Writing BLACKOUT
One of my favourite things about this year's advent calendar adventure is that in a lot of ways it feels like writing fiction. The way I work these things is that I plan out what each day's instalment is going to be and write the first week in advance as a buffer, and then I write the rest over the course of the month. I know where it's going and what all the broad strokes of the adventure are going to be, but I don't figure out small details until I'm actually writing (obviously) and I get to see connections grow organically each day.
Here's a character from today's update:
Zara, the Scavenger
HD 1 AC 7Can see in darkness. Attacks twice due to her metal arms.
Short and slender. Metal arms grafted to upper ribs beneath her natural arms, both ending in thick pincers. Black glass lenses embedded in her orbital sockets, covering her eyes completely. Zara has been scavenging the Big Dusty for 20 years, retrieving metals and plastics and weird technology for the Guild of Scavengers in Sandriston. She doesn't claim to understand most of what she pulls out of the Dust, but you can't avoid developing a little bit of knowledge when you see so much weird stuff. She's an expert with machines and circuitry, and she fabricated her arms herself - though she didn't fit them, of course. That was a job for the Grafters at Last Gasp, who she's still paying a decade later.
Until I wrote this character I didn't know that there was a Guild of Scavengers, and I didn't know that I was leaning quite so hard into the science fantasy part of things. My original intention was to have this weird alien structure in an otherwise quite standard fantasy setting, but this NPC entry took me in an entirely new direction that I'm enjoying playing with. This is outside my normal wheelhouse so writing it has been a lot harder than something like Reivdene was, but that also makes it a lot more fun.