Welcome to the 15th (fifteenth) writing club update. Opening Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics to page 15 (“Portrait of the Author as a Young Fan”), we find this fiction related snippet:
When the movie [Star Trek: The Motion Picture] was over, I really, really did not want to leave the bridge of the Enterprise. I had to make that experience last. I still remember that very precise feeling, equal parts wonderment, recognition, and melancholy: this was the place I had been looking for, this was where I wanted to live, this was where I belonged. I had found my promised land. Pity it was all fiction and make-believe.
A pity indeed that the post-scarcity almost-utopia of Star Trek’s Federation is only make-believe. But then isn’t a story an almost-world, waiting to be brought forward by the midwives of action. Maybe casting writers and artists as parents is overstating our importance a little bit… it’s nice to think about, though.
But what I can’t overstate is how great our writers are:
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Yes! Believe it or not that was kind of my goal from the beginning - I only ended up GMing (for the first time!) in order to playtest it. After the first playthrough the devs were very supportive of publishing it and helped a ton with editing.
One of the things they did that I think is really cool was preparing a premade template for people to share/publish their campaigns. I’m kinda going overboard on quality and depth because this is also a kind of manifesto on rural solarpunk and New England solarpunk for me. They really want to share basically any resources people create at whatever level of polish they can manage. The end goal is for FA to be much more community-driven I think. The devs largely limited themselves to worldbuilding Southern California as an example and leave the rest of the world open to the community. We’re setting up a wiki and working on a map that’ll show where campaigns have taken place too!
So I was already using their template which worked really well, though I had to adapt it a bit because my campaign was much more open world than their previous examples. And once they played it, they were interested in publishing it through their channels like the rulebook and the original premade campaigns. So it’ll go up on itch.io and DriveThruRPG someday!
And yeah I’m really excited! It’ll be great to see it out there after all this work, and I’m looking forward to making an interposed, print-ready version so people can bookbind a copy of they want.
Eventually I’m hoping to rework a lot of the plot, setting, characters, and content as a choose-your-own-adventure book which will also be free and bookbinding-ready but I really have to finish this version first!
Oh wow, it sounds kind of more comprehensive than “just a novel” like I’m doing, haha. How exciting!