Alright, the Kenoma Quickstart still isn't done, but it's getting a lot closer to done. I've been alternating work on the adventure with going through and doing a little proofreading on what I'm going to be putting out (though I'm planning to do multiple versions of this so I'm just trying to get it up to high quality and not worrying about perfection yet), and I have seriously underestimated the amount of work I thought I'd need for the adventure.
The good news is that it's now mostly done, and I should definitely finish up the text tomorrow. Whether I get the text and the book done or just the text itself will depend in large part on how smoothly the page layout goes.
Typically that's easy for me, but I'm working in Word and haven't done a Word to Affinity Publisher export before. I'm also going a lot more ambitious on this project's approach to sidebars and in-text formatting, so we'll see how it works. I did a quick test and it looks like the whole thing should come together nicely.
Unlike with the Google Docs export process, it seems to retain text formatting when I open a Microsoft Word exported document in Affinity. That doesn't necessarily do all my layout for me, because I'll need to do the columns and stuff as I like, but it does about 80% of it because it appears that things like bulleted lists and headings should just work.
So the way I've opted to do this adventure is responsible for a lot of the delay. I'm aiming for something like a 2-6 hour runtime, with some of that time factoring in the "here's how you play" and "choose your character" parts of the session.
To accomplish this goal, it's set up with something like 10-25 scenes depending on how you play, letting you go from a straight start-to-finish with a brief showcase of the mechanics or get more in-depth to the world of Kenoma.
The way to describe this would be to say that it's written a little bit like a Fallout quest, where you have the main objective and then a few things around it, and the rabbit-holes can be as big as the whole thing.
One thing that I'm probably over-doing is handholding the GM. Because it's a variable plot, I don't think it's too prone to railroading (though there are natural barriers to keep players from going off-track in the sheer isolation of the place they're heading to and the bureaucratic dystopia of the Coalition's central hubs), but I do feel like making sure that the GM knows that there are all these different ways where the sample characters' abilities can play into the adventure in a mechanical way.
That's probably a little too much in hindsight, but I'll see what feedback I get on it. From the initial feedback I've gotten from other designers it sounds like this is a "good idea" but I can't help but shake the feeling that I'm writing a lot.
Of course, I freehand almost all of my sessions on the fly, so this is basically just the opposite of what I'd do at my own table. That's probably not bad, though I need to be conscious of my limitations.
It does feel good to be getting stuff done, though, and I feel confident that tomorrow or Friday will be the release day when I can point you guys over to a download page and you can have access to a file.
