HostileHex24: The Two-thirds Mark
This post is a part-way review of my progress with the HostileHex24 challenge. More details on my interpretation of the challenge can be found here, and an older reflection can be found here. This post was originally drafted at the very start of September, and the stats were calculated up to the end of the final week of August.
Since I belatedly started the challenge in mid January, 222 days have elapsed, and I have made content for the challenge on 192 of those days. This "hit-rate" is just a smidge better than 6-in-7, which is my current benchmark for consistency on projects; if I can say that I have missed less than one day in each week, I'm happy.
Regarding the type of content produced, I have made 35 weeks of content in total, split into 13 weeks of hexes (37.1%), 18 weeks of dungeons (51.4%), and 4 weeks of towns (11.4%). The dungeon-heaviness is not necessarily unsurprising, given that each hex week has 3 runs at a 20% chance to spawn a dungeon, which will itself take between 1 and 3 weeks to write. If I were to re-structure this challenge, I would perhaps introduce a limit of only having 1 dungeon per hex to ensure that hexes are produced at a greater rate than dungeons. The challenge is called HostileHex24 after all.
Lessons Learned
If I may indulge in a little self-reflection, perhaps in the hope that others may find it somewhat useful, I have discovered the following things about my writing over the course of the challenge:
My writing has an overly-naturalistic bend. When developing locations, I struggle to inject the weird and wonderful without breaking my own sense of thematic coherency. Of course, this could be an issue with my standards and choices - perhaps I have too narrow a view of what elements can fit within a theme, or maybe I need to put more faith in the human ability to string together stories in retrospect from disparate elements.
I'm not great at generating interesting treasure. Perhaps as a result of point 1, when faced with making magic items, I have struggled to make them both interesting, impactful, and thematically coherent. I don't think this is necessarily a "choose two" situation, so it may well be something I either have to practice at. That, or I could just steal other people's wonderful magic items.
I struggle with regimented creativity. The constraint of having to write content for this challenge has started to grind as of late, especially as my creative inclinations have diverged from where they were at the start of this project. This has led to a tension between what I want to be writing (my mid-13th century historical fantasy heartbreaker) and the content that I am sworn to write. Well, sworn is perhaps a little emphatic, but I made a commitment to this challenge, and I intend to see it out.
Recursive Reflections
In my last post, I raised a couple initial concerns regarding the challenge - why don't we see if those still hold up?
Missing posts due to late nights: this is no longer happening, partly due to the repeating reminder on my phone, and partly due to having to get up earlier for work now. Yay?
Interactivity limited by hostility: soon after the previous post, out of concern about the lack of interactivity, I tweaked the chance of a town being spawned to ensure I would have the chance to write a connected body of NPCs. This worked - I wrote a 3 week town which I am still very proud of, and it eased my concerns about a lack of interactivity in the setting. Since then, I have made efforts to introduce small notes of interactivity in everything I write, whether those be angry ghosts who can be appeased, aggressive but sapient creatures, or humans looking to survive however they can. Whilst this has made the world slightly less explicitly hostile, I think it has made it more gameable overall, and therefore hopefully more fun for players.
Wrapping Up
For now, and hopefully until the end of the calendar year, my commitment to the challenge endures. Despite the struggles outlined above, I still plan to fill out the rest of the paper diary I have been writing in, and I will produce another reflections post once the challenge is complete. Until then, keep your torches lit and hammers handy.
o7