I posted this on my more regular gaming forum, but I thought y'all might be interested in it. So on the [url=http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55023]Farcast "review" thread[/url], I mentioned that I was thinking about doing another yearblog for 2015, but I was sort of losing the juice to do it. Well, I've lost it. Completely. I think I was on the fence about it for a while, and then the [url=http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55576]review with Frank[/url] brought back to mind all the badness in the system and the hidebound nature of CoC fans... The thing is, I could totally do a yearblog dedicated to Call of Cthulhu roleplaying in any given edition. I can make my length 366 entries. Not a problem. I did it with Eclipse Phase, and I can do it again. But I don't [i]want[/i] to just do Farcast randomness one more time, I want to do...more. I want to make it better. Which is why, a couple months ago when I was seriously contemplating this thing, I sat down and wrote a design document. Which is nothing new for me. If you're going to be creating a [i]lot[/i] of content on a regular basis, one of the little tricks is to divvy it up and create sequential patterns - so I made thirteen four-week "months," each month and week got their own theme to help inspire me, and then I divvied up the content so I'd get two NPCs, one location, etc. each "week." Then you just fill things in...and eventually write it out. Nothing's set in stone, so I shifted plenty of entries around, changed things I didn't like, fiddled with things here and there...but as a practical exercise, I consider Farcast a general success, in part because of the design document. But like I said, I wanted the 2015 yearblog project to be...better. So I wrote a more elaborate design document: [url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/14EvQch3gW5hosMbhhlphyRsGMVOz-OBqII-A... I showed it to a few people, got some feedback, and revised it. Then I revised it again. On my fourth go-round, I filled out a bunch of entries in the calendar, just to get a feel for the thing. ...and that's where my DOGAS pretty much ran out. I've generated [url=https://app.box.com/shared/ojoqbce95p]lots of content for Call of Cthulhu[/url] before, but it's all been rather cheesy artifacts and tomes, crappy add-on rule systems, that kind of thing. I never made an effort to put together something [i]cohesive[/i] - and, to be fair, it's not like CoC offers a lot of great examples for the kind of thing I was going for. I probably should have written the whole thing out as a campaign instead of trying to map it as a yearblog. But this gets into the other rub: I don't think there's an audience for it. Farcast, despite my best efforts, is an incredibly niche product. It's more niche than the Ancient Files. The audience is probably comparable to a very game-specific fanzine, and even then nobody does a page-by-page review of a 366-page product. That's insane. It's like looking forward to a running commentary on every weapon in [i]Arsenal[/i] or the [i]Cannon Companion[/i]. So while I was glad for the feedback and response I got, I can understand why it didn't get much...attention. Fan material, no matter how good or bad, is generally ignored. But at least the audience it did get was appreciative of it; I know people have used some of the NPCs and weapons and locations and concepts for Farcast in their games. But what's the audience for Cold Start? Because I didn't want to do a traditional CoC game, where the PCs arrive once more in Dunwich in the 1920s and blow shoggoths up with dynamite. I didn't want to include the [i]Necronomicon[/i] or any of that. I wanted - I still want, in many ways - a game which is about [i]Lovecraftian[/i] roleplaying. A little more [i]True Detective[/i], a little something to keep the players guessing. But it's not a campaign, at least not as conceived. It's...more like what you would hope to see as online supplements to a campaign, or maybe snapshots from a lengthy multi-book campaign. Individual NPCs, individual locations, some adventure seeds and short scenario concepts, some definitively non-Mythos tomes...yeah, a good Keeper could stitch it together, but would they? And would they want to use any of it in their "regular" flavor CoC campaigns? I kind of have my doubts. So that's a large part of it. If it's not going to be what it arguably should be - if it's not going to serve the audience - and if I'm not liking it before I even start properly writing it, then probably I shouldn't write it. So, that it's it. I declare this project dead.