of the Damned! I don’t even know why I wrote this in a forum discussion in the first place, but I spent a lot of time...
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Enoch-ographics and Logistics: The Sequel!
Special thanks to Doctor Vampire for his assistance. Wow. I didn’t think a post about the demographics and logistics of Vampire’s Enoch would be a big hit, but it got a lot of views, and people asked a...
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Unannounced Absence! And Recent Stuff
Sorry about that. Here’s what’s been going on. I was sick as a dog for almost two weeks. Normally this doesn’t interfere with writing much, but in this case it was happening as two deadlines hit, for a...
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Leia Organa: A Critical Obituary
General Leia Organa. Official portrait, Hall of Darasuum Kote, Coruscant. Leia Organa, the politician and revolutionary who led the defeat of the Galactic Empire, died after a short illness. She was 60...
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Exploding Superweapon
I think that ring is Ezra Klein. Leia Organa: A Critical Obituary is soaring through six figures of views. I never expected this. In seventeen years of writing, this is the most widely-read thing I’ve...
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A New Year Awaits You in the Off-World Colonies
A Roy Batty picture is obligatory. If you’re from Southern Ontario and you didn’t go to the better parties of the 90s, you rang in the new year with rain and androids. You watched Blade Runner at...
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Deep Space Nine, Season Nine (and Eight)
I don’t even need to caption this. You can live with it. You can live with it? Let’s do Deep Space Nine again. Okay, context. The first thing you need to know is Canadian Netflix is pretty bad, and we...
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Working for Green Ronin and Other News
So, some good news. I now have a regular gig with Green Ronin Publishing. I’m excited to take up a bunch of projects with the company as a developer “at large,” meaning I work on a variety of stuff...
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The Dark Side of Capital: Economics, Ideology and Palpatine’s Empire
A Note on Terminology: The Fourth Sith Empire is known to non-historians as simply, “The Galactic Empire,” but is in fact one of a series of state formations informed by (the ever-changing) Sith...
View ArticlePatreon and On
This site has been lying fallow for a while, but I’ve started a new trick to motivate myself to do writing that isn’t work: the faint promise of cash. Yes, I’ve started a Patreon. You can find it at...
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2K a Day
This included a chunk where I wrote 17,000 words over two days. Then I did some more. Also, God help me, this book is what, 17, 18 years old? I don’t know who needs to hear this for their career...
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Zero Draft
Three to five drafts, depending on the section, along with a lot of intermediary docs, and in 1e, I can still think of a sentence I wrote that I hate. So, elaborating on yesterday, I’m going to talk...
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What an RPG Developer Does
My first official Big Book For Another Company development credit. I have ones related to smaller stuff and self-publishing, and have developed parts of books without being credited, but this was my...
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Hide Your Process
Do up as many buckles as you like, but the next time around, drop the ones you don’t want or need. When people beat around the bush at the beginning of a section, easing in through atmosphere,...
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What to Expect From Development
I wrote up the Silver Ladder in a third-ish draft of Awakening 1e because developer Bill Bridges invented them after the first two drafts had already been submitted and there was still time for me to...
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Weasel Voice
Really, they deserve better. “Weasel voice” is a fake, possibly misleading name for a real problem encountered by lots of RPG writers. Everyone has heard of active voice and passive voice in writing....
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Writing for Nonlinear Readers
“Blah blah body text–but kids, y’ever heard of troupe play?” Folks like roleplaying games to read like fiction, like technical manuals, or like something in between. The in-between options are...
View ArticleWriting Long Stuff
Writing is a skill…sort of. In a traditional RPG with skill mechanics, writing would be something anybody can try to succeed at (unlike brain surgery or particle physics) with the education we assume...
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Lazy Declaration
The power of not caring what you’re gonna do until you’ve done it. Here’s an option you can add to most conventional RPGs that have a core mechanic. It’s called Lazy Declaration, and it’s inspired by...
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