I will continue to drop drafts for the yet unnamed Solo game/setting here as a living writing diary as I get them free of typos, but they are all drafts and some of them probably won't be in the finished product.
The goal of all of these updates, from various in game sources, like the travel brochure I am currently working, printed on the behest of the chamber of commerce, is to give enough description that Soloist can grab and run, but they by no means tell the full story of the Verdant Peninsula or the city of Five Towers. That is entirely intentional.
The goal of the finished product is to have a complete starter for a setting, with cool things, people, places, and lots of weird devices for PCs, who may well be adventuring mercenaries, to jump in with both feet.
I see these documents (and the additional information in the appendices) as but one leg of a tripod. Another will be inspirations gained from the Oracles and Tables that you chose to employ in your game. And the most important part will be your own imagination. So when I state, for instance, that the Merchant Prince's estates have a level of opulence to make a successful sea captain and wealthy man feel poor from one shared dinner, you get to decide what that means.
Likewise, as will be stated in the next document to come out, a travel brochure for the Verdant Peninsula, that the outlying parts of Five Towers are "lawless" you and your oracle of choice will decide how that lawlessness looks in your game.
Other sources I believe will be coming forward over the next few weeks are: a letter from a Wizard to his nephew who is considering following in his uncles footsteps, several transcripts of local conversations that an aspiring young journalist has recorded, a draft of the notes of a Rune-Plate engravers introductory class to a new crop of apprentices, and the possibly mad ravings of a mage concerning "vast environmental deterioration" leading to "dimensional destabilization" caused by Rune-Plate technologies.
All of the documents will be written by sources in game and will have sample adventure hooks and Fate questions to carry the game from what I write to what you can play. Maybe the source is trustworthy. Perhaps it is mistaken. Maybe they are even lying. They are certainly leaving some parts out. Nothing will be fixed in place, until it is fixed in place in your individual game.
Taken as a whole they will describe the setting pretty well I thing, but as a spring board to your own unique adventures, not my prewritten adventures.
I don't know how long the final work will be, but it will clock under 50 pages including appendices. Maybe a lot shorter if I can condense the exposition documents enough. No one wants endless exposition. We want to play. So I am going to try to stay under 10 documents, and excepting the travel brochure I am currently working on, no more than 3 pages each. That should give about 30 plot hooks, a sample of NPCs, a couple rules options, and some prefab locations to check out while you break in your PC.
Coming up next, probably in 3-4 parts, the travel brochure "Welcome to the Verdant Peninsula"
Thanks for reading.
W.D.
