Long time no speak. To be honest the past couple of months have flown by in Hippocrene land. It's been really cool seeing the first batch of MM25 modules come through on the pledge manager, there's a ton of good stuff there!
So where are we at with Hippocrene?
TL:DR a bit behind with writing, aiming to get pdfs released in late July or early August, and shipping everything to TKG in August.
Writing To be honest the writing is the only hold up on the module, and that's my bit, unfortunately. I'm still working on some bits as we speak, but the main portion is over with Chris Airiau's queue for editing now and the remaining chunk will be with him soon. The size and scope of this zine—a sandbox setting and 4 modules that intertwine—has been quite a step up from my first module (The Dose Makes The Poison, now available at Iglootree and soon in the TKG store) and I want it to be the best it can be.
Layout While I get the writing to a place I'm happy with, my main goal has been to keep everything else moving. I've been working with Lone Archivist on the layout, which is in a good place and we'll be going into final layout in July once the edit pass is done.
Artwork I've also commissioned some additional spot artwork and a hero city scape image from Luke Oram (who nabbed the Grand Jury prize at the Triptech jam recently with his Seven Stars Remembered module, check it out). I think his style compliments what we've already got from Malachi Ward and which I'm excited to see what he comes up with. I'm also working with Luke on my next project (more to come on that very soon, very excited about that...).
Web App I've been working with a developer pal on the web app to accompany the Hippocrene module The New Sound. This module serves as a 'way in' for players to get access to Malvolio, and is a fetch quest to locate four cassette tapes that are spread out across the Dream. The app will have a boombox and an interface when you drag cassettes onto the boombox to play, building up more of a track the more cassettes you find. Is this an essential item for game play? No! Is it fun as fuck? Yes! we've got a working prototype and will be finishing this off soon once I get a suitably mind bending club track on the go.
The boombox for the web app, also the graphic for the page header for The New Sound module.
Rimwise Wanderer zine Lone Archivist has created a design template for this zine and I'm currently adding my entries to this in Indesign. Since this is mainly a big list of interesting locations, writing into layout seems the quickest way to get this into a workable doc that I can then hand back over to Lone for final tweaking. Think this will be a fun one!
Sticker bundles I've been putting stickers into little cellophane envelopes in batches of 10 for about two weeks now, and am currently about half way through bundling up the 300 or so needed for the campaign. Here's this morning's batch:
Have been putting batches of 10 into bags with my morning coffee. What a time to be alive.
That's about all for now, I'm hoping to give you another update very soon with more cool stuff!
