rtf as an intermediate step, or something?)Īs for the adventure, it’s kind of a mashup of things that have interested me lately: I’ve been reading M.R. (Seriously, though, Scrivener ought to be better at this than it currently is. ![]() I guess I’ll just have to adopt some other kind of formatting cue to make things easier: adding bullet points is, after all, easier than removing them, discovering Word has removed more than I asked it to, and then having to re-add them. That’s too bad, since I really like Scrivener for drafting stuff: being able to move around bits and pieces of text willy-nilly was a real life-saver when it came to reorganizing the text a few times. When I exported to work, it inserted all kinds of weird tab space markers, and bullet-points where I’d put none in the text, so I had to waste a bunch of time just cleaning up the text after exporting it. On the less-bright side, the new version of Scrivener is no better at handling tables than the previous version, and in some ways it’s worse. But figuring out how to ring the bells and blow the whistles also inadvertently reveals bits and pieces of how the bells and whistles and graffiti and blood and bone fragmnts and pottery all got there in the first place.) The adventure itself is pure locale, a tower filled with bells and whistles designed to let players do what they want and deal with the consequences. I guess what I really mean is minor moving parts and interactive effects of the scenario that are linked to minor elements in the background story that shaped the scenario as it is, if that makes sense? There is a “plot” in the background-or, rather, a tragic and horrible story about how being a decent human being can get you destroyed if you’re not careful-but it emerges as something revealed by discoveries: its “plot” in the sense an archaeologist uncovers a story by digging up bone fragments and shards of pottery, not as in a railroady adventure plot. (“Subplot? Did he say subplot?” Why yes, I did, but the adventure isn’t exactly plotty. Paring down, concentrating the clues, and minimizing the red herrings and “subplot” stuff can only achieve so much, after all. Most of the hard work actually involved figureout out what and where to pare down, and I still ended up way over the originally suggested wordcount. Scapple really helped me:įor reasons of space and sanity-preservation, I had to cut out a certain amount of the moving parts and linkety-links between X and Y and Q and M and R and Z unless W as well as C. It’s one of those deals where there’s a clue to Mystery A in locations C and F, but to access that clue you need to solve the puzzle in locale N and accessing locale N means uncovering the clue in locale Q, and so on. However, that’s changed with a project I just finished working on, a freelance RPG-writing project. That’s on me, of course: I probably could have used it while plotting out the novel I redrafted last year, but it never really occurred to me. I’m not sure how I ended up with a license for Scapple: I think it was thrown in with my Scrivener license, though it may have been included in some bundle of Mac software. What I am sure of, though, is that I didn’t find a use for it until recently.
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