The Harrowing pt II - Wrapping Up

First off, an apology - I was truly a lazy blogger yesterday, copying and pasting the article from Wikipedia, and the God of Sloth cursed my work, with horrible formatting that I didn't even check!  I've reformatted yesterday's post, so if you were curious just what in hell I was talking about, now you can know.

So, down to business.  I set out this month with lofty goals, and as the month winds down, I can look back and say that the the results were decidedly.... mixed.

I was able to blow through the Risus One Page Challenge entries with little problem.  Both of my submissions can be found here.  I'm a bit proud of both of them, even if they both leaned a bit more towards post-apocalyptic than steam punk.  It was a fun exercise.

NaGaDeMon is next.  I started off the month designing a board game, sort of like Axis and Allies, but with less of an emphasis on military strength.  The game has evolved, and is now a card game.  There are 172 nations in play, and much like during the Cold War, escalation is everyone's enemy, and the nuclear Damocles Sword hangs over all players.  Convince the people to rise up, buy them off or just invade and take them over, there are many different ways to secure world domination, but if you invest too much of your resources, you may succumb to forces at work on the home front.  I've been working with someone I know to turn this into a real thing, and while there is zero chance it will be anything close to playable by the end of the month, it's real.  It's going to happen.  So while I failed the NaGaDeMon challenge, something good has come of it, for sure.

NaNoWriMo.  This was always going to be the longshot, and lo and behold, I didn't quite make it.  Actually, it would be fairer to say that I bombed out spectacularly.  I held through the first week, missed one day and never recovered.  But hey, I now have a quarter-finished novel under my belt, so I can go back and peck at it sporadically.  I also learned that the "Don't edit, just write" is impossible for me to do.  Literally.  Impossible.

The Clockwork Cave continues to slog along.  In an interesting twist though, a sort of "mini-game" that I designed as a part of the adventure has mutated (heh) into the core mechanic for From the Ashes.  I'm actually quite pleased with it, and I think it fits the system not only mechanically, but spiritually, as well - it enhances the idea behind the game.

So that's pretty much it.  The easy stuff was easy, the hard stuff was hard, I made some progress, fulfilled some goals, left some undone.  Pretty much life, yeah?