I did more work in the WttW peripheral materials. I managed to get to the reigning High King at the time of RttW, Robert IV (#33). As I was getting to him, I ran into a problem as he was only 11 when his father King Colin VI died and there were no near male kin of appropriate age to take the role of King Donald IX. You might be saying, “You’re the writer. Just fix it.” Well, I did fix it… by eliminating Donald IX and just having a ten-year regency period. (Usually they don’t like to have very long regencies.) Before I had Princess Sarah, the daughter of Colin VI married to a Lord Charles, but her husband was compelled to divorce her so that she could marry Robert IV to strengthen his claim. Lord Charles got the boot too as now Robert and Sarah were betrothed as children to legitimize him and then when he came of age, the marriage went through to celebrate the end of the regency. Who might the Lord Regent be, you ask? Why, a Lord Donald mac Charles. See what I did there? (Maybe it should’ve been Charles mac Donald…)

I was doing some bits and pieces on some of the others of the Twelve Kings. (In case I hadn’t mentioned it before, the lands from Axios to the 16th Trial are divided among twelve sovereigns.) I mentioned the need for exogamy after poor Raibeart III. Well, we start to see a bit more intermarriage with the other domains from Donald VII on. (Donald VII himself was three-quarters Midgardian and his wife a princess from Babu Dhaba.) Anyway, I needed to account for some of them, but I haven’t started on a complete list of genealogy yet.

Actually, I’d like to shift gears to some mechanical features of the Game. I’m thinking of having the phase of the moon influence æther levels, but that’s going to mean I need to keep track of the phases of the moon. I think I’ll make my life a little easier by not giving the moon of the World the same variability as ours between lunations. (There is an artificial quality to the World and I might as well take advantage of that.) The World is on the Julian calendar, so I’m going to have to worry about drift with the solstices and equinoxes. Oh, what fun.

Speaking of equinoxes, since the spring equinox is a national holiday here, I’ve got the day wide open, so I’d like to dig into my to-do pile of manga reviews. I think I mentioned elsewhere that I’d like to try to knock out ten a day in the coming off-time I have before the new school year starts. One of the big things that started gumming up my workflow is that the reviews descended into extended recaps of everything that happens. This wasn’t how it started, but with episodic gag-based series like Aho Girl, I couldn’t really make a nice overall summary of what was going on with the plot and characters, so I’d have to break down each little episode. This style then infected my reviews of series that did have overarching plots and character development. I do rather like some of my commentary, but it makes for a nightmarish workload. You saw how my reviews of Kimetsu no Yaiba stalled out a couple years back. I’m thinking about scrapping what I’ve written so far on the review of Volume 20 and start fresh with the new style. If I’m only writing a paragraph or two per volume, I should be able to buzz through these reviews fairly quickly. We’ll see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

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