May as well put this here as anywhere, I guess: it’s where the page went in sequence originally.

In order: Harky passes on his Firestone (Chapter 28), adventurers protest the Head-of-House class (chapter 24), we flash back to the Battle of the Burning Heels (Chapter 21), Iwatani Sr. signs some diabolical agreement (Chapter 22), and the cultists are cultists in greater numbers (Chapter 22). Those last two would turn out to be pretty related.

This was our second preview in four years and the last time we attempted one. Phil pretty much hated them at this point, feeling that they put the story development in an arbitrary straitjacket and often crossed the line between teaser and spoiler. And whether I disagreed in principle didn’t really matter much because if we couldn’t do previews like this together, we couldn’t do them at all.

That aside, I’m a little torn: I still hold it as an ideal to be so far ahead on your work that you can sell a year’s worth of stories like this, but it’s pretty clear to me now that we were not there. Panel 1 gives too much away and would actually take place in early 2014, while panels 2 and 3 aren’t really that heavy in dramatic relevance. Maybe I’ll try the “coming in…” device again someday, but I’ll only do it if I have a lot of confidence in my outline and full control over its execution.