Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Battle Reportification Part 13 - Piecing It Together


How do you combine all the elements that I've shown you? Find out after the jump.

First I'll give you an update on how my attempt at getting the rest of my army painted so I have a fieldable army as per my resolution:  no progress.  I will work on painting for probably about an hour after this post is done, but so far I've done nothing aside from almost having completed the two major colors I want on two of my battlesuits (similar to base coating, just not finished yet).  Also I have a bunch of other details and colors to add to them before they are finished.  Probably will be another 6-10 houNrs of work on those two alone.  How are your resolutions coming?  Discuss it in the comments if you'd like to share.

Everything seems to be going smoothly with your Battle Report.  You have constructed the setting with a solid amount of depth, your narrators and other characters are realistic, interesting, and there are places that you plan on taking them in this or in future Battle Reports, you roughly know what sorts of scenes you want to work on in order to have plot, show off your setting, and provide some much needed character development.  Now it just comes to you combining everything as the planning phase is finished.  But at this point you have so much material it almost feels overwhelming!  Did you perhaps do too much preparation?

Have no fear, Charging Carnifex is here!  You may be daunted by how much you have done if you did EVERYTHING that I talked about but you really shouldn't worry.  Remember that strategy that I talked about with the spider webs or clouds, where you start with a central idea and move on from there, connecting the dots as they say?  You can do the same thing here, beginning with those ideas or events that you determined are the most important or reminiscent of your theme(s).  Whether these are the significant events, specific conversations where characters are revealed in greater detail to the audience, or even just certain pieces of local lore that shows off the situation in a light that is perfect for your theme.  Take a few of these ideas, and branch out from there.  A lot of times you will have had an idea already of the order of events as you were writing everything and that won't hurt, use that if you like.  If you can't remember or didn't do that there is no problem, you can pretty quickly find a logical order for how things fit in and how you can intermingle these scenes with each other.  Look at the scenes that you can't get heads or tails of where they belong.  So that character is being portrayed in a scene as very depressed and hopeless.  Pair it with each of the theme relevant ideas you chose.  Does it make sense if it happened before the scene?  Or would it be better suited to after it?  Perhaps there was a brief skirmish (remember when those Khorne Bezerkers assaulted the squad of the Guardsmen of one platoon or another?  They were near a building and from their perspective out of sight of most every other unit on the table, or at least it would have been hard to see them).  This is a perfect opportunity because no one would have been nearby to help and so the narrator or whoever the character is talking to was forced to watch helplessly by as recruits, children who had just joined the Guard and that brings out the depressing part of their character.  If that event doesn't work, try it again with the next one, and the next.  Even if you think you've found the perfect fit, try it with the others, you never know, you might find an even better one!

I understand that this is a shorter post than the others, but most of the work has already been done, and anything else I say would probably be repetitive or so obvious that you would find it useless to read.  Hope you enjoyed the post, see you guys tomorrow!

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