WIP: The Weirding - Champions

So I literally worked all day long yesterday on a single project - well, a single project within the overall site. I had to get a lot of the keystone pages up in one form or another just so visitors could surf-through, but I specifically worked on the Champions department.

I am pretty excited about it - not just because I spent all day working on it, either! It has a very long way to go, but this stuff - like most of the content on The Weirding - is several years old in HTML form and was culled from notes and games I ran and played throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. The last time I actually gamed was 2005 and that was a bust. It was supposed to be a scheduled campaign, but the folks I was playing with weren't real gamers and they'd straggle in and out and leave on beer runs and be gone for 2-3 hours, etc. - didn't go far and wasn't much fun. The last time I played Champions or Dark Conspiracy would have to be five years ago, easy (the campaigning in 2005 was for Cyberpunk).

So getting back into this is a two-fold experience: first, finding my way through the coding; then, getting back into the system enough so that I know what I am doing. Both are incredibly involved processes on their own; together, they can make one close to Schizophrenic!

Now, these are way early drafts. You'll notice few live links, tons of formatting "errors" (meaning there just is no formatting yet), and I'll freely admit the advertisements are wonky-looking (insofar as placement, layout, etc.). Most of these pages were originally designed without advertising and the current layout depends too much on negative space for me to really maximize real estate. Still, this is all free to you and advertising in this form doesn't pay the bills - not even the hosting bill - so we're stuck with it until I get a chance to really tweak it all out.

I'm letting you surf through it mainly because this content is what made the last site so popular and I took the links down a long time back and said it would be up on the new site, but kept having problems getting to it. The last site had a Google PR of 9 and I had absolutely no idea about SEO, marketing - any of that stuff; this is good content and I'm honestly not even as proud of it as I am the Dark Conspiracy stuff, there's just more of it (and Champions is a far superior system)... so far. However, I have to admit, there's a hell of a lot more there than I realized, once I broke it down and organized it!

And that's the biggest issue so far. I have a clear and definitive plan for organization and am pretty sure it's going to work quite well, but it takes a while to implement and... it's just a really big project. They all are - that's why more hasn't been done to now; it isn't just because I'm lazy.

This content, possibly more than anything else, proves - irrefutably - that I am the reigning king o' all nerds. You must all bow unto me.

NOW, DAMN YOU!

Lowly dogs!

And this really is just the very beginning. The Chill content will be online by the end of the week. The Cyberpunk Glossary and some Dark Conspiracy will be up by Halloween. In-between the larger chunks of publishing, I will continue to tweak what is there, so that when our annual Halloween festivities roll-around this year, The Weirding will finally - after two years, a few hundred dollars, and several hundred man-hours - be in full-swing!

So, check out the Champions material I've published so far and keep in mind that this is the very infancy - this is real early-draft stuff that I'm just too excited to sit on any longer. This should give you a good idea of the approach I am taking for the entire site and hopefully you'll find it as interesting and fun as I do.

See!? KING.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008