Progress Report

There definitely won’t be a chapter today. However, that’s not to say I wasn’t working on Harry Potter and the Save or Die. A good deal of planning was put into the rest of the book, and my plan for the climax has been significantly improved from my previous one. If you’ve enjoyed my story so far, I think you’ll like the end of this one a lot.

Also, work on Death or Glory progresses quickly. Rogue wizards, along with magically-controlled demon-possessed golems, bound demons, apprentice wizards and mind-controlled minions (kill the wizard, free the minions!) are added to the game as a new enemy faction. Also now there’s a Glossary, and a few optional rules (such as a rule for switching GM-role among the players cleanly, and one for having a ‘roster’ of multiple characters per player, and choosing which to send out on a mission-by-mission basis). Also, I figured out how to have automatically-updating page cross-references in Word, so there’s that. The main obstacles now to getting this into an Alpha-Release state are fleshing out the random mission generator (there are a lot of tables to fill in). I also want a pre-made Mission with pre-made characters as a sort-of ‘tutorial’ for the game.

The Alpha Release will likely be plagued with typos and weird grammar, rules inconsistencies, bizarre layouts, and sometimes obtusely-worded sentences. After that, my main focus for Beta will be on layout and making the rules as transparent as possible, with the occasional ‘feature’ added (new missions and new enemies mainly; equipment and PC abilities are pretty much where I want them). In total, we’re looking at about a 100-page rulebook. There won’t be anything in the way of illustrations for a while yet (maybe for ever), because I can’t draw to save my life.