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.

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.

More work on the WttW peripheral materials. I was doing some work on Sanity Checks and their intersection with Charisma Checks. Thrilling stuff, I know. We’ll see what else comes up. Stay tuned.

I continued to do some work in the peripheral materials of WttW, working on the system for NPC companions, dubbed Hirelings, Pets and Familiars. Hirelings are People of the World contracted to serve the Player, Pets are Beasts and Monsters that are either tamed or subdued by Players, and Familiars are Beasts and Monsters bound to Mage-type Players by a Pact. The method of acquiring these three classes of companions vary, but the general restrictions based on Level category is the same. There’s a singular cap, so if you want to mix and match, you have to be Level 11 and up. The max is 95, which aligns with the 96-Player limit of an Adventuring Company, treating the Player as the anchor for the formation. (For reference, a standard Party is six Players, a Troop consists of at most four Parties, and a Company of four Troops.) While this might sound rather broken from a gameplay perspective, the People of the World are actually a liability at the more advanced Trials because their Level cap is so much lower than Players (PotW cap at 40 while Players cap at 80) and there are a lot of complications with trying to manage an army of high-Level Monsters.

I’m glad I already have this week’s chapter ready because I haven’t done any story writing and it doesn’t look like I’m going to get to it anytime soon. It’s pushing my limits just to jot down some of these ideas amid all the other stuff demanding my attention. We’ll see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

I was doing work in the WttW peripheral materials and while I was trying to figure out which Trade Guilds would actually have Trade Skills associated with them, I came up with the idea of guilds without official sanction, covering the goings-on in the grey and black markets. They mostly serve as a way to better organize the activities of organized crime in the World. How much our gang gets caught up in this sort of thing remains to be seen. Once I make some more progress on the Trade Skills list, I’ll try digging into Chapter 11 of RttW. Stay tuned.