(Honestly, I have no idea what this thing’s title is anymore. But I’ve been working on the beginning today. Some of you will recognize the pov character as the gladiator Bella Kanto, although this is the first time I’ve tried first person with her. I like it. Anyhow, here you go.)
A blade straight through the air. Sidelong, slicing the snowy air in half.
Roll back on the heels, keeping the spine straight. Distance doesn’t matter, as long as steel isn’t colliding with eyeball, even if it’s close enough to brush an eyelash free.
Step step back, shift weight inside that left greave. Use the little shield, shaped like a snowflake, just as intricate. So easy to snag a blade with it, but I have to be careful with that, The shield’s just as prone to being broken as breaking, maybe even more if the blade were thick. I’ve done that more than once, Last year it snapped lucky, sent a blade flying up into Spring’s face, almost put her eye out, left a nasty gash the width of my little finger away from the orb.
Snow crunch underfoot from the still falling snow. My day, solid winter. The season of my power. The reason I wear Winter’s armor, crystal and steel against Spring’s gaudier garb, all spring blossoms in yellow and pink and blue. Like fighting a flowerbed.
No wonder I’d won for the last twenty-four years against that gaudy thing, no matter who inhabited it each year. Winter’s lines were clear and sharp and swift. The floral armor was heavier, with its lines of gold mesh over the pearly surface.
Click click click, blades testing each other. Meanwhile my arm comes out, rotates just a little to snare her swordpoint, swivels and snaps back in place, while my blade pushes forward at the same time. Don’t give her a moment to breathe, no time to think, press in fierce and hot and ardent as a yearling bull.
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Zen and the Art of Spiral-Carved Incense Burners
A stone lantern sits along the pathway, waiting to be sold to a Kadian merchant.This essay originally appeared in the February 2001 issue of Imaginary Realities. The crafting system in Armageddon is something we worked towards for a long time. The implementation may not have been the most efficient (I still, vividly, remember making hundreds of arrow objects so we could have them with every possible color combination of fletching) but getting it into the game was a huge source of satisfaction.
One of the desires expressed at the very first Armageddon player-staff meeting I ever attended was a yen to move away from “a hack and slash economy,” where players made their income by selling the gear off NPCs (and the occasional PC) that they had killed. How, one immortal noted, could the world be realistic when there was no coded reflection of the material underpinnings of it? How to create this economic reflection was a question that remained in the air for several years, and it was not until discussion of implementing crafting code came up that such a move seemed possible.
We laid the groundwork for crafting by first creating ways to get the raw materials. I reviewed what was produced from skinning the various creatures in the game, both to make sure that players could skin most corpses and to ensure that what was being produced was reasonable. We implemented skinning difficulty: some things, such as pelts, are harder to extract from a corpse, as opposed to cuts of meat. Beyond that, we added a forage command, allowing players to find rocks and wood. Later, this was expanded to add other arguments: artifacts, salt, and roots. Forageable objects differ according to the sector type of the room and in order to make this reflect geographical differences, we added some more sector types, such as thornlands, salt flats, and ruins. Salt can only be foraged in the salt flats, for example, and roots are only available in fertile land (hard to find on a desert planet).
Once the ability to gather raw materials was in place, a couple of initial crafting skills were implemented: basket weaving and tanning. Basket weaving, admittedly, started out as a bit of a joke, but it served its purpose: to allow us to discover flaws. Both skills necessitated the creation of the objects to be crafted: a series of baskets for basket weaving, and tanned versions of various pelts and hides. With each, I tried to make sure there were incentives to use the skill: tanning a hide made it both more valuable as well as sometimes adding wear flags, while baskets included some objects that were wearable on the back or otherwise handy. I included the ability to craft an object, a numut vine sash, that had vanished from the game when the city of its origin was destroyed, and this in turn led me to wander through the database to find other objects that could be recycled and used for the code. As part of this effort, I ended up adding a component crafting skill for the magic users in the game in order to use a series of objects left over from an immortal project that had never been fully finished.
Although some objects could be recycled in this fashion, many others had to be made for the crafting code as we began to implement additional skills, including bow making, knife making, cooking, dyeing, leather working, bandage making, etc. Occasionally, obsessiveness got the better of me: after creating four different types of arrowheads, I decided that people should be able to make striped fletching for their arrows, so they could, if they wished, make arrows using their clan or House colors. This required me making some 300 or so arrow objects in a madcap building session that left me not wanting to ever type the word “arrow” again. Here, planning out the entire effort in detail ahead of time and having used a different structure for coding the items would have paid off, instead of having added bit by bit as I went along. For example, I found myself regretting the variety of gems one could forage in the game when I ended up making multiple bone dagger items, each with a different gemstone in the hilt. Having the entire structure sketched out ahead of time, rather than adding in skills as they occurred, might have been helpful, although some of the skills came from player suggestions after they’d been exposed to the new code.
As the skills began to be more fleshed out, we started making them available to the players. Cooking was a skill everyone got, while others were fitted into the skill trees (Armageddon has a branching system) where appropriate, with merchants ending up the vast beneficiaries overall, going from a possible 13 skills to 38. Some additional skills grew out of the effort, such as analyze, which allows a player to determine an item.s component parts, and armor repair.
At the same time, we added a secondary guild system, which allowed players to flesh out their backgrounds further, by adding a few skills, usually crafting. The secondary guilds were not the same as the regular guilds but intended to reflect life experiences or talents, including stone worker, bard, house servant, guard and mercenary, and I enjoyed putting the packages together in a way that made sense, such as giving the house servants pilot, flower arranging, and a high cooking skill or the mercenaries ride, knife-making and an increase in their ability to hold their liquor.
Inevitable questions and problems arose. On Armageddon, skilled merchants can often identify the style of an item via the value command, if it came from a specific region or culture, and in order to accommodate this, I made the crafting of some items dependent on materials available to only those groups. Shopkeepers began to be glutted with some items (nothing is sadder than a Kadian merchant laden with nothing but spiral-carved green marble incense burners), but this allowed us to check and adjust item prices by monitoring the shops to see what items were appearing at what costs.
For example, since wood is more expensive in Allanak than in the Northlands, some players were cashing in wildly by making and selling wooden spears to House Salarr, which I hadn’t realized would happen till I noticed them selling for 300 sid (Armageddon uses obsidian for its coinage) in the shops.
The experiment still continues and new items, many contributed by players, are added every few weeks. Currently, there are some 3000+ possibilities, crafting wise, coded, and there are still gaps. When I initially did the dyes, for example, I left out the color orange, which means that I keep getting inquiries about implementing variations with that color from the players. The fact that it would require writing up another 300 or so objects has stopped me so far, however. But the players are using the code right and left, and some are actually supporting their characters with it. Though there is still a limited market for incense burners.
Not sure if this is the very beginning, but it’s definitely in the first chapter.
The rub of metal around her wrists was what bothered Shyra the most. Not the standing with the others, chained on the back deck, exposed to wind and cold. Or the catcalls of the sailors, appraising each Dryad in terms of beauty and body. Or the pull of her home grove, dwindling with each mile of river the boat achieved. She wouldn’t die of that, at least until she rooted and became vulnerable. THe lack of food didn’t’ bother her either, as long as there was plenty of sunshine and water.
They all managed to send their hair down along the boat’s side, down to the water line to drink there. But when the captain was cranky, he would shout that they might tangle the paddlewheel and would order one of the boys to clear it.
The boy would come with machete and apologies to hack away their hair. It didn’t hurt, any more than cutting his own hair would have hurt, but they pretended that it did, in order to use their reproachful cries to make him wince.
They had little enough to amuse them. The Dryads knew they were as good as dead. Dryads and Naiads captured and taken to Tabat never returned. If they wanted to escape, they all agreed in their whispered conversation, relying on the great engine’s noise to mask what they were saying, it would be best to get away before the boat reached the city.
She suspected that the Captain, if not all the crew, knew exactly what the Dryads chained there were plotting. They were not the first Dryads the Swan had carried. The railing was matted with fine, greenish root-hairs, layers upon layers of them in the spots where the boys were too lazy to scrub.
And all along the side of the boat, on the inside of the railing, were pictograms scratched by former prisoners. Some were easy to decipher: Six Flowers, Sun and Rain, Riverfern. Others were harder, lacking an established alphabet. A clamshell might be that, or some other concept, or food, or the sea, and coupled with what could have been a candle or eel or sprout, who was to know the precise name of the former prisoner, fate as unknown as Shyra’s, who had scratched that, in letters no more than a fingernail high, in the space beside the hasp to which Shyra had been secured for the duration of the journey?
