Rumors of the Seacat (Patreon)

Hello the heroes!

I think I missed last week's update in the ferment of writing and ripping things up—though some may have gotten through on the server.

I finally figured out the last big bit of the conflict rules. Thought to myself, "Ah, so pleasant, this September weather is decent, can go out for walks in the park again at last, all the annoying details figured out, now just to do the writing and complete the seacat and publish it and on to other things."

Great! Off we go, writing. Last few bits.

Celebrated a bit on the weekend, sat in a park and had a beverage with some friends after a long while, made myself feel like a human incarnate and not just a human in keyboard.

Sad down to wrap things up the Monday, and something didn't quite fit.

All the pieces were good, but the assembly was making me ... dissatisfied. I asked. Folks gave feedback. I walked away from the layout software in disgust.

Tuesday it hit me. I was trying to gild the lily and explain the pun. Leafing through Whitehack's elegant assortment of chapters it hit me that the structure of a roleplaying rulebook is already pretty much solved:

1) how to make a character (which also sells the game to the players)
2) how to play (which lists the basic rules)
3) how to run the game (which gives one player the tools to run the session and don the top hat of the top cat).

Instead, in my mix of pride and insecurity I was trying to overdo things. I was qualifying rules, "each hero is usually played by one player." I was explaining rules, "this rule is set up this way to avoid X, Y, and Z." I was, essentially, mixing design notes and blueprints together with the finished seacat to justify myself (it's not just more mediocre poop, I promise!) and to puff myself up (see how smart I am!).

So I was faced with two facts.

• Nigh everything was written.
• I wanted to rebuild the book, cutting away the excess.

This was going to be rough.

For an hour or so I thought to myself, "Oh god, it's been staring me right in the face, a year's worth of work, tinkering, polishing, and all for nought."

"Maybe I just finish it as is and nobody will notice."

"It'll be quicker that way."

Wednesday morning I set to work rebuilding the whole foundation.

Every single paragraph and character, table and cell style, baselines and fonts, spacing and everything. Since I knew exactly what I would need, this would now be much simpler. And everything would look more elegant.

But, oh, was it a chore. Because of the way Affinity Publisher deals with tables, I eventually set up 9 different cell styles to cover all the different types of cell I would face: left and right columns, headers and footers, alignments, guidelines.

I had to shoot one of my sacred cows: ever since learning about baselines in layout, I've wanted to align every single line of text to a baseline. In the end, I had to admit, this made the workflow absolute murder. I did stay true to myself and tweak every single table parameter to within 0.1 milimetres (that's about 1/288th of an inch).

The graphic design remains a matter of taste, but at least I can admit that what I've done fits my taste very precisely.

Variations on fonts and leading (line heights) and spaces between paragraphs. Tweaked, nudged, and more. So many times I've read posts by designers about how Helvetica or Helvetica Neue are overdone. I tried probably a dozen different fonts for the headers. Bebas Neue, DIN Condensed, IBM Plex, Fira Sans, Montserrat, Cooper Hewitt to name just some of the more obvious ones (Cooper Hewitt is very beautiful, actually, and I ended up using it for the hero sheet, while Fira Sans made an excellent font for the sidenotes on the pages).

But in the end, I had to admit, nothing gave that heavy, doom-laden inevitability to the headers that Helvetica Neue Condensed Black pulled off so effortlessly.

So, I had to confess, there's a reason for Helvetica's enduring popularity. It is good.

By late lunchtime the foundations were ready and I set to assembling the chapter and realized something that seemed completely obvious in retrospect.

It makes no sense to write about how to make a character if the reader doesn't have a character sheet in front of them.

I also realized another thing.

My current character sheet just wasn't doing it for me.

Now, by a stroke of luck, I knew precisely what I wanted, because I had played with it last week when I did my first print mockups for Heavenmaker (title tbd, patent pending, bat barking)—the board game that generates a variant of the history of the UVG.

Minimalist. Wiry. Weird. Clean. Like the layout. Leaving space for me to fill with art.

But I couldn't stare at a computer screen anymore. My eyes felt like heavy cubes of lead. I felt like a sour-cooked shoe pretending it was was a smoked ham. I took a notebook and a pen, and went to my favorite local cafe to pretend I wasn't in a megalopolis, have a cappuccino, and draw the whole sheet by hand, with no reference. By gods, I've been working on this system long enough that it's now entire and compleat in my head.

Luckily the cafe has outdoor seating and South Korea is plinging along at around 100 covid-19 cases per day, so sitting outside by myself with a mask didn't feel too much like contributing to the crisis.

One cappuccino and an iced espresso tester later, I had it.

And it looked like a sea scorpion. Bonus.

I went home and traced it out, step by step, with a 0.5pt line on a 2mm grid, to fit the 180x268mm text frame of the seacat layout. What's 6 hours when one's tracing little lines on a screen, right?

And there it was ... the foundation was laid. (see attachments for the sheet)

So, what now?

I'm frankly fed up with how long I've managed to drag out finishing Seacat, but the long trip was necessary. It was part of the creative journey, the hero's journey if you will.

"The answer was within you all along!" spake the Golden Goblin.

"Yes, I suppose," admitted the Dolorous Diborg (it's 2 cyborgs in a trench coat!).

So this is what I'm planning:

• Seacat is going to be just one core book with 3 parts: 1) making the hero, 2) playing the game, 3) running the game. An appendix might include something akin to a bestiary, but that's later. Can't guess at a page count right now. It's looking like 200 pages. Not promising little comics in every sidebar.
• I'm going to finish this as soon as possible. I'll post a paid post with as much of it as possible next week.
• A lot of the extra content (additional skins or archetypes! more gear! new spell albums!) is going to get individual little booklets. Like Zoa does for vivologists in the Vastlands, there'll be a book of golems and golem races for example.
• Dark Prologue will get finished when it's finished, It's progressed from last time, so I'll post that next week too.
• Other things will wait.
• Oh, Seacat is also getting a revamped logo.

Thank you for your patience, everyone, and I hope you're taking care this cold autumn. I know it's not as pleasant as playing face to face, but I hope you're getting your digital roleplaytime!

Peace and health,

Luka