Sunday, December 07, 2008

The Story of Elthos


Another step forward was taken in my agreement with Jarod this weekend. He will be picking up on taking the story from the game test this summer and turning it into a children's book. I'm very much looking foward to working with him. I've known Jarod since 2006 when we co-created the Literary Role Playing Game Society of Westchester and he's been both a help and an inspiration since then. The Yahoo site has posted as of today 1996 message, and we have a host of materials in the Files, Photos and Database sections.
Jarod is extremely talented. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he will come up with for the "Revenge of the Weasel King". We've already discussed that for simplicity sake we're going to take some liberties with the story line as I originally wrote it, which was a story-form of Gamesmaster's notes really. While it is very story-like, it isn't exactly a children's book the way it's written. It follows exactly what the characters said and did during the game, and for that reason it really doesn't conform to standard story structure. For example, in The Revenge the story takes place about a month after the "War of the Mice and the Weasels" which was created by the 12 kids I ran the Elthos RPG Game Club with in 2004. That's a great story in it's own right. But this summer we played the sequel. So there's a certain amount of backstory material that is not evident in The Revenge of the Weasel King, but pops up intermittently. So what we're going to do is reshape the material so that it makes a better book. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate what the Elthos World is like, and to show off one of the adventures so that other Gamesmasters can have a good idea of where I am going with it. The other purpose is to produce a children's story that will be fun in it's own right. I think Jarod will do an amazing job, based on the previous writing I've seen of his, and on the initial edit he did. This is very exciting!

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Stay on Target ... Stay on Target...


I am steadily working toward my goal of publishing the Elthos ODS Web Application and ODS Rules book online by January. It is a lot of work, but I'm making progress and think I should be able to do it. The publication of the Web Application will include all of the Phase I features I have in mind, and even a few of the Phase II, such as, if all goes well, Object Sharing between Worlds. That is a bit of code that I am going to implement this weekend. If that goes well then I will probably publish the site without the payment system, and then add that the next week. So progress is being made in the programming department. On the other side of the shop the creative team is tooling away mightily. The Tarot Cards are coming along fantastically. And I have a very good Editor / Creative Writing Expert who is helping me to craft the first Elthos RPG Novelette. That's exciting. I hope to have that illustrated as a children's story as well. So all in all things are coming along. Slowly, but surely.