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 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.

I managed to make some respectable progress on Chapter 25 of TWH. Brainstorming the dialog the day before definitely helped. (I have to do something when I’m biking to and from the station, after all.) I potentially could finish the chapter by the time the weekend’s out. I can’t guarantee it, but it makes for a nice goal. Let’s see what I get done. Stay tuned.

I did just the barest amount of work on Chapter 25 of TWH and a more respectable bit of progress on ColoFlip, doing a bit of exposition on the crew’s behavioral programming. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m really enjoying this opportunity to explore the ground level on the fringes of the Empire. So far in the Cross Arc, our view of the Empire has been skewed by the fact that we don’t get to see much outside of Project Reclamation and the Expeditionary Fleets. As fun as Reclamation stories are, I want to explore more of the post-Union universe. I really need to kick off The Æther War Chronicles as I’ve dived into the aftermath of the Æther War without digging into the war itself. Things to consider as I move forward in the Cross Arc.

What’s that? I said I was going to be focusing on TWH this week? I really do need to do that, don’t I? I’ll see what I can do. Stay tuned.

I was doing more work in the peripheral materials, focusing on Bergeny yet again. In particular, I was working on related encyclopedia entries. Loads of fun. I might do a little more fiddling around before switching over to CoP for next week. Stay tuned.

Although I mostly worked on the peripheral materials, dealing with stuff both before and after the events of TWH, I also made some progress on the main story itself, finishing Chapter 25 and starting on Chapter 26. Speaking of the peripheral materials, for some reason I was spending a lot of time with the family lines of the Princes of Bergeny. I don’t know if I mentioned this elsewhere, but Bergeny originally had a fairly typical royal line until the end of the reign of Arnolf III. Rather than simply have his eldest son succeed him, he divided the kingdom among his seven surviving sons and instituted a system where the seven Princes and their successors would elect the new King from among them. Ultimately, the first King elected was the eldest among the brothers, but from there, a fairly stable arrangement of rotating kingship developed. Anyway, I got to try to account for seven lines of rulership to keep track of it all. Oh, what fun it is. Anyway, we’ll see what other fun I get up to over the weekend. Stay tuned.

I made some more progress on Chapter 24 of TWH and am almost finished with it, so that bodes well for next cycle. It shouldn’t take long to wrap it up and hopefully I can get a decent head-start on Chapter 25 as well. Stay tuned.

I spent a fair bit of time in the peripheral materials getting an estimate of Hecate’s forces and then fiddling around with the world map in a continued effort to try to sort out the scaling issues, location relative to the climate bands, etc. I did do a little more writing on Chapter 24 of TWH, so that’s something. Going back to the map thing, I’ve found some tools I’m going to try fiddling around with more. Stay tuned.