I can’t believe October is over. In fact, the end of the month snuck up on me so quickly that I’m writing this in November. But it’s been a good month.
Looking Back
For the most part, this month went almost exactly as I expected, a rare occurrence these days. We started out with the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post, then the write-up on the GODCo bio-lab and the last full article of the month was my notes on the adventure I ran in that bio-lab and a game report of how it played out.
I said last month that I wasn’t sure what the fourth article would be. It turned out to be the third article and was a write-up of the Battle of Stenmar, a sneak-peak at the ship battles of the Second Sathar War as they will be reported in the Detailed Frontier Timeline. The war is about to open up in the timeline and I’ve been busy playing through the opening fights this month behind the scenes in preparation to reaching that point of the timeline. I asked around and people were interested in seeing how the battles played out and this post was a trial run to work on the format. More on this in the “Looking Forward” section.
The other major effort this month was getting issue 30 of the Frontier Explorer out the door. This took a bit longer (by about a week) than I had really hoped to spend on it, but I did manage to get it out before the end of the month so we stayed on schedule. It’s been 30 issues (I can’t believe we’ve done that many) and we’ve still managed to get every single one out in the target month.
Between the Frontier Explorer, and playing through the Knight Hawk Battles, I haven’t had much time for anything else. So much so, that I have put my Skills for Hire game on hiatus. As I talked about in my What We Need is More … Focus post, I’m stretched too thin and while I enjoyed running this, it was taking up too much of my currently limited time. So I made the decision to put it on the back burner for now. The players have stepped up to the plate and are running games for one another but for now, I’m not running any more. We’ll see if I get back to it.
Looking Forward
A lot this month is going to be about the Detailed Frontier Timeline. We’ll start with the usual post on Tuesday recapping all the events of the last month. But this month the sathar fleets start toward the Frontier and the first battles of the conflict occur later in the month. My plan is to do a post that is part Knight Hawks scenario, part battle report, and maybe some commentary much like the Battle of Stenmar post for each of these battles as they occur. For the most part, these will be posted on the day the battle occurs (together with the summary post on Twitter). However, at the start of the fight, there are four battles on one day with on more two days later. These will start on the 21st and I just post one a day until they are all up. That will constitute the weekly post that would have come on the 24th, the last of the month, but you’ll get 5 for the price of one. Had I waited to post the Battle of Stenmar until the day it occurred, that would have been the post for the 17th. But I wanted to get that one out early to get feedback. After those initial battles, the post will be much more sporadic and I’ll post them on the day they occur and I’m not planning on having them be the regular weekly posts.
Beyond that, this month is wide open and what will be coming out is completely up in the air. Your guess is as good as mine. It’s NaNoWriMo and I might try to get back to writing my novel but I don’t actually think that will happen.
In the “behind the scenes” arena, I do know we have a number of projects under discussion in our “Frontier Explorer Presents” series. One will probably be out by Christmas. Another, which I’ve mentioned before, is the short story collection. That one is going to be my focus as Tom Verreault, my Frontier Explorer co-founder, is working on the one for Christmas. We’re also kicking around the idea of another project with Eric Winsor, the author of all the Jurak Hangna articles in the magazine, to put together a special Jurak Hangna themed publication. But I think that one is a bit longer term.
I want to get back to modeling so I’m hoping to focus a bit more on the HSS History’s Hope and get its model finished and draw up the deck plans for it. That may be another Technical Manual once it’s all done. I might also put some time into my starship construction system this month as well as I’d really like to get that done and start making ships based on the system.
Final Thoughts
And that’s it. I’m sure that there are several other things I should be mentioning but they have completely slipped my mind. As always, share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.