Student of Trinity

Sounds like an interesting book. I admit to some trepidation about overtly Christian fantasy fiction, though, where answered prayers affect the plot. I just couldn't do that. I believe it could possibly be pulled off artistically, though it seems as though it would be very hard, but I just couldn't do it myself, psychologically. It would feel blasphemous, to me, to sit down as an author and decide how God should act. Editing really heavily might approach co-author status. Maybe you two should collaborate? Co-authoring can certainly be tricky, but some teams have definitely pulled it off well. And you know, for the Christian fantasy fiction market, a husband-and-wife team of authors might also be a selling point. That's obviously not a decisive factor, but hey, it's a real one. A couple percent more in sales might be the last little lift you needed, to get over a threshold into bigger attention.

Three-volume novels were big in the 19th century, long before Tolkien. They weren't trilogies; just big fat books, of around 200,000 words, sold in three separate packages. There wasn't any plot resolution at the ends of the first two volumes; if anything, I expect they tended to end with cliffhangers, to encourage purchase of subsequent parts. The format was so standard, it became a convention just to refer to the convention. Why three was the standard, and not two or four, I'm not sure. We know from the Book of Armaments that Five is Right Out, but other than that, I'm guessing. The size of each volume was probably fixed by physical convenience. With legible type and decent paper, 300 pages made a convenient lump of paper to carry around, or something. I'm guessing then that three volumes was roughly fixed by the fact that 200,000 words is about as long as you can easily stretch a story. It's about twice what is reckoned a typical length for a modern mainstream novel. I conjecture that there's a sort of phase transition involved: you can pad a single story up to 200,000 words, but to go much beyond that, you somehow need to tell multiple stories, either in sequence or in parallel. So I'm thinking that the average Victorian novelist could consistently milk a story for three volumes, but four would have been pushing. Then, given those basic (conjectured) limits, simple forces of practical economics imposed a stricter standardization. Apparently there were standard book contracts stipulating fairly precise lengths, so that prices could be standard. It's hard not to consider that some of the same issues are still involved in trilogies today. I have a feeling that individual volumes have gotten a little longer. I expect the average total length of a modern trilogy is over 300,000 words, but with some amount of resolution in the two intermissions, books may still be a little leaner now. I'm actually wondering about this myself at the moment. My novel has reached nearly 120,000 words, and could conceivably end there; but I've only told about two thirds of the story I originally had in mind. I think my plan will be to write the remaining third, and see whether it really ends off in 60,000 words, or shows signs of running on towards 100K. In the former case, I guess I'll try for my original plan of a fat trilogy. In the latter, I'll have to look at something more like a pentalogy of slimmer volumes. I haven't really thought about the large story arc in that way. Trilogies are simpler, somehow. Which just brings me back to the question. I don't really know why.

Uncharacteristically, I've recently seen some movies. In particular the two newer Star Trek films. Also uncharacteristically, I've seen most of the older Star Trek films and series. I was never a serious Trekker, but I kind of liked the series. I quite liked these new films. The funny thing is, they gave me a new respect for poor old William Shatner as an actor. Precisely because my first reaction was, Hey, it's neat to see these silly old characters played by real actors for a change. But the thing was this: I was in large part impressed by the new Kirk because, despite seeming a lot more lively and believable, he was recognizably Kirk. So then it occurred to me that for James T. Kirk to be a character you could recognize, even when played by someone else, William Shatner can't actually have done such a bad job.

Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.

I guess there are some advantages to waiting for the Windows versions of these games.

Oo. A book?

Yeah, good old Strong Daze. I used to say that a baby could toddle through Inner Gazak-Uss with nothing but Strong Daze, pumped Mental Magic, and a sharp rattle.

As I recall there is a dude standing around outside Fort Mud who will buy gemstones and emeralds and such. He pays less for them than regular merchants do, but unlike them, he has infinite gold to pay with. So you'll get much more total gold over the course of the game by selling everything you can to that one guy, and selling everything he won't take to the regular merchants, until you drain them of gold. I seem to recall that mined crystals are also necessary for making canisters, as well as the much rarer puresteel rings, so you may want to hang onto them for a while. Otherwise, as Triumph said, Geneforge 2 introduced one or two special artifacts that can be made by combining some unique special items. The Emerald Chestguard, in particular, is almost a game-breaker. In addition to being quite good armor, it gives you 2 extra AP, and in the old combat system of G2, that's just deadly. With it and a couple of other things you can get your default AP up to 12, and then boost to 18 with Haste. That's just insane. You can run half across the map in combat, or walk into a room and fire off three Auras of Flames in a row. Ur-Drakon? More like Ur-Marshmallow.

Hmm. That's a pretty good argument. Okay, BoE sales in the thousands is probably about right.

I think by then we can look forward to Avadon VII.

I doubt it paid well, because I strongly expect that almost everyone who bought BoE would have made contact with the community here at some point. That puts an upper bound of around a few hundred copies sold. Not bad if you're only looking for beer money, but not great, when this is supposed to pay your mortgage. BoE must have done well enough for Jeff to consider trying it again with BoA, but I suspect that this wasn't really such a high threshold.

I am real or fake. No-one is the best: the best is yet to come.

Sorry, but this has been heatedly discussed, literally for years. Lilith knows what she's talking about. Jeff doesn't really make game engines. He makes games. His engines are only debugged enough to run his games. Debugging them enough to run all possible games would be great, no doubt; but in order to have the time to get that done, Jeff would have to stop making new games for at least half a year. The money would not be made up in sales of his great Blades-of-Geneforge game, because hardly anyone actually wants to make their own games, because making games is hard. Jeff can't afford to lose that much income. The bank would take his house. Jeff knows all this, because he's tried it twice. He got burned twice. He's not going to do it again.

In one way an Agent is a good choice for a first play-through. You probably won't build many creations, maybe even none at all, so you'll have less micro-managing to do in combat, and the game will go faster. Take Easy difficulty and that will be fine. For the full Geneforge experience, you kind of have to play a Shaper at some point. Then you get to have some of those bizarre creatures on your side. Eventually you may be wheeling around a little army of seven personal monsters, and by cunning tactics, you can crush the enemy. This is a style of play that's much less generic in an RPG.

I've never played either game, so I find these reactions very interesting. It sounds as though a 'big open world' isn't everything, because if you can just go anywhere and do anything, then nothing really matters, and it ends up feeling as though you can't really do anything at all. On the other hand I can understand that the opposite extreme, of a small little world where the plot runs on rails, is somehow disappointing, too. For me what's best is a big world, where I'm free to wander around quite a bit, but where I'm likely to run into things that turn out to be important stories, not just one-shot side-quests. That gives the feeling that there's treasure out there to find — not in-game loot, but stuff that will be really cool for me as a player, stuff that will go somewhere, and actually matter, other than just by helping me level up. The leveling system does also seem fundamentally flawed. It sounds like a good idea to enforce some realism, by making you gain expertise only in things you actually practice. But somehow it goes completely against the munchkin fantasy that the leveling mechanic is really all about. People are prepared to spend hours and hours in sheer tedious grinding, for the reward of being able to gain whatever skill they want. And people are prepared to spend hours pursuing side-quests, to gain particular skills given only by that quest. But what no-one wants to do is feel locked into a particular playing style indefinitely. That's not the power fantasy that RPGs are all about. That's weakness. Limitations are for real life.

I repeat my pet theory about the Awakened: already in G2 they weren't doing so hot. They still talked idealistically, but Ell-Rah was dead, and to avoid bringing war-trained serviles to a drakon-fight, the Awakened of G2 were hustling to catch up in the race for power. They were summoning demons, modifying themselves, and breeding drakons, just like everybody else. If anything, they were taking more risks than the others.

Well, dang. I knew I should have switched to Chrome.

Maybe it isn't exactly sad. Just crotchety.

Yeah, Jeff's in-game documentation has been brutally lacking for a long time. A lot of things sounds awesome but were actually nerfed two games ago, or sound lame but are actually deadly if pumped. It would be easy to revise these. I wonder whether this is where Jeff would actually use and appreciate a fan-made contribution. I have a sort of hunch that he just hates writing these in-game descriptions, for whatever reason. I bet that if we here put together some kind of 'missing manual' for the games, Jeff might well take them over, and edit them in to the next updates, and say Thanks.

It's not sad about having Bell's palsy?

But that particular Salisbury steak is probably not going to be eaten. It's only crochet. So why should it be sad?

Doesn't the 'barrier of the winds' Awakened endgame of G2 suggest that those drakons, at least, will be able to fly? Or am I just reading too much into 'of the winds'? I always pictured them as flying, anyway. But other than that, I don't think there's anything in any of the games that even mentions flying in connection with drakons or drayks. Wingbolts evidently fly, but for some reason they never go very high. That's kind of hard to explain. Their wings look too small in relation to their length to be generating much of a ground effect. There is that one episode in G4 where an attack by vlish over water is mentioned, though not seen. Vlish clearly float. Why can't they float higher?

Without mentioning any details of the actual story, I have something to say about the latest episode in writing my novel. It's really confusing. Total length is just over 110,000 words, now. The current section is about 40,000 words of confusing stuff. Without my quite realizing it, the plot in this section has somehow turned into a dense composite of deceptions. It's bad enough that there are three different characters within the story who are currently all trying to deceive each other. What makes it absolute hell is that I, as the author, am trying to deceive the reader about all three of them, so that the reader will think they are following every character's cunning plan, but then be shocked and amazed at what actually happens. So the number of cunning plans has just multiplied out of control. Each of the three characters has a real plan, with a shocking denouement — I mean, something totally over the top. A gruesome villain will turn out to have deceived the world about her race, sex, sanity and loyalty. A character who has seemed to be dying of fever will fake her own death by burning at the stake, and send a large fortress over an immense waterfall with an ANFO bomb. And an apparently effete wimp will turn out to be a four-armed mutant killing machine, go on a rampage with an enormous broadsword made of depleted uranium, and then fly away with a huge pair of artificial wings. Seriously, you couldn't make this stuff up. Well, apparently I could. But it's pretty insane. So my first task was already hard: find some way to make all of those insane things realistically possible. Amazing as it seems, I think I've done that. These bizarre denouements are not things I'm trying to awkwardly work into another story; they are the story. I can bend the entire universe around them, to make them work. I have. And I think I have done a fair job of covering my tracks, too, in that the things I have written into the world and the previous chapters, in order to justify these crazy things, seem to me to fit smoothly into the rest of the story. They resonate with other parts of the world and the story, well enough that I don't think they stick out as arbitrary elements that have obviously been added just to make something else happen. Given how bizarre the stuff that ends up happening is, this is not trivial; but I've worked hard for quite some time, and taken forty or fifty thousand words to lay it all out. The next layer of difficulty was that each of these plans is a deception, aimed by each of the three characters at the other two. So each of them involves a cover story. These are all very intelligent people, and they know that about each other. Their efforts to deceive each other have to be realistically effective. Having laboriously made all these outrageous things possible in the world, I have to conceal them with cover stories that can deceive two smart characters. Again I think I have managed this, though. The three characters are all clever and resourceful, but there are a lot of things they don't know about each other — and of course what they know is entirely up to me. So I believe I have made it completely plausible that each of these characters would be attempting to deceive the others in the ways that they do. The ones that should be deceived are believably deceived, and the ones that see through the deceptions do so believably as well. Only recently, however, did I realize that this still wasn't enough. There's a third layer to the challenge, as well. The reader will know more than any of the characters. In particular, one of the characters is the narrator of this section, and one was the narrator of the longer section before it. Neither narrator has any reason to deceive their readers deliberately. And anyway, these two are the main protagonists. They have to remain reasonably sympathetic and credible, so the reader has to reliably know quite a lot. This means that the reader is unlikely to believe that the one character is really dying of fever — it has already been mentioned that her people have turbo-charged immune systems — or that the other is such a coward. The reader will have serious doubts, at the least, about two of the three cover stories. And if the reader starts looking around at all, at what else might possibly be going on instead, all my efforts to make the crazy denouements possible will probably be too obvious. I think I managed to stop them from sticking out as totally weird, but if you're actually looking for a cunning plan, because you know too much to swallow the in-world cover stories, then there are obvious possibilities. So I need yet a third layer of cunning plans. In addition to the three in-world-plausible cover stories, and the three amazing real plans, I have to construct three red herring plans. These need not be plans that the three characters actually consider using. They are alternative plans that the reader will imagine. They should distract the reader from the more astonishing real plans, so that the big surprises can come unspoiled. This may be the hardest challenge of all. I have to contrive additional cunning plans, clever and realistic enough that the reader will accept them as worthy of the story and the characters. In fact the red herring plans have to be pretty compelling; they have to completely stop the reader from looking any further. Yet I have to have good reasons why the characters don't use these plans, but follow their own real plans instead. And finally I have to get my narrator to suggest these red herring plans to the reader — his own red herring, and those of the other two characters as well, even though he himself may be taken in by their cover stories — yet without the narrator ever just lying to the reader. Nonetheless I think I'm getting there. The third of these deceptive characters, who is not a protagonist, has just entered the story in this section, and will die at the end of it. So I have a lot of flexibility to redefine her character and her knowledge, in order to make things work. Neither the other characters nor the reader know much about her, anyway. So she's fairly easy, actually. And I think I have it pretty much worked out for the guy who is the current narrator. His real plan is so monstrous, and his cover story is so wimpy, that it's pretty easy to insert a much more realistic-seeming red herring plan in between. I can make the red herring plan be an actual plan that the narrator has in mind, though half-heartedly and with doubts. The narrator can quite realistically write things that will sound to the reader like hesitations between the realistic red herring plan and total cowardice, when in fact they are hesitations between the modest red herring plan, and the extreme rampage that will ultimately be chosen. The toughest one will be the red herring plan for Anastasia. She's the character who is best known to the reader, and she is established as a preternaturally resourceful heroine. She already has a track record of getting out of tight spots with creative tactics. Moreover she narrated everything up to just the week before this episode, and in the past tense; she even told the reader directly, early on in the story, that her role in it would not be that of a victim. So the presumption that she is somehow going to get out of this must be very strong, and the reader will be on the alert for anything that might offer her a hidden opportunity. My only advantage with her is that she is no longer the narrator. So there can now be things that she knows, that the reader does not know. She can also do things out of sight of the current narrator — and the reader knows this, so the reader can also be made to think that she has done some things, when in fact she has not. I guess my other advantage is that I don't really have to deceive the reader for ever. I only need to keep the reader in the dark until close to the climax, when there's enough action going on that the reader will just read on to see what happens, instead of sitting back and thinking. And maybe I can undermine the reader's confidence that she must survive because she still has to write the first part of the book, by suggesting that she may be writing it all now, and the book may be put together by someone else, from her notes. Anyway, whew. This has all become quite the brutal tangle. And as if the plot weren't thick enough with deception, there are motifs of deception scattered around in setting and character as well. The massive sword that gets used in the end is not what it seems; it appears to be merely an impractical symbol, and its uranium core is covered in a layer of steel. The current narrator's realistic red herring plan will probably be to hide an ordinary greatsword inside an enormous wooden sword that's a prop for a play. The whole episode takes place in the castle of a rebel earl who is still pretending to be loyal to his king. And the narrator's cover story of wimpiness is specifically to be an effete thespian, who keeps talking about stagecraft and acting. What a hall of mirrors. I don't know if any readers will ever be able to make head or tail of it, but as the author I can say that there's a tremendous satisfaction in finally blowing the whole place up and flying away from it, with everything finally straightened out and simple. There's an excellent chance that this is story is now hopelessly overwrought and overburdened, and its elaborate plot is either incomprehensible or blatantly contrived. I think there's still a chance that it will actually work, though. Almost anything can make sense, in the right context, and with science fiction, the author has an awful lot of control over context. If it does end up working, it will be one of the most intricate episodes of plotting that I've ever seen. It's been a lot of fun just to try to make it work.

This is definitely difficulty-related. On lower difficulties, it's not a big deal to waste a bunch of skill points on useless things. It's only on Torment that you really have to know the optimal path and follow it closely.

Steam engines were civilian at first, of course, but it was the fact that steam-driven locomotives could haul huge amounts of supplies, and carry huge numbers of people, that multiplied the size of field armies by about a factor of 10 between the Napoleonic wars and the US Civil war, and put the total into total war. Steam-powered factories must also have been used to mass produce weapons, ammunition, and equipment for those enormous modern armies.