The Guide, Maps and Sweat

Damn.  I'd meant to post more starting with this month and already I'm in the ditch.  Not than I'm not working.  Those who give a $10 donation can see on my patreon that I've put up new material regarding the Streetvendor's Guide and a large sectional map of 6-mile hexes stretching from Kronstadt to the Adriatic Sea.  Plus, as I wrote in the last post, I'm also busy breaking my body into tiny pieces.

Still, I'm here now.  It's my D&D night tonight, with the players having fought the drow elves of that lair to a draw.  In truth, the players were winning rather easily, having acquired a lump of heroism and invulnerability potions, but after fighting since June in real time, in a long and protracted fight all over the dungeon, the party was ready to let the drow go when they gave ground.  The fight against the drow took place over the same ground the party had fought the goblins, so the battle map got repurposed.  Tonight's session's going to be a lot of rolling henchfolk, addressing person desires for the party, filling in the gaps of the player's retainers and picking from their collection of characters and henchfolk who they want to put together for the next campaign.

In other news, I missed some sort of window because Patreon now wants me to put my logo on four different products in order to take advantage of the "loyalty program" that I was going to sell this cup through.  We're re-evaluating our choices, which is going to take another week or so.  And because I'm researching it, youtube is slamming me with horror stories of why not to offer print on demand products.  We'll work it out.  I'm not getting any response from online readers about it, so I don't take it as critical work.

Until I crash and burn again surrounding the Guide (it's a combination of heavy creativity, excel calculation, research and not fucking up on the details), this is pretty much how the next year is going to go.  I'm actually drawing maps just now to relax between wrestling matches with Guide material.  I just posted content about embroidery, which I know next to nothing about.  With my old equipment lists, designed primarily for my own game parties and not really mattering, I could postulate any number I pleased and shrug it off.  But now the necessity to get it right gives me panic attacks as I frustratingly dig through source materials that talk endlessly about everything except the details I really need.  It's nice, I guess, that I now know what a lazy daisy stitch is, and have seen one done, but it's of no appreciable use to me with regards to the content I'm creating.  The mass of material I'm wading through could serve to create in infinite number of books that I never intend writing ... but it might perhaps be interesting at some future date to create a subsidiary list of items that didn't make the Guide's cut.  Who knows?

So, I'm off to lunch.  I have one answer for the Q&A this week that didn't get a Patreon preview, for which I'm sorry.  Often it's too easy to kick cans down the road.  But at least it can't be said I'm not producing.