I continued my work in the bestiary and have finished marking the habitats of all land mammals in the World. I just have to take care of birds, aquatic animals and insects and I can consider going back through and making labels to indicate rarity. Won’t that be fun?

One thing I’ve done to make cataloging the animals easier is that I don’t distinguish between individual species within a genus and occasionally within a family. Instead, the idea is that the particular animal has a different “skin” based on the area. For instance, the system wouldn’t distinguish between a spotted hyena found in Shabba (an area that’s equivalent to the Sahel on Earth) and a striped hyena found in Babu Dhaba (the equivalent of Persia). However, I have to check the ranges of all the different species so I can better replicate the equivalent ecosystem on Earth in the World. I’m definitely thankful for articles that include full maps of habitats.

Another thing I’ve done, that I wanted to mention yesterday but was in a bit of a hurry to get the post out before I had to deal with other things, is that certain types of Demihumans that come in Chromatic series is that all lower-level variants continue to appear in environments with their higher-level cousins. This can mean that encounters will involve low-level mobs with more dangerous high-level monsters mixed in. Did I mention that there are certain penalties for fighting critters that are much weaker than you? Yes, well, that’s a factor as well to add to the frustration. The World isn’t especially nice to the Players.

Anyway, if I can finish my work on the bestiary and the Rookies’ stats over the weekend, I should be in a decent position to dive into the story proper for next week. Stay tuned..

Again, no story progress, but I managed to finish accounting for all the Deminhumans, Magical Beasts and such, so now I just have the ordinary critters to get sorted. Also, there are now woolly rhinoceros in Jotunheim and Nidavellir, so you’re welcome. I’m sure I’ll get to story content eventually, but as I said in my last post, a delay until next week is pretty well guaranteed at this point. So it goes. I’ll just have to do what I can in the meantime. Stay tuned.

I’ve been really busy lately as you know and have had a lot of other deadlines pressing on me. I did fiddle around a bit in the WttW peripheral materials at least. I need to at least get the initial stats for the Rookies, and me being me, I feel compelled to chart the whole theoretical journey to Level 80. I didn’t get too far, though, due to the typical reason of me conking out again in the evening. Perhaps I can get things to settle down a bit, but I imagine the story update is going to get pushed to next week. Maybe I can turn things around, but I doubt it. Stay tuned.

In the WttW peripheral materials, I added a few more Demon types to make the Legions of Hell all the more fun to deal with. I also decided to change the category from “Devil” to “Demon” to better encompass the range of infernal beings. Either way, there are Monsters labelled simply as “Demons” and “Devils”, so there’s going to be overlap, but I figure it makes more sense to classify all of them as Demons and save the “Devil” label for the upper echelons of the hierarchy. As far as common parlance is concerned, it’s a distinction without a difference, but so it goes.

I made a little more progress on Chapter 5 of CoP, but not all that much as Tuesdays are very busy for me. Also, I spent a fair bit of the little time I had trying to better sort out the organizational structure of the Holy Catholic Church, naturally modelling it after the Roman Catholic Church. Not being Catholic myself, a lot of the information was new to me, so it was interesting digging into ecclesiastical governance. Of course, very little of it is going to be apparent in the text of the story itself, but you know how I like to make the whole iceberg.

I’ll see if I can’t get farther in the next round. Stay tuned.

As you not doubt expected, I did more work in the WttW peripheral materials. Now instead of just three varieties of vampires (Ghouls, Vampires and Vampire Lords), there are eight (the previous plus Dhampirs, Vampire Offspring, Lesser Vampires, True Vampires, and Elder Vampires). I’ve also added Elder Liches (with the idea that there will be dummy boss rooms in the 19th Trial with enemies nearly as difficult as the actual Trial Master) and Alchemic Ogres (which will be a real pain to fight, I’m sure). To clarify on the latter, some Monsters appear in progressively stronger incarnations. The three types are Chromatic (green, blue, purple, red, yellow, black, white), Metallic (bronze, iron, silver, gold, platinum, orichalcum) and Alchemic (albedo, nigredo, citrinas, rubedo). And, yes, it’s deliberate that the last four grades of Chromatic Monsters are in the opposite order of the Alchemic ones. The World is mean like that.

While I was working, I saw some calculation errors in the stats of a few entries and went back through the list to correct the errors where I found them. You see, character levelling follows a consistent pattern whether you’re a Player or an NPC. You start out with a base distribution of 20 points and then gain six points per level. Players have an advantage because they get a 10-point bonus at the start plus a 10-point bonus when they make Tier 2 (Level 21) and Tier 3 (Level 41). In other words, a Level 80 Player will have the same amount of points as a Level 85 NPC. (Players cap at Level 80, and People of the World at 40, but Monsters can reach as high as 99.) Anyway, there was about a dozen or so that needed fixing, so I took care of that.

Lastly, I did actually do a little work on Chapter 5 of CoP, but I didn’t get all that far as I was running out of steam and then what energy I did have was devoted to constructing and stocking my newly arrived bookcase. (I’m actually feeling settled enough to buy a little furniture and I got tired of my increasingly unstable stack of manga toppling over.) I hope to get more done later, naturally, but we’ll see how things go. Stay tuned.

Yes, well, so much for making progress on TWH. However, I am almost done marking all the fantastic beasts and where to find them. I added a lower grade of vampire to the list and I’m thinking I might add a few more vampire types, but that’s a task for later. I still have a fair chunk of the Demihumans to get sorted, and then there’s all the common critters.

However, I do need to be hopping on CoP with whatever time I can steal away. There’s a lot to be done at the day job, so that has to come first. Surely I can keep my priorities straight, right? Anyway, we’ll see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

I know what I said I was going to do, but that wasn’t what I did. You see, I was looking at the bestiary in the WttW peripheral materials and I had just taken the first steps toward marking the habitats of the different critters. Now, I’d started by just having a text block, but the thought of cross-referencing all 24 areas for the current 746 critters and editing the text string for each and every one sounded like way too much of a pain and it wouldn’t be that readable either, so instead I decided to make a chart for all the areas to mark their presence or absence. It’s still a lot of work, as I’m checking the lists I made for the Trials as I go, but it’s a lot more manageable. Also, at least for the normal critters, I’m checking their real-world ranges and using that as a reference for their equivalents in the World.

I spent the whole day working on this and I doubt I’m even halfway done yet. I’m noticing several different categories that I hadn’t really included in the earlier lists, so I’m going to have to account for them, plus I’ve been expanding the ranges of a lot of the more fantastical sorts. I’m being a touch cruel by allowing overlevelled Monsters into certain areas, but they’re not meant to be common or anything. Speaking of which, once I finish the first pass, I think I’ll go back through and add further labels to indicate rarity. For instance, you could be really unlucky and encounter a Demon (LVL 23) in the 1st Trial, but it’s not all that likely, and you’d probably have to be in a rather dangerous neck of the woods anyway.

These are all things to occupy the time that should be dedicated to actual story content, but what can ya do? Stay tuned.

Again, I didn’t get any story writing done, but in my continued work in the WttW peripheral materials, I decided to convert my notes on different alloys into a spreadsheet format in a bid to confirm whether or not the stated densities of certain alloys matched a proportional sum of their components, e.g. does the density of sterling silver match 92.5% at 10.5 g/cm^3 and 7.5% at 8.92g/cm^3? This assumes a fairly uniform mixing of the components, but I was curious if there might be some other chemical process at work that would alter the density. I think some of my formulae don’t quite line up, but alloys are often represented by a range of values and my results were generally in the ballpark. One of the things I’m thinking about is how many alloys I want to have at play in the World.

Another thing I’m thinking about but haven’t acted on is changing gold and silver equipment to being simply gilded and silvered, especially in the former case as pure gold is both really soft and really heavy, which makes it garbage for armor and weapons. (Gameplay-wise, there are metaphysical benefits such as a buff to Luck and Charisma that partially justify the cost in the case of gold, while silver has a number of magical properties that make it rather valuable for equipment.) If I switch to gilding and silvering, you’ll have actual steel under the fancy stuff, which will better justify spending more, rather than just sticking to hardened steel gear. I’ll then have to go back and recalculate weights, so that’ll be fun.

Anyway, now that my first week of the new school year is done, maybe I can work on getting that head-start on Chapter 27 of TWH. I really would like to get at least half of the chapter done so I have some chance of meeting my deadline next cycle. Stay tuned.

I spent a whole lot of time in the WttW peripheral materials continuing to play with currencies and relevant measures. I came up with a basic exchange rate among copper, brass/bronze, silver and gold to use as a rule of thumb and measured out things accordingly back when the face value better matched the real value. (Learning that currency often had more of a token value even in antiquity made it easier for me to do things like keep the sestertius’ dimensions consistent until it was withdrawn from circulation even as the debasement of the denarius messed with the two coin’s real value in relation to each other.) I also gave dimensions for ancient coins that Adventurers might find on the way. (I didn’t go so far as to make multiple varieties per region or anything like that. There are seven different varieties based on material.

Further research supports the idea of making larger denominations of the denarius, not from the classical perspective but from equating the denarius with the penny in the Late Middle Ages/Renaissance Period, which accords with the general cultural and technological level of the World.

Another issue I’m having to puzzle through is the handling of storage space. Each block of storage space in one fluid pint (the fluid pint of the World being about 591cm^3). However, the dry pint is about 80% the volume of the fluid pint. Simply having dry goods occupy the space of a fluid pint per dry pint is an easy enough solution for things like cereals and such, but since I’m dealing with currencies, should I have a single stack occupy a single slot (a more gamey sort of mechanic; think along the lines of the RE4 attaché case) or should I allow multiple stacks to fill a slot if they can fit? Currently I have coins stack at 100, but if we assume a uniform cube for a single storage slot, you could fit 896 denarii into a single slot, but that would end up weighing almost 3.5kg. The basic Small Coin Pouch would surely break and even if it didn’t, who wants to lug around 3.5 kilos of change? Of course, we don’t usually fill our storage items to the brim, so simply doing a single stack per slot is probably a reasonable choice. It’s something I’ll have to think about a bit more.

Anyway, Friday is going to be a really busy day for me, but maybe I can settle down and get some writing done in the evening. Stay tuned.

I didn’t get any story writing done, but I did do a fair bit of work in the WttW peripheral materials. I was thinking about the stack of coins Pawel handed over to Dupont in Chapter 12 of RttW and I was thinking about making larger denominations of the denarius. Mixed currency means more items to account for, especially in light of the five different iterations of the denarius. However, the fact that I’m blending ancient Roman and medieval English styles gives some additional headaches to account for. I decided to add currency weights to the list of units, which led me to add some from antiquity like the mina and talent that I figure will mostly be used by dealers in currency.

I was also trying to figure out the ratios for the values of different metals, though even when used as a reference point, modern prices can’t be equated to ones from the past. (Consider a 12:1 ratio for silver to gold in antiquity when it’s more like 100:1 based on the current market.) And of course values are going to fluctuate over time and we have over 650 years the Game has been going on. I don’t know how interesting this is to general audiences, but I find it fascinating and trying to replicate something this complicated, is both a fun challenge and rather frustrating, and the real kicker is that the average person reading the story itself will have no idea all this is going on behind the scenes.

Perhaps I’m just playing with weights and measures and the commodities market to avoid digging into Chapter 27 of TWH. I do intend to get some work on it done, but there’s also plenty of work-work as well. Fun times ahead. Stay tuned.