I continued to make progress on Chapter 26 of TWH and officially made the split into two parts (as you’ll see reflected on the site). I don’t think there’ll be the need for another split at this point, but I suppose it depends on how much detail I get into with the various fights. Interestingly enough, in my original meta-tag summary of the final battle, I describe Lys as having to fend off both the Hecate’s minions and Prince Wilfried’s party. You may recall that I had a much different conception of Prince Wilfried during the preproduction phase. I’m much fonder of the character he’s become.

It’s mostly something I was doing while I was chatting with my family, but in the one spreadsheet file in the peripheral materials where I have the comparative timeline of different reigns and dynasties and such for the Tellus Arc, there is a parallel chronology of Earth with a place for major events to compare the developments in the two worlds. I mostly just had some of the events related to King Arthur, but I started expanding that out. It perhaps says something about me as the sort of people and events that first came to mind for me. It also made me think of the significant ignorance of history and a disinterest in the subject on the part of some of my colleagues. It’s not something I can understand. I suppose if I take their attitude toward the pursuit of knowledge and compare it to my own toward something like sports or music, I can understand the mindset a bit more, but whatever, I suppose. We’re only educators, right?

Anyway, I expect to continue to work on TWH tomorrow in whatever time isn’t dedicated to the update, then it’s off to CoP. Stay tuned.

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.

If you’ve been following the long and rocky road of TWH’s production, you won’t believe me when I tell you that I finished Chapter 25 right out of the gate this week. Yes, I’d already finished about half of it beforehand, but for me to get through a chapter so quickly (in this book at least) is definitely a rare thing. I was looking back to see when serialization began. It was all the way back on 23 Dec 21. If I can stick to schedule, it’ll mean it took me three and half years that should’ve wrapped in less than half that time. As far as released novels go, I think Tico1 still has the worst of it, but “The Case of the Spotted Leopard” is without a doubt the grand champion, still stuck in development hell after all these years with no foreseeable way out on the horizon. I will finish it one day, but it won’t be today.

Anyway, I went on to do a little work on Chapter 26, which will very likely get split into two or even three chapters by the time I’m done, and then returned to the WttW peripheral materials. I’ve made it to Raibeart III (#27), but the High Kings are starting to get a little Habsburgian, so it’s time for them to start introducing a little exogamy. Oh, yes, I also wrote a bit on Chapter 12 of RttW for good measure.

I intend to continue working on a bit of this and that in the days to come, so hopefully I have something more exciting to report than several generations of consanguineous mating in Clan Mac Culién. Stay tuned.

I spent another day focused on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials, primarily focused on House Wulf, but I did a number of other things like significantly rework Mark’s encyclopedia entry. In case you were wondering, I intend to put this material out in the wiki once I start to put it together. In fact, I may start adding entries there in the very near future so I can officially launch it.

I do have to share one story that came out of yesterday’s work. (Warning: Spoilers for Knight of Gladius: Volume III) You remember Claudius, right? Randwulf’s kid. Mark’s half-brother. (Or would it be three-quarter-brother?) He rode off into the sunset after KoG3, but what happened to him? Well, up until now, I’d said that he returned to the ancestral homeland of Gotland, had a son Roderic and most likely escaped the Planet during the Great Crossing. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but the Great Crossing is a mass exodus of humanity from the Planet. The events of KniTwi are some of the foreshocks of the calamity to come that drives humans away.) Well, now he not only returns to Gotland but specifically to the family’s holdings in Wulfbach and reunites the two branches of the family by marrying the Radwinda the daughter of Friedhardt, the head of the Gotlander branch of House Wulf at the time. (If you’re inclined to get squicked at this, I should note that their common ancestor is six generations back, so don’t get your banjos out just yet.) I expanded his family so that he now has three more children in addition to Roderic: Antonia, Rodwinda and Friedric. The idea was for Claudius to take over the newly unified House Wulf, but you know how he’s not quite built for a fight, so when Lord Friedhardt died, his half-brother Adelhardt took over instead. (Claudius is still listed as a claimant to the title of Lord of Wulf, though.) If Claudius had actually inherited the ancestral gear of the Conquerors, he would’ve had a stronger claim, but Randwulf took it with him.

A fun bit of trivia is that I have since given Claudius a Gotlander name, Rodwulf, which happens to be the same as the eldest son of Wulf the Conqueror. (It wasn’t a coincidence, of course.) Also, his full Roman name is Lucius Claudius Antonius Lupinus. Randwulf’s idea was to have his son start a new branch of House Claudius to maintain standing among the patricians. (I may not have mentioned it elsewhere, but when Nyssa married Randwulf, she called herself Claudia Antonia, posing as a daughter of one of the patrician families of Eagle, hence Claudius’ name.)

Anyway, I continue to flesh out my world. I dipped my toe a bit in House Hassani, but there’s a lot of work that needs to go into that. My sources over 20 years ago for Arabic names weren’t great, so it’s a bit of a mess. Also, dealing with fecund polygamists is, oh, so much fun when building genealogies. As fun as that prospect is, I really do need to turn my attention to RttW and I’ve got some other stuff to deal with as well. Let’s see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

I didn’t feel that writing a couple sentences to finish off Chapter 3 of CoP was quite enough to warrant a post (though I know I’ve done it for such minimal work before). I did go ahead and do most of the work for the review post, so it wasn’t like I was spending the day idly. Anyway, we had a rather sharp contrast with all the work I’ve done on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials since. I’ve been focusing on the houses of the Eight Stars, especially House Leon, House Crucis and House Wulf. I decided to have House Leon belong to a line of rí túath (a sort of tribal chieftain/petty king), so I ended up creating a thousand-year line of succession for it. However, the main line eventually gets excluded, which explains how they ended up in Gladius. There’s a similar story with House Wulf, where the family ends up splitting into the half that carries on the Conqueror’s mantle and the half that rules the freehold granted to Wulf by the Emperor after the War of Ban. If this was not enough, the Gladian lord Ingwald of Glasford (a fiefdom in the area of Stormtree) provides the glue to bind the two houses together.

You see, Gearalt the sixth Defender was not chosen to be the tanist to succeed his father as rí túath, so he ventured out to seek his fortunes abroad. He spent a spell in Titan as a mercenary before returning to his homeland of Fodla to be rejected a second time, so he then went to the Greater Gotland Empire, where lent his sword to the faction supporting the future Emperor Reinhardt III. This faction also included Ingwulf the sixth Conqueror. Ingwulf was already connected to Lord Ingwald of Glasford and when he and Gearalt forged a marriage pact between their grandchildren, Gearalt was added to that connection. This was what led his son Leander to participate in the Gladian War of Unification, which brings us to the status quo you’re familiar with from the Gladius Cycle stories. In fact, Percival’s maternal uncle Ingwald (the grandson of the previously mentioned Lord Ingwald and the head of the cadet branch of House Wulf that took possession of the family’s Gotland holdings) was the one acting as his proxy as head of House Leon during his minority. You might find it ironic that the two families are so closely knitted together given what happens in the stories, but this sort of thing wasn’t all that uncommon in real world history, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise in fictional history inspired by the real thing. For some real fun, did you know that House Hassani has married into House Crucis not just once but twice? That’s a story for another day, though.

I’m having a lot of fun with this, of course, but I really do need to redirect some of this energy. We’ll see if I manage it or not. Stay tuned.

You know how I said I was going to get Chapter 3 of CoP wrapped in the morning and posted in the evening? Well, it didn’t happen that way. I was working on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials all day and didn’t start on CoP until the evening. I didn’t take a nap in the afternoon like I was intending, so you can imagine how the evening went, yet somehow I managed to make enough progress that I’m just about done, so I’ll just shift the release schedule by a day and we’ll go on from there.

In case you were curious about my work in the peripheral materials, I was primarily focused on the royal family of Titan. You see, it turns out that I hadn’t made a family tree for them yet, so I corrected that oversight. Some changes cropped up along the way because some encyclopedia entries were less detailed than others, causing me to lose the connection. For instance, during the reign of King Halfdan, his first wife was unable to produce an heir for him, so he was pressured by the jarls to divorce her and was given a child bride in the thought that the younger the bride, the more fertile she would be. (No, that isn’t how it works.) However, King Halfdan opted to wait until the girl grew up a bit first, only to die within the year. This little widow was then carted off to the convent to live out her widowhood, only to leave her cloister after some years and find herself a new husband in the form of Sieghardt the Conqueror, only this time the age gap went the other way, with her being 22 years his senior. This was Asta Ingisdottir, only I never mentioned her by name in King Halfdan’s encyclopedia entry, so I ended up making an entirely different character to serve the role of his second queen (now an age allowable by canon law), who ends up murdered after the King’s funeral. I stumbled on Asta’s entry later and realized my error. Rather than delete the new storyline, I simply changed Asta’s story so that she was betrothed to the infant son of King Halfdan by this new Queen and then was sent off to the convent for her protection, lest she end up like her little fiancé. (Yes, the baby was murdered along with the mother, because succession disputes are brutal.) This managed to tie up things nicely, but there’s bound to be more instances of me coming up with new stories and having to either retcon the old ones or rework the new ones. However, I really like it when I have a good idea, only to find out that I already had that good idea years before and made provisions for it.

I intend to switch over to RttW next week. We’ll see how much time I spend working on the chapter that needs to go out and how much time I spent detailing which insects are native to each of the Trials. I’m sure it’ll be all sorts of fun. Stay tuned.

I said I was just going to do a little bit of work on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials and then focus on finishing Chapter 3 of CoP, but it was the opposite. I spent most of the day on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials and only got a sentence done in CoP before I entered my phase of variable consciousness in the evening. That doesn’t bode well for my deadline, but I think I’ll try to get the chapter finished in the morning and get it posted by evening.

Besides adding more regnal years, one thing I was doing to improve the encyclopedia was adding labels for kings and such, something I’ve done in other, more recent encyclopedia files. For example:

Rudolf V (III 3653 – 3718)

53rd King of Bergeny

However, in the course of doing this, I was thinking about additional titles and such. For instance, one of the honors bestowed on the Elemental Knights was a global peerage, the equivalent of a count, but some would go on to gain other titles as well (or they already had titles beforehand). I wanted to account for that and just House Aran alone kept me busy for a couple hours, as I was accounting for lines of succession and stories would spring up as I worked. Fun, fun, fun, but it doesn’t get me any closer to meeting my deadline. I’ll see what I can get done and then go from there. Stay tuned.

I completely threw myself into the Tellus Arc peripheral materials, continuing to add regnal years to many of the different domains across the Planet’s 15,000-year history. At least with the Dragons, they rule for centuries at a time, so there are only fifteen Kings of Dragons to account for (not counting the Xarid pretenders, which I of course have also recorded). While doing this, I was adding and modifying a lot of entries in the encyclopedia and timeline. The history of the two Black Dragon dynasties have gotten fleshed out quite a bit more now. There are a lot of things that had been left incomplete for years that I’ve started filling out more, such as the list of Kings of Ban, the predecessor of Byrn. In fact, I was in the middle of filling in the regnal years for that dynasty when I had to find a stopping place. I really do need to be getting back to CoP, but I anticipate that I’ll at least want to finish with the Kings of Ban first. Stay tuned.

I did some writing on Chapter 3 of CoP, which was good, but rather than stick to this, I ended up going down a rabbit hole in the peripheral materials. I believe I was checking out the conversion of dates in the different calendars in the Tellus Arc the other day and ended up making some adjustments, which then spun into a whole things where I was adding regnal years for different dynasties and such, and as stories were developing from this, I had to dig into the timeline and the encyclopedia, and I’ve only managed to scratch the surface. I do need to go back to writing on CoP, but I’m definitely going to spend more time on this. Stay tuned.

I only got a few sentences written Saturday, so I didn’t feel like it warranted a post. Honestly, I didn’t do much better this go-around, but here we are anyway. I only managed to inch along a bit in Chapter 25 of TWH. I might’ve gotten more done if my office productivity manager didn’t insist on occupying my time. So it goes. I’ll be switching over to CoP, but I may still try to get some of the ideas I have for TWH onto the page. My work-work load for the week is rather light, but there are a number of ancillary tasks that may be taking a decent bite out of my time. We’ll see what gets done. Stay tuned.