This hex encounter has a proper, full-fledged three clues style mystery. Except I couldn’t figure out a third clue in time to keep my schedule from slipping any further, so instead it’s a two clues mystery with a couple of mulligans thrown in.
Are You Ten Thousand People?
Here’s something that happens way too often: People will come to a thread asking for advice and give their opinion. Worse still, sometimes someone will post advice that applies to general markets, and then a second someone will post their opinion as a counterpoint. Even if the first person is just making a guess about market trends based on their anecdotal experience, they are still actually trying to help the creator who asked the question. Someone who posts their opinion is implicitly claiming that a creator’s goal should be to cater to their tastes, specifically, or at best the tastes of whatever half-dozen random yahoos first walk into the Reddit/forum thread where the advice was posted.
Some creators are hoping to appeal to a broad audience of strangers in hopes of making a career out of their passion. Others have a more specific audience in mind, maybe some personal friends or what-have-you. In the latter case, no amount of personal opinions from random strangers will be at all helpful. In the former case, only the aggregated opinions of many thousands of strangers matters at all. If the creator is a writer trying to make a living self-publishing and they sell their books for $6.99 each and see about $5 of that in actual income, and if they’re writing one book per year, they need about ten thousand fans buying each book to make an average-ish annual income of $50k. If that writer asks for advice on their latest project and you walk in and give your personal opinion without even bothering to think whether or not anyone else shares it, the immediately relevant question is: Are you ten thousand people? No? Then shut up.
The Rejuvenation Pit
The magical doodad in this one involves age reversal. You can pick up some penalties if you sacrifice too many people to the pit and get yourself bumped down to fifteen years old. This immediately begs the question: Why can’t you get stat bonuses for going from 30s or 40s back to your 20s? How come there’s penalties for messing up, but no benefits for actually using the pit correctly? The answer is that characters who are already in their 20s would be unable to get those bonuses, which would be unfairly penalizing them, because it’s not like they got more characteristics at chargen or anything.
Additionally, I expect few parties will end up stumbling into the penalties, whereas many parties would figure out how to get themselves the bonuses. This means that characteristic bonuses could be had for the low price of snuffing a few Chaos sorcerers, which would benefit people who rely on those characteristics a lot (like melee builds) while being barely noticeable to people who don’t tend to use them in the first place (like ranged builds, face builds, psyker builds – anyone for whom being in melee means something has gone horribly wrong, and 5 extra points of Toughness and Strength won’t change that). It’s not like it’s a short-lived bonus, or one that requires a lot of effort to acquire.
The Shadow Village
I don’t know why, but this whole mini-adventure was way harder than I thought it would be to write, and I’m not sure it’s up to my usual standards of quality. I can’t point to any specific flaw, but it all feels very off to me.
Travelogue
Worldbuilding: Magic and Military
The final installment in my contribution to the enormous and probably mostly pointless library of worldbuilding advice on the internet. Today, we talk about the exciting things and why the internet is so bad at them.
Worldbuilding: Economy, Government/Law, and History
Continuing on from yesterday’s post, more worldbuilding shenanigans, because apparently the internet doesn’t have enough “how to worldbuild” posts out there to help writers procrastinate their actual writing.
Continue reading “Worldbuilding: Economy, Government/Law, and History”
Worldbuilding: Climate and Culture
Talking about how to worldbuild properly is a thing that people like to do. I approve of the general idea of putting as many writing processes out there as possible, because you never know what’s going to work for any specific writer, which means all you can really do is toss out as many possibilities as you can and hope one sticks. To boil worldbuilding down to its most critical elements, though, the one thing you need to accomplish regardless of what else you’re doing is to make elements of the setting affect one another. This is something that can get lost in the weeds when you’re filling in one of those worldbuilding template dealies that people like, whether that’s doing what I do and filling in some kind of encyclopedia style multi-sectioned textbook entry on the setting or answering a long list of questions about the world or whatever. My encyclopedia-style entry, for example, is divided into climate/geography, culture/religion, economy, government/law, history, magic, and military, and I have little notes about how each of those should work, and I’m going to post them in a bit, because they work for me and maybe they will work for you, too.
The important thing to remember, however, is that only the first entry filled in or the first question answered or the first detail added is fully under your control. Everything else after that must acknowledge the existence of everything that came before. If you establish that your setting is almost entirely water with only occasional islands and your inhabitants are regular old land-dwelling, air-breathing humans, you cannot then write about how an empire rose to military hegemony because of their unstoppable heavy cavalry derived from their knightly houses, because in an island-based setting any military power needs a strong navy first and foremost and there is hardly any land for cavalry to outmaneuver enemies on to begin with.
That out of the way, let’s talk about specific facets of worldbuilding.
The Three Statues
Getting some love today in Vestitas: Riddles and tech heresy. Tech heresy was originally planned to be as big a feature as the regular kind so that people who play as hereteks or Mechanicus adepts don’t feel like they’ve got nothing to do, but I’ve wound up not really offering any techno toys even though I’ve had occasional techno villains or death traps. We’re fixing that today. Fresh from the Dark Age of Technology, a logic puzzle and the three Men of Iron who kill the people who fail it.
The Invisible Daemon
I feel like the rate of production is impacting the quality somewhat, however 1) Hopefully I’ll get better and back up to old standards with practice, and 2) I think 80% of the quality in 20% of the production time is a pretty good deal, especially when, at the old rate of production, it would plausibly take me until fall or even winter 2018 just to finish the hex encounters.
Chamomile Has A Blog 