Technoholic Formula Changes!

Year 27

October 1st, 2024: though I wrote it about four different times, I have finally completed the Subplotting Adventures sub-section of the On the Nature of Adventure chapter of my Judging the Game book. It may get written a fifth time, but I'm happy enough with this text for now. We'll see if it speaks to me properly once I wrap up this chapter.

September 24th, 2024: also a while ago, I had written what is now the second protion of the On The Nature of Adventure chapter of Judging the Game, which is (now) entitled Adventure Duration. Since it moved, I reconfigured a lot of the text, and made it fit with the flow of the new first portion of this chapter, which I rebuilt last week.

September 17th, 2024: a while ago, I had written what is now the first portion of the On The Nature of Adventure chapter of Judging the Game, which is entitled Plotting Adventures. Having decided to reconfigure this entire chapter, however, it required a serious revision from top to bottom. And I've done just that, and like the result so far.

September 10th, 2024: addled by drugs while working today, I pored over all the Judging the Game's text while cutting and stripping wires by hand. I've found the structure I want for the On The Nature of Adventure chapter of this work, and have made numerous additional grammatical modifications. The text for this thing, it's starting to speak to me.

September 3rd, 2024: I think I'm done with the Character Generation chapter for Judging the Game, even if I've believed that twice already, so I went through and proofread it all. I'm relatively happy with the text now, even after I reconfigured this chapter's intro text a bunch. It may not be perfect, if there's such a thing, but I'll take it for now.

August 27th, 2024: letting the words take me where they may, I have reconfigured the Generating Antagonists portion of Judging the Game again. And then again. It's now called Memorable Characters, and focuses on more than just those characters in opposition to the players. Good characterization advice applies to everyone, does it not?

August 20th, 2024: though I struggled with how I was to assemble the last portion of my Judging the Game chapter on Character Generation, I've nonetheless manufactured all the text for my Generating Antagonists subsection. I may wind up rewriting the whole thing yet, but at least for the moment I can reliably say that I'm happy enough with it. For now.

August 13th, 2024: still banging away at Judging the Game - its Character Generation chapter in particular. This time around, I've written a portion of that chapter entitled Party Cohesion, which involves player characters and how they do - or do not - get along. Included are a few means by which players can work to avoid conflict amongst themselves.

August 6th, 2024: I'm continuing to bend my head around what I'm trying to plug into the Character Generation chapter of my Judging the Game work. This one consisted of the section entitled Backstory, and talks about the merits of a character's background and history, and how both act to lend depth to a character from the very beginning.

July 30th, 2024: I kept noodling away at the 'On The Nature of Character Generation' chapter of Judging the Game, and have wrapped up another chunk of that. This one, simply entitled Personality, talks about how characters are more than the sum of their assorted benchmarks. That and how well the personalities of various characters out to be expanded upon.

July 23rd, 2024: writer's block, after a fashion, forced a shift in my focus. I tinkered around with the On The Nature of Character Generation chapter of the book today, that being the 'Starting Points' section. This expands on why the various character generation references start player characters out at fifty (50) points, and a few other pertinent issues.

July 16th, 2024: I wrote the first portion of the On The Nature of Adventure portion of Judging the Game over the last few days, fine tuning the text today. This one, titled 'The Number of Sessions in an Adventure', goes on about precisely that. You know, whether you're playing a one-shot story, a full-blown campaign, or some mixture or variation on a theme.

July 9th, 2024: had a few minutes to myself for once, so I have gone and proofread all of my extant text for Judging the Game. I found a bunch of stupid errors in the text, which I fixed, but rereading all of my work on this thing thus far helped me to better plan out the structure of what's left, in particular the 'On The Nature of Adventure' chapter. Section. Thing.

April 9th, 2024: today I actually attempted a scheduled update for the first time in about a year, taking time to update the 13 for its latest year of operation. With how little I actually managed over Year 26 of the site's existence, what with me building a house bus, a lot of this involved bundling last year's updates with this year's. Sorry.

Year 26

April 8th, 2024: observing the flow of the text in the first portion of Judging the Game, I rearranged it a bit so the House Rules sub-section appears before the Genre Rules bit. The latter is sort of halfway between the former and mere chosen options, so it seemed better to expound on them after covering changing the rules.

April 7th, 2024: I'm holding off on the second half of the Genre Rules thing for the time being, letting the genre rules example go for the time being. Thus, I began work on the last big part of Judging the Game's first section, that involving House Rules. I banged out all of this text in one go, once I decided how I wanted it written.

April 6th, 2024: I started my work on the Genre Rules sub-section of this portion of Judging the Game. These are optional rules explicitly put into play to enforce the narrative cohesion of a setting, and I started out by explaining what the point of the things are, and how they can be fielded to better one's game experience.

April 5th, 2024: while I could pontificate on the various sub-genres that tickle my fancy for weeks on end, I kept it to a dull roar, and rounded out my Sub-Genres text with blurbs concerning the Crimewave, Post-Apocalyptica, and War on Terror sub-genres. I probably had a bit too much fun with these, to be sure, but is that a bad thing?

April 4th, 2024: continuing my Sub-Genres work, I built a blurbs for three potential sub-genres that players might decide to adopt for use in their games. This triple whammy includes Cyberpunk, Space Opera, and Urban Fantasy, three sub-genres that are quite popular these days, whether on the table top, while streaming, and elsewhere.

April 3rd, 2024: moving along in my effort to finally wrap up my core rules, I persisted in adding text to Judging the Game. I began the follow-up to the Genre sub-section by writing the stage-setting text for Sub-Genres. This explains what sub-genres are, and more importantly, how one can use them to enhance their games.

April 2nd, 2024: though it's not the largest block of text I've ever written, my Genre sub-section of Judging the Game's first big chapter is one I'm trying to get just right. But I think I've done a good job making a few more genre blurbs today, including bits and bobs for the Adventure, Horror, and War genres. I kind of like this round of work better.

April 1st, 2024: I built out a few bits on genre for Judging the Game today, including blurbs for Fantasy, Heroics, and Science Fiction. Each of these portions of the Genre text include a paragraph of flavor text, and then another to give a broad notion of what it covers and how it can be used. They'll probably need revising as well, of course.

March 31st, 2024: continuing on in my work on Judging the Game, I began the next sub-section of the rules, that on Genre. This is to help players narrow down what kind of game they actually intend to play using the CASE. Began this larger block of text with a preface to the genre descriptions to come, though I see me changing this text too.

March 30th, 2024: today I began the first big portion of Judging the Game, which is On The Structure of Reality, which begins with the Infinity of Infinities sub-section. This is where the basic structure of reality that the Costumed Adventurer Simulation Engine recognize is detailed - at least in the absolute minimalist means possible.

March 29th, 2024: starting the next big thing, I started noodling around with some of the text for Judging the Game. This primarily consisted of me hacking together the intro text, a process I began while driving my bus route each morning (long story). I'm sure I'll hack it up many times over, but I like what I've come up with so far.

April 24th, 2023: wrapping up my work on ghouls, I forged their QARD variation today. This was also a full rework, replacing my old Saga edition of these fellows with a conversion of my new CASE standard. Testing out my hindrance rules with my QARD ghoul entry, it seemed to work out perfectly. Or perfectly enough, at the very least. Ah, successes!

April 23rd, 2023: having overhauled my CASE 'greater zombies' from the bottom up when turning them into my new ghouls, I similarly had to rebuild their 4C System: Edition 13 edition. This mostly involved just pasting the whole thing over and doing a fresh conversion from the old one to the new one, but hey, that's easier. And takes less time!

April 22nd, 2023: with my variations on the zombie sorted, I can now engage in the process of transforming my old 'greater zombie' 'alien' type into ghouls. Aside from a bit of the extra weirdness I added to the original, these pretty much make perfect sense as ghouls, so I'm running with it. Consider it local color, like my atlanteans wound up being.

April 21st, 2023: overhauled the QARD variation on the zombie description today. And this was incredibly fortuitous, for doing so forced me to finally figure out how I was going to make hindrances and augmentations work, since I despised how they applied to character generation previously. And what do you know, having done so, the zombie's base cost now makes sense!

April 20th, 2023: since yesterday I overhauled my CASE variation on the basic zombie, I did the same for my 4C System: Edition 13 version of that beast this time around. Today I worked out how the base cost of the thing had to be overhauled in the face of my streamlined limitations rules, which naturally allowed me to update that on the original.

April 19th, 2023: one of the many, many outstanding tasks required of the content changes here at the 13 is the exporting of all my Variant Earth 13 materials. Of course, one portion of v13 that overlaps with my rules corpus is the sample aliens that are going to land in every variation on Exobiology 101. One such overlap is the classic zombie.

April 18th, 2023: Ironhide is fixed. I broke him in numerous ways for his CASE variation, from the missing popularity asterisk blurb to all kinds of grammatical failures. Egad. Ironically, the QARD version was spot-on this time. I also added the languorous limitation to fix an oversight from my previous work on him, accounting for his 'fragility'.

April 17th, 2023: ugh, that's a threepeat for the nature of things I had to fix on extant Autobot entries. What I'm saying is that all of Huffer's variations here were suffering from the same issues as Gears and Hound. At least knowing what I bungled helps to fix it in my existing Transformers work before I write any more of these mechanoids.

April 16th, 2023: when poring over Hound's various Technoholic renditions today, I had much the same problems I did with Gears. His original CASE version only needed the slightest of modification to better fit with my intent (had to get over myself a bit), but his QARD edition needed adjusting from being a mere conversion to its own entity.

April 15th, 2023: beginning another round of error checking on my extant Transformers descriptions, I have pored over my description of Gears today. Seems my CASE variation on the grumpus was fine, but his QARD edition was slightly off-kilter. That's just what you get when you change your conversion process in progress or something.

April 14th, 2023: once again producing an all-new Transformer to fill out that whole 'Transformers' portion of the site I'm hosting, I covered another mail-order exclusive, this time from 1985. This fellow is Camshaft, a surprisingly brutal Autobot who possesses 'two and a half' different forms: a humanoid shape, a vehicular shape, and a weird hybrid of the two.

April 13th, 2023: the last segment of my first round of Transformers reference improvements to clear me for just building all-new character descriptions, my proofreading of Cliffjumper has proceeded just fine. I apparently gave him a +1 CS bonus to the damage his glass gun can inflict, so I dialed that back juuuuuust a bit. Apologies.

April 12th, 2023: kept at my minor effort to ensure my Transformers descriptions are solid, since I did fiddle with the text of Transcribing Transformers a bit during the year or six it took me to write that. Thus, I proofed my description of Bumblebee today, and it would appear that I hadn't bungled anything for this major Autobot hero.

April 11th, 2023: continuing my foolish effort to error-check my Transcribing Transformers efforts over the years, I have begun working over my Transformers descriptions to ensure I didn't bungle them all up somehow. It's bad advertising, you know. Anyway, I went out of order for some reason yesterday, so I backtracked and worked over Bluestreak today.

April 10th, 2023: one of the things I decided to do was verify that I'd compiled all my extant Transformers character descriptions correctly, along with making notes on each where I'd deviated from the Transcribing Transformers work. Looking at Brawn to start, I got his CASE variation correct, but I seem to have drifted a bit on his QARD variation. Whoops.

April 10th, 2023: the general consensus on the Internet seems to be that three of the mail-in figures from the early Transformers line actually came out in 1984, not 1985. Thus, I have to add a few more Autobots to that initial roster of the things, starting with Zetar. He's one of the Powerdashers, a tactical boring device that recently got tech specs!

April 9th, 2023: welcome to the twenty-sixth year of Technohol 13: the Atomic Drink! While I don't have much planned for the site this year, what with me needing time to complete the construction of our family's house bus, I've taken time out to prepare the site for whatever progress I do manage to produce for all of y'all.

Interested in using Technoholic content in your own project? Please read this beforehand!