I did a little more writing on Chapter 19 of RttW, but not nearly as much as I should’ve done.

I ended up debuting a new chara in DA. You see, I decided that as a way to explain Azuki’s shapeshifting ability in the context of the OreHosa continuity, she would be the descendant of a Yōgitsune (fox spirit). Given the lifespan of Yōkai (effectively immortal so long as they have sufficient yōki to sustain themselves) and most of the other races, it stood to reason that the ancestor in question would still be active, hence the creation of Konoe, an emissary from the Yōma Union to the Hijirijima Occupation Zone.

Now, I made a mistake with the name. I actually meant for it to be “Kanoe”, from the Heavenly Stems, but while I could’ve just changed the name, I decided to make something of it. In Japanese, the sound foxes make is “konkon”, so I decided that in the Yōgitsune dialect, “ka”, especially when preceding “na”, “ni”, “nu”, “no”, “ne” or “n” becomes “kon”, hence “Kanoe” becomes “Konoe” (actually pronounced a little closer to “Konnoe”). I was rather pleased with myself for that bit of cleverness.

I’ve got to resist the urge to pay for another expansion of the character roster for a little while. Not that I can’t afford it, just a matter of necessary restraint. Once I get about three solid character concepts, I’ll go ahead and do it, but that will presumably be a while off. There are characters I’d like to add that DA’s character creator isn’t really built for, so I can’t be adding them. We’ll see how things develop, though. Hopefully I can focus on getting that chapter of RttW in the can at long last. Stay tuned.

Besides my usual image generation antics (and paring down my massive backlog of images to posts because I’m a schmuck who has to make most posts have a story to them), I did actually do a little writing on Chapter 19 of RttW. It wasn’t much, happening right as I was running out of energy for the evening, but at least it was something. As for OreHosa, not much new material was written because I was busy catching up on the work from the day prior that had to be transferred over, reformatted and such. I guess it keeps me out of the beer joints. I’ll try to get some more writing done, but inspiration might strike from another corner. Stay tuned.

Believe it or not, I actually did manage to get started on Chapter 19 of RttW. It was nothing amazing, progress-wise, only about half quota, but it’s an actual start. There’s so much work-work to be done and the evening seems to evaporate in a moment without me even beginning to take a crack at all the stuff I want to get done, but I’ll see what I can scrap together over the coming days. Stay tuned.

I did not, in fact, do any writing on TKoH or manga reviews either for that matter (to the surprise of few, I imagine). Instead, it was all about the WttW peripheral materials. I got the details in place for scarves and gorgets, currently still being treated as Accessories. I started adding details for the materials needed for crafting the current list of Accessories, and that got me to thinking about the Durability ratings I had. Previously, hardened steel had a DUR of 80, higher than even Elder Dragonscale, which I knew was silly, so I dropped it down to 50, above regular steel and below titanium. For the most part, I use the Mohs hardness scale as my basis for DUR ratings, but I realized that I needed to account for apparent logical contradictions from the scale as it stood. I modified the DUR check to account for the defenses of each type of material. This way, it’s easy to cut cloth with a Slash attack but not break it with a Bash attack, for instance. There’s probably more refinement that needs to be done, but progress is progress.

I’ll no doubt continue to fiddle with this, but another distraction has come up that I’ll talk about shortly. Stay tuned.

As I mentioned last time, I was already doing more work to diversify some of your options for equipment even as I was writing the entry and I continued that work afterward while also adding some more gear, such as haubergeons as a lighter, cheaper option for mail that gives you the aforementioned benefits at the expense of coverage. The parts that are covered are just as protected as with full-length hauberks, but that may not be much comfort to you if an enemy lops off your arm. I decided to add over and under layers to arm, hand and waist equipment. The waist gear operate in a somewhat unique way as it pairs with the torso and leg gear at that level. For instance, if you have a Leather Jerkin equipped to Torso(Main), a Leather Belt equipped to Waist(Main) will be over the Leather Jerkin without being considered on the Waist(Over) layer. When deciding what gear gets to be used on multiple levels, I had to consider interaction with other gear to try to avoid anything silly from being done, like trying to put mail over plate. As I was doing all this, I started to think about maybe adding a neck slot for armor pieces like gorgets or clothing items like scarves. (This would also help separate the neck for game mechanics purposes when decapitation is on the menu.) At the time, I decided against it and opted to have gear for the neck just be counted as Accessories, but as I write this, I’m starting to waver a bit. I’ll sort that out later, but to go back to the story, by thinking about Accessories, I realized the need to add Durability as I didn’t want Accessories to be treated as indestructible, and also difficulty ratings for crafting purposes. While I was at it, I went to the Storage items and added DUR for them as well (as, again, I didn’t want them to be indestructible). As I was looking at the respective DUR of different materials, I got to thinking that I may need to recalculate the values, but at that point I conked out, so that’ll be work for later.

Thanks to living in a country with a vestigial shamanistic/animistic culture, the vernal equinox is a day off, so in addition to doing more work on this stuff, I hope to build up some lead time in TKoH and get some manga reviews written. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.

You’re not going to believe it, but I did it at long last. I finished Chapter 3 of TKoH. Yes, I did end up giving the sequence something of an abridged treatment, but I didn’t think you wanted to read five pages of Sigurd getting bucked off and kicked in the face by Grani any more than I wanted to write it. Now I should be able to get a decent start on Chapter 4 if not finish that, but I need to pick up Thidrekssaga again before I can really dig into the next couple chapters. One thing at a time, I suppose.

I also did a bit of the inevitable work in the WttW peripheral materials. The main thing I remember doing is making cervelliere’s function on either the main layer or under layer for head protection. The former allows you to put something like an arming cap on for padding while the latter allows you to wear it under a mail coif. If I haven’t mentioned it before, in the World’s game system, you have three layers for armor (which includes regular clothing) and only three, so you have to think about the best combination based on the climate, your combat role, your proficiency, your finances, etc. (And I just had to step away to make a bunch of other armor pieces work on two layers for greater flexibility in armor options, such as being able to wear a hauberk over a gambeson or mail under plate. You’re welcome, Adventurers.)

Another thing I worked on was the background material for a story I’ll probably be launching a teaser for in the very near future. The idea’s been percolating in my head for a year or two and I’ve committed to moving it into preproduction. I may wait until I have another one or two teasers to roll out with it (not necessarily related stories). I was thinking about making at least two sequels to TKoH, so maybe once I’ve put a little more work into those, I can make an announcement on the main site. That should do it for now. We’ll see what comes from here. Stay tuned.

Reader: “How have you not worked on TKoH this time?”

But I did work on TKoH!

Reader: “Really? How much did you get written?”

One whole line!

Reader: *sigh*

Yes, well, a funny thing happened. I was watching a video on the distinction between knights and men-at-arms (mostly confirming what I already knew) and as the video got into the 17th Century, I thought that a lobster-tail pot helmet would make a nice addition to the WttW armor list. However, as I was making the entry, I realized I didn’t have lobsters in the World. This led to another fun round of expanding the World’s repertoire of marine life and then a whole bunch of new helmets getting added to the armor list. Previously, I’d limited the number of helmet types to keep the list manageable, but as a slight compromise, I add some particular types but without going through all the different materials. (For instance, you won’t be able to get an Adamantite Great Bascinet, just steel.) For a lot of these, the base stats don’t change, but combat calculations will be influenced by such factors as coverage. Speaking of great bascinets, if the visor is down, strikes to the face will be calculated the same as other parts of the head, but your visual Perception will be reduced. If the visor is up, your visual Perception goes back up but a strike to the face will be calculated without taking the helmet’s Armor Defense into account. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

I’m bound to push through and finish that daggone chapter eventually. As the deadline looms ever closer, perhaps the heat will light a fire under my tail. Stay tuned.

Reader: “So what did you do this time besides write on the chapter?”

Well, I’m glad you asked. You’re going to love this. As you should be aware, the World in the WttW series is based on our own world. I decided to map the Trials to the areas of the Earth that they correspond to and then used it to execute this neat idea. You see, normally Players are bound within the limits of a particular Trial. The invisible walls of video games is an actual mechanic in the World. If you try to go out of bounds, you’ll be repelled by a magic barrier. However, the People of the World aren’t bound by this limitation. As such, I devised so-called hidden pathways that connect the Trials in unexpected ways. For example, if you travel southeast out of Lower Midgard (the 1st Trial), which corresponds to southern Germany and eastern France, you can get to Costa Concordia (the 9th Trial), which corresponds to Italy. A journey of 2916 leagues along the Golden Path can be accomplished in just 157 leagues. These hidden pathways aren’t always this convenient, but it can be a major boon to merchant caravans. The downside is that you don’t have the relative safety of the Golden Path or much if any human settlement along the way to support your journey. For instance, along the Golden Path, at least in the more built-up Trials, you at least have an inn every eight leagues where you can rest, get food, change horses, etc. On the other hand, by bypassing the Trial Gates, you also bypass the tariffs imposed on entry and exit in each domain. It’s a bit of a high-risk, high-reward proposal.

Players can take advantage of the hidden pathways, once they’ve opened up the destination via normal progression through the Trials. In other words, once you’ve cleared the 8th Trial and opened up the 9th, the hidden pathway between the 1st and 9th becomes available to you. This is actually vital to late-game play, as human settlement ends at the beginning of the 16th Trial. Players are able to magically transport themselves via the Trial Gates, but it only applies to themselves and whatever they are carrying. If you’re wanting to move a lot of materiel to support large-scale ranging, the kind of which you’ll be doing late in the Game, you may want to take the 1445-league journey between the Killing Fields (4th Trial) and Nidavellir (19th Trial).

As you can tell, I was calculating distances between real-world locations to get me the figures for the length of the hidden pathways, and considering the ones that go over water, I started thinking about the need for nautical miles as a measure for sea navigation. This sent me down the rabbit hole of calculations of the Earth’s circumference from Eratosthenes to the 16th Century. You may recall that the measures used in the World are a mix of Roman and old English units, which fall out of sync with modern measurements. For instance, the long mile of the World is 1.476km compared to the 1.609km of the modern US mile, both because the World inch is based on the Roman uncia (2.46cm) and the long mile is 5000 feet (as was the imperial Roman mile). We have Eratosthenes’ overestimation of 252,000 stadia (700 stadia per degree) and Posidonius’ underestimation of 180,000 stadia (500 stadia per degree), though both were using differing lengths of stadia. The current calculation for nautical miles is that there are 60 per degree, which is convenient for calculations when dealing with circles, so I came up with a long furlong (the furlong corresponding to the stadion) when calculated at ten to the nautical mile actually got within 0.556% of the actual circumference of the Earth at the Equator and just happens to be almost the same length as the Attic (also known as the Ptolemaic) stadion. This long furlong also happens to be an eighth of the long mile, so it works on several levels. (Yes, I’m obsessed with weights and measures.)

In spite of all this time being spent on the WttW peripheral materials, I actually did do something related to TKoH. I went ahead and named all the chapters and updated the Table of Contents on the site accordingly. It certainly leaves a better impression on the reader seeing that everything is clearly planned out. (I should probably spend a week or two before starting serialization to actually ensure all that is sorted first. Looking at you, RttW.) I’m sure I mentioned this elsewhere, but I spent years before I actually committed to writing KoG1, so a lot of my early stories had been brewing for a long time, while more recent books have had a rather short preproduction phase, for better or for worse. On the one hand, it’s a good thing to be so eager to write a story that I’m just getting it out there, but as a general rule, the more preplanning that goes into a story, the better the finished product. Anyway, maybe I can actually focus on TKoH a bit. Stay tuned.

Rejoice, seafood lovers. If I end up having Haruhi powers and the World of WttW becomes real and you somehow de-age to the 10-12 range to make you eligible to be summoned, you can rest assured that grouper, tilapia and snapper are now on the menu in select locations. I didn’t stop there, I also added some other fun critters like the Gargantuan Slug, a 3-meter-long slug that weighs in around 3 tons. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

In other news, I’m reworking my concept of the 17th Trial (Muspellheim) a bit. I’m currently thinking of the setting being similar to the Altiplano in South America but with a volcanic activity level similar to Kilauea in Hawaii (or even higher). I’d originally just imagined a completely inhospitable hellscape, but now it’s only a partially inhospitable hellscape (the completely inhospitable hellscape being reserved for Helheim). Also, basing it on the Altiplano explains how they have (some) domesticated llamas in Mirkwater (though not exactly how those llamas originally got there).

Anyway, I will once again make an effort to direct a little more of my energy toward TKoH so that I can actually meet the new deadline. Stay tuned.

I keep playing with the fishies. I can’t seem to stop myself. At this rate, I’m going to matriculate into the University of Hawaii to get another degree that does nothing for me, but I’ll certainly be able to tell you about all the differences between Istiophorus albicans and Istiophorus platypterus. While I do have trouble finding some of the data I’m looking for, I do greatly appreciate the maps FishBase will generate for the appearance rate of most species they have recorded. Anyway, I’ve pretty well taken care of this round of additions to the WttW bestiary, but I’m already thinking about the need to add more. At this point, a fishing minigame almost seems inevitable, much as I don’t actually like those.

Hopefully this work will mean that it’s out of my system and I can buckle down and focus on TKoH next week and actually meet my deadline, maybe even knock out Chapter 4 as well so we don’t have to worry about another delay like this next cycle. (The new school year is looming and by now we should know what the first term does to me.) We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.