I was done early enough last night that I was able to turn my attention to one of the other important tasks, and make a fair amount of headway. Working from a partial, I was able to complete a chapter of the forthcoming Multiversere second edition.

This chapter is not found in the original rules. That does not mean that it contains new rules. What it does is provide better organization for the rules as published, plus give some tools to referees to streamline play. The new second chapter of the rule book (unless some really major editing happens) is called Character Creation, and pulls together basic information about attributes, skills, and equipment, plus distinct approaches to creating player characters (the On the Fly Character Creation System available on our support site), bulk characters (on spreadsheet format similar to what I use for the forum game), and highly detailed special characters such as the “not-I” player character, the major villain, or the mysterious mentor (the old highly detailed character sheet approach).

I have an incentive for this. Years back when I was writing the novels, I was also reading them to my youngest son in nightly installments. This meant that I had to keep writing to stay ahead of him, so that I would have enough to read each night of the week. In something of the same way, I am posting the new edition of the rules in daily installments to a private list of Valdron insiders, to get editorial comment as I proceed. The reason for doing it this way is so that I don’t reach the end and have to wait for several other people to get through the entire book before giving feedback; it also should mean that everyone with a legitimate interest in contributing will be “on the same page” (quite literally) as the discussion progresses. Thus far comment has been minimal but not non-existent, and changes have been made.

Otherwise we had a bit of concern over a missing houseguest, and a boy who missed the bus whose school is not around here, each of which cost me some sleep. On the other hand, I made some progress editing my Romans notes while waiting in a car for someone who usually gets out an hour or two later than predicted.

Speaking of cars, there has been a development on the new car front that sounds very good to me; however, since a lot of these developments go up in smoke I’m not going to say more about this at this point.

I am going to do a spot of light shopping today, though. I just have not quite decided when.

–M. J. Young