WIP Update – 21 Mar 25
As you would imagine, the first part of the day was all about the WttW peripheral materials. And what was I doing? Why, I was digging into the exciting world of nettlecloth and hempen textiles. I first learned about nettlecloth when I was working on TBP. I was wondering what Barnlings would do for clothes and nettlecloth made perfect sense for a race that can’t afford extensive agriculture or animal husbandry. I was reminded of it recently for some reason and decided to add it into the world. I’d already used hemp a little, but I made it more extensive. Stats-wise, nettlecloth and hempen clothing aren’t that different from linen, but linen is slightly more difficult to craft and more expensive. (As a gameplay benefit that helps justify the added expense, linen offers both heat resistance and cold resistance, the only kind of cloth to do so.) Another benefit to nettlecloth and hemp is that they’re not regulated by the Trade Guilds like other textiles are, so you can make, buy and sell these goods without having to worry about going through official channels. It makes for a good option for Adventurers on the go who need to replace damaged clothing. (Basic clothing has a fairly low Durability rating, so it won’t hold up after any extensive ranging.)
Another thing I spent a lot of time on was continuing to flesh out the Summoning system. This included assigning a Soul Grade to each and every entry in the Bestiary(there are over 700 entries currently). I also decided to have different scales. For instance, common Beasts are rated lower than Magical Beasts, which are rated lower than special classes like Dragons and Fae. For instance, at Level 25, a Centaur is in the same Level band as a Level 26 Drake, but as a Demihuman, the Centaur is a Grade C Soul while as a Dragon, the Drake would be Grade B. Keeping all that straight was loads of fun.
Fromm there, I decided to make Necromancy a unique kind of Summoning with slightly different rules. Rather than capturing the Souls of the Monsters and such that you kill, you instead bind the Souls to the corpses and raise them up. You don’t have to worry about Soul Gems, but instead of Soul Gems breaking, Necromancers have to worry about trying to raise too many Undead and losing control over them. It’d be a fine thing in combat to raise yourself an Undead army just for them to turn on you. Hope you put some extra points into Luck.
One thing that comes with regular Summoning is the mid-level ability to call Elementals (drawing from the ambient æther rather than captured Souls in a Soul Gem). Now, we have the classic four Elementals: Salamanders, Undines, Sylphs and Gnomes; but I needed to cover all of the Twelve. I’d already devised Lumens and Shades in the Tellus Arc for light and dark, so I went ahead and brought them over, but what about the other six? Here in Japan, we have kodama and kanadama for wood and metal, but I decided that since the Japan-equivalent Murakumo is a Hidden Trial with limited contact with the rest of the World, their terminology wouldn’t enter common parlance. I ended up adapting the names of relevant Greek gods, but I’m not entirely happy with this. More on that later.
With all that done, I switched gears to work on TWH like I said I would. I made some respectable progress in Chapter 26, which is almost definitely going to get split at least once at this point. Although development has been a chore on this one, I really do enjoy the character dynamics and the divergent threads are coming together here at the end. I imagine I’ll be continuing my work over the weekend and then we can be looking to pick CoP back up next week. Stay tuned.
Tags: Else Arc, Hecate, Tellus Arc, The Witch Hunters, TWH, Welcome to the World, WIP Update, WttW
Else Arc, Hecate, Tellus Arc, The Witch Hunters, Welcome to the World, WIP Update | James Carmack | 22 March 2025 |
