Update #2

We're so back?

I put posts on hold in order to create and iterate on content for playtests more easily. Then vacation, sickness, events within the group delayed the playtests, but I still didn’t post. Whoops! I’m getting back into it. There will be more posts, they will probably be smaller.

Website

The Core Rules have been consolidated and posted on the website.

When I created this blog I would write a post about one ruleset or mechanic every week. This was useful as a mechanism to keep me writing and fleshing out the rules, but these separated rules posts were very bad as reference material during playtesting. I had expected this might be the case when I wrote the posts. To mitigate this I choose to keep the posts themselves relatively terse with all of the tangents and digressions within footnotes. This was a bad strategy! The posts were not very good as reference material and they were not very readable. Going forward, posts about mechanics will include a link to the reference-material-ready-version on the website. The main body of the post on Substack will not have to act as reference material, it will include all of my digressions and tangents within the text.

Archetype Tables and Content

Various skills and archetype tables are still being tested. My current strategy is to write skills on blank cards and arrange them in 3x3 card organizer pages where the first 6-8 cards are skills on the table and the last card lists any costs or requirements to roll on the table. They’ll be digitized ~soon. Listen, I’ll probably have to look for a job again soon, things will be busy.

Code

The TTRPG functionality within the repo has been separated into a submodule called TTRPYG. I will get this onto PyPI eventually. I believe this is cleaner than one big messy repo, and it will make it easier to focus on just content or just code, rather than having to juggle both. There have been various small improvements like allowing groups of entities to be split into arbitrarily many .json files rather than the database being one big .json.

I improved my workflow for adding content to the database, but annoyingly this does not help me get posts out on Substack! When an entity is added to the database I can generate cards, text blocks, and tables in various formats. This should make moving the content to Substack posts very easy. However, Substack uses sort-of-but-not-really-markdown, and it only formats the markdown if you type it, not if you paste it in (???), so I still have to manually format all of the content! This slows down my posting.

Rather than wrestle with the formatting, I’m just going to put the markdown output of the utilities in a code block.

# Content
## Like This
Here's what it does.
*Here's an elaborate description.*

There were more code improvements I made. There were more that I planned, but I’ll post about them later! I want to get this post out, get things moving.