Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: My Projects


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650.000 so far

About half an hour ago a friend asked me how many words I have written so far from the beginning of this year.
I did some math – it was a lot easier than I thought because I keep track of my projects wordcount: blog posts, work on my stories, articles and reports, translations.
The total came up to roughly 650.000 words in 2017.

pulp_writer

A little more than 2000 words per day, every day – roughly 270.000 words only in blog posts here on Karavansara and on my Italian blog.
Which is actually less than I hoped for – I was aiming at 1.000.000 words in 2017.
But well, I still have seven weeks before the end of the year.
Writing 3000 words per day every day until New Year’s Eve, I might be able to pack another 150.000 words into this year.
800.000 would not be a bad number.

And in 2018 I will do a day-by-day wordcount tally, using a spreadsheet.
To do statistics on it.
I like statistics.


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Hammer-style sword & sorcery

coverThere’s a thing we’ve been talking for a while, with my friend Alex – that is a fine Italian writer of genre fiction – about doing something somehow similar to the legendary Hammer “failed pilot” Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter1.
And indeed Alex did something like that, with his series about the Uhlan, a fine line of horror/adventure books.
As I said, we talk about something of that kind roughly once a year, usually in the whereabouts of Halloween, when we reminisce like old men about old Hammer movies, old games of Ravenloft and even more obscure geekeries like Chill, the old, classic horror game.
We might call it Hammer Style Sword & Sorcery – that is not a thing, as far as I know, but works with us.

Let’s sum up the basic elements of this project that will never be… Continue reading →


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Pulp Egypt

Gaming supplements can sometimes be wonders of research and scholarship.

Selection_885I mentioned a while back the monumental Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion.
Now, from the depths of my collection, I have recovered another wonder of a lost age – Peter Schweighofer’s Pulp Egypt – Adventures along the Nile, 1933-1939.
One of the best generic gaming resources I ever bought.
In 176 pages, Peter Schweighofer packed a ton of useful information.

  • Timeline from Predinastic era to the 1930s? Check
  • Gazzeteer and visitor’s guide to 1930s Egypt? Check.
  • Egyptian odds and ends and strange artifacts? Check.
  • Lots of information for game-masters interested in running various kinds of Egyptian adventures? Check.

The lot with maps, photos, and a very neat layout.
The information is synthetic and to the point, and nicely indexed.
There’s even an article on assembling a pulp adventure soundtrack.
And it’s system agnostic, as they say – you can run it on whatever system you like.
Beautiful.

And this beauty will be particularly useful both for my long-in-the-coming re-run of Masks of Nyarlathotep and for my current serial project.
How neat is that?


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Behind the Copper Mask

arlecchino-maskAnd here it goes: a 5000-odd words story, done in one day.
And then revised while dining (late) and converted rather quickly in a variety of formats, without even a cover or anything.
This is practically a glorified first drafts, with all the problems that this entails.
I’m pretty sure no characters changes name between page 3 and page 16, but everything else is possible.
Expect the unexpected.
But what the heck, I made it.

So, check out below for a preview, and the links for the download from Google Drive. Continue reading →