It turns out that my ambitions were grossly unrealistic. You know the bit about manga reviews? Well, a lot of it has been sitting untouched for two or three years. Yes, I still remember the broad strokes of what happened, but to write a meaningful review, I’m really going to have to reread all of it. That’s a pretty tall order and I ended up napping away most of my daylight anyway. We’ll try again during my off-time starting next week. I can guarantee there won’t be any ten reviews written in a day even if I did nothing but focus on that.

Of course, my focus is in other places. I did more work in the WttW peripheral materials as you’d expect. I got the basic format for the lunar cycles down. I just have to fill out 700 years’ worth. Whee fun. While I was at it, I decided to add a mechanic where the times of day and the seasons also affect certain kinds of magic. This is going to make spell calculations so much fun. -_-

To close things out, I started to detail how Summoning works. Most spellcasting is fairly straightforward, but there’s a little extra work involved if you’re a Summoner. You see, first you have to collect souls in Soul Gems in order to summon Spirits. It’s a bit of a Pokemon mechanic, only with a chance of failure added in for extra fun. Here’s a hint: invest in quality Soul Gems. The real fun bit is that you learn Summon Spirit before you learn Capture Soul, but fear not, gentle Player. It’s possible to get pre-loaded Soul Gems. (In fact, it’s not a bad way to earn cash as a Summoner. Go out and farm mobs for a safe, steady income or try harvesting the really difficult ones for the big bucks.)

I’m going to be working more on all this stuff, but I want to do some more writing on TWH as well, so let’s see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

I did more work in the WttW peripheral materials. I managed to get to the reigning High King at the time of RttW, Robert IV (#33). As I was getting to him, I ran into a problem as he was only 11 when his father King Colin VI died and there were no near male kin of appropriate age to take the role of King Donald IX. You might be saying, “You’re the writer. Just fix it.” Well, I did fix it… by eliminating Donald IX and just having a ten-year regency period. (Usually they don’t like to have very long regencies.) Before I had Princess Sarah, the daughter of Colin VI married to a Lord Charles, but her husband was compelled to divorce her so that she could marry Robert IV to strengthen his claim. Lord Charles got the boot too as now Robert and Sarah were betrothed as children to legitimize him and then when he came of age, the marriage went through to celebrate the end of the regency. Who might the Lord Regent be, you ask? Why, a Lord Donald mac Charles. See what I did there? (Maybe it should’ve been Charles mac Donald…)

I was doing some bits and pieces on some of the others of the Twelve Kings. (In case I hadn’t mentioned it before, the lands from Axios to the 16th Trial are divided among twelve sovereigns.) I mentioned the need for exogamy after poor Raibeart III. Well, we start to see a bit more intermarriage with the other domains from Donald VII on. (Donald VII himself was three-quarters Midgardian and his wife a princess from Babu Dhaba.) Anyway, I needed to account for some of them, but I haven’t started on a complete list of genealogy yet.

Actually, I’d like to shift gears to some mechanical features of the Game. I’m thinking of having the phase of the moon influence æther levels, but that’s going to mean I need to keep track of the phases of the moon. I think I’ll make my life a little easier by not giving the moon of the World the same variability as ours between lunations. (There is an artificial quality to the World and I might as well take advantage of that.) The World is on the Julian calendar, so I’m going to have to worry about drift with the solstices and equinoxes. Oh, what fun.

Speaking of equinoxes, since the spring equinox is a national holiday here, I’ve got the day wide open, so I’d like to dig into my to-do pile of manga reviews. I think I mentioned elsewhere that I’d like to try to knock out ten a day in the coming off-time I have before the new school year starts. One of the big things that started gumming up my workflow is that the reviews descended into extended recaps of everything that happens. This wasn’t how it started, but with episodic gag-based series like Aho Girl, I couldn’t really make a nice overall summary of what was going on with the plot and characters, so I’d have to break down each little episode. This style then infected my reviews of series that did have overarching plots and character development. I do rather like some of my commentary, but it makes for a nightmarish workload. You saw how my reviews of Kimetsu no Yaiba stalled out a couple years back. I’m thinking about scrapping what I’ve written so far on the review of Volume 20 and start fresh with the new style. If I’m only writing a paragraph or two per volume, I should be able to buzz through these reviews fairly quickly. We’ll see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

I just worked on the WttW peripheral materials. I’ve gotten to Gregor III (#30), who I was looking forward to as his legal reforms represent a major pivot for the World. While I was at it, I was having to build up the family tree for the Duchy of Eisenschien. You remember that Duke Heinfried that came up in the conversation between Pawel and Oscarius back in Chapter 5. Well, he was the previous Duke of Eisenschien at that particular point in history.

For a little bit of backstory, the territory in Lower Midgard that includes the lair of the First Trial Master used to be known as Dünwald, but when the Duke of Dünwald refused to pay homage to King Raibeart I, the King stripped him of his title and dissolved the duchy, replacing it with a new one named Eisenschien with a loyal vassal as the 1st Duke. You might think that would put Eisenschien firmly in the Robertite camp, but they switch to the Donaldites after the deposition of King Cailean III and he didn’t live long enough after his restoration to pay them back for their betrayal.

With Eisenschien having ingratiated itself to the Donaldites, the 6th Duke succeeded in getting one of his cousins married to King Tearlach I and later his own son would claim the throne as King Donald VII. (The 6th Duke was actually the great-grandson of King Domhnall VI who was adopted by the 5th Duke. He had no designs on the throne himself, but his son had other plans.) The family would then split between the half that held the throne and the half that held Eisenschien. This may change as I detail the next few generations, but for now, this is the situation that holds as of the present in the story. (I may decide that the royal side gets taken over by a different family if we get a generation with no heirs.)

In case you were noticing it about the names of the High Kings, their rendering changes over the course of time to reflect the slow progress of linguistic modernization. For instance, Culién becomes Caileann becomes Colin and Domnall becomes Domhnall becomes Donald. Although the spelling changes, it’s the same name and so the Kings are numbered accordingly, e.g. Culién II from 0103-0137 is followed by Cailean III from 0351-0355&0357. I do the same thing in other genealogies, such as the Emperor of the New Earth Empire with the Santana pretender Juan Carlos II coming after the mainline Emperor John Charles I Augustus.

I’d like to round out the next four or five generations of the High Kings at least before redirecting my energies elsewhere. 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 continued to work on the WttW peripheral materials. I’ve now made it to Padair I (#22) and started to fill in the details on a turbulent period in Axios’ history known as the Bloody Years, about ten years of unrest that saw three High Kings assassinated and culminated in a grand purge of the losing faction. And it all got kicked off some twenty years earlier because of a party wipe on a boss run triggered an uncharacteristic behavioral pattern in the First Trial Master. (Expect this element to become a factor in the main story.)

There’s loads more to do, but I need to be turning my attention to TWH. I may be sneaking a little work in to get the next 300 years in the history of the High Kings covered. Stay tuned.

I just did work in the WttW peripheral materials today, mostly writing encyclopedia entries and working on the Player’s Guide. I didn’t add to the family tree of the High Kings beyond adding King Alasdair III’s bastard Iskander. One of the big things I was working on was heraldry as it relates to Adventuring Companies. You see, when an Adventuring Company is founded, they get a color based on the Patron of the founding Captain and a heraldic beast based on their Job. A bit of a spoiler, but later in the series, Pawel will end up forming his own Adventuring Company called the Cyan Wyverns, but while Pawel and company hail from 21st Century Earth, the word “cyan”, which only dates back to 1889, doesn’t quite fit in the medieval stasis of the World. I was doing some research into heraldry and ended up reworking some of the stuff I’d already written, basically reassigning all the colors I’d originally attributed to the Twelve. I decided that the modern parlance of the Players would be influencing the World but that traditions would still hold. In other words, the color officially attributed to Thoros, Pawel’s Patron, is bleu-céleste (sky blue) which more or less maps to cyan, so in the official Guild records, the color will be listed as bleu-céleste and glossed as cyan, thus fixing the issue. I also doing some similar work to account for modern gaming terminology and devices like the Player Slate (basically a magical tablet PC), having their introduction parallel their appearance in Earth.

There’s plenty more to do, to the point that I wonder if I’ll be adding background details even after the current five planned books are finished. (It’s quite likely.) I’d also like to start thinking about putting some work into the wiki. It’d be nice to get it up and going. We’ll see what I can get into. Stay tuned.

First, let me happily report that I finished Chapter 11 of RttW, so we’ll be able to go forward with the update on schedule. Of course, I spent a lot of time on the peripheral materials as well. I proceeded down the family tree of the High Kings to Domhnall V (#17). That may not sound like a lot of progress, but there’s a fair bit that went into getting that far. I always end up making such soap operas when I do genealogy work. Anyway, I’ve already done some work on Chapter 12 before, so I’ll try to get more done over the weekend to give me some lead time for next cycle. Maybe I can get more that four High Kings sorted while I’m at it. Stay tuned.

I made some respectable progress on Chapter 11 of RttW, finishing the first section and cracking into the second, but a lot more time was spent in the peripheral materials. Similar to what I’ve been doing in the Tellus Arc peripheral materials, I’ve been providing regnal years for the High Kings of Axios (and will do so for the monarchs of the other domains as I flesh them out) and I also wrote up summaries of the Trade Guilds in the Player Guide (as it was relevant to my work on the current chapter). I’d say I’m pretty well positioned to meet my deadline at this point, so yay for that. Besides doing that. I’d like to finish detailing the family tree of the High Kings. My earlier work left off at Dubhgall the Terrible, the thirteenth of 36 High Kings, so I’ve got a bit of work to do there. Well, all fine things to keep me out of the beer joints. Here’s to another productive day. Stay tuned.

I was actually spending a fair bit of time yesterday rereading posts on this blog. I had to go back and apply a recent retcon regarding Emperor Michael I Neologos in “A Brief History of the Emperors of Earth” among other minor tweaks and corrections. There was stuff at work that chewed up a fair bit of my time in the office, but I did actually start digging into Chapter 11 of RttW. Will I make my deadline? That remains to be seen. Anyway, I can try focusing on that and see where it gets me. 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.