I was able to finish Chapter 17 of TWH and made some progress on Chapter 18 as well. I can’t promise too much progress over the next couple days. Festivities and all, you know. Well, you all enjoy yourselves as well and we’ll see what I can whip up by the time I pop up again. Stay tuned.
After Wednesday being a total bust (once again passing out the moment I was putting hand to keyboard), I was able to make further progress on Chapter 17 of TWH. I’m not finished yet, but I’m hoping to still get it out in time. We’ll see. Stay tuned.
The primary religion in the World centers around the worship of a pantheon known as the Twelve. The Twelve consist of six gods and six goddesses considered by some to be distinct individuals and by others as different manifestations of a single godhead. While it’s possible to worship the Twelve as a whole or certain combinations therein, devotion is typically focused on a single member. This is mostly due to the fact that Players must choose a single god to act as their Patron. This is less relevant for People of the World, but they also tend to focus on a single god as a matter of convention.
While the Twelve are associated with numerous aspects of Nature and society (often overlapping with others), I’m just going to list them with their primary attributes here and may do more extensive coverage in the future.
Obviously, the way Players view the Twelve and the way the People of the World view them are different. For Players, the benefits of a Patron are more tangible. A Patron determines the type of magic a Player can use and conveys Blessings that influence things like weapon proficiency, resistances, and more. Now, it is possible for Players decline to have a Patron, but there are few benefits to this other than avoiding the weaknesses of any single alignment.
The center of worship is the Great Temple in Axios. This is where Players are first summoned. There is a separate chapel for the Faithful of each of the Twelve. Because People of the World do not have access to magic or Blessings, Players comprise the whole of the clergy and are supported by dedicated layfolk among the People of the World called tertiaries. Each Cult is headed by a Pontifex supported by an Archbishop for each domain (two for Axios) and any number of Bishops (which is not restricted to the Job class of Bishop but includes all Tier 3 Clerics). Simply having the Job of Cleric doesn’t automatically make a player recognized clergy of a particular Cult. They must complete a term of Temple Service in order to be eligible to wear the official vestment and must maintain good standing with the Cult to retain that privilege (and wearing vestments without the Cult’s recognition can result in prosecution for the crime of impersonation).
Different days of the week are assigned as sabbaths to each of the Twelve. Furthermore, there are weekly cycles for each season, excluding the weeks of the solstices and equinoxes, which have their own celebrations. Beyond that, there are monthly and yearly cycles (akin to the Western and Chinese zodiacs respectively), and whenever these align, it marks times seen as especially holy. Other observations commemorating saints and martyrs and such have varying degrees of observation depending on your location.
Outside the worship of the Twelve, traces of animism and other folk religions can be found among the smallfolk, as well as ersatz versions of various Earth religions, particularly a pseudo-Buddhism observed in parts of the Hidden Trials of Murakumo and Shangri-La. In many cases, there is a syncretistic blending of these other belief systems and the worship of the Twelve.
As a brief overview, this should suffice for now. I may do expanded commentary on particular aspects of religious observation in the World at a later date. Stay tuned.
I managed about half-quota’s worth of progress on Chapter 17 of TWH. It’d be nice if I was moving along more briskly, but at least I’m not deadlocked. More to come. Stay tuned.
I made some progress on Chapter 17 of TWH, but I was also having to do additional research for some elements of the action scene. I was also working on a commentary post I wasn’t able to get finished in time, so you may be seeing that sometime next week. I’ve got a lot of extra time at work this week. I just need to focus it on writing. Stay tuned.
I made more progress on Chapter 21 of EM3 and also wrote some on Chapter 9 of RttW. I need to be switching gears to TWWH, but I imagine I’ll be drawn back to RttW while I’m at it. Stay tuned.
I continued along in Chapter 21 of EM3. I believe I’m pretty close to a stopping place as I don’t want the characters to go ’round and ’round too much in their conversation. We’ll see what more I can get done over the weekend. Stay tuned.
I did a a repeat of the pattern established earlier in the week by having one day where I made minimal progress before conking out followed by another where I actually made some decent headway. This time it was with Chapter 21 of EM3. If I can get the chapter finished before the weekend’s out, I’ll have a bit of a lead that will give me a buffer in the production pipeline. If only I could do the same in TWH… Anyway, that’s all for now. More to come. Stay tuned.
I wasn’t going to mention Monday’s progress because it really wasn’t worth mentioning, but I’ll make note of it for the sake of continuity with yesterday’s work. I was rereading what I’d already written on Chapter 20 of EM3 to get me back into the mindset, but by the time I was ready to actually start writing, I didn’t even get two sentences in before conking right out. I was able to make up for this shortfall yesterday and complete the chapter. Yay.
To make Monday look slightly less bad, I’ve also been doing work in the peripheral materials for WttW. Tax law. I’m sure it’ll come up at some point in the story. You’ll see. Anyway, that’s all for now. Stay tuned.
Since I’m going to be kicking off the Welcome to the World series in the next couple weeks, I thought I might go ahead and give you a quick overview of what the World is and how it works before we get started. If you’d rather let the World reveal itself over the course of the story, you can ignore this post. Anyway, without further ado…
Whereas the Planet in the Tellus Arc is a parallel world to our Earth with the same overall dimensions, the World of WttW is a little more abstract. Rather than a sphere, it’s a helix, starting with the Royal Capital of Axios in Upper Midgard (what one might term “the Zeroeth Trial”) and terminating in the Womb of the World, the site of the Twenty-first Trial. The World is divided into twenty-one zones known as the Trials, with an additional four Hidden Trials that branch off the Golden Path running from one end of the World to the other. The Trials vary in size but are limited and bound by invisible walls known as the Barrier. There is one way in and one way out of each Trial (excepting the ones that branch off into a Hidden Trial). The Exit Gate can only be activated after defeating the Trial Master, the boss monster of each Trial. Because each Trial is not connected by ordinary geography, you could face wildly different biomes going from one Trial to the next. The further you descend, the stronger the monsters are, and as a general principle, if you’re strong enough to beat one Trial Master, you will be just strong enough to survive in the next Trial.
There are two kinds of humans in the World: the Summoned (Players) and People of the World (NPCs). The People of the World are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the World, while the Summoned are brought into the World from Earth to participate in the Game. The goal of the Game is to complete the Trials and defeat the final Trial Master, the God-Dragon Ur-Tiamat, who is said to be the root of all evil in the world. The Summoned have greater potential than the People of the World (in numerical terms, the People of the World are level-capped at 40 while the Summoned are level-capped at 80) and are therefore the only ones with any chance of winning the Game. One way the World ensures the division between between the Summoned and the People of the World is that the two cannot interbreed. Another is that it is very difficult for the Summoned to survive without adventuring, but adventuring also has a high mortality rate (with a single annual cohort typically being reduced by half in the first year alone). Players are able to have children with each other, but a small portion even survive long enough to reach child-bearing age, much less find the stability to raise children, then Second-Generation Players have challenges of their own, such as a high risk of being orphaned and being pushed into adventuring too early with fatal results. Second-Generation Players are valued because they inherit some of their parents’ abilities, which gives them an advantage over the newly Summoned, though overconfidence in this potential often leads to the aforementioned fatal results.
Tied to the goal of winning the Game is the concept of the Brave. It is believed that the Brave is the only Player capable of reaching Level 99 and therefore most likely to stand a chance against Ur-Tiamat, who is also said to be Level 99. What’s more, it is believed that the Brave will possess the Blessings of all of the Twelve Gods of the World. You see, each Summoned chooses a Patron among the Twelves and receives Blessings as a reward for their faith. These Blessings can be inherited from parents to children, so in theory, a child with all twelve Blessings could be achieved by the fifth generation, but efforts to orchestrate a breeding program have failed to yield fruit, as it were.
I’ll stop here as I could keep on going for a good long while if I let myself. I’m thinking of doing little featurettes on different aspects of the World and the game system as we go, breaking things up into digestible chunks (though I may actually publish the full game guide on the site at a later date). I don’t know if we’ll have one of those featurettes next week or if we’ll do something else. Stay tuned.
