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grrgyle @slrpnk.net

Writing Club - March 2025

Welcome to this ninth/IX/9th writing club update!

Happy mid-March to you all, my well lettered friends. I hope you've been graced with some nice weather as we in the northern hemisphere enter into the warmer time of the year. Today is delightfully dreary and overcast where I'm at, which I'm hoping to channel into some indoor creativity.

Okay! Here are the Writers:

Please see last month's post if you need to refresh your memory on what your goals were.

Just an FYI that while "membership" in the writing club is fluid and open, so too are the names above simply my best guess, without judgement, at who is participating on any particular month. So if you don't see your name up there and you'd like me to add it, just shoot me a DM or even better just share what you're working on and you'll be added right back to the roster the following month. :)

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  • We've been making progress on the campaign book - I've written a few new sections and rewritten a few based on finally getting to play them with the second group. They hitched a ride on a cargo airship and talked to a bunch of local old folks the first group never met. And playing those scenes helped me find ways to reorganize them to make them easier to run with no prep, and to add dialogue 'options' that came up which I hadn't expected.

    Andrew has continued working on character profiles for all the NPCs so all I need to do now is combine them with my document and perhaps make some small edits.

    My main project on the campaign lately has been researching phytoremediation for a handful of locations where it's underway. I start by identifying which contaminants make sense for that place based on its history, then I look for plants that hyperacumulate it or that come up in papers about phytoremediation targeting it. Then I check that they're native (or a reasonable addition based on climate change) to New England. That's the point where most fail since the Americas seem to have fewer hyperaccumulators etc than elsewhere. Then I write up what the process of using these plants/bacteria/fungus to remediate looks like.

    I've also been working on some location artwork for introducing locations where the descriptions would otherwise take a long time:

    • phytoremediation

      Had to look this one up. Misread it as "meditation" and was really confused initially.

      I like how grounded your worlds are. It's an interesting choice: where to fabricate, and where to research (and where to combine the two, I suppose). It would be easy to just make up a plant, a sort of Mass Effect or mutant Witch's Butter.

      I'm curious where those kinda joints (by this I mean what are you OK bending, versus what you like to keep fixed/real) are for you in your creative process.

      • That's an interesting question - you're right, it would be easy to write it that way and this is an incredibly new field (the oldest stuff I've found dates back to the 90s and I've seen papers announcing the discovery of the first known hyperaccumulator of this or that contaminant dating as recently as 2023) so chances are good anything I write will end up with some 'obvious' gaps in a few years.

        I guess I'm trying not to make up any technologies - most of the scifi elements in the campaign are from the Fully Automated lore rather than my imagination. I suppose I want this to be very grounded and practical, and educational. I'd like it to convey a lot of information about how these contaminants work, where they come from, how they spread, and how we remediate them. I'd also really like to emphasize the importance of watersheds, groundwater, and also to reintroduce a lot of old New England practices (spring houses, the ice harvest, etc) that I think are solarpunk but are also fading from living memory. I think solarpunk works best when it's practical, when you know as a reader or player that you could go outside and do some of this stuff.

        I'm going to keep thinking on this - I know I have a few places where I merged FA lore with IRL remediation and detection practices (such as with the chemical detecting slime mold from the equipment table in the rulebook). I'll see if there are any other joints where real life stuff meets scifi.

        • I think solarpunk works best when it’s practical, when you know as a reader or player that you could go outside and do some of this stuff.

          Yeah I love that aspect of solarpunk, too. Like a better world is actually possible without waiting on some miraculous scientific breakthrough, or alien technology.

          Not to put down the really out there fiction, because I love that too. Just for different reasons. :)

        • I'm a sucker for well-researched hard sci-fi!

          Have you found it challenging to expound these concepts without detracting from the rest of the text? Additionally, have you discovered any differences in writing technically as opposed to narratively?

          • It hasn't been especially difficult but I think I've got a huge advantage this time in that I'm writing a premade campaign guide for a TTRPG rather than prose fiction. When I'm writing prose I definitely struggle with how much information to include and how to fit it in so it feels natural and doesn't mess up the pacing.

            With writing this campaign, I know from the outset that the players are going to miss huge swaths of the content. But the upside is that because they're the ones driving the plot and deciding what to focus on, I'm free to provide as much information as I feel would be useful to the GM and if the players want to engage with it, they will (sort of like side quests and optional audio logs in video games).

            I'm definitely a worldbuilding-first writer and I love the fiddley little details that make a place work so this has been an absolute blast. I keep the 'box text' narration stuff short and descriptive but I provide all kinds of information so if the GM has to play an expert on something like a farmer or deconstruction worker, or environmental restoration tech, they'll hopefully have enough to sound like an expert.

            The other advantage I have is that the plot (a quest to find thousands of tons of illegally dumped industrial waste in rural New Hampshire) aligns well with my goals.

            Basically I wanted to write out how I think rural New England might look in a solarpunk future (a lot like a modernized version of how it did a hundred years ago) and to introduce some practices like ice harvest, spring houses, etc that predate modern tech but align well with solarpunk ideals. I wanted to write some more grounded solarpunk with a lot of emphasis on reuse and salvage. And I wanted to talk about watersheds, groundwater, and how pollution moves through them, and various practices used to remediate different contaminats.

            I stocked the game with locations and characters that address one or more of those themes, in various ways. The players' search for the waste is almost bound to bring them through a bunch of these places and to start conversations thatdevelop on those themes.

            I hope some of this is useful, I think this is the biggest fiction project I've worked on, and I'm surprised to find that it's going much better logistically than previous attempts at writing prose novels. I think the worldbuilding-heavy structure and lack of a single set plotline just worked really well with how I write.

22 comments