5MW Rokaner Report #2

RR#2, Bounty, February 2024

Happy Leap Day to you all!

This month’s Rokaner Report is a short one. Taking time this month for some development reflections and that reducing that feeling of being “always on” for games-related work.

First up though, I do have a world for y’all, in the system of the Spotted Sun!

The Spotted Sun

This planet is borne of Chris McDowall’s year-long #galaxy24 challenge. The idea is similar to Sean McCoy’s #dungeon23 of last year, but a bit more tame. Instead of creating one cohesive dungeon level per month, you write one solar system per week. Monday is the star, Tues-Fri are locations orbiting the star, and Sat/Sun are adventure hooks.

Naturally, as a sci-fi guy, I took to this immediately. In the first day, I plotted out 55 stars for the year, and started lists of weird worlds. The challenge, the fun, week-to-week has been in building how the people live in these worlds, rather than a table of cool megastructures that exist (even if megastructures are very cool too).

The habitable planet orbiting the Spotted Sun hosts three peoples. The Folk of the Bounty (1), the Bridge Kingdoms (2), and Viridian Consolidated drilling outposts (3). The sun itself is a yellow-orange dwarf star, slightly smaller than our own, and it is covered in expansive sun spots that are visible to the naked eye. And for some esoteric reason, the spots are heating the star (and planet!) instead of cooling it.

The Folk of the Bounty are Gardeners, transhumans who bioengineered themselves to coexist with the mountain ecologies of this world, which they call Bounty. The climate change is causing them serious problems, and one faction made the taboo call to contact outside help.

The Bridge Kingdoms are Trads, i.e. baseline humans, who are stuck in a pre-gunpowder feudal age. Their deal is the Spotted Sun, which they worship in different ways. The factions are split into their own interpretations of the “Face of God” (the sunspots), and they tattoo the spots onto their own faces.

Viridian Consolidated is an exploitative interstellar enterprise, consisting of groups of Trads, Loopers (transhuman spacers with hands for feet), and Visards (cyborg/net transhumans). On this planet, it’s just Trads who are drilling for oil in the northeast wastes, which is not helping the climate problem.

The line between “a lot” and “too much”

I have this on my twitter and bsky accounts, but I have ADHD. New ideas for projects pop into my mind all the live-long-day, and and I say “Yes yes yes!” to work with others when I’m genuinely excited by their proposals. Focus is hard, but I’ve been lucky in game making. There’s always something different to work on: tables, room descriptions, NPCs, more tables, layout, graphic design, collaborating, and the beat goes on (tables!).

I’ve reached a point now of critical mass, however. I felt hounded by a lack of writing progress, and I couldn’t wrap my head around why I didn’t feel “productive enough.” It wasn’t until I wrote it all down that I realized I am toeing the line on working on TOO MUCH at once.

Seeing this list made me think how horribly I’ve broken one of Watt’s guidelines: Work on One Project at a Time. I found these guidelines so important that I’ve had them on my desk since this newsletter released, I heartily recommend reading this post.

The one-at-a-time guideline is the one I knew I would never be able to follow, in any case. But obviously I’ve gone way way overboard. So, how can I make this list look less scary?

Prioritize, Ritualize, Break It Down

Prioritize. A few of these are jams (purple), so they take the backburner seat. If I cannot make the itch jam deadlines, then tough shit, I suppose. Next I assess the deadlines. Deadlines for commissions (yellow-marked out and blue highlight) come before personal projects (green). And attention to Ongoing Tasks usurp current work.

So the two highest priorities would be Twisting Unseen and that top marked out yellow thing. The yellow thing will take one morning at most to complete, and is overdue (but also waiting on another thing for that, so it’s complicated). Ah! See that parenthetical? That’s me trying to weasel the “priority” out of this task.

That’s the rub with ADHD, a certain dread builds up that “difficulty to begin” that’s so annoying. I am lucky enough to have gotten so used to coping with this aggravating impulse to procrastinate that it’s only annoying and doesn’t devastate my mental state. Like I was saying before, that impulse has served me well before, but there comes a time when I gotta just say “no” and write. So:

Ritualize. I used to be better about this. My ritual these days is: put on theme music, my solar lamp, open ghostwriter and go. The better version begins with 5 minutes of light exercise, 5 mins of meditation, wearing my “writing hoody” (that thing ought to be put out of its misery, egad), and a page of self-affirmations. Some folk go for a walk, or head out to write in a coffeeshop, library or someplace. Whatever you do, next you gotta get to work on the lil pieces.

Break it down. First, don’t break down everything, just the one or two most important. Breaking projects into small, achievable tasks has been the key for me to complete large projects. And even still, a huge list of small bits can be super intimidating. Checking off those boxes feels good tho.

The free app Linear for project management has been a nice help. And no, they’re not paying me to say that. (But hey, I’ll take yer money and squawk if yer readin’, Linear people.)

Another piece of creating small discrete tasks is helping plan out the week. Ploppin’ those into your schedule isn’t always easy. The more regularly these bits are “tested” in specific timeframes (another pleasure of ADHD, shitty time-tracking skills), the easier allotting time for writing becomes.

Good luck out there, and see you next time.

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

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