I have bitten off more than I can chew. In fact, what I have bitten is chewing back and may be bigger than me.

The Unnamed 2022 Project is still an on-going, living breathing beast of a thing. But (yeah there’s a qualifier) — I haven’t risen to the self-imposed challenge and I’m about to blow past my first self-imposed deadline. I would have preferred to announce today that the first “drop” of 2022 was ready and that you’d be able to download PDFs of this first content pack for free (or pay-what-you-want, if you felt like tipping) from at least two digital stores including… um… Gumroad.¹

There isn’t a release this week. So let’s talk about what I *have* been doing for these last 16 weeks—including a selected sampling of the diversions and dead-ends encountered so far—and where the 2022 Project is at.

I have a name, and a website, and that website is running a Wikipedia-like software implementation², which will be the home of the always-free parts of what I’m working on. The working title for the project was “System15” [riffing on the xkcd comic, Standards] and is now called Plinth·RPG

https://plinthrpg.com/

Plinth·RPG, properly, is the game: a rules-light tabletop fantasy storytelling RPG that I’m still working on. When I’m finally done with the mechanics of it and have wrung it through several additional future drafts, it’ll probably be at least 16 pages³ but not more than 64, with art, and available as a slickly formatted PDF⁴. Since the objective is to write a rules-light game, the overwhelming majority of the content (the rest of plinthrpg.com) will be a whole new fantasy setting, more or less as I write it. That’s one reason, though not the only reason, that I went with wiki software rather than a blog format for the Plinth site.

That fantasy world will probably need its own name at some point. Though I’m fine with moving forward under the really-is-that-what-you’re-calling-it, the-name-just-seems-generic-to-the-point-of-obfuscation brand of “Plinth” in that Plinth has at least two things going for it: no one else is using it, or anything close to it, and also (as you might have noticed) I registered the dot-com.

Today is, was, my first deadline, as I noted in the last blog post. This announcement, and the reveal of the still-skeletal website, was not what I intended to release.

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My goal for the Untitled 2022 Project was to prepare and release a “content drop” every six weeks: digital files available for download and containing, well, something like an old school D&D adventure – some maps, some descriptions, a few notable NPCs and perhaps a new faction (to add to my collection), and if appropriate, some monsters or creatures or critters to go along with.

This was a good first impulse and is still a decent idea. I never got anywhere close, though, because I rapidly careened off that course on onto a different track.

My idea for a simple adventure map was sabotaged when I asked, “Well if I’m making a map anyway why not make it part of the world we’re building?” and that led me down a rabbit hole of medieval and renaissance travel modes and travel times and appropriate map scale and wait, how many kilometers is the Earth’s equator again and what about the distance to the poles, and say has anyone done a world map projection that works with hex maps⁵, and now I have a lot of notes and some fun things sketched — but I’m not really closer to that first Pack drop and I still don’t have a format or template that I can iterate on and drop things into.

[Image caption: you can maybe see how things like this became a distraction]

So I don’t have the neat, initial adventure model that I thought I would have ready at this point. I’m not at the finish line; I am only just now getting ready to run this thing and enter the starting gate. It sucks, and it’s not where I want to be, not where I planned to be, but I know whose fault it is⁶ and all I can do is keep going.

My next self-imposed deadline is six weeks from now, Week 12 of 2022, and Friday 25 March;
I’m already anticipating that I’ll miss that deadline too.

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One of the blacksmiths I follow on YouTube⁷ has a neat saying that I’m going to borrow for this, “Need a tool, make a tool”. The concise version is memorable and I can’t improve on it, but I’ll expand on it just a bit so you know what I mean by it: If you know what you need for your end goal but you can’t find the exactly right tool to get there, go ahead and make the tool (or tools) first. Which he literally does in many of his early videos, making hammers, tongs, drifts, dies, all kinds of tools.

For what I’m working on, I need a couple of tools first. I need to get up to speed on Scribus and build the PDF template. Of course, it’ll probably be a two-column layout that looks like every other RPG rulebook but even just saying that assumes a lot – font choices for headers, body text, tables, sidebars—oh yeah we’ll need to figure out formatting for tables and sidebars, and we’ll also need allowances for spot art. The goal is to have something that looks familiar to the target audience but in the ‘house style’⁸ that stands out a little bit from everything else. I haven’t done layout since 1990 and that was on the school Macs and I’ll be honest, I don’t even remember what the program was called, and many intervening years of banging my head against CSS hasn’t honed those skills any. But once those decisions are made, the template is a tool, and I can just (hopefully) drop the words into it.

The other tool I need is for maps, and surprisingly, the best tool that’s available may just be Clip Studio Paint. But that’s more software for me to learn and another template to build. I don’t know that I’ll be able to do both in twelve weeks, let alone six.

But that’s fine. And I have two tools that already online and working: The new Plinth·RPG wiki, and this blog. I can keep the lines of communication open, certainly, for anyone who is following me on this weird new adventure, and I can describe the process of learning how to build new tools and also the tools themselves, if they’d be of use to anyone.

That’s where I’m at. It’s a new starting line. And I’ve got a six week sprint ahead of me.

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¹ if you’re not on twitter or not following enough artists & content creators on twitter you missed the drama: The CEO of Gumroad (a smaller but once a decently well regarded e-commerce platform where you could sell, among other things, PDFs and digital files) was caught out trying to mint his own batch of NFTs. Twitter, at least the twitter I’m following, was collectively not amused. Ko-Fi and Itch.io have been the most commonly recommended alternatives.

² for those who must know, either to suit their own similar needs or just to be nosy: DokuWiki, https://www.dokuwiki.org/, which is available under the GNU General Public License (so: free) and which was both easy to install and easy to get started with

³ If I’m a good editor and manage to reign in all my usual bad impulses, like including footnotes for everything, then I might be able to keep things down to a taut, efficient 16 pages. I anticipate it’ll be more like 32.

⁴ and maybe also print-on-demand, if I barrel past the upper page limit I just set and project bloat inevitably sets in and the whole thing is closer to book size than not.

⁵ the answer is yes, but figuring out how many times it was answered yes and the ins-and-outs of each is a whole week shot, I tell you.

⁶ I’m going to blame ADHD of course

⁷ Yes there is more than one. Alec Steele in this case, and I’ll just note that’s a fantastic name for a blacksmith

⁸ Graphic design is my passion

⁹ I’m not sure why I started leaning so heavily on footnotes for jokes and asides but I think it’s too late to stop now. And that probably means I’ll have to include some sort of allowance for footnotes in the PDF template, dammit.

I’m building a world.

This isn’t that unusual. In fact, it’s so common there’s a longstanding joke about “world builder’s disease”, where creators and authors of many different sorts become a little bit obsessed with all the pesky little details of a fantasy or sci-fi setting and distracted from actually writing characters and story. Or, in the case of someone working in and around RPGs, becomes so occupied with lore and backstory and possibilities they lose sight of players, and the game.

I’ve got a bad case of world builder’s disease. Not terminal, but I’ve suffered for decades. And the project I’m starting *isn’t* about fixing that—because I’m not sure that world building is the problem to be fixed.

If I do have a problem, it’s that I’m easily distracted—and sometimes that distraction isn’t the internet (I know, right?), I’ll get sidetracked by another idea: A new rabbit hole to run down, a character idea that needs to be chased down and properly sorted, a road ‘less travelled by’ encountered in a yellow wood, that sort of thing. To date, I haven’t found a way to avoid the distractions, and I haven’t been disciplined enough to ignore them.

What slowly dawned on me is going to sound like a stupid idea: I had a suspicion that what I really needed was something *bigger*, big enough to accommodate the ideas and the distractions both. A super-large idea container that I could just start binning things into.¹

So I’m building a world.

I have notes. Lots of notes. Lots of disconnected ideas and story beats and fragments of mythology.² The whole thing could use some structure. And of course I mean literal structure, in that there will be maps, and a wiki.

But by ‘structure’, I also mean deadlines. For inspiration I look at how Dickens and many others wrote their novels: a bit at a time and serialized in magazines before it was all wrapped up (and edited) into a book. Many of us are already familiar with how motivating an actual deadline can be. I don’t know if the self-imposed deadlines will loom quite so menacingly over a beleaguered author’s very soul, but I have a calendar set up for 2022 and we will discover that together.

I’ve been working at this big project in fits and starts all through 2021, and going back into 2020 a bit.³ So parts of this project are already set up, but the ribbon cutting and grand opening will be the first deadline, six weeks into 2022, 11 February. My big goal for the new year, the overall goal of the project, is to publish an installment every six weeks.

I’m still trying to decide both what publish means and what the actual product will be for these ‘installments’, but I’m leaning towards a package of materials for folks who enjoy fantasy role-playing games.⁴ A set of maps and some background and some characters, a setting or adventure suitable for a gaming session, along with some notable NPCs and a new faction and a new town or city, another small corner of a slowly unfolding world.

While I’m working on each Drop [working term, I’ll come up with a better name later] I’ll be adding all that along with the other details and proper names of things to the custom wiki. If I get distracted by something shiny, I’ll add that to the wiki too. And between now and February, as I figure out the actual scope and scale of the 2022 project, I’ll be blogging here, talking my way through my process, telling you the tools I’m using—and learning—and sharing whatever the hell this is, both the process and the project.

Sharing is the best part of what we do online, ideally anyway.

And in the interest of sharing, I’d like all of this to be free. (Mostly free) (and some large part of it always will be free.)

I will be giving away what I can⁵, and we’ll work out the financing later. At some point I anticipate that my project will need art, lots and lots of it, and for that I’m going to need an art budget. Though I do like money, and find it has many uses, this is not a project I plan to make money on. (I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an outside chance that I’ll build something worthwhile through this — and worth putting a price tag on — but wherever that place is, we’re not there yet.)

This is the point in the article where I try to wrap things up, and end with something trite like, “So Join Me on This Epic Expedition to a New World! I have a lot of ideas, and hope for the future, and though I don’t know quite where we’re headed I look forward to where this Grand Adventure (And Experiment!) will take us!”

At the moment I can’t think of anything better to end on, and far be it from me to make an unexpected break with tradition.

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¹ “Bin” is probably the wrong verb to use here but let’s go with binning for now.

² In addition to the notes I’ve specifically made since this started, I also have older stuff that I might, might, recycle into the new World as well, but I’m not sure how many of those past worlds could find a new home here and which should really stand alone and apart (and are best forgotten). There is a difference between a large encompassing world with many influences, and just putting every failed draft into a blender and hitting frappé.

³ Pandemic. Y’all know. And the long slow crawl up this on-ramp is also why I feel like deadlines might help. A new start, a new year, an actual schedule. Motivation.

⁴ The distance between RPG and Fiction is a short one. Not even a brisk walk down the garden path, more like standing on different parts of the lawn, batting things back and forth over a net. So I hope my decision to favor RPGs over Fiction doesn’t disappoint. Hopefully the flexibility of the format allows me to be even more creative.

⁵ And releasing as much as I can under a Creative Commons license. Share Alike or just straight-up free to use.

⁶ Worldbuilding might not be a problem that has to be fixed but the jury is still out on my reliance on emdashes, parentheticals, and endnotes.

I didn’t post anything on the actual first day of the year because
1. I didn’t actually have that much to say (apparently)
2. This isn’t going to be a new year’s resolution thing where I post every day, no matter what
3. Actual events of the day were, after waking up: some youtube; a nap, like, got a blanket off the bed and settled in and really napped; forcing myself awake because I did in fact have somewhere to be; showering and the necessary things to be out in public; spending the afternoon with my folks, and a traditional New Year’s dinner¹ —
4. and after driving home and settling in with the blanket again I didn’t feel like writing. Or blogging, anyway; if inspiration had struck I probably would have been willing to write out a story idea or scene fragment

So there, you get the play-by-play of the 1st anyway (with an extra side of thought process) on today, the 2nd, probably around 3 in the afternoon when I get home to post this and not around 8am when I actually wrote it.

This being the internet, despite a certain bias towards the new and newly-updated, the time between creation and consumption doesn’t really matter so much. My words will likely be just as valid on 2 January 2040 as they are today, except perhaps for the detail where it is chilly enough to require a blanket.

So if the goal isn’t to produce a daily diary in web log format, or to engage in daily writing exercise as part of a new year’s resolution to “write more and make it a habit”, then what the hell am I doing here?

I write every day and have for years but way too much of that has been on Twitter, particularly in the last four years or so². I need to refocus away from that platform, and I already have a blog (with its own domain name and web hosting and the CMS and *gestures broadly at everything on this page*) so doing some very rudimentary mental calculations: here I am. Again.

I still don’t have an overall site topic, or focus, like I used to when RocketBomber was about bookselling³. I have a lot of interests, I read voraciously⁴, I like to consider myself broadly literate across many categories⁵, I have a tendency to both think I am impartial while simultaneously forming strong opinions about things⁶, and if nothing else I find it particularly easy to settle into a self-reflective mode and basically just talk to myself⁷. So the topic-of-the-day could be anything, really, or nothing⁸.

The blog should be an outlet for me to share, when I feel the need to share (or overshare; see endnotes) and scratch that itch before it incubates and then ends up on Twitter as a “Buckle in folks, I need to tell you 1/X” situation. Among other things, here I have the space for all my parenthetical asides and other digressions⁹ and can perform formatting tricks that are either impossible to do even in threaded tweets, or supremely awkward given the character limits.

You might also hear more of my “authentic” voice in the blog. Editing to fit on Twitter is actually really good practice for an author (including comedians and humorists , as the constraint is a great way to find the joke in a joke) but constantly writing in headlines is not the best way to write. Even in a thread, the rhythm of 280-characters-per forces you into less-than-ideal phrasing and constructions. You can ignore that and just post your paragraphs in their entirety, unedited, and let the breaks fall where they may, but the fact that twitter will display the tweet-chunks with those breaks forces the reader into the clunky twitter rhythm anyway. This is probably the number one reason people hate Twitter threads even if agree with the author and like the points presented: reading a twitter thread is exhausting¹⁰.

You might find my ‘true’ writer’s voice and damnable habit of digression at least as exhausting. But at least here I can vary the rhythm of the writing to suit, and you can read it as a single page and not telegraphed cue-card style, one poster-board all-caps shout at a time.

That’s probably enough “nothing” for today’s post. I’ll see what topic grabs my attention for tomorrow¹¹

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¹ traditional German, with roast pork sauerkraut, because they’re from Ohio. I’ll fix cornbread, collards, and black eyed peas at some point for myself later. Probably Julian-Calendar New Year’s, 14 January, because why not

² the last four as a daily thing but also looking at ten years total on twitter at this point. damn.

³ “RocketBomber” as the name is itself an artifact from a time when I thought I’d be blogging about science fiction. See also: archive.rocketbomber.com – or maybe not, on second thought. The words are all still there, and links to individual articles should still work, but the formatting has not adapted well to its new home and it’s a bit of a jumble at the moment.

⁴ too much of my reading is online only, I need more books. Literally more fiber (things printed on wood pulp paper) in my media diet

⁵ literacy in the age of digital print is about more than just being able to read; parsing and understanding information now also requires both some basic understanding of the visual but non-verbal ways we communicate—art and charts, sure, but also things like font choices and formatting and page layouts—and also approaching sources with healthy skepticism and a critical eye. Too often “a thing” is seen as “more true” just because the presentation was slick and the tone authoritative, actual facts aside. Literacy can also mean a certain grounding in a few of the more important fields, i.e. scientific, financial, cultural and multicultural literacies, and civics, and etiquette (online and off; rules often unwritten and never really covered well) and increasingly, being “literate” across a couple different fandoms. This endnote would really have been better as a post all on its own; I’ll drop myself a reminder to revisit the topic in a few months.

⁶ …the actual worst possible combo for writers on the internet. I only hope my self-awareness of the problem serves as possible inoculation against being “that guy”.

⁷ When writing for myself, I tend to write both first-person and in constant dialog with myself, with past-me and future-me, so much so that I often use the pronoun “we”. Like, note-to-self-style, “We should probably check and see if talking to yourself is still a symptom of something in the DSM-5”. We find it fairly easy to write in the mode, and we find it helps with planning and projects that are going to span a length of time that will require more than one “me” to accomplish. This is a mental-processes thing (not neurotypical, but I like it and it’s mine) and not an identity thing – my pronouns are still he/him. Not least because it’d be Supremely Weird to ask others to use “we” and we ain’t that special. And without access to a time machine I’m pretty sure you’ll only ever talk to one of us at a time. This is another endnote that would have been better as a stand-alone post and I fear that if I continue to use endnotes this will continue to come up as an issue.

⁸ Today’s post—this post—might be a good example of what “nothing” from me looks like. I hope you like the content because if nothing else, I can guarantee a lot of “nothing”

⁹ exempli gratia, vide supra

¹⁰ obscure history threads are an exception. I love me some obscure history threads. Twitter-threads-as-a-medium seems all but custom designed for ‘em

¹¹ If you’d like my take on a particular topic, perhaps an expansion on a point in one of these end notes, you can let me know on Twitter. Of course on Twitter. obviously.