This page is for recording things worth communicating among the GMs. In particular, Justin should record any significant additions or changes to the game notes, and Darker should mention pages where he puts in commentary to think about.
New entries should go on top, blog-style.
Also note that you can change your Preferences to "view all edits, not just most-recent". I make liberal use of edit comments and the "minor revision" checkbox, so viewing RecentChanges with the all-edits option on will generally give a good overview of what I've been up to. --Darker
Mar. 2, Justin --
- Created the Next Time page, for notes on things that could be done better.
- Started all the photocopying. Unfortunately, the copy-feeder at work isn't working well, so I'm going to have to go down to Staples to do most of it.
Mar. 1, Darker --
- Created Exploring the Castle.
- Added Hero to Othar. Might also be appropriate for Agatha? But she already has a mess of abilities, so I didn't add it in. Justin: I'm in the middle of printing -- over halfway done, actually. At this point, stuff is going to have to be really important to get in. (Eventually did print it, but it required a special run; I'm not likely to do more at this point.) I have an all-day meeting tomorrow, and there's tons left to do tomorrow night, so I need to be getting away everything I can tonight. The theory is that character packets gets stuffed and given out at the con tomorrow evening, so I have to have all character-packet materials printed tonight and copied tomorrow afternoon. Darker: <nod> Got it.
- Tweaked Superhuman to also act as "you're never unarmed". Von Pinn doesn't fight with weapons, but should be on par with the other armed badasses. Justin: No, really not. She's good, but she's not that much better than the other badasses. She's incredibly strong, but she's not a trained warrior. The other level-10s aren't as powerful, but are much more trained. It's quite intentional that, while they're on par in pure hand to hand, Zeetha could take her apart if she has her swords... Darker: OK, Roger that.
Mar. 1, Justin --
- Printed out pretty much the entire core of the game, including the GM materials. Made all the buttons. Generally burned the midnight oil: didn't finish until about 3am.
- Wrote the Real Agatha character sheet, to fill in at mid-game. It's not exactly a work of art, but it was hard enough keeping it down to five pages as it was. Someday, I'll learn to write both short and good.
- Created the School Accounts item, and made a few tweaks to Wooster, Gil and Beetle to give them a fighting chance to piece together Wooster's mistake with the Geisterdamen.
- Some mild adjustments to Special Abilities, to make things slightly more Point-dependent. It's still not as well-balanced as I'd like, but I think I have to stop fiddling. Everyone will get the same number of Points (I'm thinking 7) at the beginning of the game, and can use them as they see fit.
- Put in all of the Combat Values. Roughly speaking, untrained human normal is 5; trained human is 7; very well-trained human is 9. The 10s are Zeetha, Von Pinn and the Jaegers. (Zeetha is actually the top of the scale because of the plusses she gets from her swords.) Those numbers are chosen to be close enough that someone can get a lucky shot in, but statistically the expected results will usually be seen.
- Bought a portable printer, which I'll have with me at Intercon.
- Copied all of the Who You Know sheets into Word, and fixed the formatting, to get them ready for printing.
- Stuffed the icons into the wiki. The formatting kind of sucks, but there's no quick-and-easy fix, so I'm cleaning in up in post-processing in Word.
- Found at least acceptable images for all of the characters, and did the scaling for the buttons and icons.
Feb 28, Darker --
- Questions on the Transformator Justin: Responded, and added another comment or two.
- Thought on Dingbot Communication Justin: Fair enough -- I've put that on the to do list.
- While you're doing special abilities / items:
- There will be some locked doors in the Castle. I'd planned on having locked doors say something like "You can unlock/relock with any key opening A, G, or H". "A" (for "all" and "Amagog") will unlock any normal-sized door lock in the castle (master-key); no other special letters at this time.
- Sarah probably ought to have: I Knew That Was There (avoid triggering a trap; doesn't keep others from doing so unless she gives them careful instructions ahead of time); Hide And Seek (can be unfindable to normal methods while in castle passageways); Home Turf (may go to not-public by asking a GM or locked rooms), and probably a copy of Small if she has any small forms. Justin: I think you're more sensitive to these than I am -- you want to just write the abilities? The important properties to fill in for a property are Name, Type (usually "Ability") and Text. Darker: Will do! As I was going to bed just now, I realized that available writing bandwidth is a much greater concern than "should thing X be in the game?" (it being much easier for you review and delete-if-necessary than to add more stuff to the stack) and logged in to add a note to the effect of "don't bother writing these; I can do it". (Will continue to do this ongoing.)
- Discovered minor wikistuff: moving/renaming/deleting topics appears to interact strangely with properties in some way; having a trailing newline (or whitespace?) in the Description of Bluesheets seems to cause subsequent Bluesheets to format oddly. (Fixed in all bluesheets so far.) Justin: Ah -- please don't rename things. I haven't tested that, and have absolutely no confidence that it doesn't break the properties code. (And it would be very, very, very bad if the property tables broke at this point -- I don't have a quick way to regenerate them.) The trailing newline problem is strange, though -- I do that frequently. Darker: Yeah, sorry about that - I'd forgotten this was partly experimental tech. (Apropos for the game. :) I stopped doing anything further with renaming + such when I posted the original note.
- Created The Castle - Silas, The Castle - Beetle, The Castle - Sarah as bluesheets for Silas/"Glassvitch"/"Abner".
Feb. 28, Justin --
- Wrote the formal text for the existing Items. There aren't as many of those as I'd like -- adding a bunch more would be useful, but it'll depend on having the time to do so. Still need to go through the character sheets and figure out which Items and Special Abilities are referenced but not written.
- Added a bunch of new Special Abilities in the course of going through and writing them up. They're getting reasonably consistent in style and approach, I think.
- Started the Briefing Notes.
- Deprecated both the [Command Constructs]? and [Command Jagers]? special abilities. I'm reasonably convinced that the first isn't true, and the second seems a bit subtler and more voluntary than I'd originally been thinking.
- Some notes at the bottom of Combat Mechanic.
- Went through the Special Abilities, and writing up the formal text at the bottom. Note that there are three distinct types: Special Abilities, Special Disabilities (limitations), and Special Spark Skills (areas this Spark is particularly good at, and should be cut extra slack in if they try to work in this area). Also, note that I am making most of the abilities Point-dependent: this introduces a moderately interesting resource-management game, and means that players have to be careful not to overuse their Abilities.
- Added a bunch of off-the-cuff ideas in Castle Contents.
- Added the Omnivore special ability to Sarah.
- Gave Krosp, Artie and Dingbot Prime the Small special ability.
- Commented on Darker's comments in Mechanics?. Main upshot: yes, GMs are strongly encouraged to give out points for good roleplaying.
- A little cleanup on the Circus Bluesheet. While its greatest use will be for the backup characters, put it into the appropriate main characters as well as a convenient reference. Note that Agatha gets this, but Maria does not. While Darker is right that it isn't clear that the Jaegers know about the Circus' Sparkiness, I find it fairly hard to believe that they don't -- they are very talented at finding things out, and it's clear on the pages immediately before the game is set that they have figured an enormous amount out, and they are totally unsurprised when the Circus does a lot of remarkable stuff in the current story, at the end of Book 6. So I'm going to simply assume they know by game time.
- Hacked the Special Abilities page so that it works. For reasons I'm still not clear on, the "~Special Ability" query form fails, presumably because of the space in the name. Couldn't figure out why that's failing, but found an alternate query form that works, so we can get a decent list.
- Spending the day at home, mainly focused on cleaning up Items and Special Abilities.
Feb 27, Darker --
- Dumped more stuff into Castle Contents. Found disappointingly few pictures of doors in my huge-ass collection of clipart; may see what I can photograph tomorrow.
- Created a short Circus Bluesheet - even for those who've read the comic, the reference is probably helpful, and for those who haven't it's essential. I can't remember if the Jaegers know about the circus' sparkiness at this point. Also: Zeetha should probably be ticked that they've taken Yeti (her boyfriend) in particular. Justin: Good point. Added that to her character sheet. Parts of the bluesheet are incomplete and it's all kind of rough.
- A few thoughts about Points in Mechanics?.
Feb. 27, Justin --
- Taking an intentionally quietish evening: last night I blew past my stress limiters, and slept wretchedly, so I'm taking it a little easy in the interest of calming down. Mainly focusing on looking for good pictures for the characters, for buttons and such.
Feb. 26, Darker --
- Since you're dealing with namebadge stuff: you wanted me to remind you to make a couple of not-main-characters in case someone (Sarah or Beetle w/Transformator) decides to turn into "some guy" or "some girl". Justin: yep, that's on the to-do list.
- Will move forward with Castle stuff. Question #1: What are you using for item cards? 3x5s? Justin: or 4x6s, anyway, depending on what my stock appears to be like. I'll probably know exactly tomorrow, but assume it'll be some kind of notecard.
- Question #2: When will the special abilities be printed out? I can already see that a few characters are likely to end up with castle-relevant abilities (ex: Sarah avoiding traps; Dingbot Prime / Artie being really small; etc). Justin: I'll be writing most of them tomorrow; I may or may not print then, but we ought to be able to add some Thursday if need be. Packet-stuffing must be Thursday night (I have a long workday Friday), so printing will have to be before then.
- Question #3: What sort of ambiance would you like? Justin: Hmm -- good question. We're talking about a relatively benign Spark, so it's not too sinister. Let's play it this way: this is a man who doesn't regard himself as being in any way malign, so much of the Castle is sort of like an absent-minded professor's lab, with stuff just sitting around. But he's still a Spark, and he has Spark assumptions, so there are deathtraps and occasional sinister dungeons because, you know, that just what you do. So intentionally a bit inconsistent between the "show" bits and the "real" bits. A few rooms should be deeply dusty (because Sarah hasn't been paying attention to them, or they've been blocked up), but most should be surprisingly well-dusted. But she has left the Master's stuff all exactly where it was, out of sentiment.
- Created Castle Contents as a dumping ground for notions of what's in the castle.
Feb. 26, Justin --
- Main focus this evening was sanity-checking my plan for the picture-based identification system. I think it works. I've gotten myself read into the GIMP enough for the basic tasks I need, I've figured out how to use the new button maker, and I've figured out how to make the wiki display the images interspersed in "Some People You Know" properly. Note that, for the time being at least, I've intentionally messed with how images display in the wiki: they automatically align and size the way I want for this task. It's a hack, but a very practical one. But I also proved to myself that I want full-body images of the characters, not faces, so they're distinctive.
Feb. 26, Darker --
- Came up with a notional Castle Mechanic. It'd be more work (for me) up-front, but could help save GM time during game, as well as making the castle space a little less nebulous. Let me know if you want me to move forward with it. Justin: I like it! It gives the players something else to do, and it sounds like fun. If you're willing, please go for it...
Feb. 25, Justin --
- Sent out the Player materials to the Players. We're now pretty much committed to the plot web. We can make minor modifications at this point, but not big ones.
- Wrote the Personality blurbs. Broadly speaking, not nearly as strong as I'd like -- I hate writing in a rush.
- Went through the To Do List, and killed off most of the immediate ones.
- Went through [Feb 19 Darker Review]?, adjusting things as appropriate. Left a bunch of comments to the comments there, including some clarifications about my thinking.
- Wrote the intro letter that will be going out with the emails later tonight.
- Wrote the Maria part of Agatha, which is her initial character sheet, to be sent out with the emails. I still need to write Agatha per se, but her sheet doesn't come out until the middle of the game (and is necessarily going to be short), so she's a bit lower priority.
Feb. 24, Justin --
- Wrote Mirror-Agatha, the longest of all the character sheets. To make up for her weak connections to the character web, she's got a lot of useful ambient information for the plot web, and as much roleplaying opportunity as I can fit in.
Feb 24, Darker --
- Comments on Dingbot Prime into [Feb 19 Darker Review]? (since you're finishing the first-pass of writing before acting on any of the stuff in there). Justin: Thanks. I'll be doing my pass through that on Sunday afternoon.
Feb. 20, Justin --
- Finished writing Dingbot Prime, who is even stranger than Othar was. A bit thin, and that isn't entirely accidental -- it is the most conceptual character, and fundamentally not plot-driven. Could do with more, though, if anyone has suggestions. Note that the Green Squishy Lizard is the Winslow doll, who is sitting on the laboratory workbench. He is actually a near-omnipotent alien lifeform from another dimension, but in this world he is simply a slightly telepathic puppet. He is the cause of the Replicators plot.
- Started putting together the Packing List. Lots more to go in there.
Feb 20, Darker --
- Whoops, forgot to mention last night - took another quick look at the Combat Mechanic.
Feb. 19, Darker --
- Read through all characters written as of noonish today. Content-based thoughts are in [Feb 19 Darker Review]? - many of them had no single logical place to be put inline, and might be missed; this way there's a punchlist of items. Also made a number of small phrasing / spelling tweaks to character sheets; mostly spelling twists that a spellchecker wouldn't catch. Justin: Lovely; thanks. Jane will also be doing a proofing pass, but having two passes will be a very good thing -- I know that the MS is hideously dirty at this point, and I don't really have a convenient spellchecker in the loop here anyway. I'll probably finish the first writing pass, and then go through your comments in detail and adjust accordingly. At a fast skim, they pretty much all look like things I do need to fix, so the reality and consistency check is much appreciated.
Feb. 19, Justin --
- Cast the two new players, [Celia Tite]? and [Mac Magruder]?, and sent them their hints.
- Wrote Krosp, and gave him a raft of minor Special Abilities that seemed to match what we've seen of him.
- Gave DuPree the Torturesmithing Special Ability, which matches the pseudo-Sparkiness we've seen in her.
Feb. 18, Justin --
- Wrote Sarah.
- Wrote Moloch, and a few Special Abilities and Items for him.
Feb. 17, Justin --
- Wrote Gil. Not elegant -- I'm having to write faster than I like -- but it should do.
- We've had two drops from the evening run, both of which filled from the waiting list. (Both correctly gendered this time, blessedly.) I sent out a request for casting questionnaires from the new players.
- Began writing Zeetha. Gave her Skifander Blades, Stealth, and Psychic Gems.
- Thinking about how to beef up Zeetha, and began pulling together a bunch of threads lurking in the back of my head. The result is the Children of Skifander plot, which pulls together a bunch of hanging plot threads in the book. (And might, just possibly, even be more or less correct -- this plot is mostly derived directly from the source material.) It gives Zeetha an active plot to pursue, ties her into the Wulfenbach faction quite directly, and sets up a mystery that might be solved in the course of the game.
- An idea for us to stick in our back pockets: if things get too quiet during the game, we should probably have a random monster encounter. We've already established that we're out in the forest (in general, the area around the Hidden Castle has been left alone for centuries by the superstitious townspeople), so it would be pretty normal for some giant Clank or Construct to wander in out of the Wilderness to inject some chaos into the game.
- Finishing up Wooster, who I have been writing during the week. Added the Special Ability Tea Making and the Tea item for him and Tense for Gil. Note the unspoken (and, actually, unknown to either of them) implication that Gil is slightly addicted to Wooster's "family recipe" tea. This is a cigarette-grade addiction, not a cocaine-grade one, but there nonetheless. It's a slow-rise addiction: someone drinking it just a few times won't notice, but after four years Gil is pretty hooked, and that's made worse by his dreadful state of mind. Wooster himself is also slightly addicted, but has never noticed (he's never been without the stuff) and is unlikely to notice anything over the course of the game unless the GMs decide to do something with it.
Feb. 12, Justin --
Feb. 11, Justin --
- Wrote Dimo, Oggie and Maxim. Yes, they're all pretty similar, different mainly in the details. Added the Jaeger Music, Smell, Jaeger Regeneration, Life Sharing and Heterodyne Life abilities.
- Tweaked the Many Jaegers plot, to make clear the relationship between Jaeger "Life" and the Spark. Tweaked Helen's Brain Transplant special ability to make clear that she is an expert in brain sciences -- this may become relevant if the players want it to. Tweaked Von Pinn to know about this plotlet.
- Added a new wiki markup: anything put in between two carets shows up in red, like this. IMPORTANT: please do that for any comments that need to go into actual game materials like Bluesheets or Character text! I want all of that commentary in red, so we don't accidentally overlook it before we print the sheets. (The next version of the wiki will have first-class threaded comments, so that we don't need to do stuff like this, but that's a ways off yet.)
Feb. 10, Justin --
- Began the great Jaeger project. Wrote the Jaeger Cosmogony. (Which basically started with me musing, "In the beginning, Gott said 'Let there be light'. And it vas too bright." It sort of spiraled out of control from there.) Wrote the first draft of the Jaegerkin bluesheet. Both of these feel slightly off in terms of accent: if someone wanted to go clean that up and try to get it to better match the Jaeger accent in the books, that would be welcome. The Jaegerkin bluesheet may get a significant tweaking yet, but it's a decent start. (The Jaeger Cosmogony I'm happier with.) Note that all of this ties closely into the Many Jaegers plot; I'd noted there what I'm doing here.
- Finished writing Embi.
Feb. 6, Justin --
- Filled in more bits of the Timeline, based on the characters who have been written.
- Wrote Payne, adapting bits liberally from Marie.
Feb. 4, Justin --
- Wrote Marie, and some scattered To Dos that I need to get back to. Started the [Backup Characters]? list, of mini-characters worth writing in case someone gets killed.
Feb. 3, Justin --
Jan. 30, Justin --
Jan. 29, Justin --
Jan. 28, Justin --
- Wrote Z.
- Replaced [Thomas Gunn]? with [Tara Halwes]?. Tom discovered that he had double-booked the weekend, and had to withdraw. Tara confirmed that she is willing to cross-cast, so put her into Tom's role as Z.
- After a busy week, back to work.
Jan. 22, Justin --
Jan 22, Darker --
- Comments on Beetle and Pies.
- Added Anti-Cute to Von Pinn. I could a case being made for her succumbing involuntarily to the cuteness of a child - though even that'd be a stretch given her apparent sternness / tough love for her wards - but of a small fuzzy animal? I'd sooner believe it of DuPree. Justin: Fair enough.
- I laughed my ass off at Othar's "Who you know" section, BTW. :) Justin: thanks!
Jan. 21, Justin --
Jan. 20, Justin --
- Wrote Silas, Othar. (Othar is fun. Note, BTW, that he has a secret Special Ability implicit in his character: he recognizes people by their role in the story, more than he does faces. So his "Who you know" list is intentionally odd: he sees through many of the disguises, but filters the truth through his own distinct lens.)
- Finished writing Beetle, and lots of updates to the Timeline. Man, writing characters takes longer than I'd remembered.
- Added a new twist to Many Jaegers.
Jan. 19, Justin --
- Added the Pies Item/Mechanic, as a minor plot for Marie.
Jan. 16, Justin --
Jan 16, Darker --
Jan. 16, Justin --
Jan. 15, Justin --
- Read Darker's commentary on Combat Mechanic. All of it is good food for thought, and I'm just going to sit on it for now, since it's not on the critical path yet. Also read the Many Jaegers idea, which feels like it's moving in a good direction, but doesn't quite work for me yet; need to keep thinking about that one.
- Replied to Darker's idea in Notes, and introduced the Suspected Revenant placeholder plot in case we want to use it. Also replied in Transformator.
- Finished going through the To Do List, and dealt with almost all of it. Still a bit left, which are genuine open To Dos.
- Noted the ramifications of today's GG page in Payne, who is suddenly looking much more powerful and interesting.
Jan 14, Darker --
- Thought: Given that there is a device in play which can send people Really Way The Heck Out Of Game (how far away is another dimension, anyway? ;), is it worth coming up with a few [backup characters]? / contingencies? They don't need to be fully fleshed out, obviously, but something more than "Clank #1" might be useful. Without them, we either have to go completely seat-of-the-pants if someone wants to leave, or metagame-stonewall players attempting to fix/use the Mirror (which a non-trivial subset of LARPers would find frustrating). Justin: I suspect the best way to address this is through semi-artificial timing constraints if possible -- yes, it's metagame, but it's common enough that people aren't going to be shocked by it. But yes -- having some backup characters in our back pocket would be a good idea, if we can manage it...
- Given that the shapeshifting barrel-o'-monkeys has already been opened, I like the Transformator. :)
Jan. 14, Justin --
- Wrote up the Transformator device, which is how Beetle is doing his shape-changing. Yes, this thing is chaos in a box, but I think it's sufficiently limited to not be too dangerous, aside from introducing yet more possible identity confusion if it gets used beyond Beetle. (Note that the original purpose of this device is to give Krosp a chance to turn people into cats, if he thinks of that, just for sheer humor value.)
- A couple of tweak notes at the bottom of Infinite Agathas, to get the timeline and relationships straight.
Jan 11, Darker --
Jan. 9, Justin --
- Added the Family History plot.
- Going through the [To Do List]?, to see what comes out of it. I'm deleting some old ToDos, and changing others (that I want to keep the notes of, but probably don't need to actively track any more) to OldToDo.
Jan 9, Darker --
- Looked over the various plots. Generally, I like what I see (and am appreciative of the increased potential for conflict :). I do wonder, though, whether players whose favorite thing about the Girl Genius world is the Jaegers are really going to enjoy a "remove the Jaegers from the Girl Genius world" plot; personally, I'd find it a lose-lose proposition, and kind of depressing to boot. Justin: interesting point, and worth thinking about. I definitely want a pan-Jaeger plot that ties into the backstory of where they came from and what their connection to the Heterodynes is, but I'm open to possible alternatives -- we're not committed to this plot yet. (I need something like it structurally, but the plot web is not particularly dependent on the details.)
Jan. 8, Justin --
Jan. 7, Justin --
- Added the Mirror-World plot. This is only written into Mirror-Agatha's character sheet, but could easily touch on many characters, depending on who decides to trust her and listen to her.
- Significant tweaks to Succession, to make it a bit less friendly.
- Small enhancement to Replicators plot.
- Added the Dingbot Studies plot.
- Filled in the Prophecy plot.
- Added the Spies plot.
- Filled in who is in the Brain Transfer plot.
- Added the Brigadoon Effect plot.
- Tweaked the Plots page to be a better cross-reference.
- Main focus today is cleaning up and beefing up the plot web. I'm specifically attempting to attend to Arnis' critique that the game doesn't have enough conflict; I'm setting up more plots to have more head-to-head disagreements, and some more zero-sum situations. I don't have a lot of pure villains in the game (and am not terribly inclined to add more), but it's not hard to put in strong disagreements between people who consider themselves to be of good intent.
Jan. 5, Justin --
- Rough first pass at Combat Mechanic, suitable for commentary.
- Tweaks to Beetle and Silas, to turn the latter into the greatest living expert on Amagog. ToDos in Zulenna, to reflect her swordfighting ability.
Jan. 3 and 4, Justin --
- A couple of comments in [Disguised Characters]?.
- Wrote the rest of the [Casting Letters]?. I plan on sending these out on Sunday, so check for any obvious problems soon, if possible. Probably put any notes in here. Note that the first few paragraphs of each are boilerplate: only the "Your Character" and "Costume Hint" sections vary (as well as the names and email addresses). The format is purely practical: it's designed to make it quick and easy for me to send them out.
Jan. 2, Justin --
- Began writing [Casting Letters]?. Note that the actual content is coming from the individual Character pages, in the new Blurb and Costume properties.
- Enhancing the wiki software to be able to cope with nested queries. Still a little buggy, but I think it's good enough for now.
Jan. 2, Darker --
- Started a collation of [Disguised Characters]? (including shapeshifting, etc)
- Briefly looked at casting (adding Role to the Players list)
Jan. 2, Justin --
Jan. 1, Justin --
- Tweaks to Von Pinn, and a major rewrite of the Runaways plot.
- Replied to Darker's question on Brain Transfer.
- Cast the evening run of the game, having done the morning run yesterday. My brain is dribbling out my ears, but I think it's a decent set of compromises. Tweaked schema to display casting.
Jan 1, Darker --
Dec. 31, Justin --
- Major tweak: realized that, if Dingbot Prime is going to be played by women, then Sarah needs to be rewritten to be male, due to player gender balance.
- Continuing to tighten and adjust. Added the second dimension to Jenka: she is a trusted Wulfenbach servant.
- Main focus of the day is casting. What fun...
Dec. 30, Justin --
- More work in Beetle, Marie. Tweaks to Agathas Jagers, and firming up the Many Jaegers plot.
- Tons of notes flying everywhere. I'm in plot-tightening mode, which means that a lot is changing very rapidly.
Dec. 29, Justin --
- Began writing [Primary Considerations]?, the summary of all of the players, to get a handle on casting.
- Extensive work in Beetle. Suffice it to say, if he's going to be in-game, he needs to be central in order to avoid being irrelevant. Wrote up the history of what's happened since his death, and the core of his plot -- basically, wrote the skeleton of his character sheet. I think I'm now satisfied that he will work.
Dec. 26, Justin --
Dec. 25, Justin --
- Starting to firm up plots, taking a bunch of the random ideas and notes and turning them into formal plot entries. Added Runaways, Succession.
Dec. 24, Justin --
- Still contemplating the exact character balance. Still contemplating having Adam and Lilith in -- it wouldn't be all that hard to write them in with Gil.
- Noted in Annotation Clockwork Princess the precise range of pages where I think we might potentially set the game, and am starting to think concretely about what that means for the various characters.
- Some assorted notes in side-pages like Heterodyne Stories and the current Annotations.
- Back to annotations. The usual scattered notes, especially in Agathas Jagers, Gil, Wooster, Hostage Squad, Adam and Lucrezia. Added fairly sketchy pages for the Sturmhalten characters: Aaronev, Tarvek, Anevka, Vrin, more in Geisterdamen. I currently suspect the game will be set before Sturmhalten, but might as well get through the note-taking, so we have as much information as possible before we write.
- Blew in the next round of player applications. We're getting close to complete, fortunately: about half-a-dozen who haven't signed up yet.
- Sigh: the holidays have not left me with a lot of time to work.
Dec. 20, Justin --
- Added a whole new twist into the Replicators plot, one of those "so crazy it just might work" ideas...
Dec. 19, Justin --
- Mainly focused on Player stuff tonight. Added in the remaining Players who have signed up so far, and composed and sent out a reminder letter to those who haven't.
Dec 17, Darker --
- I like the idea of writing Beetle in, even if it's not canon that he survived; it's the kind of thing that'd crop up in a Heterodyne story, and creates for lots of great "Beetle! You're alive!" roleplaying. He's also a strong Spark who isn't lined up behind any existing faction; the events surrounding his "death" probably have him a bit put out at Wulfenbach. Plus the tension between him and Silas...yeah. I'd say sub Beetle for Mell. Justin: Hmm. Okay, that had been a somewhat idle idea to start with, but I'll take it seriously. It does have a lot of potential, although it would need to be handled with care.
- We're currently looking at having four Jaegers in game. Is it worth perhaps making one or two of them non-canon? I'm thinking that while the four we already know have different personalities, they've all got pretty much the same agenda and perspective, which means they'll tend to all be involved in the same plots in the same ways, and not have much interesting to talk/argue about among themselves; it'll mostly be how they deal with the rest of the world. The "Conflicting orders" notion in Many Jaegers pretty much requires a non-canon Jaeger; the hat rivalry is more believable between Jaegers who haven't worked closely with each other over decades; the "wild Jaegers" are different than (say) Wulfenbach Jaegers (this is called out when Agatha's three ask her to OK Payne's plan for them). IMO, it might be worthwhile emailing the people who listed particular Jaegers and ask if they'd enjoy playing non-canon Jaegers with similar traits (be it "romantic", "goofy", "tactical", or "rides a big bear"). Justin: Interesting observation, although I think there is enough room to play with the existing Jagers to introduce disagreement. Certainly it's easy to have Jenka disagreeing with the other three, and I don't think it would be hard to get those three on different sides. So long as we put the disagreement into the backstory (say, by having Dimo be the first person to discover Mirror-Agatha and have been dragged along in her wake), I think the players would roll with it. The key is that the players are most likely to prefer good-natured disagreement here, since that's most in character for the Jagers -- so it's easy to see them simply deciding that taking different sides is the easiest way to deal with the problem.
Dec. 17, Justin --
- Noticed that we could write Beetle into the game if we really wanted to.
- Went and assigned the new Gender field to all characters, so we can make sure the player/character gender balance matches. Result of that is noting that we would need all of the "neuter" characters to be played by Males. (The actual player balance is 16/11 Male/Female.) Which is fine for Krosp, but would require rewriting Sarah, and would mean that the woman who asked for Dingbot Prime couldn't play it. This may suggest dropping, eg, Mell in favor of a Male character. I am seeking opinions of which might be better to include, Khrizhan or Abner.
- Did a fast slash-and-burn pass through the characters, giving tentative assignments of who is in game; that is now reflected in Character Potential. This isn't hard and fast yet. I could easily see pulling Pix and Abner if we wanted a good romance plot, or maybe Adam and Lilith, who are interesting (but not well-connected) characters. But this seems like a reasonable tenative list. Opinions are solicited.
- Finished the inventory of characters that we have so far, rating each one in Character Potential. Approaching the point of being ready to choose who's in.
Dec. 13, Arnis--
Dec. 12, Justin --
- Adding the "Potential" column to the Character pages, to start figuring out which ones have how much potential to run in the game, and started filling that in. Values are Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor and Out. The PotentialNotes field is for discussing the rationale of those ratings. The summary can be found on Character Potential.
- In a mood for meta-work tonight. Created [Casting Thoughts]?.
- Responded to Wulfenbach Interests.
Dec 12, Darker --
Dec. 12, Justin --
Dec. 10, Justin --
- The usual scattered minor notes, particularly on Agathas Jagers (collectively and individually) and the major Circus characters. As I get up to Moxana's real introduction, more thoughts on her and how she might play into the plots as an NPC, as well as how her backstory interacts with Amagog's.
- Fixed the wiki so that double-click doesn't try to edit if you're already editing.
- Inputting the responses to yesterday's email. One interesting complication: we have a lot more serious Narbonic fans in the morning run than the evening one.
Dec. 9, Justin --
- Sent an email to the players who have signed up so far, asking for corrections to the "noncanon" and "narbonic" questions, since it turns out that they were broken on the casting form.
- The usual random minor notes. Not as many significant additions: I're getting late enough (volume 5) that there just isn't as much to add at this point, especially since I'm intentionally avoiding the Other plot as much as possible.
- Responded to Darker's comments from yesterday.
Dec 8, Darker --
Dec. 7, Justin --
- Note in [General To Do]? that we need to do something with the code wheels. (Thanks to Ellen Endress for reminding me.)
- Blew in the Players who have submitted their casting applications. Added a "Note" property to the PlayerTemplate?, so if you add a Note property to a Player page, it will show up. This is intended for us to discuss casting over the next month. First off-the-cuff observation: my foundational assumption that everyone wants to play Agatha was incorrect. Everyone wants to play Jagers, instead. This may affect some decisions about which characters go in.
- The usual mess of random comments. Interesting ones in Agathas Jagers. A few in Othar, notably the observation of how well he really understands Agatha.
- Responded to Darker's comments in Plot Brainstorming.
Dec 5, Darker --
Dec. 5, Justin --
Dec. 4, Arnis, havign just noticed this page --
Dec. 3, Justin --
- LATE NIGHT: Added the notion of Embi having been fictionalized into one of the Heterodyne Stories. Added the Circus Arrested plot. Introduced the notion that Gil et al are traveling incognito. More notes on Artie's shape-shifting power.
- Started keeping track of Heterodyne Stories, which I really should have been doing all along.
- Responded to Arnis' note in Agatha.
- Continuing to fill in details on the various Circus characters. Added very minor characters Circus Cook, Yeti, Augie, Wanda.
Dec. 2, Justin --
- Lots of minor notes in various pages, notable Krosp.
- A bunch of notes in Zeetha: Klaus speaking her language, her status as a Main Character, her stealthiness, her combat philosophy, etc.
- Filled in a bunch more of the semi-minor Circus characters, largely from the [Cast List]: Thundering Engine Woman, Aedith, Rivet, Lars, Marie, Andre, Moonsock, Embi, Moxana. Also a few more notes on the Circus itself.
- Responded to Darker's notes listed below.
- After a couple of lazy days, back to work.
Nov 29, Darker --
- Thoughts on the mirror-plotline in Helen
- A few more notes on Klaus
- And a question in [Wiki Tech]?
Nov. 28, Justin --
- Tweaked Moloch (to note where we last saw him).
- Some notes on Klaus and Lucrezia, as I begin to understand their backstory better.
Nov. 27, Justin --
Nov. 26, Justin --
- Starting with the Circus. Added Balthazar, Trish, Abner.
- Tweaked ProWiki codebase so that double-click on a page kicks you into edit mode. (A feature of FlexWiki that I'm fond of.)
- Various personality observations about Krosp.
- Minor notes scattered around.
- Observation in Spark Nature about Sparks and violence; also, noted same in Agatha.
- Starting in on Book Four -- kicked off Annotation Circus of Dreams for it.
Nov. 25, Justin --
Nov. 24, Justin --
- Added the idea of Adam's weaponized voice.
- Added the Prophecy plot idea. Added a bit to Amagog, especially the concept of his diary and the hiding of the Castle.
- Relatively interesting notes on Von Pinn (and her relationship to the Hostage Squad), and Zulenna (who is clearly a revived corpse at this point, which demands to be a plot).
- More scattered randomness. Note that I've hit the interstice, where the pages aren't available online, so I'm having to do footnotes by page number in the collected edition instead.
Nov. 23, Justin --
- Replies to much of Darker's round from yesterday. (Short day, for Thanksgiving.)
Nov. 22, Darker --
Nov. 22, Justin --
- Lots of minor annotations to a variety of characters, but nothing terribly important.
- Introduced the question of whether Klaus is in the game.
Nov. 21, Justin --
- Read through all of Darker's notes listed below, and added additional commentary on most of them.
- Added the Construct Rights plot, mainly for Artie but potentially tying into all Constructs. This one's fluffy, but could be fun.
Nov. 20, Darker --
Nov. 19, Justin --
Nov. 18, Justin --
Nov. 17, Justin --
Nov. 14, Justin --
- Added Dimitri.
- Some mild enhancements to Moloch.
- I'm seriously reconsidering some of the details around the Infinite Agathas plot. I like the basic concept, but so far I'm coming up cold on some of the bits. For instance, I'm not sure that the Circus adds enough plot oomph to be worth the people: it has a lot of minor characters, but not enough interesting ones. And it may be foolish to assert that it's been weeks since the Mirror of Amagog incident -- that gives too much time for information to percolate out. Might be better if it's been just a few days, or possibly even a day, so that people are still feeling their way around each other. (Countering that: need to make sure that the Narbonic characters have enough ties to others to work.)
Nov. 12, Justin --
- Began filling in Krosp.
- Responded to Darker's comments in Agatha; introduced the possibility that Agatha and Maria might be the same person.
- Added the possibility that Agatha's Spark is limited to Dingbots and repairing/improving other peoples' devices.
- Wrote up The Dragon From Mars in Annotation Short Stories. IMO, this story is enormously important to continuity -- my guess is that it is a highly-garbled version of what really happened at the end of the last war. (Theo's protestations of having made the whole thing up aside.)
- Added Itto -- probably not in-game, but possible. In general, continued to flesh out the Hostage Squad a bit.
- Added Othar. Damned if I know yet what I'm going to do with him, but he simply has to be in the game.
- More assorted observations about the Jagers.