Oct 08
JaybeeDevlog
First off, there’s a new Preview Edition up for download. The only changes are the addition of the paladin’s spell progression (which somehow eluded me for two years) and a spelling correction.
All the missing monsters have been taken care of. From there I’ll be hand picking “iconic” monsters that I believe should be in the book but it’s only about 10 creatures or so. I mentioned that I will be adding WP and NWP so the rest of the day will be spent culling the best proficiencies to create a sort of “definitive” list of skills that could carry the average fantasy campaign from level 1 to 20.
HawkWolf (my editor) is at the tail end of the spells. Once that’s finished, the spells will be added to the preview version which will balloon the damn thing from 180 pages to over 600 pages! The book will shrink once we format the thing into two columns but this book is going to be massive and we haven’t even added in items or monsters yet!.
Oct 05
JaybeeDevlog
Finished about 10 monsters today, rewrote the spell Symbol to match the updated Spell Compendium IV, and sketched the image entry for “Purple Worm” and will color it soon. Most of the monsters left are animals and I’ll probably just transcribe the entirety of Mammals, both normal and small, to the monster list since they’re referenced so many times by summoning spells. Once the 20 or so monsters left are finished I’m going to be adding iconic monsters I believe I should keep like pegasus and argus-eyes (my OGL version of beholders). With monsters finished I can move on to editing items to lighten my editor’s work load.
I’ve been thinking about seriously adding proficiencies to the book. I’m still not interested in the other optional material, but proficiencies were one of the defining optional rules that separated 2e from 1e whereas most optional rules were cut material from 1e. Non-weapon proficiencies will probably be the only optional rule I decide to add.
Oct 03
JaybeeDevlog
Finished a few of the missing monsters, bringing me down to about 30 left. I’ve made a few plans about categorizing the monsters because I feel simple alphabetical order won’t do. They will be listed by category (humanoids, monstrous humanoids, fae, abominations, elementals, etc.) and then listed alphabetically.
Although I got away without using ability scores for monsters up until now, I’ll be creating a system for doing so. Essentially monsters will be “average” with a stat array of 10, 10, 10, 9, 9, 8: each type has bonuses/penalties (example, animals can never have more than 4 int and undead always have constitution 0) and then each individual monster has abilities/penalties. For example, a human bandit will have Str +2, con +1, int -1. Like 3e there’ll be an “elite” array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10 for “boss” monsters. In general, monster ability scores are useless because the average monster won’t have any noticeable bonuses/penalties not already listed under their writeup. This information is for creating new monsters or customizing existing ones: maybe the PCs hire a monster so his individual scores are necessary.
I need to remind myself to update rules on vision and maybe write a section on stealth. It’s widely believed that move silently/hide were essential to stealth but that’s not true. There’s already a chart on the limitations of vision but there’s a few things I need to add like spotting light in darkness. On a moonless night in flat terrain a human can see a candle from about 3 miles.
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