Wiki, February 21, 2011

I'm off today, as part of a long weekend working on the interactive system.  I have 87 cards designed, each needing some artist to work on in the next four months (*I hope!), but the mock-up should be ready for printing by Saturday.  This, obviously, has been holding my attention ... but as a kind of rest, I have been working on other things too for the benefit of the Wiki and for interest's sake (such as the game started on the previous post - don't forget to vote).

As promised, I've added four more spells to the list.  All of them are spells possessed by the party of that same post.  In all honestly I should have posted them before the battle post went up - but this is the way of house rules.  You don't learn just what they can do until it is too late.  Some, no doubt, will have voted without realizing that my bless spell or my protection malevolence don't quite work the way they expect.

But this is a condition of playing in someone else's world.  Things are never quite as expected.  Since there never will be a single accepted interpretation of any rule, this is how things go.  One has to roll with the punches.

The spells I've added to the wiki include Bless, Command, Protection from Malevolence and Tasha's Hideous Laughter.  These are the spells the fighting party possesses that are most different from the Player's Handbook (the others are pretty much as written).

With combat on the brain, I have started a rule set for that system that I've been talking about for days.  The two new pages I've created on the Wiki to handle it describe Movement, Scale & Space, and Surprise & Initiative ... the latter, I'm afraid, is only half done.  I'll get to 'initiative' if I get the time this week.

And this is a notable day.  I have the last maps up to date - none in reserve at all.  Obviously, new maps will be created from time to time, and all the old ones around the edges will be updated.  Plus, there will be additional terrain maps added to the individual pages, plus political maps that I will eventually add (showing the nations without other information, to make the boundaries clearer) and the possibility of other maps someday for climate or resources.  But for now, yes, the maps are all up.

These are mostly empty, I'm afraid.  The actual finished portions are the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula ... the rest are all empty Africa.  But someday I'll get to them.  These should show how ambitious I am:  there's Dahomey, the Lower Niger, Bornou, Oubangi, Darfour, the White Nile, the Blue Nile, Ethiopia, the Gulf of Sheba and Socotra.

I am not certain I've explained this before.  I began experimenting with this map system in September of 2004, and did not produce the first portion of my first map until November of that year.  The small section was that of Voronezh province on the map D 05, the Don Basin.  The party started in a small town called Kolyeno, in the upper right quarter of that map.  If the gentle reader looks, they will find the Caves of Chaos shown on the map, just across the thick border from Kolyeno (some 50 miles away).  That thick line is the border between Russia and the orc-mastered Jagatai Empire.

Step by step, a world gets made.  I hope others will find themselves encouraged by this work as it is ongoing, and will recognize that great things can be accomplished through perseverence.