For those of you that read these “state of the Frontier” posts, you probably realize that my plans got turned all upside down this month. The plan was to focus on Ghost Ship Osiris and the Death at Rosegard adventures with maybe some other items in the background. Well, the background jumped to foreground and then the month was over.
Looking Back
I had intended to work on the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure but for the most part that didn’t happen. I did get some initial sketches done of the Pursale ship. But I’m not completely happy with them and they definitely need some work.
Death at Rosegard didn’t even get touched. I honestly don’t think I even thought about it this month. I have now added it to my list of draft posts, however, and so it will be bugging me to get it finished now when I look at active projects.
What did come to the forefront was the beginning of the “Create a Star System” series. Triggered by a couple of posts I made on the timeline project, that series got stuck in my brain and seriously worked on. This month we got the details on creating the system data and actually drawing the map (including a video of the drawing process). The drawing of the map didn’t take as long as I expected but it took me a lot longer to actually do the write-up in the posts than I was anticipating.
I also posted a short bit on my new starship construction system covering hull types, armor, and sensors systems. Those are the last of the pieces of the system that differ significantly from the standard starship components in the core Star Frontiers Knight Hawks rules. I’ve been thinking about the system and realize I need a little bit more work on the engines so there is one more post on that before I can pull it all together.
Behind the scenes, the timeline project continues unabated. I also started working on pulling the next issue of the Frontier Explorer together, more on a management side, but things are progressing.
Looking Forward
So what’s in store for this month? We’ll start the month off with the now usual timeline post. I have entries for half the days this month (up through the 12th and a few random days after that) plus about half of April as well. So at some point in the next week or so I’ll be sitting down to flesh out the rest of the events happening over the next 30-60 days in the Frontier. We’re still a bit away from the massive Sathar fleets showing up in the Frontier but the activity is starting to heat up.
Now that I missed it last month, I plan on getting the sathar inhabited cave system finished and out this month. It really just needs some work cleaning up the map so I really don’t have an excuse.
After that, I intend to finish up the “Building a Star System” series with the Fochrik system’s calendar. That will wrap up that series for now.
I’m not sure what the 4th post of the month will be. Most likely it will be the last little bit about the engines in the new starship construction system. I’ll be working on the Pursale ship but I don’t know that I’ll have anything ready to go on that before the month is out unless I do a post just about the sketches and general design. Or it could be that something else grabs my interest and I run with that. We’ll see where it falls out.
The other thing I’ll be working on behind the scenes are the Frontier Explorer and another fanzine. There will be a big push on my part this month to get the next issue of the Frontier Explorer ready since we plan on releasing it in April. Keep your eyes on the magazine’s website for more details as they come out. We have all the articles we need, we just need to finish polishing our new layout. I’ve also been asked to head up another fanzine, this one more focused on general OSR topics and probably more fantasy focused. It’s in its infant stages but I have a big team and plan on leveraging my Frontier Explorer experience to put them to work and minimize what I need to do. More director than front-line worker bee. There will be more information on that in the coming months as well.
I think that’s it for now. I had a good month and am looking forward to a busy but exciting March. See you all around the Frontier.