Monday, April 13, 2015

This

The best laid plans . . .

I was going to spend a couple of days experimenting with this idea that occurred to me last week while I was working on the weather tables.  However, after just a few hours I'm already toasted and not interested in continuing.  But what the hell.  I'll toss it out into the universe and maybe I'll come back to it.

Basically, there is no one who can think of more ways to create jobs that can never be completed like I can.  This is one of those.

Most of you are familiar, I'm sure, of my various maps, designed with 20-mile hexes and covering the world.  Here's a small example, just a tiny piece of a map in modern-day eastern Ukraine.

Some names are changed because much of this map is in the
possession of non-humans in my world.
It occurred to me, supposing we wrote out a description for every hex.  Just supposing.  And while we're at it, suppose that each hex included directions to the next hex over, so that a party could follow the map around like one of those old video games from the '80s, that asked if you wanted to go NW or S.

And suppose we put it all on a wiki.  Like this and this.

What would I do with eternity?  Probably this.

I don't know, it's pretty near an impossible job.  I started with the particular two hexes that I did because this is where the online party ended their travels.  I suppose, starting the game again, it would be cool to keep track of the hexes where the party explored this way, adding a hex a week or something like that, plus adding additional details onto the wiki as we went, so that the whole game could be accounted for.  Everyone would remember what the name of that bartender was in Shino, because it would be recorded on the wiki and could be looked up.

If memory is really what we want parties to have.

I like the idea.  I'm just not sure I'm young enough for the idea.  Maybe if I started a company that did nothing but this, hiring a bunch of fanatical young people to write descriptions for hexes based on real world counterparts?

What would I do with a lot of money?  Definitely this.

2 comments:

  1. The scale of the project is what makes it impressive, definitely, but the idea already exists in the MUD/MUSH community. Multi-thousand "room" worlds are getting pretty common now, though I'll tell you they definitely take years to work up.

    So basically, yes, you're one hundred percent correct that you could do it if you had a team of fanatical young people. They'd be super into it. There's a solid community of persons who do it already!

    The dream would be getting some person to travel to each location's counterpart in the real world a la Google Maps and write it from there, like some kind of preposterously detailed travel guide.

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  2. I saw a pic of Azov and my eyes jumped to "...online party.. starting the game again..." and missed the rest. ;-)

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