WHAT HAPPENED:
I’ve been doing some math, (a mistake, I know), and I can barely type. Gosh it’s late. But what I’ve come to is that if I am able to average writing 10 monsters a day, I can have the Bestiary out by Halloween of this year. And I also know that is an entirely unreasonable timeline. There’s just so much to write… Part of this is to tell certain people to go fsck themselves because I do what I want on my own timeline, but it is good to have a deadline for motivation. I think my favorite part of this job is the WHOOSH sound deadlines make as they go flying by overhead. 😀
Crap. It occurs to me that I haven’t been putting ANY of this back into the Ember Bestiary Internal Design Document. That’s the way the poopie crumbles I guess. …wait.
Finished the Archon! I thought that would be harder.
I’ve also completed the Arctic Centipede! But after some thought, renamed it to “Frostscale Centipede” and moved it to the “F’s”. I do weird stuff.
In an effort to streamline my, uh… efforts, I’ve decided to just plow through with the Q&D versions of these monsters for now and touch them up later. I’ve been going for a finished product page-by-page, and that’s a great way to go crazy …-er.
So far I’ve knocked down the Baelnorn and the Banshee this way, and I bet I can zoom through the text for all of the B’s tonight. You’ll know how that went tomorrow I suppose. And so will I!
There are a couple of “entries” that are more like entire chapters in here. I’ve got Baatezu and Animentals. Those aren’t monsters, rather they’re classes of them. I haven’t looked into how many different types of Baatezu (and Tanar’ri for that matter) exist, but there’s a healthy number for sure. I once cobbled together a book from Internet files called “Infernal: The Book of the Abyss” that detailed all the Tanar’ri, and it was some 40 pages if memory serves. In fact let me look that up right now.
(looks it up)
Wow. 46 pages of decidedly not my stuff. 46! That’s almost half!
(That joke wasn’t meant for you.)
Anyway, that book was a layout exercise to keep my chops up in the downtime of the Pandemic and other health issues. I can’t release it, but I might well remake it as a free offshoot of this project.
Man, this puts me way ahead on Monster-of-the-Week!
CONCLUSION:
The hardest part of making something move is getting it started in the first place. True in Physics, true in Publishing.
I love my job.
-Alan