RunePunk Ruminations

It’s pretty cool digging back into RunePunk. My brain is bubbling over with ideas, and I’m anxious to get some of them down and out to you. I’m going to do something I don’t recall having done before (or if so, it’s been a long time, like a month or more). I’m going to start sharing some of the actual writing stuff. This isn’t mechanical, well, there is some stuff mechanical, but it’s not rules mechanics. (See what I did there?)

Before we get going, I should mention we’re using footnotes now.[1. Yeah! Kristian!] I’ve seen them used to good effect on other sites. Let me know what you think of them, but I think they’ll add value in the long run.

At any rate, here’s been my process: I read a bunch of RunePunk stuff, immersed myself in a lot of mood music from the likes of Bauhaus, Abney Park  [1. As an aside, Abney Park was around before RunePunk, but didn’t transform themselves into a steampunk band until 2006–the same year RunePunk released. Coincidence?], and others. I then voraciously reread RunePunk and cut and pasted huge swathes of the document into BaseCamp. [2. I’ve discussed Basecamp recently. It’s our Project Management Software.] After all of that, I got down to the business of writing the words. Well, I figured GreyMesa would be the most heavily divided and structured as it is the original District. It was used as the base of operations after which all others were structured, so it’s probably 50 to 100 years older than all the other ones, but I’m trying to preserve a bit of the elasticity with dates and such. I want to add detail and embellishments, while still providing a lot of space for GMs to customize the City to suit their liking. So, I’m looking at these 10 boroughs (subsections of the District) and am needing to come up with names. I won’t be able to go another further until I get names. This is just how I’m wired.  [3. Names are power.] So, I start jotting down names for a moment, but I’m smarter now. I decided to put the semantic rule down on paper. [4. It’s been rattling around my head for ages. Simply put it’s generally an Adjective + Noun, smashed together with each word capitalized. It’s how they do things. For example: Grey + Mesa = GreyMesa]

I wanted words to prompt me. A lot of times I use dictionaries and such to look through, spur ideas. I found this nifty website [5.  Not exactly what I need, but very good.] which aided the process. I got ideas and I set to working. Today, I got a lot more things fleshed out, but I thought I’d share the borough names for the first time anywhere. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the attention I’ve given them, and they sound as oddly a part of ScattePoint as anything you may have read in the past.

BitterScream
CobbleCore
CumberTie
DarkSummer
HarshHabit
SevenStone
SpiteHammer
TameHome
ThistleWind
WitterBin

Of course, I can’t give away all the details, but I’ve painted pretty word pictures to go along with these places. If you follow us on Facebook, you’ll see I did a shout out about BitterScream yesterday. Things are rolling along swiftly!

Until next time, I bid you, dear reader, adieu!