Product Plans for January 2025

 Hello. C J here. I finally have the core rules for the print your own card game Quantum done. I’ve taken a few days to go through my notes and make sure that Quantum works and has everything in it I want it to. I’m considering what to do next. I’m making the core Quantum cards for my Ancient China themed setting Carthia this year but that involves a lot of planning and is supposed to be done by Summer. There’s no need to do it quickly. Carthia needs to be faithful to the source material from Ancient China, at least what of it I can find, and that will take a lot of slow planning to do.

This leaves me with a lot of space and time to do something else. I know and have published enough stuff about Ascala that anyone should be able to write a story there. Ascala is the first of these I’ve done. I don’t have anywhere else in the setting that I can write stories in as easily and with as much knowledge of the location. I also have a long list of things I know about Ascala that I haven’t put into a product yet including most of the named playable or non-playable characters. They have stats. I need to find some way of explaining all of this.

I’m thinking of doing what most game companies do in this situation and writing supplementary books about their main game line and setting. I have a lot I could write down and eventually draw. Then that’s new ebooks to promote the whole series of games. I want to do one in Ascala and then see about the other nations like Nebula and Eternity. Nebula and Eternity have cards at present that I’ve typed but no long format document explaining what life looks like there to the average person. They don’t have main characters yet with stats.

This brings up one complexity. I know that being an artist there is the category of tasteful nudity. Photographers are perfectly fine depicting respect for the human form of either gender. Authors routinely write erotica under another penname or a respelling of their name. I have a product I made ages ago called Heart and Fur. It’s a tabletop RPG about depicting characters’ lives when they were not having an adventure. I’m releasing it eventually as a free download.

It’s incredibly well written even by my standards. It’s about being a person and playing to your strengths. It’s about teamwork. It’s about practising storytelling without the need for conflict. It doesn’t have combat or death in it. It has rules for clothing helping to express a person’s feelings. It has rules for depicting intimate relationships in stories. It also has rules for sex and a couple pieces of art depicting consensual sex between adults.

I know this is probably a stupid question to ask, but where’s the line? Is it obvious to everyone else that erotica can be sold next to normal novels and tasteful nudity is respectful? I am horrible as a person at the concept of artistic license. There isn’t a reason for this. There is no cause. I just know that most people find me through Facebook and Facebook doesn’t allow linking to anything adult. This is not a problem. I don’t know where the line is. I don’t even know how to look it up. I can draw human and fictitious anatomy well. It’s part of the training in art I’ve done. Where do I put it?

On a more fun note, I can write 3000 words a day on a full day of typing work. This is my limit for storytelling. Game mechanics don’t count. Once I’ve got a core dice mechanic made writing any amount of text about it in a day is not hard. Writing up the history and culture of a nation is what I do in my free time. I’m really picky about app games so I need to be near games some other way. So I build them in text format. I’m working on a name for the new series of setting books at present. I’ll post more when I’ve got something done.

C J Mcpherson