I had an idea percolating in my head on Wednesday, one that I didn’t commit to page as there wasn’t much of anything I got done that day. (And I can only blame reading the final volume of Oshi no Ko for my lack of productivity in the evening, that and my increasingly common habit of passing out in my chair before I get around for bed.) Anyway, that was more fodder for the WttW peripheral materials, but I didn’t stop there. It wasn’t until the evening that I got to it (and a wonder I was able to progress as much as I did), but I actually was able to make some respectable headway in Chapter 22 of TWH. This isn’t going to be that long of a chapter, so there’s actually a decent measure hope of me making my deadline. I’ll buckle down and power through. Stay tuned.

I fiddled around with the WttW peripheral materials some more, but a kernel update prompted me to reboot my machine and that made for an excuse not to open up all those files again. In theory, that should’ve meant a lot of good progress would get made on Chapter 22 of TWH. Well, I can’t say “a lot”, but at least some progress was made. That’s something, right? I need to pick up the pace, though. Stay tuned.

I know I said I needed to start working on TWH, but I continued to fiddle around in the WttW peripheral materials. I finished setting materials and quality ratings for the weapons list and then drew up the list of Trade Guilds. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was just going to adapt the guild list I made for my DnD scenario and there aren’t a whole lot of changes. For instance, in the DnD setting, Adventurers aren’t a special class of isekaied people, so it made sense to have guilds for the different character classes, but in WttW, the Adventurers’ Guild has a monopoly on dealing with adventurers, so instead of class-based guilds, the Adventurers’ Guild has “schools” for five of the six Job trees. Clerics are the exception as the Temple claims rights to their training, which also means that Clerics who fall out of favor with the Temple have a much more difficult time finding support for their advancement. Anyway, I really do need to work on TWH. I have quite a bit of time available this week, so I just need to make it happen. Stay tuned.

I continued my work in the WttW peripheral materials. In particular, I was developing the crafting system and to that end, I’ve been applying difficulty/quality ratings to equipment and material requirements. Saturday was mostly devoted to clothing and armor and Sunday was more focused on weapons. For the former, it was enough to just have two material requirements, but for some of the weapons, two wasn’t enough, so I added a third material slot for crafting purposes. Of course, even this is fairly simplified compared to reality, but the WttW system has always been about trying to balance realism and relative ease of use. Anyway, I need to turn my attention to TWH, but I imagine I’ll still be fiddling around in the WttW peripheral materials as I go. Stay tuned.

Thursday is my busiest day of the week with my current schedule, and with me having next to no energy by the time I get home lately, I didn’t accomplish much beyond adding a few items to the list, which I didn’t think was enough to warrant a post. My schedule was much more open today, but it was shocking how little I accomplish. For whatever reason, I was working on the map of Korush for CoP a while, then I did a little bit on Chapter 10 of RttW, but I got distracted detailing a relevant key item, then similar items (specifically, contracts and such). From there, I started thinking about the Trade Guilds. In the DnD scenario I was building for my niece a few years back, I drew up the guild structure for the setting, and I don’t intend to reinvent the wheel, but there are some bits that don’t fit the setting of RttW, so I need to account for that, but I didn’t get farther than reviewing the guild list for that setting (there are 108 guilds there with numerous subordinate companies) and thinking about how to work out the Trade Skills system. (I’ve already developed a simplified version for my alternative game system, so I have to decide if I want to go along those lines or do something a little different.) Of course, none of that gets me across the finish line, so we’re going to have to just move the cycle along and come back around next time. I intend to continue working over the weekend, but don’t expect the chapter to be finished just yet. Stay tuned.

I said I was going to focus more on story writing, but I ended up digging into the World’s sumptuary laws (prompted by me expanding the list of clothing items) and revising the section on taxes and such. I did get a little writing done on Chapter 10 of RttW, but by the time I got to it, I was actually writing with my eyes closed as I was struggling to make at least a little progress before crashing out. We’ll see how things develop in the coming days, but at the rate things are going, I may not make the deadline. Stay tuned.

I didn’t get much done in either the story or the peripheral materials, but I did write a little bit on Chapter 10 of RttW. (Once again, I made the mistake of trying to write in the evening and conking out shortly thereafter.) I added a few more articles of clothing to the item list, so you’ve got some more options there. I’ve got a busy day ahead of me, so there may not be much to report in the next entry either. Stay tuned.

I mentioned pockets last time, so I was going through adding storage space to different articles of clothing (and adding some items to the list). Now, unlike a lot of modern clothing, pockets aren’t all that common, so it doesn’t apply to that many items. A particular exception is the Smuggler’s Set, which is loaded with pockets.

I was further developing the mechanics I was working on before and laying some of the groundwork for dealing with things like weather and terrain. (Until now, I’ve only accounted for temperature thus far with some notes on certain items about waterproofing.) Lots of things to deal with.

I started to do a little writing on Chapter 10 of RttW in the evening, but I didn’t last long before conking out. So it goes. I’ll try to focus more on story progress for now. Stay tuned.

Again, no story progress but extensive work in the WttW peripheral materials. Besides some additional tweaks to the weights and measures, I added a new mechanic. While Charisma is a base stat in DnD, it isn’t in the game system I created for the World. However, I decided that the concept of Charisma was useful for a number of things, so I decided to create it as a special stat outside the base stats. With the base stats (Strength, Constitution, Intelligence, Spirit, Dexterity and Speed), you get a default spread based on your starting Job, plus ten points to distribute as you will. With Charisma, you get a randomly generated value between 1 and 100, plus a ten-point bonus for being an Adventurer (a game mechanic way of representing the inherent respect the People of the World have for Adventurers). You gain a point of Charisma for each character level and you can also gain a point of Charisma for the equivalent of a character level by performing successful Charisma Checks (1XP for a successful Charisma Check). Speaking of Charisma Checks, these are actions like Charm, Bluff (Lie), Tame/Subdue, and Lead that rely on Charisma for the calculations.

Now, I said that initial Charisma scores were randomly generated and I meant it. So I went down the list of characters and ran the random number generator and it was funny how things worked out. With the bonus applied, Pawel’s initial score was 80 and Zofiya’s 83 (while poor Jun was 31) and among the kids, Fedor is a whopping 98, Zsuzsanna a respectable 59, and Arjun a measly 19. This was entirely random and it just happened to work out with what I envisioned for the characters. The same held for the others. I would’ve liked Ramachandra’s initial value to be higher than the 64 he got, but the idea of him working hard to get to where he was actually works pretty well when I think about it. Anyway, it’s neat how things work out.

I need to focus on making actual story progress in the days to come, but I do want to continue to flesh out these mechanics. Also, pockets. I’ve decided that certain clothing should have their own storage slots, so I need to go through the list and account for that. Fun to come. Stay tuned.

I didn’t make any story progress, but I spent a lot of time in the peripheral materials for the WttW series, particularly plugging in the weights and measures system into the spreadsheet. I’ll be posting a simplified version of this in the appendices later. The system used in the World is a hybrid of Roman and traditional English units, so there’s a bit of difference between the units used and the ones you know. For instance, an Axian inch, like the Roman one, is 2.46cm rather than the 2.54cm US inch. One thing I had to go back and change in the item list was all capacity references using liters (which was a placeholder for convenience). You see, I set a block of storage at half a liter mainly because I started with accounting for water storage first. A pint is close enough, though in the current system, the dry pint is less than that and a fluid pint is more, but it’s a workable compromise. I was then trying to edit some of the assorted containers. I want to arrange the storage blocks in three dimensions, which means the actual capacity doesn’t always quite match, but if you’ve studies traditional measures, you know there was historically a lot of shenanigans involved. Anyway, this is the sort of thing I do with my free time. Expect more of this to continue. Stay tuned.