Thursday, January 04, 2007

Dark heresy update 1

So, we recklessly promised to post a regular update on how Dark Heresy was developing.

So far this year it's been the little details that we've been tinkering with.

Today we added Explosive Collars to the list of Equipment a Guardsman might start the game with, sparking a long debate about explosive radius and whether its ok to use another character as a mobile grenade. Effectively, people were in favour of it as long as they weren't the ones in the collar. Typical.

In other news, we finally cracked our bugbear- the name generator. What's more difficult than coming up with a name for your character? Coming up with hundreds of 'em, that's what.This had been on our minds a fair amount, as names in Warhammer 40,000 are a pretty wide and varied affair. Everything from the short punk-y names of Hive gangers to the mellifluous tones of High Gothic needed to be catered to- and in a reasonable amount of space. We toyed with generators that mixed syllables together, but never really got the gears to work on it. Instead, we ended up doing it all by hand- and what an exhausing thing that was too! Thankfully the guys on the forums provided some inspiration, and we had the nice long break of Christmas to recover.

We've liberally plundered real history, geography and science as well as sprinkling a dash of names you might recognise from the Horus Heresy novels, and the history of the Imperium. We've also added some we just plain made up, and a few little gags, just for us. All in all, we're fairly pleased.

What's difficult now is to stay away from the charts, and resist the temptation to tinker.

Still, thats the art of design, right?

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Figgy pudding


Black Industries and Black Library enjoying some fine Christmas pudding and brandy cream.

Mmm...pudding.