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Hello and welcome to my angst-dumping round. I limp to towards the conclusion of chapter 3 (go me) but real life, exhaustion and Fallout: New Vegas are hindering my progress. I also think I might have something resembling … ye gods … a title. Yes. A title. I hate titles. There’s such a lot of pressure on them. I haven’t really been worried by the lack of title, telling myself I could figure something out when it became important i.e. when I actually had enough of a product that I needed something to call it.

But also, from a weird superstitious creative perspective, I’m scared of titles. And I don’t want to pretend my bloody NWN2 module is some great burning flame of creative genius or anything but there’s something so … so … definitive about a title. Like inspiration is a fleeting deer and a title is a spear by which you pin it, bleeding, to the ground. Melodramatic, moi? But I think of that bit from Prufrock…

And I have known the eyes already, known them all
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

That notion of trying to capture something intangible, transforming it into less than it was, smothering the last light from the fading coal of inspiration. Yes, I am overthinking. It’ll be fine. Absolutely fine.

Anyway, the working title is Weorthan, and no guarantee I won’t change it because either I confront the fact it’s wildly pretentious or I come up with something better. Worthan (the th should actually be a thorn but I didn’t see any reason to make it MORE inaccessible) is tied to Anglo Saxon ideas about fate. It translates, depending on usage, into something like “to become” or “to be made” or “to be caused by” or “to be turned into” – essentially encompassing lots of useful story themes about moments of transition, and the connectedness of those moments. As far as I can recall, and it’s been a while since I’ve splashed about in these waters (so it makes perfect sense of write a module about it, yeah) although the Anglo Saxons believed that one’s fate was set, like a path you had to walk, or threads on a loom, you were also making your fate, or your future, in the moments of the present, which, of course, was created from the moments before it. So fate was kind of an on-going process, always becoming. I’ve probably expressed that badly. But it fits, I think. Well, it’ll do.

One of the characters came up with it for me, really. Or rather it arose as a title possibility from a discussion within the game itself, and so I went with it. I’ve said before that I like writing game dialogue because you get to mess around with different voices – well, to an extent, I can’t do accents so I don’t even attempt it, but I do try to make them sound different, to the best of my meagre ability. I guess I’ve always liked that about writing in general though – I mean, I know obviously it’s all me, I’m not nuts, but you sometimes end up expressing things you didn’t know you’d thought, and that’s weirdly pleasing.

Here are some screenshots of characters I’ve especially enjoyed.

click to embiggen

This is Annis, your stalwart, and sarcastic henchman (henchwoman? henchperson?). She’s not actually talking to the Debugging Bear, he’s just in the vicinity, being helpful, as is his wont. I’m starting to think the DB is a bit of an attention-whore actually. I like writing Annis because she’s not highfalutin in the slightest, and for Deeply Thought Through And Significant Reasons, I chose to give her a modern idiom, which keeps the tone light and means she can express things that other characters wouldn’t be able to. Also she punctures me when I’m being all sententious.

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This is an emo leper. I know this is probably deeply insensitive but lepers are cool! So cool! See:

CLICK TO EMBIGGEN LEPERS SAYING UNCLEAN!

Ahem, anyway. I had an empty space on one of the maps and so I put an leper encampment, including emo!leper, there because, y’know, why the hell not.

click to embiggen

And finally this is Fouinon, formerly of Orbec – who is basically, as name suggests, a weasly shit. But weasly shits are fun to write.

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