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.