Recovering "Fear"

No, I wasn't so lucky as to actually recover what I'd written previously, but I have spent a fair amount of time rewriting this scenario in the last week, and I'm far happier with what I've done recently than I was with what I already had. The primary thing is that the player characters are so much more vibrant in the new version. I ended up only reconstructing two of the six original characters (who couldn't love a character nicknamed "Roadkill"?), and of those two, one of them is significantly different. I'm really pleased by the new characters.

Each of the characters has some kind of significant character flaw (which is why they're Outcasts or Renegades, as defined in the In Nomine universe), which I'd originally intended to base on six Buddhist hells I'd come across in my reading. Ultimately, I used only a few of them, but the ones I used work very well.

The Dark Shadows in-joke regarding NPC names enabled me to quickly reconstruct most of the worthwhile NPC background, though I did lose some depth that way, which I might take some time to rebuild in some form.

The main thing that's worth reconstructing is the dream research. I seriously doubt I can find everything again, but I remember how I was going to handle the familiar ones (dreams about falling, drowning, etc.), so that won't be hard to rewrite. However, I'd come across a web site that had all kinds of twisted dreams that I used in one form or another, and I don't know if I can find it again.

Another interesting point here is that it had taken me months to write what I had, and I just rewrote most of it in a single week, improving much of it, just by making a more focused effort. There's a lesson there worth remembering. And a significant part of the problem was that the reason it had taken so long was because I'd gotten bored with the original cast of player characters and had a hard time forcing myself back to finish the scenario. It would've been better to have realized that they were boring me and have the will to scrap what I'd already done for the sake of improving and finishing the scenario. Again, a lesson worth learning.

And now, to finally finish this and move on to new projects...