I continued to be wrapped up in the WttW peripheral materials. I have this idea that may end up as a short story of an Adventurer getting separated from his party in the mountains of Murakumo and he gets picked up by a Yuki Onna. The idea is to play on how much intellect and autonomy the Monsters actually have. Anyway, this prompted me to make a whole set of Yuki Onna gear. Great for cold resistance, so you’ll do A-OK in Niflheim, but the tradeoff in heat resistance means you’d practically vaporize in El-Samak, to say nothing of Muspellheim.

From there I started working on the cycles of the Trial Masters being defeated. You see, as you advance in the Trials, the respawn time for the Trial Masters becomes longer and longer. The gameplay function is to ensure Players actually have time to level and assemble before taking on the later Trial Masters. The past day or so I added a system that caps the number of Players that can take on a Trial Master at a time. It is of course possible for more to join in, but only the eligible formation will get credit. Smart Players could work it out so that they abuse this system, but actually getting a large number of Players together is quite a challenge, both because of their high mortality rate and the fact that they tend to be bad at cooperating. Anyway, I had expanded my chart to include all the Trial Masters, as before I’d just covered from 11th Trial Master on, so I was filling out the exploits of past parties and ended up having to make a number of adjustments. For instance, Jean (who appears in the prologue briefly and gets mentioned in Chapter 8) was originally supposed to be a member of the Red Griffins before he joined the White Lions, but he was too underlevelled for the Red Griffins’ exploits, so I ended up making another Adventuring Company that got wiped in Jotunheim.

With the new Player limit system, I also got to thinking of alliances and such that would form prior to the foundation of Adventurer Companies and that’s going to have a big influence on how the White Lions were formed and how they operated. Originally, it was all headlined by Ramachandra and his party, but now it’s more of a joint effort with another party that has yet to be detailed and so leadership positions have to be shared accordingly. This will all play a big part in the plot of WttW2 and WttW3.

Speaking of WttW3, I was developing more details for Jun’s backstory, so I had to pen the first draft of her monologue about what happened to her first party. No, it doesn’t get me any closer to finishing Chapter 12 of the current story, but it’s all connected. However, at this point, I may just need to gloss over the details that sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place as I only have one more day to freely dedicate time to writing. We’ll see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

I started off by working on that calendar error that was giving me the dickens the day before and now everything should be square from BE 382 to 355 (and by extension, the 262 to 235, 142 to 115, and 022 to AE 006 segments of the subsequent three cycles as well).That’s 28 years out of a 120-year cycle. Amazing. (Then I think about the remaining 92 years I have to eventually deal with… -_- )

I then switched gears to get to work on RttW. I made a bit of progress on Chapter 12, but then I got hung up on figuring out how much Pawel and Zofiya would have to spend to get their ten kiddos decently equipped before leaving Axios and then I realized that I hadn’t done character sheets for the seven kiddos besides Fedor, Zsazsa and Arjun. (Actually, nine eventually, as we need to round out the two parties.) When I do the character sheets, I chart their stat growth all the way to Level 80 (whether or not the character actually makes it that far) and as I do it, I try to get into the character’s head and think about what’s important to them, what they actually need for their Job and how all that comes together. For instance, Spirit rating wasn’t a priority at all for Pawel as he was running a Fighter build, but then in Tier 2 he decided to cross-rate to Mage in order to become a Mage Knight in Tier 3, so he had to focus on building up stats that he had completely ignored the previous 30 Levels. Among the new kiddos, there’s this girl Elishavet who’s a Fighter who insists on steadily building her Intelligence stat, not because she needs it that much from a gameplay perspective but because she doesn’t want to be seen as stupid compared to her party members. (Though the INT stat only really applies to intelligence in a meta sense, as a very grouchy Oscarius will tell you if you ever try to make fun of his 4 points of INT, and if that doesn’t work, he does always have his 189 points of STR to fall back on, as that poor table had to demonstrate back in Chapter 5.) Anyway, these are all things I’m thinking about as I work.

As I can expect rather hectic days back at work Friday and Saturday and probably on through July, I really need to get the chapter finished in the next couple days. We’ll see if I can get it done or not. Stay tuned.

I’m not sure why I decided to do it, but I was going back and checking the Korushi Calendar. I was worried about errors having crept into my work, so I decided to change the layout to make it easier to check. Instead of 12 rows of 10, I switched to 10 rows of 12 and finally five rows of 24 to more conveniently display the leap year cycles. (Remember that because I’m a loony, I created a system where there are three different cycles of leap years that all have to be accounted for in a 13-month year that doesn’t follow the same easy to remember pattern as our calendar.) Sure enough, errors started to be found out, but as I would make one round of corrections, I’d find new errors. It was driving me crazy. I was wanting to preserve the year the story takes place, so I’d have to make changes backwards and forwards through each pass. I’m still in the middle of the third pass and will probably at least finish the six years I have to go back. The funny thing is that the particular error I found was occurring at convenient 10-year intervals, where I mistakenly had the month of Arn at 28 days instead of 27. I’d probably just copied from the previous month and forgot to delete the “28”.

With this driving me right up the walls, going to the encyclopedia to write about different governmental systems and such. I’ll spare you the details for now, though. One day I’ll get the wiki up and going and you can read all about it there. Anyway, as I said, I want to at least finish my corrections to the calendar back to the starting point and then I think I’ll actually try to get some writing done on RttW. Stay tuned.