[Games] Wonderland (Some) More
Feb. 23rd, 2021 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jordangreywolf
Return to Wonderland (No More)
"Wonderland No More" got published back circa 2013 or so, didn't sell that terribly well, and therefore there wasn't much motivation to put out anything new to support it (though, of course, it's hard to expect an RPG product to do terribly well if there's no support for it).
In any case, it would seem that the previous owners were open to selling the property back to its creators, and therefore I've been given a chance to dust off all those old PSD and IDD and IDB files and see if I can't get this thing up to spec for the newest edition of Savage Worlds. That would be the "Savage Worlds Adventurers' Edition," which for some reason is called "SWADE" instead of "SWAE."
Blue SWADE shoes? Sultans of SWADE? I feel like a pun is in order, but I've got nothing.
I have my work cut out for me. For one thing, it's going to need a new cover. I did the original cover art, incidentally, and as much work as I put into it, it never really looked all that good. I love the *concept* -- the crazy Hall of Doors-meets-MC Escher vibe (after all, it was my concept), but my execution is pretty weak. It's chaotic, the colors are washed out, and the pose of the main "Sanity-Challenged Haberdasher" character up front is painfully awkward. It needs replacement. Fortunately, the main writer came up with a suitable concept, and I think I can deliver on it ... provided I can set aside the time required and actually DO it in a timely manner.
Other Campaigns & Games
This puts me in an awkward situation as regards to the matter of my Deadlands campaign having wrapped up (and I haven't replaced Saturdays with anything else yet), and Digital_Rampage's Starfinder campaign wrapping up (as of this last Sunday, and he's already planning to start ANOTHER Starfinder campaign).
Starfinder, Pathfinder, SOMETHINGfinder seems to be all that's on the menu, or else I have to RUN something, and I have enough trouble finding the creative sparks to start up a new campaign without ALSO trying to complete other creative endeavors at the same time.
So I think I may just have to take a "vacation" from weekend roleplay for a while. I don't want to disengage from everybody even more so than I have already (with the "pandemic" and all, it's not like I really do much in the way of paying visits and hanging out in person, let alone online), but while it may have been a useful change in perspective to be on the player side of the screen for a while, too much of my weekends being taken up by game obligations (plus weekdays and many weeknights being taken up by WORK), and I'm unlikely to make any progress on new obligations for Wonderland before it's old and cold and gone.
File Excavation
Anyway, part of the process involves unearthing old hard drives from now-dead PCs, and trying to see if I can salvage anything from them. The PC I ran my "Wonderland 1888" campaign on back in 2012-2013 is long gone. I haven't actually bought a new computer for myself in ages; I've just been using hand-me-downs, whenever Gwendel upgrades (and when it's not on account of her old PC frying). I really wish I could find the master files for those full-color illustrations I did for the online WNM campaign -- the Maptools maps, the character portraits, and so forth. They won't be useful for the Wonderland No More main book -- the interior is strictly black-and-white, dominated either by Tenniel prints, or pen-and-ink attempts to replicate such a look -- but they could still find use in *supplementary* material. (And supplementary material is part of what we'll need, so we don't just put out a sourcebook unsupported by a proper array of *adventures*.)
What I'm really dreading is that I've gone through my collection of salvaged hard drives, and one of them won't load (it's an old Samsung drive from an Iomega external drive that died ages ago), and another one is a solid-state external drive that, when I plug into a newer system, gets the computer to ask, "Do you want to format this? C'mon, c'mon, you REALLY want to format this, dontcha? LEMME FORMAT IT ALREADY!" Okay, not literally, but it really seems to be just ITCHING to wipe all my data as soon as it gets an excuse. I was able to load it successfully on an old machine running Vista, but that machine is in pieces now. Why I can load this USB external drive only on an OLD machine and not a NEW one, I simply do not know. I really should have just offloaded EVERYTHING off that drive at some point to archive onto some other device, then gone ahead and reformatted it on a new machine, and then, if I so cared, put stuff back onto it.
My archives all seem to be "snapshots" around different times. Most of my Wonderland-No-More-related files are circa 2010-2011, when I was, of course, actually working on this. Then, my archives jump to around 2015 or so. I think that particular unit was circa 2012-2013. I AM NOT ORGANIZED ABOUT THIS AT ALL. I uploaded some shrunk-down versions to DeviantArt and put up for "show 'n' tell" elsewhere, but I really need the high-res masters for anything approaching print quality.
Revising the Core
It's all going to be "virtual" this time around -- PDF, no print run -- so I have a little more freedom to play with the materials. I'll still try to keep the main core book print-ready, but individual adventures and handouts can play around with Adobe Acrobat layers and form-fillable features, and other fun stuff, and COLOR, I suppose.
This won't just be about updating to the new rules and re-branding, but another shift is to try to make the central campaign conceit a little more "flexible." As originally published, there was a very specific "Victoria" plot point campaign with a distinct beginning, middle, and end, protagonists and antagonists, and so forth. However, I can see that a lot of the material for a "Wonderland gone wrong" could be easily adapted with different cosmologies for WHY such a Wonderland exists, what the real world is like, and what should be done about the whole mess.
For instance, in my Wonderland 1888, I played around with the notion that there was a fairly nice Wonderland to be found, worthy of saving, but that there was also a twisted, corrupted version as well. In this take on it, it reflected the dark mind of a particularly "gifted" person who had once visited Wonderland as a child, and then was obsessed with returning as an adult -- no matter WHAT the price.
I could also envision framing Wonderland as part of some sort of virtual reality experiment in a cyberpunk-ish world, revisiting the "Avatars" concept with "VR spills into reality," or even just play it up as a self-contained fantasy world with Wonderland themes, with dungeons populated by jabberwocks and slithy toves and chessmen, without caring TOO much about what the "Real World" is up to in the meantime.
Wonderland Gaming
Of course, one thought that occurred to me is that for my Saturday afternoon games, I could run another Wonderland campaign. Digital_Rampage would likely NOT be interested, but at a certain point I just have to run with whatever I've got. And if I'm devoting my creative energies toward revamping WNM, then that's going to be occupying a big part of my brain-space, so it seems only natural that I'd use it as fodder for some one-shots or even a campaign. Alas, all my maps and such I developed for virtual tabletop play would be in the same place where all that artwork was I developed for the online Wonderland campaign. So ... until I find THAT, I'm out of luck.
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Date: 2021-02-27 03:58 am (UTC)And I feel you on the "what happened to these files???" problem, ugh. I used to keep logs from my RP on FurryMUCK, including dozens of ones from when I met Lut. I lost them all like 15 years ago, after moving computers, and I still regret that. I have one 3.5" discs with a handful of logs on it, but of course no 3.5" disc reader anymore. :|
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Date: 2021-02-27 11:41 pm (UTC)I guess the real point of contention would be that I was *supposed* to make something that would look "Tenniel-esque." And I just don't think the end result looks like something Sir John Tenniel would have drawn, by a long shot. I think it's pretty evident that how I drew this was to first make a photo composite of a bunch of architectural references at oddball angles (and that DID take a lot of work -- as I had to basically twist and redraw a LOT since I couldn't just find everything that would fit perfectly together at the angles I wanted) for a reference, and then start filling in details. I get the feeling that if Tenniel were to tackle something like this, it would probably be something a lot more organic, and have a lot more dynamic use of negative space.
In any case, the lead writer had a more specific motif in mind anyway -- he'd like an image that shows a view of Wonderland as if in a mirror, but cracked down the middle ... with one side being a fairly whimsical-looking Wonderland, but the other being a more twisted, shadowy, menacing version. I think I can work with that. (I'm not sure if the picture itself is going to be "colorized" or not. It depends on what I can do with the rest of the cover, I suppose. It might be nice if I could come up with something that would plausibly look like a Victorian-era book cover, but that might be too tall an order, especially since I have a logo to work in.)
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Date: 2021-02-27 11:49 pm (UTC)