Posted by EarthDragon on 22nd August 2015.
Progress! Definite progress has been made, with a significant advance made in the rules section of the page and some work done on the background section of the site also.
The races are now all entered and ready for viewing. There are 33 distinct races (though the two human races are quite similar in terms of stats and are really differentiated mostly by culture) and 13 possible Bloodlines that can be chosen for characters. These are found under the Rules menu, the Characters sub-menu, and then the Races sub-menu under that, and this page is now, as of today, considered finished, barring any errata that may crop up later.
Currently (still) under development are the world maps. This is a large exercise as there are many, many million square miles of terrain in the world, the majority of which, the party will probably never see during this particular run of the campaign, though stranger things have happened. As well as the areas outside the players' ken, I am working on player-level maps of the known world, ranging from the fairly specific for the area around the capital where play starts, to the general for the rest of The Unification. Once I have players enrolled and know more about their backgrounds, each player will get a personalised map of the region they grew up in, before being enlisted into The University. This will reflect local knowledge at the time the character left home, and may be subject to some change from the intervening years, but not much variation. Thus, a diverse group of characters of a reasonable number could, conceivably, develop a reasonably accurate map to a fair level of detail of a large area within The Unification. There are, of course, more detailed maps of everywhere for the use of myself and the co-DM. For those who are interested, all the maps for this campaign are being generated with ProFantasy Software's Campaign Cartographer 3 and Dungeon Designer 3, to create some quite nifty maps. As they become available, maps will be uploaded to the site.
Under the BackGround menu, the sub-menu Cosmology has been completed and is now a working link. This details some descriptions and basic rules for the known planes of existence in the campaign. While this is based on D&D cosmology, and much of it will be recognisable, it is also quite different to standard D&D cosmology as well, so you would do well to read it and understand it, as the differences could cause problems if you were to suddenly find yourself stuck in the Temporal Prime or the Undëvæth.
The rest of the menu items on the site within the left side menu are not completed, unless they appeared in the previous update, and they redirect to a placeholder "under construction" page. As these get created and loaded up, there will be news items in relation to these pages, and the news menu will start getting news archives added. Eventually, they will all work, and the site will be fully live. After that date, all other news items will be almost exclusively in-game news events, rumours and trivia that will reflect the current state of the world. Classes will be among the last things to be uploaded, partly because there are so many and there is so much work involved, and partly because I don't want players to be ready to game in the world before the world is ready to game in them.