HostileHex24 So Far
As a brief recap of my last post, a little over 6 weeks ago I (belatedly) started a daily challenge for this year inspired by this blog post. It has been going well so far - I started on the 23rd of January, and as of 4th of February I had fully made up for my late start, leaving me to write my third hex on that Monday with all previous weeks completed.
Across the 6 weeks of the challenge so far, I have missed writing something on only 5 days in total, which I believe is a pretty reasonable proportion. Most of these non-submissions were largely due to late nights where I would begin the writing process for that day after midnight - but time marches on regardless, so those days went marked as incomplete. As of last week, I have set a repeating reminder on my phone to submit some work for the challenge a good time before I head to sleep each night, which seems to be working well in helping me remember before it reaches the witching hours.
The most difficult aspect of the challenge so far has been the conflict between interactivity and hostility. My inclination in adventures or settings is for those with very high levels of interactivity present throughout eg. each scenario having a weird little guy that players can talk to (credit to Brad Kerr for that phrasing). This desire is somewhat difficult to implement when the setting is intended to be so hostile - after all, if everything wishes to kill you, why bother trying to exchange words before the trading of blade and claw? Although it may seem I am about to produce some fascinating insight into how I resolved this conflict, I am afraid the opposite is true. I have found little resolution between these opposing tenets so far, and I have so far settled for making my setting a well-blended mix of distinctly hostile and more interactive features. This has somewhat limited the extent of broader interactive components, but I do intend to try and draw in some larger factions to the game world over the next few hexes to try and give players some potential recurring characters to encounter.
We shall see how that goes.
o7