Welcome to another edition of Campus Tour– your behind-the-scenes look at the people and places you can encounter in Degrees of Horror. This week I’m taking the tour off the beaten path, and off campus. The thing about fighting the forces of darkness in a “real world” setting is the need for supplies. Buffy and Willow went to “the Magic Box” for supplies of an arcane nature, but what about all those wooden stakes? As a student in East Texas, just where do you get your hands on a silvered dagger or body armor on short notice? My answer (in part) was Vanderhorn’s Workshop.

Paul Vanderhorn

Paul Vanderhorn’s mobile home and workshop lies at the end of a gravel road 100 yards off highway 96. At first glance, the property bears a strong resemblance to a junkyard. The cast-off frames of lawnmowers, weed wackers, and less identifiable machinery litter the yard like abandoned carcasses. Yet sheltered from view by the workshop, target range of punctured targets and mangled mannequins hint at something deeper.

Vanderhorn’s reputation as a wizard at small engine repair keeps his workshop busy and the bills paid, but his enthusiasm for renaissance reenactment earns him many a sideways glance from his conservative neighbors. When he isn’t fixing chainsaw engines, this modern blacksmith can be found tinkering with armor and weapon designs. Inside the shop, swords, crossbows, pikes, and maces sit in various states of completion alongside dismantled chainsaws and lawnmower engines. The eccentric tinkerer even has a working catapult.

Vanderhorn isn’t blind to the paranormal activity in Pinebox’s, but age and a bad knee keep him out of the fight. Although he may repeatedly warn characters of the dangers in meddling with the things that go bump in the night, he still looks favorably upon anyone willing to stand against the darkness.

Having finished plot point 6 last week, I can officially say I’m at the half-way point for completing the edits for this chapter. It should all be down-hill from here, right? Sadly, it isn’t quite that easy. Plot Point 7 is another replacement plot point. Although the one it is replacing had a neat premise, at the time I was really struggling with writer’s block and I left way too much on the GM’s shoulders to make it cool. This new adventure is integrated much more tightly with the preceding plot points, makes good use of the setting, and brings the cool to the table with less work by the GM.

That’s the good news. That bad news is that while I have a workable outline, I’m still only about 1/4 of the way through the writing. Hopefully next week I’ll be able to report its completion.

Plot Points Completed: 6 of 12
Pages:  30 of 39
PP word count:  463 of 20,940

“Class Note Wednesday” has once again blown past “A Little Late Thursday” and right into “Oh-Oh Friday”. The good news is that I can finally report that the edits to Plot Point 6 are complete. Here’s the breakdown:

Plot Points Completed: 6 of 12
Pages:  29 of 41
PP word count:  1,750 of 21,585

I exceeded my word count goal for this plot point by 250 words and I still need to move the character stats from its place in a separate chapter to this one. This is not an action-packed adventure like the one I wrote for plot point 4. This is much more about investigation. It’s made more difficult because the heroes don’t know what they’re looking for, only where to find it. As with plot point 5, this adventure has the potential to be memorable and fun, but as with all plot points I’m relying on the GM to fill in the grace notes.

Anyway, on with the campus tour!

The Roost

The Ravens Multi-Use Indoor Arena, aka the Roost, has served the campus community for more than 60 years. Unfortunately the ugly grey, windowless, round building suffers deeply from its cold-war era design aesthetics.

Despite the basketball arena’s occasional renovation and creative decorating every couple of decades, the building still shows its age. From peeling paint to vacant fire extinguisher racks to struggling air conditioning, it’s no wonder most campus tour guides skip this building. Even so, the building has not completely lost its luster. Every college campus has certain “dare” make-out spots, and ETU is no exception. Making out atop the ETU Ravens logo on the floor of the basketball court is the “Mount Everest” of challenges for adventurous lovers.

Inside, a high-ceiling breezeway circles the ground floor. From the breezeway, patrons enter at the top row of arena seats. Visitors who walk down the aisles to the basketball court can find entrances to a basement level circling the arena situated under the bleachers and breezeway. This basement area circles the entire building includes locker and sports equipment rooms, a loading dock, offices, multi-use classrooms, cramped conference rooms, and so on.

Second only to the football stadium, the Roost is the largest capacity building on campus. Consequently, its use frequently extends beyond basketball. For events like freshman orientation, staff appreciation, talent shows, science fairs, concerts, and so forth, the university covers the wooden floor with padded mats and erects a stage at one end of the court.

It should also be noted that, like many buildings on campus, the Roost has its own urban legends with regard to hauntings. Two ghosts are rumored to make the building their home. One is a serious but otherwise harmless young woman, said to smell of smoke. This ghost has been known to actually speak to people–usually just to say hello–then disappears a moment later. The other ghost only appears in the basement, and is often mistaken for a rival mascot at first. In a typical encounter, a lone student or staff member is walking down the basement hallway when he sees a brown-skinned figure dressed only in a loincloth and carrying a spear. The figure lets out a bloodcurdling scream and charges with spear held forward before disappearing a few steps in front of the hapless victim.

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Beginning next week I’ll make separate posts for my Class Notes updates versus Campus Tours. I have plenty of material I can queue up for Campus Tours, ensuring that those posts come out every week on time regardless of how things are going with the edits. Hopefully I’ll get back on track with my Class Notes posts as well, but the truth is that all the plot points to come either require significant revisions or are complete rewrites.

It’s Class Note Wednesday (a term I just coined moments ago), which means it’s time for my weekly update on where things stand with Degrees of Horror. Unfortunately this week I can’t report the completion of edits on plot point six. After catching (and mostly recovering from) The Plague™, the last 7 days were devoured by t-ball, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, in-laws, and Masonic lodge. Even so, I have made some progress.

After the edits came back from Pinnacle, we decided that the original Plot Point 6 was too weak to try to save. Instead we’re promoting one of Ed’s “Midnight Tales” to Plot Point status. Although Ed’s basic premise remains the same, I’m having to make adjustments so that the adventure serves a purpose in the overall plot point campaign.

Also, when this adventure was a Midnight Tale, Ed gave the GM a lot of freedom to create encounters leading up to the dramatic conclusion. As a Plot Point though, my next step will be to flesh out earlier encounters (“Act 1″ and “Act 2″, so to speak) so the GM can take the plot point and run it with minimal preparation.

One of the things fans really dig about Savage Worlds is the ease of playability and the low prep for GMs. For writers though, Plot Points and Savage Tales are a constant balancing act. On one side we want to give GMs enough information to run a gaming session with only 15 minutes of prep, but on the other side the intent isn’t to write scripted adventures. (Even though that’s what 12 to Midnight is known for.) How much is enough? How much is too much? Different GMs have different ideas (and needs), but we’re doing our best to strike a sensible balance.

Anyhow, I don’t regret all the little bits of life that kept me from finishing plot point 6 this past week. It’s what being a husband and a father is all about. However, I am going to make a stronger effort to use my down-time wisely and get this sucker finished.

Check back next week for an update on plot point six AND Class Notes on ETU’s basketball arena, the Roost. Due to space constraints we cut a lot of good “flavor text” about the Roost from the book, so I’m looking forward to sharing it with you here!

If you visited the site last week you might have found something alarming. At least, it was pretty alarming to us. 12tomidnight.com was hacked and the website disabled. Actually, it could have been significantly worse than it was. The hacker wiped the logs (presumably to cover his tracks), deleted all the e-mail accounts, and deleted a key folder that kept the site running. However, we haven’t found any evidence that he planted malware the website (and if he had then his disabling the website would have been counterproductive), nor did he mess with the databases that drive our website and forums. Obviously we were able to restore the deleted folder from a recent backup, which means no data was lost.

If you visited the site last week and got a “site not found” message, have no fear. 12 to Midnight is not dead, and I fully plan on continuing my weekly Class Notes on Degrees of Horror.