I did finally dig into Chapter 3 of TKoH, almost did enough to count for two days’ worth but not quite. Scripting this next bit will be a bit tricky, but I don’t expect it to be all that long, so once I figure out how I want things to play out, I should be able to wrap it up fairly quickly. If I’m doing really well, maybe I could even knock out Chapter 4 this week and build up some lead time. We’ll see how it goes.

I also spent some time in the WttW peripheral materials, mostly doing minor tweaks throughout the guide. Speaking of the guide, I need to think about starting work on the wiki. It’d be nice to get some of the peripheral materials out there for public consumption. A project for another day, I’m sure. Here’s to me not getting too distracted by the peripheral materials and staying on target. Stay tuned.

Actually, as I was writing the previous entry, I was already continuing my work in the WttW peripheral materials. I continued to work on the details for Djalli and also worked on a secret character, then decided to do some work building up profiles on a few NPCs, namely Black Tom, Rothkopf and Fränzel. I did some adjusting to the base stats for the different NPC classes as I thought NPCs shouldn’t have any points in Spirit as they can’t use magic, but as I’m writing this, I saw that I’d made provisions where NPCs can gain points to Spirit, only that the growth rate is much slower than for Players and it doesn’t actually serve much purpose. (At very least, most NPCs wouldn’t naturally be putting points into Spirit, so some of my adjustments were justified, but I was feeling a bit bad for tertiaries devoting their lives to prayer and service to the gods with no reflection in their stats whatsoever.) I’ve since partially reversed that move. (I will also note that even if Spirit is largely useless for NPCs, it’s not completely useless as Spirit ties to Magic Defense. It could be just enough to make the difference between life and death for a pious soul.)

I also was expanding the section on tax law a bit, adding in scutage to reflect how the Chevalier class of NPCs have moved away from their original military function, much as was the case with knights in the real world. I was then trying to figure out rates of payment by cross-referencing how much soldiers were paid in the 14th Century and then adjusting it for the current prices in the World. (As a rough estimate, due to inflation, a penny in the 14th Century England is worth about 100 denarii in the World at the time of the main stories.)

This actually helped lead into some relevant research for this week’s chapter of TKoH. In retrospect, I’m glad in the update of the site I didn’t say that the subject of my research was “buck breaking”. I was under the impression that the term was primarily used for the breaking of horses and only figuratively applied to the breaking of black slaves, but it would seem that the term exclusively applies to the latter rather than the former. That would have been mildly embarrassing. ^_^; If you know the story of Sigurd, then you know why I’m researching horse breaking. I will go ahead and preface this by saying that I don’t endorse the old harsh methods of forcing horses into compliance and this chapter is meant to have a bit of a comedic edge to it. (Although I have only introduced Sigurd so far, I’m pretty sure you can imagine that he’s not the sort of person to employ the modern techniques of “gentling”.) Hopefully I can leverage this research to quickly jump into the chapter and move forward. Stay tuned.

It wasn’t much, but I did a little work in the WttW peripheral materials when I wasn’t working on the update. Mostly I was building up the profile for Djalli Djalli, the founder and Captain of the Black Rhinos. I imagine that now that I’ve started, I’m going to have to finish it before I can move on. The work to be done on TKoH remains prominent in my mind, but we’ve got to move that energy from the tip of my brain to the tips of my fingers if anything’s going to get done. Stay tuned.

As you can tell from the update, I finished Chapter 18 of RttW. Once that was finished, I of course spent some time in the peripheral materials.

I mentioned the generational labels I had for grouping the characters in an earlier post. Well, I went about figuring out the dividing lines to make it work. At first I just tried the US generational cohorts, but that didn’t quite serve my purposes, so I settled on simple 20-year blocks that happen to split the characters off where I want them. I did, however, have to move Oscarius and Dupont over to Gen 2, at which point I realized I hadn’t done character growth charts for Dupont or Mariangela, so I worked on that.

I believe I’ve mentioned before how I enjoy getting into the characters’ heads when plotting out their stat growth. There was an extra layer of interest as I used the data for Crispo and Soraya (Arjun’s mom) as the starting point, so I was able to see how the characters diverged as they went. For instance, as a Relic Hunter, Dupont cross-rated into Cleric and had to start bumping up his Spirit stat, while Spirit was less important to the Highwayman Crispo, who put a lot more of his points in the traditional Thief strong points of Dexterity and Speed (though he did still need to boost his Spirit a little while cross-rating to Bard prior to promotion).

I need to be thinking about switching over to TKoH, but I imagine the lure of the WttW peripheral materials isn’t going to release me just yet. I will try to prioritize getting the chapter finished first, though. Stay tuned.

My task was simple: Write the last page or so of Chapter 18 of RttW and be done for the deadline. With the exception of one period proctoring a test, I had the whole day wide open. No problem, right? Well, can you guess what happened next? That’s right. The old lure of the peripheral materials got its hooks into me. I started by writing about the respective rights of bondservants and serfs in the guide, then set up the outline to give details on the peculiarities of the different Trials, then started writing descriptions of the Trial Masters, and then the big one, working on the rarity of different critters in the bestiary. I’ve actually finished all but about 200, all the common Beasts (excluding the domestic Beasts, which was the first thing I did). To add rigor to this, and to better define what occurrence rate means, I started doing research on different animal populations by country. If I had sense, I’d just do the countries that have equivalents in the World, but I’m trying to get more of a big picture view first that I can distill down later. All fascinating stuff, I’m sure, but it doesn’t get me any closer to meeting my deadline, so I’m going to have to get the chapter knocked out in the morning (or later, knowing me) and then post it later on Saturday (or even Sunday morning). I really don’t have that much further to go, and if the office productivity specialist will grant me a little time, I should be able to get it taken care of fairly quickly. Stay tuned.

Another day of respectable progress on Chapter 18 of RttW. One more round like this and that should do it. I also went ahead and wrote a little on a yet to be enumerated chapter. I know I really should have everything plotted out before I start writing (definitely before I start serialization), but as you may have noticed, as I went through my backlog of stories I’ve been planning since high school, I’ve started to do more writing on the fly. I won’t say it’s the best model to operate under, but I don’t know if I’m going to break the bad habits I’ve picked up anytime soon.

I didn’t do much in the peripheral materials this time, but while I was proctoring tests, I was doing some research on the seed rate and yield of various crops because I want to sort out both the game mechanics of farming in the World and also the social factors as well (taxation, land usage, etc.). All thrilling stuff, I know. Maybe if my folks hadn’t worked so hard to veer me away from agriculture, I’d already know this stuff. Anyway, I need to focus on getting that chapter done, so I’m going to get to it. Stay tuned.

I made some good progress on Chapter 18 of RttW. I also started to do some work on creature rarity in the bestiary. Obviously, marking the Trial Masters as unique was easy, but assigning rarity levels to the rest of the current 693 entries (plus the 45 special-class critters) is going to be a fair bit of work. I’ll be directing most of my attention to the chapter first, though, so if I can keep up my current pace, I should be ready in time for the deadline. Stay tuned.

As you should know from looking at the main site, I made teasers for the new WttW4 and WttW6. I decided I might as well do it sooner rather than later. Once that was done, I did more work in the peripheral materials, but I did actually start on Chapter 18 of RttW. It wasn’t much, just the opening paragraph, but I’ve got the ball rolling and besides proctoring a few of the finals later in the week, my schedule has opened up for the time being, so I can actually focus on making some headway. I’ve already been simulating some part of the chapter, so it should make the writing process go faster. And with that, I’d better get back to it. Stay tuned.

So Sunday we had our graduation ceremony and in the evening my colleagues held a party to celebrate with me squeezing the weekly shopping and chores in the middle. As a result, I didn’t have the usual time to get the update put together, so that was my task Monday. Once that was done, I was supposed to do some writing on WttW1, but instead I continued on the peripheral materials. There are a lot of considerations that go into establishing Gen 4. (For the purposes of grouping charas into cohorts more so than setting proper generations, Ramachandra and all them are Gen 1, Pawel & Co. are Gen 2, Arjun et al. are Gen 3, and the kids to be born are Gen 4.)

Maternity tends to hit female Adventurers hard. Because I don’t ascribe to the trend in a lot of modern media of making pregnant action girls, the pregnancy alone is going to cost you at least two Levels in Atrophy while you’re out of action and unlike modern society (in some parts of the world, at least), it’s not common for new mothers to get right back to work after giving birth. Typical maternity leave goes from when the pregnancy is obvious (usually in the second or third month) to the child’s second birthday. It takes six month for Atrophy to properly kick in and after that it’s a Level every three months, so that can leave you ten Levels down by the time you get back in the Game. If you have multiple pregnancies, you may as well abandon the idea of progressing any further. Now, because of how XP is weighted, you can rehabilitate your Level more quickly by taking on higher-Level Monsters with a smaller Party (taking advantage of higher-Level companions to protect you while you grind XP), but when maternal instinct kicks in, you might find yourself questioning why you’re risking your life when you’ve got kids at home to take care of. How childbirth affects Adventurers, male and female alike, will be a major element of later entries in the series, so be looking forward to that. (And if you’re not looking forward to it, hopefully you’ll find enough else going on to keep you invested in the story.)

While working on the Gen 4 situation, I’ve gotten closer toward setting the chain of events leading to the endgame. One thing to consider is the affect of age on the characters. You see, you can only exercise your full potential during the period of adulthood. I’d previously set it at 15 to 35, but I decided to up the line of middle age to 40, so you have 25 years at max potential. The status debuff of middle age only affects your physical attributes, so Mages, Clerics and Bards remain more viable at older ages, but Fighters, Archers and Thieves are at a disadvantage, especially in the late-Game scenario. While Pawel’s Tier 3 class is Mage Knight, his skills are more weighted toward his physical abilities than magic, so his age is going to be a concern. (Pawel is a couple months shy of his 26th birthday at the start of the main story in WttW1, so that leaves him with 14 years if he were to develop grander ambitions than just earning enough money to return to Earth.)

There’s still a lot more work to be done, but that work isn’t necessary for the next chapter, so I’m going to try to at least get the daily quota’s worth of writing done before spending more time in the peripheral materials. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.

I continued my work in the WttW peripheral materials getting the timeline and raid schedules sorted out. I’m pretty satisfied with how things are up to the point where the White Lions cashed out and am moving forward beyond that. There’s a lot of soap opera shenanigans on the horizon and I don’t know who’s going to be left standing at the end of it. One thing’s for sure, there’s a good two or three more books to be had out of this. I need to decide on where the breaks will be and I’ll be coming out with teasers in the near future.

As you know from the currently available teasers, I’m not ordering the stories chronologically. We start with Pawel and Zofiya’s resummoning (Year 652 by the World’s calendar), Volume II covers Pawel, Zofiya and Jun’s time in the White Lions (640-645), Volume III their time up to joining the White Lions  (637-640), then Volume IV around the time everything is falling apart (around 656). Volume 0 of course starts at the very beginning as more of a side story. I’m thinking about putting new volumes on either side of the current Volume IV (which would make it the new Volume V). There’s plenty of room for additional side stories, prequels and such, but six volumes for the main narrative should do the trick. One more thing to work on, but first I should actually try to get the next chapter out. That needs to be the priority for next week. Stay tuned.