Good Monday, wingnuts. Time for another WCRPG update.
Well, as I'd hoped last week, I was able to affect the final set of changes to Chapter 8.2 last Monday after the update. I'm not wholly satisfied with the solution I came up with for planetary exploration (namely, the single hourly roll for weather became three separate rolls, one for weather, one for quakes and one for volcanic activity), but it does prevent the total apocalypse that would happen otherwise on a particularly high set of rolls. If I can think of a solution that would get that back down to a single roll, I may go ahead and implement it at a later date. For now, I'm happy to call the chapter complete.
The bulk of my focus this week was on Chapter 8.4 (Interstellar Travel). This chapter was one of the chief ones that I could not transfer over directly from SFRPG and so a lot of its content has been completely new. I have had to reorganize it several times over the course of the previous week and a lot of what's there is from the official sources on jump and hopper drives in the WC universe (namely the
CIC Jumpfaq article and the information from the
Confederation Handbook available at WCPedia). The actual workings of each FTL system are handled very similarly to one another; the difference is in the details, of course. 8.4 is not quite done at this point; I still need to determine what "special topics" are required for the game, including rules for such things as wormholes, jump gates, etc. I hope to have 8.4 done by the end of this week.
As I was working with the information from the Confederation Handbook, I kept on coming across dates of various events in the development of the various drive systems. I decided to take advantage of that information and add it to the timeline in Chapter 12.1. This gave me the impetus I needed to start filling in the timeline this past week; everything in Chapter 12.1 was essentially finished with the exception of the timeline. After finishing up the entries from the Confederation Handbook's "Every Citizen's Guide to Practical Science", I went ahead and added the timeline from Star*Soldier, entries from the CH's "History of the Terran-Kilrathi War" and "History of the Pilgrim War", and watched through the cinematics of P2 to check for dates mentioned in the game. I've looked through the rest of Star*Soldier for events pertaining to the Nephilim War and I've gained access to the intended Privateer Online timeline. I would like to add the POL timeline entries, but while the timeline there does indicate a renewed conflict with the Nephilim, it doesn't appear to be anywhere close to the scale of what was ultimately put in Arena (i.e. a full twenty-year conflict that utterly destabilizes Confed's hold over the Epsilon Sector). I'm still trying to reconcile the events in POL with those indicated in Star*Soldier, so I can have something for the Nephilim War other than "some serious s*** goes down" in the timeline entry. This does mean I'm taking a little bit of license here; I still hope that what I ultimately have for WCRPG's timeline is comprehensive and as "canonical" as possible. Late in the week, I mentioned in a seperate thread how close the timeline was to completion and asked for help from the community to help check for errors or superfluous entries; I could still use the help.
WCRPG sits at 63.6% complete as of this morning.