Hello Trello!

There are moments, when I feel that I am almost finished with my adventure Release from the OGL Vault, but when I think a bit more about what still needs to be done, I know that I am kidding myself. Like I wrote a week ago, I think I will take close to another two months. Hopefully, this time my guess is not as ridiculously off as my first two tentative aims were (namely, around the release time of "Keys from the Golden Vault" and sometime around Easter.)

During last week, I prepared a Trello board to keep track of what remains to do. Unlike a standard Kanban board, where the columns represent the stages a task moves through, I used columns to represent the type of work:

• Designing

  Locations, monsters, magic items, etc., for which I still need to figure out the very basics: contents and purpose of a location, mechanics of a monster, workings of a magic item, etc. Before I haven't finished with the design work for such an item, there usually is no point in starting to write about it

• Writing
  "Things" (again: locations, monsters, magic items, but also certain sections such as information for the DM, conclusion, etc.) about which I have a good enough idea to start writing about them.

• Maps and Arts
  Tasks that have to do with mucking around in a Krita or some other graphics editor.

• Tooling
  Programming tasks, mostly regarding my LaTeX style for typesetting the adventure.

• Review
  Review tasks I will have to do when everything is written.

• Done
  OK, I was lying above, this column is indeed a state, namely the final and most desirable one -- I hope watching it grow over the next few weeks will yield some additional encouragement!

I also use tags of colors green, yellow and red to mark tasks with a measure of "difficulty" -- the idea being that whenever I have a little spare time, I can at least pick up a green task and work on it.

After the first week of using the Trello board, it looks like this:

Last week's progress

Regarding the progress of the past week, we have:

I am a bit astonished that I have added as much as 2000 words, the biggest part of which was the description of several magical items that occur in the adventure (along with some dressing to make the items a bit more interesting: for five of them, there is a curious fact or a rumor the adventurers may learn about). Another
large part were three items the DM can drop into the adventure in lieu of a specific item the characters are looking for, adding some dressing and a bit of a challenge for the players.

So there goes another estimate of mine: last week, I thought another 5000 words would see me to the end of the adventure, but the 2000 word of this week have not really brought me signifiantly closer to finishing up.

I'll be interested to see, how many of the items on my Trello board I will be able to complete in the upcoming week ... and how many additional ones I will add.