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Taking a gamble
Dec. 23rd, 2008 08:24 pmI just finished a 1,675 word article for Pyramid which, I'm hoping, will be accepted in the Battlefield Magic issue. Our esteemed editor hasn't gotten back to me on the query letter, but since the thing was just sitting in my head begging to be written I figure it's best to send it in regardless, on the off chance that he might need a short article to fill out wordcount. It's worth a shot.
The article isn't about magic on the battlefield during the battle, but about the small group of soldiers who scavenge the bodies for useful necromantic spell components after the battle is over. Do you have any idea how much dirt from the lungs of a man who drowned in the mud is worth? This sort of stuff is a nightmare to get in the city with the watch breathing down your neck, but in a battlefield it's just laying around!
The article was easy as a dream to write, 925 words in a few hours with a break to get some pull quotes from Perez Reverte's The Sun over Breda. The stats for the three 100 point NPCs and the 50 point baseline soldiers? About three times as long as writing the article, even with the aid of a newly purchased GURPS Character Assistant. I just don't understand this system, and what draws people to it, but the simple truth is that right now SJGames is the only paying venue accepting the things I want to write. So I have to get over the hump and try to make sense of the system.
Of course, the Ritual Magic skill vanished between the basic set and the updates - what happened in GURPS Fantasy/Magic/Dungeon Fantasy to do that? I ended up going with what was in the Basic Set because that's the one I own to reference, but I'm curious as to what changed.
The article isn't about magic on the battlefield during the battle, but about the small group of soldiers who scavenge the bodies for useful necromantic spell components after the battle is over. Do you have any idea how much dirt from the lungs of a man who drowned in the mud is worth? This sort of stuff is a nightmare to get in the city with the watch breathing down your neck, but in a battlefield it's just laying around!
The article was easy as a dream to write, 925 words in a few hours with a break to get some pull quotes from Perez Reverte's The Sun over Breda. The stats for the three 100 point NPCs and the 50 point baseline soldiers? About three times as long as writing the article, even with the aid of a newly purchased GURPS Character Assistant. I just don't understand this system, and what draws people to it, but the simple truth is that right now SJGames is the only paying venue accepting the things I want to write. So I have to get over the hump and try to make sense of the system.
Of course, the Ritual Magic skill vanished between the basic set and the updates - what happened in GURPS Fantasy/Magic/Dungeon Fantasy to do that? I ended up going with what was in the Basic Set because that's the one I own to reference, but I'm curious as to what changed.
