I wasn’t going to mention Monday’s progress because it really wasn’t worth mentioning, but I’ll make note of it for the sake of continuity with yesterday’s work. I was rereading what I’d already written on Chapter 20 of EM3 to get me back into the mindset, but by the time I was ready to actually start writing, I didn’t even get two sentences in before conking right out. I was able to make up for this shortfall yesterday and complete the chapter. Yay.

To make Monday look slightly less bad, I’ve also been doing work in the peripheral materials for WttW. Tax law. I’m sure it’ll come up at some point in the story. You’ll see. Anyway, that’s all for now. Stay tuned.

Since I’m going to be kicking off the Welcome to the World series in the next couple weeks, I thought I might go ahead and give you a quick overview of what the World is and how it works before we get started. If you’d rather let the World reveal itself over the course of the story, you can ignore this post. Anyway, without further ado…

Whereas the Planet in the Tellus Arc is a parallel world to our Earth with the same overall dimensions, the World of WttW is a little more abstract. Rather than a sphere, it’s a helix, starting with the Royal Capital of Axios in Upper Midgard (what one might term “the Zeroeth Trial”) and terminating in the Womb of the World, the site of the Twenty-first Trial. The World is divided into twenty-one zones known as the Trials, with an additional four Hidden Trials that branch off the Golden Path running from one end of the World to the other. The Trials vary in size but are limited and bound by invisible walls known as the Barrier. There is one way in and one way out of each Trial (excepting the ones that branch off into a Hidden Trial). The Exit Gate can only be activated after defeating the Trial Master, the boss monster of each Trial. Because each Trial is not connected by ordinary geography, you could face wildly different biomes going from one Trial to the next. The further you descend, the stronger the monsters are, and as a general principle, if you’re strong enough to beat one Trial Master, you will be just strong enough to survive in the next Trial.

There are two kinds of humans in the World: the Summoned (Players) and People of the World (NPCs). The People of the World are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the World, while the Summoned are brought into the World from Earth to participate in the Game. The goal of the Game is to complete the Trials and defeat the final Trial Master, the God-Dragon Ur-Tiamat, who is said to be the root of all evil in the world. The Summoned have greater potential than the People of the World (in numerical terms, the People of the World are level-capped at 40 while the Summoned are level-capped at 80) and are therefore the only ones with any chance of winning the Game. One way the World ensures the division between between the Summoned and the People of the World is that the two cannot interbreed. Another is that it is very difficult for the Summoned to survive without adventuring, but adventuring also has a high mortality rate (with a single annual cohort typically being reduced by half in the first year alone). Players are able to have children with each other, but a small portion even survive long enough to reach child-bearing age, much less find the stability to raise children, then Second-Generation Players have challenges of their own, such as a high risk of being orphaned and being pushed into adventuring too early with fatal results. Second-Generation Players are valued because they inherit some of their parents’ abilities, which gives them an advantage over the newly Summoned, though overconfidence in this potential often leads to the aforementioned fatal results.

Tied to the goal of winning the Game is the concept of the Brave. It is believed that the Brave is the only Player capable of reaching Level 99 and therefore most likely to stand a chance against Ur-Tiamat, who is also said to be Level 99. What’s more, it is believed that the Brave will possess the Blessings of all of the Twelve Gods of the World. You see, each Summoned chooses a Patron among the Twelves and receives Blessings as a reward for their faith. These Blessings can be inherited from parents to children, so in theory, a child with all twelve Blessings could be achieved by the fifth generation, but efforts to orchestrate a breeding program have failed to yield fruit, as it were.

I’ll stop here as I could keep on going for a good long while if I let myself. I’m thinking of doing little featurettes on different aspects of the World and the game system as we go, breaking things up into digestible chunks (though I may actually publish the full game guide on the site at a later date). I don’t know if we’ll have one of those featurettes next week or if we’ll do something else. Stay tuned.

I made progress on Chapters 12 and 13 of NagaTen and did more work in the peripheral materials for WttW. I plan on making some progress on EM3, but I’d also like to finish those chapters of NagaTen as well while I’m at it. Stay tuned.

I made a little progress on Chapter 7 of TWH and did more work in the WttW peripheral materials. I really need to buckle down more on making story progress, but we’ll see if I can actually buckle down during Golden Week. I’ll make a goal of finishing a chapter in TWH and NagaTen each. Will I pull it off? Who knows? Stay tuned.

The main thing I accomplished was writing some of Chapter 8 of RttW, but there was also some work in the WttW peripheral materials, though not as much as previously as I’ve been goofing off a lot more. Work is starting up again, which will probably do more for actual story progress (as the story progress mentioned here was done during the days I was called in to sub). I suppose TWH needs some attention, so I’ll try to work on that. Stay tuned.

I spent the whole week on the peripheral materials of WttW, to include starting up the encyclopedia, which is a bit odd, because it’s usually one of the first things I do when starting up a new world. Of course I had to further increase complexity of the systems. I’ve added a decimal place to the weights, which forced me to go back over all the item entries, and also started to factor in volume and item dimensions. Loads of fun. Keeps me out of the beer joints, I suppose. We’ll see if I accomplish any story progress this week. Stay tuned.

As you can see, I got Chapter 5 of TWH done in time for the update, and, as you’d expect, I spent the rest of my time continuing my work in WttW. And I haven’t just been working in the peripheral materials either. I’ve gotten up to Chapter 7 in RttW. That one decision I’ve had misgivings about is pretty well locked in at this point, so I’m just going to have to deal with the consequences. World-building yet character-destroying, though hopefully as I develop the story further, the context will at least make it feel organic. Just going to have to roll the dice, I guess.

Expect more of the same this week, though I will try to at least finish another chapter of NagaTen while I’m at it. Stay tuned.

I at least accomplished one of my goals, rounding out Chapter 7 of NagaTen, but I didn’t touch on TWH any. You guessed it, I spent most of my time on WttW. However, rather than the peripheral materials, I spent a fair bit of time writing on RttW. I completed Chapter 1 and then got through Chapters 2 and 3 and started on Chapter 4. I may end up scrapping a fair bit of it, though. The main character does some things I’m not happy with. It sets the tone and establishes some concepts I want to convey, but I don’t like that he’s the one to do it. I need to try writing an alternate version and see how that fits. There’s a lot of juicy conflict that can be born of the original version, but I feel I’d lose the vast majority of the audience by doing it. I don’t know.

Anyway, I need to at least get the chapter of TWH that’s due out this weekend done. I’m sure WttW will continue to occupy plenty of my time as well. Stay tuned.

As you might imagine, WttW dominated my time, though I did managed to complete two of the three parts of Chapter 7 of NagaTen, so I almost achieved my stated goal. Other than working on the peripheral materials for WttW, I wrote a fair bit on Chapter 3 of RttW as the confrontation there is something I was itching to put down on (digital) paper.

Going forward, I’d like to finish that chapter of NagaTen and then probably go back to TWH, as I don’t have any buffer built up there, unlike the soon to be released EM3. We’ll see what I get accomplished. Stay tuned.

As you can see by looking at the main site, I did in fact manage to get Chapter 4 of TWH finished in time for the update and went on to write something like a whole sentence on Chapter 5. (I’ll obviously have to do a fair bit more than that in the next three weeks.)

Of course, I’ve continued to spend most of my time in the peripheral materials for WttW. Yes, the level of detail I’m going into is insane, but I’m enjoying myself and what more can you ask for out of life? I’ve started to seed the different zones (or Trials as they’re known in-universe) with wildlife, natural resources and such and as that gets done, I’ll have a better grasp of how the global economy operates. Eventually I need to start running combat simulations to test the game balance as well. Fun, fun, fun.

Although I’m going to be continuing full speed ahead on my development of WttW, I also need to do some writing on NagaTen. I’ve still got plenty of time before it gets released, but I would like to patch the holes in Chapter 7 at the very least. We’ll see what I get accomplished. Stay tuned.

P.S. The latest post to get assailed by spammers was “On Values Dissonance” with over 500 rubbish posts. If we had a more active community, I’d like to leave that one open for discussion, but as non-spamming traffic is quite light, I’ve gone ahead and locked comments for the time being. I may open it up later if ever there’s a demand for it.