Tag: stats

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Thanks Skuldelev!

What’s going on here? A mock-up of the ‘shipsheet’ that will be part of a reader/player’s record-keeping for SAGA. The background image is a lightly-modified version of the plans of Skuldelev I, which, as every Viking enthusiast knows, is the wreck of the large, ocean-going knarr found at Skuldelev in Denmark. Historical accuracy is pretty key for my project, so why not go straight from archaeology to gameplay?

What sort of features will be included in your shipsheet? Well, the number of your crew is vital: all are assumed to be able to participate in a raid, even if you are sailing a trading knarr, like shown here. Some of these may be wounded in battle or accident, so that’s got to be recorded, although maybe not by name. Total food is a bit of duplicate – as a single vaett of food contains 40 matr, and 1 matr costs 1 penningr and should be enough to sustain a single crew-member for a month – and a vaett occupies a single ‘room’ or cargo space in the vessel. A voyage might last 3-6 months, in the current system. Other cargo spaces might be 1 vaett of beer, or iron ore, or amber, or 2 cattle, and so on.

Your two thegns are vital: their drengskapr, vel, vithirdugr and styrkr can replace or reinforce yours during skill checks; their hylli represents their loyalty and contentment with your leadership. They can also support you in battle, using unique tactics, and have their own story-goals, plot-lines and quests. Think of them as supporting characters, or key members of your party.

The length of your voyage and the time since your most recent raid will also feed into crew contentment, which should be checked fairly regularly. The longer you are away sailing, of course, the more you risk bad weather when you return home, and the more you risk missing your harvest, putting your winter food stores in danger. Pretty key statistics, then.

This all gives the book a real solo role-playing-game flavour, with so many details to track. Yet so far, I’m convinced I’m balancing this out with the depth and colour of the world and the stories that are being told within it. I’ll have to share some more of that soon, and take your input.

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SH3 Progress

You know I love a graph. Here’s my interactive record of Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis as a draft. I have to track which sections are reserved or complete – or partially complete – on my spreadsheet as I go along, so graphing it is a natural development. Maybe it’s procrastination too.

The graph will be live on this post, also on the new SH3 page on this site, which at the moment looks pretty bare.

I’m hoping to finish a draft by the end of the summer. And that will probably be 1500-200 passages in length.

If you’re interested to see what other sorts of things I write, I posted a sci-fi short story earlier, set on the moon. I wrote it a few months ago and I’m pretty pleased with it.

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Highways and Holloways nearly finished

Let’s have a few stats about Steam Highwayman II: Highways and Holloways.

  • 1517 passages
  • 270 pages
  • 40+ unique illustrations
  • 80 codewords
  • 49 fights
  • 174 skill checks
  • Lots of beer
  • 6 croquet hoops

I’ve been putting time into formatting the pages over the last few days.  This is a tricky and laborious process, because the column layout that allows me to fit an average of 6 passages on each page is easily upset.  When passages leave ‘widows’ or ‘orphans’ – the small lines of text separated from the main body of their text – it produces an ugly page and, more frustratingly, a confusing one.  This means that each column on each page has to be vertically aligned manually, and I haven’t been able to do this until Ben’s recent submission of the inter-textual vignette illustrations.

However, since they have all been finished I’ve been plugging them in and tweaking the column lengths.  This can also include tiny pieces of editing and re-writing to add or remove a line here and there.

I’ve also had a recommendation from a backer to make the passage numbers stand out a little more.  After experimenting with a few methods and taking some advice, I’ve settled for the nice decorative flourishes – two standard Wingdings characters – that you can see on this sample page.  I think this helps and looks smart too.  There was also a suggestion of adding a number to the top of the page indicating which passages are there to help with locating them when moving between the book, but I haven’t been able to find a way of doing this that doesn’t significantly add to the page count.  A small header might seem like a little thing to add, but the body text is already close to the margins dictated by the printers, and keeping legibility is my priority.

So this is what the internal pages are currently looking like.  I hope, like me, you feel it is an improvement.  It does give me a few longer-term ideas about design and illustration, but I’ll save those for The Reeking Metropolis.