Wing Commander RPG

Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

My log looks pretty paltry as far as this past week's activities are concerned. I mainly divided my days between working on encounters in Elegy Chapter 2.2 and working on the prologue and epilogue of that same chapter, with work progressing on the dialogue of the prologue and on the narrative of the epilogue each day. On Monday, I began making SI calculations for encounter tables in the T'kon and Orestes encounters. I discovered that, based on the potential force projection of the player group and the disposition of hostile forces for the T'kon encounter, a table wasn't necessary - I was able to set the enemy fighter force at 3 Claymore fighter-bombers for pretty all but the weakest combination of fighters the players have available to them. Work on calculations for the Orestes encounter was completed on Tuesday (which I largely lost work-wise due to a family emergency) and the table itself was posted on Wednesday, rounding out work on the Orestes encounter. I also worked on the Problems sub-section of the T'kon Meth encounter that same day, starting to flesh out the notes I'd generated for that encounter during the previous week. On Thursday, I worked on the Setup sub-section of the Valgard encounter and was able to finish that up, though it took longer than I originally intended due to the need to re-check some notes (the fact that there is no direct jump line between Valgard and Pasqual offered up a logical problem for which I had to come up with a quick and reasonable solution). I made the decision to turn the Valgard encounter into a "running fight", where the encounter spans the entire route through the system, and which will necessitate a re-calculation of the transit distance (again) in the Kabla Meth encounter for the approach from Qua'lat/Valgard/Vigrid, work that I'll attend to this coming week. Friday was devoted solely to work on the prologue and epilogue, and a few notes were moved from Chapter 2.2 into Chapter 2.3 on Friday as well.

My Plan for this week is to continue work on Chapter 2.2. Work on 2.2 as a whole is progressing much more quickly than I'd originally anticipated and it gives me some hope that I might finish work on Elegy sometime during the next decade (which, pessimistic as that may sound, is a far better estimate for completion than the thirty-year estimate I made just a few weeks ago). Work on the epilogue is coming along rapidly, and if all goes according to plan I foresee finishing work on the narrative this coming week. I'll have more text to translate after that, a task that I generally look forward to. I still have plans to build a VASSAL space encounter utility (I have yet to take the time to find a 3D modeller to design craft, which I'd then use to generate silhouettes for this purpose), slicing work still needs to happen on the Kabla Meth and K'nag Rha encounters, I still need to work on the details of the Demon's Eye base and I need to get back to work on the Drayman-II deckplans for Chapter 2.4. All in all, things are pretty busy at the moment and my to-do list is growing ever longer. I hope to find more time to work on the campaign in the near future.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z next Monday, June 27th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

Work continued this past week on Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy Campaign. On Monday, I did a re-calculation of the time, distance and engine repair estimates for the Valgard and Kabla Meth encounters, which was necessary accounting for the changes to the Valgard encounter that I mentioned in last week's update. Work continued on the Problems sub-section of the Valgard encounter over the next two days and largely involved deciding on the structure of the running fight that takes place there. The encounter will rely on the pseudo-random encounter generation routine already built into the campaign setting, and largely what I needed to do was figure out what would take place given each possible individual encounter, while accounting for the possibilities of failure and success in the previous encounter. Work is not done on the Valgard encounter just yet - there's still the final part of the running fight to handle, the part that might involve a reasonably large fight against Confederation forces in the event of utter failure up to that point. The rest of my week was spent working on the mission epilogue, a scene largely focused on Nagkilin's foul-mouthed and humorous attempt at getting the group access to the Rah K'rakh pirate base in the K'nag Rha system. The narrative was completed on Tuesday, and translation work took up the rest of my week, with the syntactic reviews of the 26 blocks of text that make up the epilogue completed by Thursday and bonafide translation work taking place over the next two days. As of this morning, seven blocks are completely translated. The remaining nineteen blocks have been "partially translated" - the translation work there is complete except for those terms that don't have corresponding entries in the lexicon table. I'll need to generate a total of 51 new reverse terms to finish the translation work, including words for "funny", "rosette", "airlock" and "plastic". The process of generating those terms began on Friday; I've reviewed the existing literature for prior use of the terms, looked for general meanings in the Simple English and found common terms in a thesaurus, so the process is pretty far along. I have yet to fully complete the thesaurus step, which involves looking for synonyms in the existing lexicon to see if a term can be re-purposed. I already have six new terms and fifteen re-purposed terms from work done on Friday and from a little bit of work that took place yesterday afternoon. I'll be completing the process for the remaining terms today, and I anticipate having the translation work of the epilogue completed before the day is out.

The Plan for this week is to continue work on Chapter 2.2. The epilogue is my top priority, and then it'll be back to work on the mission prologue and mission details. The second scene of the prologue is still giving me headaches; I'm still working on dialogue there and have yet to complete work on all the topics that will be discussed in the meeting going on in that scene. It's coming along, though, and if I can stay focused I might be able to begin working on narrative this week. I have yet to write narrative for the first scene of the prologue and I may decide to work on that instead, just so that it'll feel like progress is being made there. There are four encounters left to complete in the mission details - T'kon Meth, Valgard, Kabla Meth and K'nag Rha. I finally have an idea for what will happen at K'nag Rha, and if it goes like I intend then it'll help to heighten the eventual animosity that develops between the Demon's Eye Pack and the Morgan pirate clan. I still need to flesh out the details of the T'kon Meth encounter, though that's just a matter of doing some typing at this point, Valgard is nearing completion, and I now have an idea of what will happen both in Kabla Meth and at K'nag Rha; I anticipate being able to knock out the K'nag Rha encounter pretty quickly. On top of all that, there's still my checklist to attend to - building a space encounter utility, work on the details of the Demon's Eye base and deckplans for a Drayman-II transport, all of which will need to be completed before work comes to a close on Chapter Two.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. Since next week is Independence Day here in the States, I will be skipping next week's update; the next update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, July 11th. Y'all have a pleasant couple of weeks and a happy Fourth.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. Typing this one up this morning on account of being out of town all of this past weekend, so I'll have to try and keep it short. This is also the first update in the past two weeks, so that job's going to be all the more difficult as likely as not...

Work continued in Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign these last two weeks. As I indicated in the last update, my initial focus was on the translation work of that chapter's epilogue, and as I had anticipated I was able to complete that work later that same day. A total of 21 new terms were generated and 38 were re-purposed for the 26 text blocks that comprise the epilogue, and once again thanks to thesaurus bloat that wound up corresponding to 141 reverse terms. I was able to add those terms to the lexicon tables before the day was out on the 27th. From the 28th onward, my focus was on the encounters in the chapter, work on the narrative of the first scene of the prologue and work on the dialogue of the second scene of the prologue. SI calculations took place for the final portion of the Valgard encounter on the 28th, and similar calculations were made for the encounter at K'nag Rha on the 29th. Significant re-writes to the K'nag Rha encounter (required due to plot slicing for that encounter, which I alluded to in the last update) also took place on the 29th. The SI table for the Orestes encounter was re-worked on the 30th, and I also filled in specifics of the Valgard encounter that day. On July 1st, I was able to complete all remaining work on the Valgard and K'nag Rha encounters. Work continued on the the Kabla Meth encounter this past Tuesday after the break for Independence Day, and after taking a bit of a break, work continued there this past Friday. As of this morning, work on the encounters in Chapter 2.2 is complete except for the specific details of the T'kon Meth and Kabla Meth encounters, both of which I hope to be able to attend to during this coming week. I'm still not entirely set on how tough I want the Kabla Meth's climatic encounter to be, but considering what the players may have to face in Valgard, it's liable to have to be a doosie...

One of the items that's been on my to-do list for a while now has been to finish generating images for the various craft that are in Chapter 7.2. This always has been something on the back burner, largely because several of those craft are brand new designs that have never appeared anywhere else. After CIC member DefianceIndustries posted a model of the Martina Nostra Razor a few weeks ago, though, I approached him about designing a "kitbash" for the other three Martina Nostra designs slated to appear in Elegy, namely the Dirk, the Falchion and the Claymore, all three of which will be needed if - as I've also talked about recently - I go ahead with plans to build a space encounter map generator. He said he'd be willing to help me out with the understanding that while a kitbash would be easy to do, new designs would take longer. Those were terms I was comfortable with, so on the 30th, I sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil and began sketching the designs for those ships, work that was wrapped up during the Independence Day break. I'm pretty excited about getting DefianceIndustries help with the Martina Nostra ships; he's done some pretty amazing work for the Homeworld Remastered Mod, and his Razor is downright gorgeous. The work on these ships also inspired me to do some 3D modelling work of my own, in this case on the Drayman-III model, again a new design specifically for Elegy. It's been a very long time since I've done any kind of 3D modelling work, and the modeller I prefer to use is at least 20 years old at this point. It's still a good piece of software - the only issues it has these days have to do with the unusual features of unicode fonts, which are easily bypassed by temporarily uninstalling them. I had forgotten how time consuming modelling work was, and how much I enjoyed doing it. I do think that my model still has a bit of a "juvenile" quality to it, but I've defered that opinion to the CIC crowd. I have yet to receive feedback on it; hopefully soon.

I mentioned some administrative tasks taking place these last few weeks. I spent time on July 1st adding categorical listings to each of Elegy's pages on the wiki, something I'd been needing to do for some time. Mainly that was done for the sake of my mobile users, assuming there are any out there other than myself; I've had issues getting to some of the individual pages from the wiki's top navigation of late, and this provides folks with another way of navigational access. I also updated my to-do list in the game's Index; it'd had been building up for a while now, and I felt the time was right to get the full list of things to do back out where folks could see it again, especially given that it's what I intended to do with the Index page until I have something more substantial to put in there (in another 25 years or so). I've been updating the Index page fairly consistently these last few days as things have been buttoned up.

One final thing that happened this week was some preliminary work on Chapter 5.4, the final chapter of the campaign. I don't know why I did that; I suppose I felt the need for a change of pace, and having thought about some items to add to the end of the story I decided to drop in a template and work out the ideas I had for the campaign's final mission. I realized that my initial idea - Ni'Rakh ultimately being attacked by the Nephilim in H'rekkah at the same time Bloodeye is executed - wouldn't work, since Bloodeye's execution takes place four days before the initial signs of the Nephilim incursion are detected according to Waypoint!. I'm going to have to come up with some adjustments to the structure of the chapter if I still want to do my final idea for it, which is to try to kill off the players in a final desperate fight against the Bugs. I'll probably go back to my initial idea, which is to have the story officially end with Chapter 5.3 and to have 5.4 as a bonus "epilogue" mission. A dark ending, to be sure - but then that's always been my intention...

My Plan for this week is to continue work in Chapter 2.2. I still have the T'kon Meth and Kabla Meth encounters to finish and work is continuing on the prologue as fast as I can manage it - which is not really fast enough given that in all likelihood that'll all I'll have left to do there by the end of this coming week. I'm finally coming back around to where I need to work on the details of the Demon's Eye Base again for Chapter 2.3, and if I get stuck with a case of writer's block after the encounters are buttoned up, I'll probably work on that in all likelihood. I have considered adding sub-categories for the Main Plot and Side Plot sections of Chapters 2-5, but I'm not sold on the need to do so just yet.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. the next update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, July 18th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

Work continued this past week on Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign, with a concerted effort underway to attempt to complete the two remaining encounters in the Chapter (the ones at Kabla Meth and T'kon Meth). On Monday, I performed the necessary SI calculations for both parts of the Kabla Meth encounter and filled out the encounter tables. Some plot slicing took place on Tuesday with the T'kon Meth encounter to help explain the circumstances of the lone transport that Bloodeye's crew encounters there. I had one of those times when I felt up for a change of pace on Tuesday, and wound up spending my afternoon break working on the prologue of Chapter 2.3, chunking up the plot elements there into a trio of scenes and working on the dialogue of the second one. Work on the T'kon Meth encounter continued on Wednesday; I'm still trying to figure how the transport's captain will react when he finds out he's dealing with pirates and how the players will have to go about enlisting his help. It's meant as a role-playing encounter, so a series of Skill Checks are likely going to be in order there. On Thursday, which was my last working day this week due to some family matters I had to attend to on Friday, I made a valiant effort to conclude work on the Kabla Meth encounter, filling in the remaining details of both parts of the encounter there. I wasn't successful - I still need to fill in the behaviors of the Border Worlds and piratical forces in the final climactic conflict there, but I do anticipate being able to finish that work later this coming week. While this was all going on, I continued to make steady progress working on the first scene of the Chapter's prologue. I've just about concluded my efforts there; I still need to write a bit of text to segue between the end of Mo and Qith'rakoth's introduction and the introduction of Qith'raklerx. If I have any amount of mediocre luck whatsoever, I anticipate finishing that up later today. I have yet to determine if I will begin translation of that scene now or if I'll wait until the second scene is ready (perhaps, not surprisingly, I am leaning towards now, but I see some utility in letting my creating consultant hear what's been written first.)

My Plan for this week is to continue plugging away at Chapter 2.2. The encounters are very nearly done at this point, and I hope to wrap them and the first scene of the prologue up this week. The big thing left to do in 2.2 is the second scene of the prologue, where Bloodeye and his crew meet to see what all has been happening since the theft of Ni'Rakh and discuss what they'll do next. That scene already has a lot of dialogue in it and I'm trying to decide if any of it needs to be pared down (i.e. if there are any parts of it that don't advance the plot). I will be in a position late in the week where I'll have more free time on my hands than usual, so I may get some work done there if I get everything else wrapped up. If I go into translation of the first scene, it will probably have priority over anything new plot-wise.

Before I wrap things up today, I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to the mighty Bandit LOAF, who (for my Twitter and Facebook followers who probably haven't heard already) has been ill enough of late to warrant a hospital stay. Best wishes and get well soon.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. Next Monday, I will be observing my 13th wedding anniversary, so I will be skipping next week's update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, August 1st. Y'all have a pleasant fortnight.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

Work these past two weeks continued in Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign. As I had anticipated and mentioned in the previous update, work on the Kabla Meth encounter wrapped up on Monday the 18th, as was work on the narrative of the first scene of the chapter's prologue. Work shifted to the dialogue of the second scene of the prologue over the next two days, with that seeing primary completion by the close of the day on the 20th. I also continued work on the Problems sub-section of the T'kon Meth encounter - the last piece of work needed in the actual Mission portion of the Chapter - on those same days. I was out of town beginning on the 21st (the "position late in the week where I'll have more free time on my hands than usual") mentioned in the previous update. Unfortunately, my time away was not as productive as I hoped, largely owing to Internet connectivity issues where I was. In retrospect I could've taken some time to do some off-line work on things such as ship designs and battle maps, and I'm kicking myself for not doing that sort of thing - I definitely had the time to tend to those kinds of matters. I did discuss the issues I was having with wrapping up work on the T'kon Meth encounter with my creative consultant, and she was able to give me some ideas that I was able to incorporate into the encounter when I was finally able to return to work on WCRPG this past Wednesday. I'm happy to report that, as of this morning, work on the Mission portion of Chapter 2.2 has reached a conclusion, leaving the completion of the chapter's prologue narrative and its eventual translation as the only pieces of work remaining. Work on the narrative continued throughout the rest of this past week. There are some pretty good-sized holes in the narrative as it stands this morning, but in general I've made it as far as the group's initial discussion as to where they plan on going next (which will ultimately be the Knag Rha system). I have been giving some thought to the story portion of the next Chapter, and during the latter part of this past week I decided I should go ahead and write down some of what I was thinking, particularly the specific scenes of dialogue that were popping into my mind. I hadn't done that in the previous two chapters and there were some bits and pieces of dialogue that I wound up not incorporating into the story as a result because I didn't remember them later on, so the hope in writing this stuff down was to make sure the same thing didn't happen again.

My Plan for this week is to continue in Chapter 2.2 with work on the narrative of the second scene of the prologue. I do want to go ahead and run the story by my creative consultant once the narrative is complete just to see how it sounds, but I'm also anxious to get started on the translation work. Work on 2.2 has been ongoing since late April apparently (at least according to my log), with work in earnest going on since June 3rd. I'm happy with how fast this Chapter has progressed, but I'm also looking forward to getting started in earnest on Chapter 2.3, where Bloodeye's group is supposed to set up shop at Demon's Eye. I am struggling as to where to go story-wise after that Chapter is completed, but that's an issue that can wait until I get there. If as much goes down in 2.3 as I think it will, I'll probably be working on that chapter for quite some time.

I also noted in my logs that the fifth anniversary of the founding of the WCRPG Wiki was on July 23rd. Here's to five years of the WCRPG project; I'm looking forward to the next five.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, August 8th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

I don't have too much to report to y'all this week, though there is some good news. Most of my week was in Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign, where my efforts to work on the narrative of the prologue continued. The first four log entries in the week are pretty much identical - "worked on prologue scene two narrative" - and I will say that logging that effort was pretty easy to accomplish (not that it's ever particularly difficult). I am pleased to report that I was able to wrap up work on the prologue on Thursday, which just leaves the translation of the narrative into the Kilrathi language to do in Chapter 2.2. I am debating as to whether or not I want to have my creative consultant give the text a once over prior to translation, just in case I need to make significant edits. Translation work will eventually transpire as it has in the past, with an initial pass to get the correct syntactic structure down prior to the transposition of terms (i.e. "syntactic reviews" followed by "translation"). I have yet to count the number of text blocks involved in the prologue but I imagine it will be comparable to the prologue of the previous chapter, which was somewhere around a hundred text blocks or so. Some work took place on Chapter 2.3 during the course of the week as well, with work on the dialogue of the last of the three planned scenes in that Chapter's prologue done on Monday. I didn't make too much progress there, but now that my focus is about to shift into that Chapter I anticipate more work happening there in the near future. I also spent a fair amount of the day on Friday beginning the plot slicing effort of the planned mission there and gathering notes on the Demon's Eye base.

My Plan for this week is to begin the effort to translate the prologue in Chapter 2.2 and to start work on Chapter 2.3. After months of putting it off, I'm finally back to the point where I need to begin filling in the details of the Demon's Eye base, starting with the completion of the base's desired statistics and details regarding the base's layout. That information in turn will be used to fill in the specifics of the mission in Chapter 2.3, where the players will be tasked with taking over the base. My plans for the chapter, in all honesty, aren't terribly well formed and I may find myself in the position where, as I get into things, I'll need to spend some time doing behind the scenes work. I don't necessarily like weeks like those; while they're necessary, I do like y'all being able to see the progress that I'm making as I go along. Battle maps in particular will probably take some time to complete, especially given that I'm once again dealing with a Kilrathi structure (which in turn means planning for a triangular grid) and given the aforementioned fact that I haven't got a good plan for that Chapter just yet. Hopefully I'll be able to work through those difficulties quickly.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, August 15th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. Got majorly distracted at work this morning; my apologies for this one being late. I also had to type this one up this morning, so it's short...

I once again don't have a great deal to report to y'all this morning. I started another side project this past week, and as usual it has cut into the amount of available time I have to work on Elegy. Ordinarily such projects are over pretty quickly and not much happens with them, but this one I imagine will take some time, so the pickin's are going to be slim for at least the next week or two. The potential is there for money at the end of it, so it has my attention. Most of my working week was spent beginning the effort to translate the prologue of Chapter 2.2, the last piece of work that needs to take place in that Chapter. On Tuesday I began by counting the number of text blocks I need to translate - there are 156 blocks of text to translate for the whole of the prologue in Chapter 2.2, which makes it about one-and-a-half-times larger than the prologue of Chapter 2.1, and as with the earlier translation work there's a lot of variance in the size of those blocks. I suppose it would be more accurate for me to get a word count; that may be something I do as the week progresses. The rest of the week was spent on reviewing the text blocks and determining the sentence structure required for the translation work. A total of 25 syntactic reviews were completed over that period. And that's all I have to report to y'all this morning...

My Plan for this week is to continue the effort to translate the prologue in Chapter 2.2, and maybe get started on Chapter 2.3. Between changes in when I take my daily constitutional and the side project, I'm down to one break per day during which I can work on Elegy. I will be endeavoring to finish up my side project as fast as I can so I can get back to devoting myself to Elegy ASAP. I still need to finish building the Demon's Eye base statistics and begin mocking up battle maps, and I still have a good deal of plot slicing work to do as I progress into the next Chapter.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, August 22nd. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Going to go ahead and skip this coming week's update - that side project I mentioned has taken center stage, on account of the fact I have a bit of a deadline I'm working against that's coming up pretty fast, and as a result I have spent no time working on Elegy this past week. Next update is now scheduled for between 11-14Z on Monday, August 29th, and I can't guarantee that I won't be pushing it back even farther...
 
Hey y'all. No WCRPG Update again today. On the plus side, my side project's at a stopping spot so there WILL be one next week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. My apologies for the posting this as late in the day as I am - it's a holiday here in the States; I slept in...

Well, as those of you who follow my updates are no doubt aware, I haven't given y'all an update for three weeks (and to be completely honest with y'all, if that weren't the case, I'd skipping the one today). The main reason for the extended hiatus is because during the period from August 15th through August 28th, I was not working on Elegy at all. Instead, I was building the initial prototype of a deck-building card game. A local board game cafe holds a Game Developer Day on the final Sunday of each month, and I wanted to have my prototype in a state where it would be playable for that event in the month of August. I chose what is probably the cheapest and yet most stressful method of building a card game prototype - to bisect index cards and create them in hand using pencil. The final product is easily editable, but I honestly can't recommend it to any aspiring game makers, particularly those of you who, like me, have been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. I did get some good feedback on the prototype and I will be taking some time in the coming month to revise the prototype based on that feedback, but I'm confident that it won't cause as much of a hiatus on the ongoing work on the Elegy project as did this initial prototype construction.

The DBG? It's not even science-fiction; it's about farming. Insert in-universe joke about a fighter pilot trying to become a farmer here.

This past week, with Game Developer Day behind me for another month, I turned my attention back to work on the Elegy campaign. My focus for the week was on the prologue of Chapter 2.2. If y'all will recall, I was in the process of translating the written text into the Kilrathi language, the last bit of work that needed to take place in that Chapter. I had a rough time getting back into the swing of things on Monday. To help, I decided to do some partial translations of the text using blocks that had been reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I think it helped, though in just my afternoon session alone on Monday I identified another twenty reverse terms that needed adding to the lexicon. In fairness, these included some terms such as 'antechamber', 'flight deck' and 'autopilot', concepts I haven't used in the story up to this point. A similar session occurred on Thursday, where the need arose for such words as 'pressure', 'overhead', 'destination' and 'deadpan'. In total, eighteen new terms were generated for the Kilrathi lexicon this past week with twenty terms re-purposed, corresponding to seventy reverse terms. All of these are scheduled to be added to the lexicon when I return to work on Elegy tomorrow. The rest of my time was spent on syntactic reviews of the text. I completed six such reviews on Monday, eleven on Tuesday and ten on Wednesday, which left just one block of text left to do in the first scene of the prologue. I forgot later in the week to do a syntactic review for this single text block, with the end result that I can't say all the reviews are done for the first scene of the prologue this morning. The remaining block segues from the introduction of the characters of Mo and Qith'rakoth to the character of Qith'raklerx and is nine sentences long, with much of that describing the garb of a Sivaran priestess (which was mainly for the sake of those who never played Secret Missions 2) and giving a physical description of the character of Qith'raklerx. She's the only character of which I've given a specific description in the text so far and I'm still not convinced it's the best of ideas given that she's meant to be a player character, but I'm hesitant to change up the text at this point. Another ten blocks in the second scene were reviewed on Thursday, and two blocks were reviewed on Friday. Friday's apparent lack of progress can be attributed to the size of the text blocks involved and what was going on in them - a lot of describing the conference arena, who was there, where they were sitting and how they appeared to Bloodeye. As of this morning, seven blocks of translation are complete in Chapter 2.2 with syntactic reviews completed for fifty two other text blocks. Another 96 text blocks have yet to see any work, so I definitely will be working in this Chapter for the next several weeks at least.

My Plan for the coming week is to continue the translation work in Chapter 2.2. I still have Chapter 2.3 on my radar, and I still have the same set of tasks to do there - finish building the Demon's Eye base statistics, begin mocking up battle maps, and slicing the Chapter's plot some more. I don't anticipate getting into Chapter 2.3 this coming week, but it's possible. I will be making a rather significant transition at my workplace over the course of this coming month; by the first of next month, I should still be an employee of the University of Oklahoma Libraries but I will - after eleven years - no longer be working regularly at Bizzell Memorial Library on the main University campus. Let's just say "that's progress for you" and leave it at that. During the transitional period I may find myself with additional amounts of free time on my hands as my regular work is placed on hiatus and the process of moving my office begins. If so, I hope to be able to use some of that time to work on Elegy. Cross my fingers that the moving process won't cut into the time instead...

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, September 12th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

This past week was pretty short as far as Elegy was concerned owing to the Labor Day holiday as well as this past Friday, which I spent making revisions to the side project responsible for the most recent hiatus on WCRPG Updates. During the three days I spent working on the campaign this past week, my focus was on the ongoing translation effort in Chapter 2.2. On Tuesday, I completed the syntactic review for the final remaining block of text of the prologue's first scene, so all that remains with that scene is the actual translation. A total of three blocks of text were translated that same day and partial translations took place on five more blocks. On Wednesday and Thursday, a total of 22 syntactic reviews were completed in the second scene of the prologue. Another three blocks were translated on Thursday with six more partials that same day. I also spent some time each day working on preparing to add newly generated terms to the Kilrathi lexicon. I have 32 new reverse terms to add to the lexicon, which as of this morning are complete through the thesaurus step. All that means is that I've reviewed the existing translations for the terms and have used a thesaurus to find similar terms; the next thing to do is to see if the synonym exists in the lexicon, re-purpose any synonyms discovered to mean the new term as well, and generate new terms for any concept not in the lexicon. I hope to have the new terms in the lexicon later today so that I can complete the partial translations already in progress. As of this morning, thirteen blocks of translation have been completed in the Chapter 2.2 prologue with 12 partials in progress and 57 syntactic reviews complete. Officially, another 73 blocks of text have seen no work as yet, though I have reason to suspect that figure is off (I caught myself adding to the count of the number of text blocks to do at least once this past week).

A couple of things happened with the lexicon itself this past week. First, there is now an "official" proper order in which adjectives are supposed to appear; since the Kilrathi rules are based on English rules for the order of adjectives, I'm reasonably certain that I've really been following the new rules all along. The other major change is one that I know I haven't been following, and that's the inclusion of Kilrathi prefixes to correspond to certain English suffixes such as -able and -ness. Officially, the existing rule (that such modifiers do not exist) will still stand as gramatically correct, but I will have the terms there for future use. It's really just making official certain compunds I've been using with certain words (most notably the use of h'in- = can for the -able/-ible suffix).

My Plan for this week is to continue in Chapter 2.2. I plan to get the terms from this week's translations into the lexicon later today, and then I'll finish up the partials currently in progress before proceeding with any new work. As mentioned, I could stand to re-count the text blocks and see if my figures are correct; that's an administrative sort of thing, though. Chapter 2.3 is still on my horizon - and to remind myself, mainly, I need to finish building the Demon's Eye base statistics, begin mocking up battle maps, and slice the Chapter's plot some more. The packing process begins this week at my workplace, so I'm hoping I still have the necessary equipment (read: a workstation) long enough to get some significant work done on the campaign. I will also be continuing to make revisions to my side project; I don't anticipate that eating up too much of my time this coming week.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. Assuming I still have access to a network-connected computer, the next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, September 19th. If it looks like I won't, I'll be sure to mention it. Anyways, y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. Typing this one up this morning, so it's liable to be short.

This past week saw the continuation of the effort to translate the prologue of Elegy Chapter 2.2 into the Kilrathi language, the final piece of work that needs to take place in that chapter before I can move on to Chapter 2.3. I had a pretty nice little system going on wherein I would perform the actual translation work during my lunch break and then proceed with new syntactic reviews during my afternoon break, and I'm liable to continue this process during the coming week. In all, a total of seventeen blocks of text were completely translated, with another 28 blocks seeing at least "partial translation" status wherein new terms had to be developed for the lexicon (and several of which were completed as the week progressed). As of this morning, all of the text blocks in the first scene have at least partial translation status except for one, the one where (once again) I segue into the introduction of the character of Qith'raklerx. A fairly massive number of new terms were generated as a result of the translation effort this past week; my count as of this morning is 26 new terms and 28 terms re-purposed corresponding to 133 reverse terms, and another 50 terms pending on top of that. In all the translation work is sitting at 39 blocks done with 18 in progress and 57 syntactic reviews complete. Another 42 text blocks have seen no work at all up to this point, which is just under one-third of the total number text blocks present in the Chapter 2.2 prologue in total. All told, things are still progressing at a fairly steady pace.

The Plan for this week is to continue the translation work in Chapter 2.2. I need to begin my week by finishing up the terms generated during the previous week; the list is getting pretty unwieldy at this point and the sooner I can make those terms "official" the better. I am in pretty good shape to complete work on the first scene of the prologue this week if all goes well and I can find the time to do everything that needs to be done. 2.3 is still on my radar, and (once again) I need to finish building the Demon's Eye base statistics, begin mocking up battle maps, and slice the Chapter's plot some more. This week is going to be the big moving week at my workplace, and I'm still hopeful that I'll have the capability of working on Elegy while the moving process is going on. I should until the late week, when the IT guys are scheduled to come and take my computer away; after that it'll be a matter of being lucky enough to find an open public terminal upstairs...

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, September 26th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

Not much of anything new to report to y'all this week. I'm still translating the prologue in Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign, and I wound up having a couple of significant distractions as the week went by (largely due to the re-location of my workplace but also due to the impromptu translation of the opening scenes of Wing Commander II, which was posted to the CIC forums late last week). For the week, I wound up completing ten blocks of text in their entirety and partially translating another six, mostly in the first of the two scenes of the prologue. At this point, all of the blocks in that initial scene are at least partially translated and just need the generation of the specific missing terms in the lexicon to wrap up. Another eleven syntactic reviews took place as well. As of this morning, 49 of the 156 text blocks in the prologue have been completely translated, with another 17 blocks partially translated and another 50 blocks having completed syntactic reviews. A total of forty blocks even have yet to see any work. I'd give y'all a count on the new and re-purposed terms for the week, except that I have been very lax about getting the terms from these last couple of weeks into the lexicon and the translation effort for the current chapter has proven that the lexicon was not as robust as I had thought it was. I'll probably need to make a major effort during the coming week to get the new terms in; the list was pretty unwieldy last week, so y'all might be able to imagine how things are standing now...

The Plan for this week is to continue the translation effort in Chapter 2.2. I think my top priority is to get the new and revised terms posted before continuing with translations. Chapter 2.3 is still on my radar, and (once again) I need to finish building the Demon's Eye base statistics, begin mocking up battle maps, and slice the Chapter's plot some more, but I once again don't anticipate getting to any of that before the coming week is out. We'll be organizing things and determining workflows at my workplace, so things could still potentially be quite distracting as the week progresses. Hopefully everything will get sorted out quickly and I'll be able to get back to work on Elegy full steam by the time the week is out.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, October 3rd. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

This past week was largely spent catching up on the ongoing effort to translate the prologue in Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign. As no doubt those of you who read my updates were already aware, I had generated a very large number of new and re-purposed terms over the last two or three weeks and I hadn't been taking the time to get those new terms into the lexicon proper in Chapter Eight. This week I rectified that, continuing the effort to generate additional required terms after taking the day off on Monday due to the re-location of my workplace. On Tuesday, in addition to generating terms, I decided to break the English-to-Kilrathi lexicon table into multiple tables divided by lettering. Given how much the language has grown since its inception, there was getting to be far too many terms to keep them all in a single table, and by breaking it up I have a little bit of additional indexing going on. A similar division of the Kilrathi-to-English table took place on Wednesday. Thursday saw the completion of the generation of needed terms from the previous weeks' translations and the beginning of the work in earnest to get all of them added to the tables, work that saw completion on Friday. The final count is 51 new terms with 85 terms re-purposed, corresponding to 330 reverse terms. The completion of the new term generation effort allowed me to wrap up the partial translations that had taken place in Chapter 2.2 up to that point; a total of twelve blocks were completed on Thursday and another five were completed on Friday, bringing the translation effort up to date. A total of 66 text blocks have been completely translated in the prologue of Chapter 2.2 as of this morning with another 58 syntactic reviews completed, leaving 32 blocks of text in the Chapter with no work done whatsoever. I am pleased to report this morning that the first of the two scenes of the prologue has been completely translated at this point.

My Plan for this week is to continue the translation work in Chapter 2.2. At this point, I'm getting close enough to finishing up the syntactic reviews in the Chapter that I think that's where I'll try to keep my focus this week. I'm hoping at this point that no additional terms will be needed for the remaining text blocks in the Chapter, but then again I was thinking that very same thing when this whole mess got started; I anticipate that additional terms will ultimately need to be generated before work on the Chapter draws to a close. Chapter 2.3 is still on my radar, and (once again) I need to finish building the Demon's Eye base statistics, begin mocking up battle maps, and slice the Chapter's plot some more, but I once again don't anticipate getting to any of that before the coming week is out. One good side effect of my workplace is that it's now taking me much less time to get between my house and my workplace (counting the fighting for traffic and walk-in that was required back at Bizzell Library), so taking a morning constitutional before work has become possible once again and my morning break is once again free for work on WCRPG, and I'm hopeful that the extra break will help speed things along as work continues on Elegy

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, October 10th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

This week began with an effort to finish up the remaining syntactic reviews in the second scene of the Chapter 2.2 prologue in the Elegy campaign. Apparently I had a rather major miscount going on from the last two previous weeks - on Monday, I discovered that I'd forgotten to count a total of eleven blocks where the syntactic reviews had been completed, which meant that I had less work to do on that front than I thought I did when I posted the previous update. Needless to say, I was pretty happy about that - Monday turned out to be a particularly hectic day in RL and I was happy to get as much done that day as I did. With only twenty-two text blocks left to review instead of thirty-three, I put in a major effort to get the remaining reviews done, an effort that I'm happy to report this morning wrapped up at the tail end of lunchtime on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I turned my attention to the final translations, putting in an effort to translate the second block of text of the second scene of the dialogue. This was a very large block that rapidly turned into a pretty substantial chunk of work. It wound up taking my entire lunch break on that day and for all the effort I put in I wound up with only a partially translated block and the need for another seventeen reverse terms (for words such as 'serendipity', 'amass' and 'perennial'). That wound up being the only thing that happened with the campaign on Wednesday, and owing to real-life events on Thursday and Friday, it turned out to be the last thing that happened with the game this past week.

My Plan for this week - go full-bore on the translation effort in Chapter 2.2. I'll likely do as I've done in the past, translate what I can and go back for any new and re-purposed terms later. There are 84 text blocks to go in the Chapter at the moment but a lot of them are small one-line blocks, and so it should be possible for me to go ahead and knock out a good number of blocks this week. I am anticipating another restricted working week this week (I already know that I'll be unable to work on the campaign two days this coming week), but I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to report substantial progress next week. I continue to hope that the translation effort won't require too many more new reverse terms, though if the pattern holds I can count on adding at least another hundred terms to the lexicon two weeks from now...

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, October 17th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

I wound up having a pretty tough week this past week owing to events in real life; on Tuesday, I came down with a stomach bug that caused me to have to leave work early and spend the day resting, and then I already had events scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday that required me to watch one or more of my children during the day. So, I only had two working days this past week, on Monday and Friday. Both days were spent on the ongoing translation work of the prologue in Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign. Monday was actually fairly productive, with sixteen blocks of text fully translated on that day alone and one partial block. In fairness, these were smaller blocks of text, but then again I did say that was what I planned to do in last week's update. Friday saw partial translations of another seven blocks of text. A total of four new terms were added to the Kilrathi lexicon from this week's translations with 22 terms refurbished, corresponding to 35 reverse terms. Another nine "unofficial" terms were generated over the week, and I still need terms for thirteen more reverse words (words including 'moot', 'punish', 'impertience' and 'resolve'). As of this morning a total of eight-five blocks of text have been translated in Chapter 2.2's prologue with 8 translations in progress. Another 63 blocks of text have completed syntactic reviews.

Since I largely lost last week, my Plan for this week is a recycled one: continue the translation effort in Chapter 2.2. I'm past the halfway mark on the translation now and this week looks to be less busy, so I'm hopeful that I can report more substantial progress at the tail end of the week. I'd like to at least get out of the part of the conversation where the group is reluctantly electing ship's officers before the week is over, which I think I can do if I don't run into the need to generate too many terms. Since I apparently forgot to add my litany about Chapter 2.3 last week, I'll add it again this week - I need to finish building the Demon's Eye base statistics, begin mocking up battle maps, and slice the Chapter's plot some more. Chapter 2.2's prologue is taking much longer than I had originally anticipated, but hopefully I can make more substantial progress this week and be able to turn my attention to the next Chapter soon.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, October 24th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

This past week was spent working on the translation effort of the second scene of the prologue in Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign. Given that I had largely missed the previous week, I made a concerted effort to get as much done as I could on each day. I completed four blocks of text on Monday with another six blocks partially translated, and nine blocks were completed on Tuesday with another seven partially translated. I really knocked out some blocks Wednesday afternoon in particular, taking care of twelve translations and two partials during that half-hour alone. Granted, they were all smaller blocks, but it did a fair amount for me on the "personal morale" front. I was only able to translate two blocks of text on Thursday afternoon, largely owing to the need to do some rapid research to learn the etymology of the names "Orleans" and "Thetis". On the plus side, I was able to fully translate the block in which I needed both of those names that day. I was able to finish up the remaining pieces of partial translations at the tail end of my lunch break on Friday, completing as much of the translation effort as I was capable of doing up to that point and leaving me with the task of generating missing terms for the lexicon in order to finish filling them in. Having let the number of required terms build up once again, the size of the list is pretty significant and I wound up spending my entire afternoon break on Friday looking through Chapter 2.0 for those terms. I was able to review Chapter 2.1 and the epilogue of 2.2 for these same terms on Saturday, so my first order of business later in the day today will be to go straight to the thesaurus step to search for terms to potentially re-purpose. As of this morning, there are 37 blocks of text that have been partially translated, each requiring only three or four new or re-purposed terms in order to complete. A total of 119 of the 156 blocks of text in Chapter 2.2's prologue have been fully translated up to this point.

My Plan for this week is to continue the translation effort. I anticipate spending the next few days generating terms, adding them in and finishing up the remaining translations, and then adding the terms to the lexicon chapter. The end is in sight for Chapter 2.2 at long last, and unless some major calamity unfolds I should be in a position where I can begin work in earnest on Chapter 2.3 before the coming week is out. As far as Chapter 2.3 goes, my first priorities will be to finish up the work I've had on the back-burner for the last few months - to finish generating the stats of the Demon's Eye base, begin mocking up battle maps, and slice the Chapter's plot some more. I'll also have to review the notes I have for the Chapter - there's a lot of them there but not much in terms of substance, at least not much yet. I'm looking forward to the work, though (definitely looking for a change of pace from translation work at this point anyway...).

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, October 31st. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

Well, I am happy to report this morning that, after four months of work in earnest, Chapter 2.2 of the Elegy campaign is finally 100% complete. The week began with the effort to finish generating new and re-purposed terms in order to finish translating the second scene of that chapter's prologue into the Kilrathi language, work which took most of my day on Monday. I was in a position to begin filling in blocks by my afternoon break. I was rather annoyed at the end of all of my work on Monday to discover that I had missed a term (specifically for 'sow'), but not as annoyed as I was on Tuesday when I discovered that I hadn't finished translating a block of moderate-size and as a result needed to come up with translations for several other terms. I was able to come up with translations for the missing terms relatively quickly, however, and made a concerted effort to finish the translation work. By the end of my lunch break on Tuesday, I had the remaining terms in place and, after a quick review of the Chapter's contents, I felt comfortable removing the Draft block at the top of the page. I'm still considering adding space battle maps to the individual encounters, but that is something that can wait for the time being and I've already placed a note in the game's index to that effect.

With the translation effort completed, my focus turned to getting all of the newly generated terms into the lexicon in Elegy Chapter Eight, which began Tuesday afternoon and didn't finish up until the tail end of my lunch break on Wednesday. A total of 54 new terms were generated during the final translation effort in Chapter 2.2 with 105 terms re-purposed, corresponding to 331 reverse terms. This brings the reverse lexicon up to just over 4,500 words; for some reason I thought the Kilrathi language already had many more terms than that but apparently not. The language is still continuing to grow in its robustness, and while it may sound more than slightly pessimistic of me to say so given the effort I've put in the translation of Elegy to date, I have no doubt that the translation effort that will take place in Chapter 2.3 will undoubtedly once again grow the lexicon substantially.

With the lexicon work completed, my efforts now turn to Chapter 2.3, entitled Bharg'Yi'nargrast'hra ("The Conquest of Demon's Eye"), where Bloodeye and company are scheduled to take the Demon's Eye Base from the Morgan's Raiders pirate clan. I've mainly been reviewing the notes that I have for that Chapter already as well as some of the text I have written for that Chapter up until this point. I had hoped to sit down and finish hammering out the stats for the Demon's Eye Base late this past week, but I never got around to doing it. I'm finding that I'm having difficulty with this mission's design. I mean, I know what is supposed to happen, but I'm having a tough time figuring out the how of it; how will Bloodeye and company take the base? My aim is to have a different experience than the one the players have already gone through in Chapter 2.1, where the goal was to takeover Ni'Rakh. I have sought some feedback from the CIC community as well as from a local game designer's group. I am confident that I will be able to hammer out the difficulties I've been having soon and that work in earnest will be able to commence on the chapter in the very short-term. I still need to finish generating the stats of the Demon's Eye base, begin mocking up battle maps, and slice the Chapter's plot some more - the same things I've been needing to do with the Chapter for the past several months. My Plan for the coming week is to begin with the generation of the base stats and to at least come up with the basic shapes of the main locations of the station - of which I've identified 14 potential sites - which may help me to generate rudimentary battle maps. I suspect that building the battle maps may help me tremendously when it comes to slicing up the plot; I know it did when I was working on Chapter 2.1.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, November 7th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.

I haven't got much to report to y'all this morning, and in fact I debated as to whether or not I should cancel this morning's update. I decided to go ahead with the update since we're rapidly approaching the end of the year and it's likely that I'll have to skip at least one week sometime in the coming weeks. I'm also typing this up this morning, so this is liable to be one pretty short update.

In truth, I spent much of my week playing Kerbal Space Program...

I did get some work done on the Elegy campaign this past week, beginning with a review of what I'd built so far for the Demon's Eye base statistics on Monday. I hadn't cracked open those notes since late May, and at the time I was reasonably far along with the basic craft creation process, essentially finished up to the selection of accessories. I had made some changes to the capacity of service the base was supposed to be able to provide, so I did go ahead and make some adjustments to the earlier portions of the design. It wasn't until Friday, however, that I finished selecting accessories and finally, after six months, completed the base's basic statistics. I've posted those stats to the Chapter 2.3 page here on the wiki, and I'm hoping that after all of this that I have use for what was created. I have already thought of how one design change might ultimately be used in the plot later on in the campaign. I also spent some time on Saturday working on ideas for the flow of the mission in Chapter 2.3. I've come up with the idea of Bloodeye's group sending a party on ahead to the Demon's Eye base to infiltrate / scope out / conduct a little sabotage of the place prior to the arrival of Ni'Rakh, something that makes sense plot-wise since the intel that the base has been largely deserted comes from a drunken Terran. I won't mention where the inspiration for this kind of mission came from, largely because I'm mildly embarrassed to admit it (and I'll leave it at that). I did attempt to work on the first scene of the chapter's prologue on Friday, and on Saturday I realized that I would need an additional scene for the prologue, the one that contains the actual mission "briefing". I'm hopeful I can keep that scene brief.

One other thing that happened this week was the translation of the opening scene of Wing Commander III into the Kilrathi language, which was at the behest of CIC forum member -danr-. His intention with the translation is to do a re-dub of that scene into Kilrathi, which personally I think is pretty exciting - it shows just how much the language has developed from it's initial use a prop in Elegy. I'll be particularly interested to see if the pronunciation guide I built to go along with the script was sufficient for the job. I did have a little bit of fun with the translation, only in as much as I made Angel say "señor" instead of "monsieur" - this was done tongue-firmly-in-cheek since the topic did come up in discussion on the CIC forums.

My Plan for this week is to continue planning in Chapter 2.3 and to play more KSP if I can get away with it. The first part of my litany for the past half-year - to finish generating the stats of the Demon's Eye base - is done at this point, and I still need to begin mocking up battle maps and continue plot-slicing. Now that I have a better idea of what will be happening in the chapter, I think the plot slicing portion will go by a lot quicker now, and I hope I'll have a basic plot structure for the Chapter in rapid order at this point. I am hoping to get some ideas for the general layout of a Kilrathi mining base and it's come to my attention that there has been a previous design of a Kilrathi asteroid base (one appears in Saga), so I may be using that design as a basis for an internal layout. I'll be sure to let y'all know what all happens on that.

Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, November 14th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
 
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