Thursday, September 27, 2012

Total Chaos: The Last Post

I owe anyone who's been waiting for me to finish off my thoughts about Total Chaos an apology. But my writing has been taking up much of my time. I have two stories into the Battle Corps site, which I hope will be up soon for your reading pleasure. I also have six more stories into the workshop, and several more stories mostly written. In addition, I've done some writing for other Battletech products, fact-checked several more products, and contributed some thoughts on some behind the scene going-ons.

Here, as promised, is the last look at Total Chaos and my contribution to it....

In addition to creating and fleshing out Gannon's Cannons, I also wrote one of the sidebars that detail some of the more important campaigns. I asked for and received the Terra --- Sandhurst and Western Europe sidebar. I had sixteen hundred words to give you, the reader, details of these campaigns.

Sandhurst was the easier of the two sections. I used the background of my Battlecorps story, The Blood of Man, to base the description of the campaign. It was a nice way to tie in the story with the "historical fact" of Stone's Terra campaign, a much different war then elsewhere on the planet.

Western Europe was taking everything I could find in the other Jihad Terra, arrange them into some type of clear order and filling in a few holes. It wasn't hard, except I had to keep one eye on the word count. As I have said in other posts, Word count for a Battletech product is absolute, and it forced me to rewrite both sections more than once to put as much information into those 1,600 words.
In addition to the sidebar, I also had to create two brand new tracks to round out each mini campaign. I wanted two different tracks and hope I succeeded. Hint: both tracks I wrote relate to the sidebar I wrote.

That's it for now; hope I was able to give you a glimpse into my thinking.

Craig