My Actifit Report Card: April 21 2022
Not terribly productive today because I’ve been feeling pretty rough for no apparent reason.
To be fair, some of that is that I smashed my foot pretty bad while stubbing my toe (yay for stupid injuries). I don’t know if there’s any serious lasting damage, but it’s pretty darn bruised up.
Besides that, there isn’t a lot to do. I had said that I was going to live-tweet the Lord of the Rings trilogy after not having seen it for almost a decade, so I’ve started doing that. Part of that is just because I need to get back into actually looking at fiction and other stuff to be productive as a writer.
I’ve been letting my productivity fall off a little, which is fine for now as far as the Year of a Million Words project goes but also is posing some issues with project deliverables. Client stuff is going fine–though I’d like to be done and I’m not done yet–but my own work has just been really slow and laborious.
Of course, I’ve also had some pretty significant health-and-sleep disruptions, and those seem to be getting better. Assuming my foot doesn’t bother me, I expect to have more stamina tomorrow and since I’ve caught up on a lot of other stuff I should be able to write.
In my most recent update on my blog I had posted about updating Kenoma with some new factions, and I have some ideas for how that works.
First, I’m renaming the contamm faction to represent one branch of a larger group. Still haven’t figured out the name, but I like the idea and it doesn’t hit any of the lore in a negative way because what is true of contamms in general is still true of this subset.
There will be a sort of bourgeois-prole hybrid faction that represents the outer party of the Coalition. They’re adaptable generalists. A good way to think of this in mechanical terms is that they excel at making things work where they shouldn’t, which sets them in a middle ground between a faction like Alcove Group–who just have everything they want and need–or the contamms who focus on making do without. Basically, if you were trying to survive a dystopia with limited materials, you’d have their background. They don’t have the direct conflict with Scary Things as much as other factions, but they tend to have character options that “multi-specialize” (how exactly I’ll pull this off is to be determined).
There is also another “outer Coalition” faction that represents the people of the demilitarized zone that buffers the two major factions (Coalition and Syndical Front). They’re basically mercenaries and smugglers, so lots of skulduggery and deception in a way that sets them apart from even the more intrigue-heavy factions like the Tantalites. They’re more combat-oriented than contamms, but less focused on having the discipline and resources of the Expedition (which is basically a straight-up military force).
The Cartels represent a sort of non-major Coalition faction. Characters who are a member of the Cartles are really the member of a single branch of the cartels, such as Coalition Security, Renaissance Human Services, or another corporate (or pseudo-corporate) entity. The difficulty here mechanically is figuring out how to flesh out some of these in a way that’s distinct from the Alcove Group, though obviously they’re going to be more focused on low-resource official duty. Cartel enforcers may specialize in non-lethal combat (which there isn’t any special ruleset for yet), while their talky and skills-based characters may have a sort of “veneer of deniability” angle. They may take a page from the Knight Limited book and have more reputation-focused abilities.
This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io
