Writing Club - July 2024

Welcome to the inaugural writing club update! This is a brand new writing club, first proposed here. I have some ideas about what I want from this club, but where we go from here is open ended.

So feel free to start new posts or spinoffs in between my monthly posts, as long as they jive with the rules in our gracious host community's sidebar, you have my full support. :)

On to the whole point of this club! The following brave things set to text concrete goals for themselves (linked beside their names, just below). If you'd like to join their number, simply say so in the comments, along with your goal for this month. Okay, here are the stars of our show: 👏👏👏👏

Participants

You don't have to share any of the actual material you've worked on unless you want to (you could even use our local Etherpad to share writing stuff - for example).

Here are some questions to start you off. I'm genuinely interested in your answers, but don't feel you need to follow my script. This is just a prompt:

How do you think you did on your goal(s)?
What would you like to accomplish for our next check-in in August?
Is there a part of your project that you'd especially like feedback on?
Is there anything about this writing club you'd like us to do differently?

No stress if you didn't accomplish everything you set out to (I fell short and I'm still here hehe). I would love to hear your updates no matter how things went!

I'll share my own progress in a comment below. What I'm hoping from this step is that we treat this as part check-in, and part conversation. This is your chance to really dig into each others' projects (and if someone has done so for you, maybe it would be nice to return the favour and take an interest in their own project? ;))

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18 comments

I think I made some good progress on the campaign I'm writing for the Fully Automated TTRPG. I've built up some of the history around the mystery the players will be investigating, some of the characters and their interconnections, and places where the players will be able to access that information. I've also built out the locations a good bit more, most of which aren't directly related to the plot, but at least it means there'll be answers ready for any GM who has to field questions about how the community handles this or that aspect of life. I've started gathering up all the characters I've mentioned in various sections so far and organizing them in the characters section of the doc, and have started building out details for them.
At this point, my goals are to build out the mystery further, to add more slip-ups and connections to the cold case murder mystery, more ways for the players to find the long-forgotten toxic waste dumping. I've done a lot of work on the nearby modern village where they start off, but the abandoned town itself is still light on landmarks so I need to build those out. I also have a lot more characters to describe and eventually stat out.
Eventually I want to polish up the feel of it, to give it a bit of an adventure-movie feel, full of exploring lost ruins and wild forests, unraveling a mystery and searching for buried treasure. But the treasure is illegally-dumped industrial waste, the ruins and forests are in the Northeast United States. Building out the art assets included with the module book should help with that a bit.
- Whoa! Your project and world sounds super interesting :) sounds like you made really good progress this month too!
  Is the setting part of the mystery? Like as the game goes on little hints are given as to the setting?
  Looking forward to seeing more of your project! Sounds like the type of thing my sister's and I would play together :)
  
  In that case I'll try to answer without giving too much away! The campaign uses the setting from the game Fully Automated! but is set in a region of the former United States which the rulebook largely overlooks. So general stuff like the history of the world still applies, and the players are free to read up on it, but I'm writing my own historical events when it comes this specific fictional, abandoned town and the area around it.
  The players are on a quest to find a forgotten buried treasure (several tons of illegally-dumped industrial waste now useful in the production of geopolymers) in a mostly abandoned town currently undergoing deconstruction and rewilding. Their search will unearth many forgotten details of the region's chaotic history from during the setting's Global Climate War 60 years before.
  
  Don't worry about giving plot away, I like spoilers lol
  & thats a cool way of building out the pre existing lore & relating it to your own home area. Id never heard of fully automated before this and it looks like fun. I like the setting of a rewilding town with a complicated history too :)
- You mentioned art in your last comment too, and from creeping your posts I see that you've got some art chops! Are the art assets a big part of your project, or are they more there to illustrate the writing? I know a lot of writing begins with images and other aesthetic media (like in my case, with maps).
  I'm also wondering if you have a kind of "moral" that you want your players to come away with. Even in interactive projects, I usually have some values or concepts I'm trying to get across to the player. Sometimes it's my secret purpose, and other times it's pretty on the nose hehe.
  
  This project has actually been a bit of an extension of my Postcards from a Solarpunk Future project! Building out all the places and options for the players to explore has allowed me to write in way more worldbuilding than I could get away with in a normal fiction project (though the players won't see all of it). Similar to the postcards where each is just a picture and little worldbuilding essay, no plot. It's also let me focus on aspects of solarpunk that I realized really interests me while working on the postcards. Stuff like reuse, rewilding, deconstruction, and generally what rural areas might look like in a solarpunk world, especially current-day bedroom communities.
  As for the art, I'd been running out of ideas I was excited about for the postcard series, but since starting in on this, writing all these new locations, I've found a bunch of new scenes I'm really excited to do the art for.
  I wouldn't say it's critical to the campaign exactly, but the scenes and maps will be something the GM can put up on screen on Roll20 to set the tone and feel, or to help the players picture their surroundings. Character portraits might help them remember who's who.
  As for a moral, I've definitely got things I want to explore: the motives for and consequences of a sort of negative peace, the shifting value of things like industrial waste based on use (and generally the very rare win-win where a waste product from one process becomes a useful input in another), the priorities of society and how it might look when one has very different goals than profits. Generally I want to explore what very rural places like my hometowns might look like when society has moved away from cars. And to generally tout values like thrift and reuse. But I'm not sure if I have a specific moral in mind.

18 comments