Another A-Z Blog Challenge… and another successful completion.
Not all my A-Z Blog Challenge attempts are successfully completed, but this one was, and it was my easiest yet.
There were a few things that made this one easier than the previous attempts.
First, this is a topic that interests me greatly, and there is a lot to write about. Even if I had all the explanations done and the templates prepared, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game has 35 domains… just in the first-party (i.e. Paizo) sources. It looks like each set of domain aspects is going to run two pages, which gives me 70 pages of content to create! If each domain started with a different letter I could fill the entire month on domain descriptions alone.
Second, and this is a big change for me, I created a backlog of my writing tasks. Even if I ignore the 24 posts from my previous attempt (but they are shown in the table below) I’m left with 29 blog posts… and 35 tasks drafting the domains (some of which made it into the blog posts), and 35 more for polishing those, and 10 more for the various fields in the deity and domain templates (some of which were included in this series, and some of which have yet to be written). I see also a placeholder for ‘example deities’, and a note saying I don’t know yet how many there are.
Third, another thing I picked up from Agile, is the concept of MVP or ‘good enough’ drafts. My inclination and habit is to present things in a ‘completed’ form: all content present. That can be a showstopper when writing, if I get stuck on something. This time around I decided to fill in what I could, and if it means presenting something half-finished because I don’t know how to finish it, THAT’S FINE. I can come back later, when I know more, and make it better. That’s why I’ve got separate entries for ‘draft domain’ and ‘polish domain’.
I read some time ago, and have come to accept and even agree:
The first draft of anything is by definition perfect.
The sole purpose of the first draft is not to be ‘good’, but to exist. Few things are created perfectly on the first try, but once something exists, even the most incomplete or flawed thing can be improved. You cannot improve a thing that does not exist.
In previous A-Z challenges, I’ve generally made it up as I went, and simply coming up with post topics was tiring. This time, I had a full list to work with. Each day I might not exactly have had a plan for what to write next, but I did have a list of options in front of me to work with. This go around feels much more cohesive to me than previous times.
That backlog is at the same time ‘daunting’ because it shows how much work I have left, and yet comforting because I know what I have left to do. Or at least, I know so far what I have left to do, but I know there will be more. I added entries today, even.
This is my second attempt at Divine Trappings. Last time I made it to V Day, with 24 posts, when I had to stop. As I recall, I was in hospital, so while I felt bad, I didn’t feel bad for not completing the challenge. This time I got through the whole thing, and while the previous attempt’s posts weren’t part of this post, they are topically relevant so I’m going to include them in the index this year. (Besides, I didn’t even have an Z-A index last time, so it feels good to finally close it off.)
I say ‘close it off’… I still have work to do, but now I don’t have to fit the daily schedule, and more importantly I don’t need to struggle to find post titles that align!
| Published | Post | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2024.04.30 | Z-A Index | List of all Divine Trappings posts. |
| 2024.04.29 | Yelling At Clouds | Redraft of the Air domain. |
| 2024.04.29 | Yeah, Figured It Out | How to make a workbook for the expanded Polyhedral Pantheon process, it’s harder than I expected but also simpler. |
| 2024.04.27 | Exploring Divine Realms | Discuss how domains might affect divine realms (i.e. planes). |
| 2024.04.26 | What Comes After? | Summarize the content and work still to be done. |
| 2024.04.25 | Variations on a Theme | Applying Polyhedral Pantheons… to planar graphs. |
| 2024.04.24 | Unlikely Pages, Unexpected Workbook | Creating a workbook capturing the tables from the domain aspects. |
| 2024.04.23 | Terrain and Landmark Tables | Tables for generating terrain (biome) and landmarks (structures and notable features). |
| 2024.04.22 | Servitors, by Domain | Describe (probably with some examples) how to build ally and summon lists by domain. |
| 2024.04.20 | Revision and Refinement | Updating the Domain template, making it more functional (randomize table for suggesting elements). |
| 2024.04.19 | Quests and How to Define Them | How to define a quest… but it got sidetracked a bit. |
| 2024.04.18 | Picking Colors and Materials | Describe the tables used for picking colors and materials. |
| 2024.04.17 | Object Tables for Making Artifacts | Describe the tables used for picking artifact base objects. |
| 2024.04.16 | Naming Artifacts, Second Try | A new set of 100 artifact names, after refining the tables (while writing ‘O’ and ‘P’ posts). |
| 2024.04.16 | Names of Power | Artifact owners from ‘Making Names for Myself’. |
| 2024.04.15 | Making Names for Myself | Randomly generated artifact names (and deity names, as part of those). |
| 2024.04.13 | Laying Groundwork for Later | Drafted a new domain (32 dieties). |
| 2024.04.12 | Kings and Sages | Nobility and Knowledge domains. |
| 2024.04.11 | Just Not Giving Up On Alignment Domains | Second run at alignment domains, this time got more drafted. Still not done, but something. |
| 2024.04.10 | Integrating Domains | How to combine and apply domain aspects to the deity template. |
| 2024.04.09 | Hilljack (Goblin) Deities | Draft deity (long) descriptions for vorubec deities from Polyhedral Pantheons. |
| 2024.04.08 | Good Domains are Hard to Define | Draft domain aspects for alignment domains. |
| 2024.04.06 | Fitted Sheets (Layout Mockup) | Mock up some domain templates (probably in Word). |
| 2024.04.05 | Elements of Domain Aspects | Review and revise the domain aspects template. |
| 2024.04.04 | Deity Template, Revisited | Review and revise what I have in the template for describing a deity. |
| 2024.04.03 | Catching Up | Recap what I think, what’s been done, what I’ll be doing. |
| 2024.04.02 | Background Material | Survey and make a list of material from 2021 A-Z. |
| 2024.04.01 | Another Attempt | Opening to A-Z blog challenge, restarting Divine Trappings. |
| 2021.04.26 | Visions and Portents | Explore the ‘portfolio sense’ described in Deities & Demigods. |
| 2021.04.24 | Unexpected Oversight | I completely forgot to look in some Pathfinder Player Companion supplements that are very relevant. |
| 2021.04.22 | Temples and Holy Places | A brief discussion of how domains influence temples and holy places. |
| 2021.04.21 | SMART Goals vs Weak Purpose | Goals are good for adventures, but purposes are better for defining deities. |
| 2021.04.20 | Rites and Rituals | How to devise, or at least name, rituals and incarnations… forgot to follow up on this, backlogging now. |
| 2021.04.20 | Quests and Trials | Define questions, trials, dogma, tenets, and obediences… the terms, if not the content. |
| 2021.04.19 | Polyhedral Pantheon Workbook Update | Describe changes I made to the Polyhedral Pantheons workbook. |
| 2021.04.17 | Obediences | Discuss how a worshipper might demonstrate their worship. |
| 2021.04.16 | Naming Deities | Describe various means of naming deities. |
| 2021.04.15 | Mistakes Were Made | I assigned a weight to the Law domain in a dwarven pantheon, when no deity has that domain. |
| 2021.04.14 | Look Again! Elves! | Examine the ‘dwarven’ pantheon, but assigning weights to ‘elven’ interests. |
| 2021.04.13 | King of the Gods | Assign weights to domains, then use the result to determine deity divine ranks. |
| 2021.04.12 | Jumping Back | Review deity descriptions in several editions of D&D. |
| 2021.04.10 | Inventing Artifacts | Brief review of how artifacts are described in several editions of D&D. |
| 2021.04.09 | Heralds, Allies, and Summons | First cut at what I want to do with servitors, and a bit about why I want to do it. |
| 2021.04.07 | God, Goddess, or Something Else? | How I determined gender of deities in Polyhedral Pantheons, and descriptions of non-binary deities in that book. |
| 2021.04.06 | Flirting with Disaster | Demonstrate how the Destruction domain might interact with other domains, in defining deities. |
| 2021.04.06 | Exposing the Truth | An early, early draft of the Air domain. A lot has changed since then. |
| 2021.04.05 | Domain Tables | Random tables for picking domains: Paizo-only, third-party only, and druid domains. |
| 2021.04.02 | Covenants | Describe how to apply covenants from Classic Play: Book of Immortals to deity definitions and domain aspects. |
| 2021.04.01 | Bulidng a Pantheon | Create aa new pantheon, to be used for examples. (Hint: it barely got used.) |
| 2021.04.01 | Aspects of a Domain | Describe the elements of the domain template… now superseded. |
| 2021.04.01 | Anatomy of a God | Describe the elements of the deity template… now superseded. |
| 2021.03.31 | A-Z 2021: Divine Trappings | Introduction to my attempt at the 2021 A-Z Challenge. |