Too Many Names

I have been running the Star Guard campaign for less than two years (though plotting it for longer than that), and in that time I have created 161 characters. That includes every character important enough to have name; there are many more unnamed "extras".

To put this in some context: the original Strikeforce story had around 400 named characters before I gave up counting, and many more than that by the end.

Some of those characters are extremely minor, and I could sum up their role in a couple of sentences. Others have pretty detailed backgrounds and play major, or at least recurring minor, parts in the story. Eventually, I'll have all of their background written down. But to remind myself how much I've still got to write, I've made a list, the Encyclopaedia Galactica Biographical Index.

In a future blog post, I will apologise for my compulsion to use awful puns in character names. But not today.

Don't Ask me, I'm Just the Writer

After slaving away for hours to perfect my latest piece of writing, I had about two days of self-satisfaction after publishing it before people started telling me what I'd got wrong.

As I've explained previously, the Heroes Universe is a piece of collaborative fiction. I'm the one putting the words down on the web site, but there's a whole team behind me generating ideas for me to use. And they wasted no time in telling me I'd misrepresented several of their ideas in Room XIII.

So: Charlie Haversham wasn't 16 in 1940, he was 14. Yvette D'Evreux wasn't trying to steal a Spitfire when arrested, she was trying to steal a Hurricane. And a couple more minor points were of questionable interpretation.

My first thought was to rewrite the text and quietly republish the corrected version.

Then I realised, I'm writing in the persona of Sir Royston Thomas, and I wasn't mistaken, he was. So in my persona as his editor, all I needed to do was add some extra footnotes explaining that he was mistaken, but leave his "mistaken" text intact. Problem solved!

So that's what the "second edition" of Room XIII now contains. If you've already read the story, there's no need to read it again because nothing important has changed. If you haven't yet read it, you can read the "correct" version here.

I'm going to follow the same approach for subsequent chapters of Room XIII. It doesn't work for the other stories on the site, but it's appropriate for how I've chosen to write this one.

Updates

 Two new articles in the Encyclopaedia Galactica section:

• Bouncing Being, stalwart member of the Star Guard.
• Science Moon-E, a not-very-important scientific outpost.

That's all for this week. More strange new worlds and new life and new civilizations coming soon. And maybe a timeline of the Emissariate. Maybe that should be my next big project.

Updates

 No new pages this time, but updates to a couple of existing pages:

• The Star Guard membership membership roll call has been expanded to include more current members. A few historical details have been corrected or tidied up.
• The list of Galactic Threats has been expanded with new entries.

Next time I get a chance to update, I'm going to add pages for some more of the planets listed in the Encyclopaedia Galactica.

Updates

 I am so far behind updating the History of the Universe, I know I will never complete the task.

I'm still going to work on it. I'm just not going to commit to how often.

Today's update is an article on the planet Esposi-2.

Updates (4)

 The latest planet to be added to the encyclopaedia: 4-TE.

There is actually a coherent naming scheme to these planets, but I'm not revealing it yet.

In case you missed the last article I wrote, it's a list of known galactic villains. This is very much an ongoing work in progress. These first few are only the ones I already had documented, and I'm going to need to create quite a few more if I expect this phase of the Game to last a while.

Updates (3)

I am still creating planets. Today it's Plastin-0

Obviously these updates don't show everything about a planet. Only the things that players should know. The super-secret stuff is for my eyes only.

Updates (2)

 The next phase of the Game will take place in space. I'm intending to start in June, so for the next couple of months I'll be planning it, which mainly means documenting the background so the players (or just me, if it's secret) have something to refer to.

So that includes things such as a detailed explanation of how hyperspace works.

Updates

I wrote a piece about the Star Guard a few years ago that I don't even remember writing. Some bits of it were wrong (i.e. I've changed my mind about things) and lots of important stuff was missing (i.e. I hadn't thought of it at the time). So here's a brand new article that says everything I need to say about the Star Guard:

http://dmheroes.co.uk/reference/star-guard.html