Ah; I see...

[jducoeur]

Here I've been getting annoyed all day at the fact that, after six months of designing this game, and several months of full-speed writing, I'm still having to pull more or less an all-nighter to finish everything up.

And now I start looking at how much text there is, now that I put it all together to print. 138 + 75 + 25 + 12 -- something like 250 pages of text. And that's just the stuff the players see, not counting all the notes, thoughts, discussion and GM-only stuff. Which does kind of explain why it took so long.

This isn't a game, it's a novel. I really need to learn to be more concise. Oy...

Comments

[gower.livejournal.com]

I have never learned how to avoid the pre-game all-nighter.

But I kind of like the idea of all of the Intercon GMs awake now, pulling everything together to everyone's fun this weekend.

I actually sort of look forward to the night before as a special part of the fun each year.

[keshwyn]

I'm just spending the evening carefully avoiding looking at jikharra's computer screen, so that I can enjoy the fruits of your labor Saturday morning. ;)

Publication?

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Is there any way this thing could be published? Or would that require too much time putting the GM-only stuff into a form somebody else could use?

With this much effort in it, it seems a shame for it to be used only once.

Re: Publication?

[jducoeur]

Well, formal "publication" per se is strictly out -- it's not my IP, and all the Foglios agreed to was letting me run it as a one-shot. (Besides, it's just plain too much work.) But I might ask them about "boxing" it: cleaning it up adequately and making it available on the Web for others to run. That's still a good deal of work, and we'll see whether I get around to it, but it's possible...

[roozle.livejournal.com]

Not a LARPer at all. But I'm really curious about this game. I wish I could hear more details.

[jducoeur]

The short version is that it's a LARP adapted from the comic Girl Genius. It's set after page 52 of Volume 5, IIRC (just before the Sturmhalten storyline begins), and then diverges *wildly* from the story, adding about two dozen plots...

[roozle.livejournal.com]

I remembered somethng along those line from reading along in LJ; I'm mildly a Girl Genius fan and interested in those two dozen plots... well, maybe someday!

[baron-saturday.livejournal.com]

Deadfellas clocks in at just under 100 pages. The most words I've ever written for a game, but still not a patch on you, Webster.

[jducoeur]

I believe that my part of Tabula Rasa II may have been even longer than this, but that was an extreme case -- I believe it was 27 characters, averaging about ten pages per character. Tabula Rasa III is rather more complex than TR II was, so keeping the length within manageable bounds is going to be a challenge...

[rickthefightguy.livejournal.com]

David, who runs a tabletop I play in, has a wiki up for the game. http://noblehearts.pbwiki.com/

probably 500 pages. Though, of course, many of them are just NPCs mini-bios. He has hundreds of NPCs, plus maps, a narrative of the story so far (2 years plus of bi-weekly games), and so forth.

He rocks.

[jducoeur]

In fact, there is a wiki for this game (which I'll open up after it's done) -- that's where most of the game development was done. It's somewhere north of 250 pages at this point, IIRC. Not especially well *organized*, mind you -- indeed, it's something of a horrible rat's nest -- but it's got over a Meg of writings in it...