12 to Midnight

As reported Monday night on our Facebook page, I officially reached the end of the manuscript! Yeah me! Mark that as one giant leap closer to being done. Granted, my “sprint to the finish” took 60 days instead of the original 30, but I got a LOT done. Speaking of getting a lot done, does anyone want to guess how I celebrated reaching my goal? If you said “By immediately starting on unfinished business,” then you guessed correctly.

Since reaching the end of the beastiary, I returned to the very first page of the manuscript, where I’d left myself some notes on things to run down. In particular, I took a fresh look at spirit possessions and exorcisms. Possessions are a horror mainstay, and in a game heavily laden with hauntings, seances, and the like it’s important to get it right. In the previous draft, we explained the mechanics of possession in the beastiary under the Ghost entry. As I worked on the entry for demons though, I realized it made more sense to have a unified “possession” mechanic for all creature types.

Then obviously if you’re going to have possessions then you need exorcisms, right? In Degrees of Horror characters can perform exorcisms using their Faith skill or using a rite of exorcism. In the old version each method was reference separately (in separate chapters, no less) with no mention of the other. Now right below the paragraph on possessions I’ve included a corresponding section on exorcisms. It explains the game mechanic in general terms and describes advantages and disadvantages of using Faith versus magic. Finally, it points to the “Rite of Exorcism” in the magic chapter and describes the mechanics of the Faith method.  This will make it way easier for you and your GM than when we had it spread out across the book.

After getting possessions and exorcism tidied up, my next step was to take a fresh look at seances. I would have sworn that we had a big section in the ghost hunting area about seances, but apparently I was wrong. Sooooo, that was my next job. In the process, I had to take into account some of our new Weird Edges– specifically the Psychic Sensitive, Psychic Communicator, and Psychic Channeler. By the time it was done, I’d folded the Psychic Communicator mechanics into the  baseline seance mechanics. From there, Psychic Channeling (renamed from channeler) became a bonus to the basic seance roll and I clarified the Psychic Sensitive. That’s pretty much how revisions to Degrees of Horror are going to go from here on out. Everything is interconnected, so fine tuning one area usually means chasing down two or three other rabbit holes to make sure everything is still in agreement. Honestly, it’s fun.

Finally, I wanted to acknowledge my writing partner’s return to the keyboard. Ed’s teaching workload has lightened up enough that he said he could take care of some our unfinished business. In particular, he is returning to the adventure generator. That chapter has been his “baby” from the very beginning, and those of you familiar with Ed’s adventure generator writing for Reality Blurs will definitely like what he’s doing here.