Subplot Kudzu

I 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.

Got an e-mail notification today informing me that my Pyramid subscription expires in 3 days. Of course, the online version of Pyramid ended last Friday, so that's a non-issue. But because I was a subscriber at the time it ended I get the next 6 monthly PDFs of Pyramid for free.

Good timing on my part.

I'm not sure how I feel about the monthly, tightly-themed version of Pyramid. It plays to my advantage right now because next month is a Supers theme and I have somewhere between 6 and 8 thousand words in it (unless Mr. Marsh found other articles to fill that space and didn't tell me about it), and I have some ideas for later issues as well. But the big advantage to the old Pyramid was the infinite variety of articles - you never knew what you were going to get - and the realization that with subscription costs each article ended up costing you about a nickle. Now it's $7.95 per issue, though you have the option to biu the issue or not. I suppose the cost difference means they expect more targeted sales, and that the eternal availability of the PDFs means they expect ongoing sales to people who missed the issue the first time.

I suppose I'll have to wait and see, but I will miss the old version. Fortunately, as a subscriber at the time that the online version shut down I was given free downloads to every single article from every issue.

Like I said, good timing.