Venice Draft 0.1

The Draft Zero version of Mythic Venice has been updated. Structurally the core parts are in place. Now what I’ll be doing is going through and making sure every bit of lore has a clear plot use. Currently it is 53 000 words long, which is about two-thirds the length of one of the standard supplements (I believe).

The main additions this time are:

* Rules for cloak and dagger fighting with stilettos.
* Ghosts who wear the volto (the white mask) and participate in Carnivale
* Coppelians – female automata who wear the moretta (black mask) and participate in Carnivale.
* Birribissi: burning lottery balls as Infernal sprites that serve the Company of Torcello
* The Giocoliere: a juggler demon, source of the lottery balls
* Stats for the Fades (native Venetian faeries)
* Stats for the Wailers (Banshees)
* Stats for the Giant Stone Crocodile plot hook

The way ahead:

I’m pulling the idea of Cicerones. It doesn’t really work with a party playing various characters over decades.

There’s a location I’m working on, the Ospedali Grandi, which will complement the bit on Opera. Basically these are orphanages which teach virtuoso-level musicianship to some of their female charges. This has given me the idea that I might want to do an appendix of companion backgrounds.

The bit where you go through and pile on the plot hooks is the most difficult part, really, because for every good idea you get perhaps a paragraph of text. For example, the theft of Saint Heliodorus gets me five sentences:

“The Ambassadatrix of Torcello cannot remove the last relic on her island so she tries to fool the player characters into taking it. She has her servants impersonate the saint and request translation to Saint Mark’s Square. A heist ensure, with the resistance carefully calibrated to ensure the player characters succeed, but do not suspect. Demons cannot avoid gossip, so eventually the player characters will learn they were tricked. Do they break back into the desecrated cathedral and face sterner resistance this time?”

So, if I wanted to get the draft up to 75 000 words with plot hooks I’d just need 400 of them.

Final sale thoughts

I’ve been saying for some time I’d Kickstart this, but that doesn’t seem financially viable. At minimum for a successful Kickstarter you need great art assets and a professionally produced video. Instead this is probably going to be finished off and made “Pay What You Qant” on Drivethru and itch.co. I’ll personally consider it a success if it eventually nets me AUD3 000. I know that’s not the fashionable 10 cents per word, but it is roughly what Atlas paid me for Sanctuary of Ice in 2003 (unadjusted for inflation) and that seems a reasonable sort of emotional boundary.