Owls and coffee

     Good morning...  A great horned owl has taken up residence (I hope permanently) in one of the cottonwood trees that line our backyard.  I first heard him or her last weekend when his booming challenge echoed through our open window at 430 am.  Honestly, it was a great way to wake up.  Since then, we've not been awakened that early again, but I have heard him most mornings around 600am as Irma and I are sipping our coffee and getting ready for the day.

      I hear the gasp of "600 am?" out there.  I actually only have to be up before 6 am for work two days a week, but the rotating schedule that the FAA asks us to follow really messes up my sleep patterns.  Working 2 or 3 night shifts and 3 or 4 day shifts a week, I find that I'm groggy the mornings after a night shift no matter what time I get up.  So I rise around 600 (or 520 for those days when I have to be in for the early shift) and just muddle through the grogginess with as near a bottomless cup of coffee as I can find.  Sometimes I even make myself useful...

     Our great horned owl neighbor does bring to mind one of the early bits of lore I'd tossed about in the D'oril series, that of Elorna's connection to owls.  In some ways, it was a direct theft from greek mythos, Athena and Owls, but I'd always kept most of the greek mythos connection well hidden.  Sha'te was one opportunity for me to showcase the differences, I introduced the Shianna.

     Shianna are very loosely based on animist amerind mythologies where every animal had a "leader", almost (or directly) a god.  Coyote, for example, or Father Bear, of the various tribal mythos, come to mind.  In the D'oril world, the shianna were animistic spirits that represented all animals of that species, from chipmunks to owls to elk.  For the most part, their connection to the k'tath was incidental, even as their connection to the humanish folk to the south almost non-existent.  Once in a while, though, they'd get involved, usually at the request (or suggestion) of Elorna herself. 

     In Sha'te, the 4 shianna I introduced  were attempting to help the leader of the k'tath, the Sen'anth, escape the shadow scouts that had been placed on her trail by Phorix in retaliation for the use of the seeker by the PC's in Heartbow and Seeker.   The PC's, with the concurrence of the k'tath, had used the seeker to try and assassinate the "unbeatable general" Yamto before he could lead the empire's army against the K'tath.  Though he lived, he didn't participate in Sha'te, and in response, the new general of the empire's expeditionary force sent a large contingent of shadow scouts to hunt down any of several leaders of the k'tath.  In a sense, this act doomed the empire to failure at Sha'te, for it deprived the army of it's eyes as it approached the battlefield.  (History buffs will recognize the similarity to JEB Stuarts ill-advised antics prior to Gettysburg, where, in an effort to regain favorable press, he undertook a wild ride "around the union army", which garnered the press, but deprived General Lee of valuable intel on the actions of General Meade in the days leading up to Gettysburg.  Yes, this similarity was deliberate)

     At any rate, the Shianna had a brief introduction at sha'te as a minor force.  They bore a faint relation to the ranger skill, Aspect of the Beast, and in the game, lent some otherworldly skills to the 4 heroes they were helping.  I vaguely recall one of the shianna was Wheer, the owl, I think another was deer, but for the life of me, I cannot remember the others.  (help, anyone?)  Each lent it's power to one of the PC's for the crux encounter, and added a bit more to the final encounter of day two, but beyond that, I didn't develop them much at sha'te.

     In writing, the shianna are out there, but as yet, I"ve not put them into the storyline.  I'm sure they'll show up someday, some how, somewhere.  It'll probably be an owl, waking our heroes up at 4:00 am.  Knowing the typical heroes of D'oril, he won't stop grumbling until the next winter.....   ;-)

TTFN,
Jim

Sha'te, Part 2. Delving into day one...

Ah hah, the readership came alive with my posting about Sha'te Valley.  The comments have encouraged me to delve deeper into Sha'te, as well as the whole IFGS game writing schtick.  For readers who aren't IFGS familiar, bear with me, I'm writing about live action role playing.  (A lot more info can be found at www.ifgs.org) Now to lure Ray in...

     Keep in mind that all this occurred many years ago, and that my recollections of the writing and sanctioning process are probably suspect.  I've also changed my view of the storyline of D'oril over the years, most significantly in the last couple of years as I've been writing, and preparing to write in retirement.  I'm sure those who participated, both as players (Del and others), or as game staff (Art, I know you're out there, mostly lurking in the wordpress mirror site) will have different recollections, I hope you'll share them. 

     I think I ended up with more than 100 pages of game copy, by the time I was done writing.  I had another 50 or so pages of notes and ideas that I'd kept to myself as background, plus all the materiel in the many minigames that preceded Sha'te.  The original concept of Sha'te was much more grand that ended up being produced, but IFGS reality being what it is, the desperate battles of a few heroes against an army just can't occur.  The biggest innovation was the 4 passes concept, where each team would stand alone against detachments of an approaching army.  But even there, I had grander ideas that never made it to game copy.

     I'd wanted to find a game site where four "passes" would exist that the teams could block.  Ideally, they would be far enough apart that it would take a few minute for pc's to move from one to the other, but hours for the approaching NPC army to do the same (The advantage of interior lines, a military tactic).  I wanted the teams to know of each others presence, and I'd envisioned them arranging to send messengers back and forth with an HQ set up central to all four passes where the LM's would huddle over a map, considering the scouting reports coming in from the K'tath kel warriors, and shift reinforcements back and forth to meet the varying threats.  There are many real-world gaming problems with this idea, though.  For one, I'd have needed many more NPC's that I felt I could gather.  Secondly, the game site I used didn't really offer a place that would work. 

     Sha'te had a theme for each day.  Day one's theme had to do with desperate last stands.  On the strategic scale, never seen but referenced throughout the day by NPC to PC lore, had to do with the massive battle within Sha'te Valley itself, as the Kel of the K'tath stood up against the armies of the empire in an effort to keep the enemy from penetrating through the valley into the south, where open spaces would return the advantage to the empire with their superior numbers (Envision the spartans against the persians at Thermapole.  On an operational scale, the players were to demonstrate the same theme with their 4 heroic "8 against many" stands within the 4 valleys while protecting the k'tath rear areas (Think 20th Maine regiment on little round top at Gettysburg protecting the flank of the union army).  And on the tactical, the 4 "heroes" made their own "1 against dozens" stands trying to delay the pursuit of the k'tath sen'anth by Phorix's shadow-scouts as she tried to get to the kel command center.  WIth this theme repeated three times at different tactical levels, a desperate last stand that, at the end of the day, left the final issue in doubt, I felt I had a storyline and concept that would really resonate with all players.

     During game writing, I knew that the massive battle within sha'te itself could only be referenced by lore, and I wanted to have in-character reports delivered to the pc's to add to the flavor, but I just didn't have the NPC's or time to carry through with this.  On the operational level, my desire to see a PC command center where the pc's would coordinate the defense of the 4 valleys fell apart because the SC felt that the resulting situation, with messengers flying back and forth from the valleys, would lead to chaos.  I'd envisioned a scene where one valley after another would report a major assault massing in front of them, request help, and each of the other valleys would send 1 or 2 of their team members to help.  The diminished teams would face a smaller assault while their roving reinforcements were away.  It was the SC's view that such cooperation between teams would be impossible, some teams would send virtually their entire fighting complement as reinforcements, while others might ignore the problem entirely.  Balancing the fights at the remaining valleys would be impossible, since the SC didn't want to have the NPC coordinator adjust the balance on the fly.  In addition, the requirement for NPC's under this scenerio would have been severly high, I think I'd determined that I would have needed more than 50+ fighting NPC's to properly challenge the teams in this manner.  Instead, I formed what NPC's I had into several smaller groups that would rotate through the valleys, hitting the teams sequentially.  Each team was completely independant of each other.

     The end result was that each team got battered, showed some success and some failure.  In my original design, I wanted success to be "all of the passes held, although it was a very near thing, only the timely arrival of PC reinforcements kept the empire from getting it's troops into the k'tath rear area."  If one or more teams had allowed a breakthrough, I had to have an in-game reason why it didn't turn the tide of the overall battle, and my idea during initial development was that the K'tath would have reserves in place, allowing them to shore up the hole, but taking away from PC resources on day two.  I wasn't able to come up with a viable way to alter the second day of a major game in such a drastic way to the SC's satisfaction then, though I'd like to think, given time and a freer hand from the SC, I could have.  As a result, I had to write second day game copy as if a breakthrough had occurred, regardless of PC success on day one.  But, because I'd had to go to the 4 independent passes concept, it was a pretty good bet that one of the teams would collapse under the assault, so as far as game copy was concerned, everything went according to plan.

     How much more exciting would the game have been if I could have kept to my original design.  PC's would talk about how the arrival of Evro and Delanore at the last minute turned the tide against the roman legion, or how their absence at the other front nearly cost everything, but Napadoc pulled a fast one and...  And, how would I have changed day two if a breakthrough had occurred.  More things to write about.....

Anyway, more to come on this subject,
Clear skies,
Jim

    

Sha'te Valley, an after action report.

      The IFGS world of D'oril began as background material for a character history.  I've touched a lot about it in the past, how it grew from there to a simple world, to a neighbor of the Land of the Seven Tribes, (and eventually splitting off so I can write without dealing with other authors.)  I guess I'm keeping the ties to the IFGS alive, in part because there are times I want to (read wish I had the time to) pick up where I left off.  As far as the IFGS version of D'oril goes, however, the world stopped at the end of Sha'te Valley,  Except I kept some things going in Brandis' character history.

     Melding Brandis' history with Sha'te and the aftermath doesn't really take much effort, since almost all of Brandis' adventures within the IFGS took place outside of D"oril.  I created the reasons he couldn't return, and fed tidbits of D'oril lore to other PC's when I played him.  I've never really had a problem with time and the IFGS, though, for I took a page from the master, Ray Michel, and allow that "Time passes differently within the worlds of the IFGS".  SO, Brandis can stand at Shatterman Pass, go through his torment following that as his soul darkened from the non-stop war and shadow threat, return home just long enough to obtain kath healing, and head back into the southern world.  Nothing happened after Sha'te.

     Except in my head.  I had jotted down game ideas, one that would have taken place months after Sha'te, another that would have picked up almost immediately afterwards.  Both got through the outline and detailed storyline phases, but I never got the the encounter definition phase, mostly because the FAA (and real life) began to consume my life.  I've kept those notes and storylines in some folders, ready to be resurrected.

     Sha'te, in itself, is an entirely different animal.  The story for that developed over the first couple of years of writing minigames, I wanted to write a game outside of the closed world of D"oril that the general populace could participate in, yet retain the flavor of the closed world that I (and the players) enjoyed.  In the minigames, I was ablt to tailor encounters, and plots, to specific characters, and pull the characters emotions this way and that.  This was to be an issue that would plague Sha'te, to this day, I'm not sure how successful I was at presenting the story I'd written for Sha'te, as I saw it. 

     One reason for my uncertainty is that, quite honestly, there were more than a few players who didn't enjoy Sha'te.  I've felt that one of the main reasons for their dislike was because they'd not been immersed in the lore and storyline for 2 summers prior to the game, like the 12 or so players (who became the loremasters and their seconds in SHa'te)  had been through the Heartbow and Seeker miniseries.  Another reason has to do with logistics, I'd envisioned encounters that just didn't translate to the limited resources of IFGS games (although the Lor games approached what I'd hoped to do).  Finally, The storyline itself was forced into the IFGS format in order to make it a playable game, and suffered greatly in the translation. 

     The end result was a series of compromises that, although necessary for the game to be sanctioned and in order for it to be playable, weakened the storyline, and hence the impact that I'd envisioned for the game.  One aspect of Sha'te that I'd not touched upon outside of a close few friends, was that SHa'te was written with an emotional plot.  I wanted the characters to feel emotions that changed from Up and excited at game start, to worried, stressed, and perhaps fearful through day one, to emotionally spent and exhausted at game down on day one.  Day two began with uplifting news that would boost the morale, allowing the characters to fight through to win the day.  An emotional roller coaster.  Except that only a few characters got into the depth of feeling that I'd intended.   I'd been able to manipulate pc emotions in the minigames, but...  It doesn't work on a grand scale.

     To this day, Sha'te remains poorly understood, at least by my standards.  What the players accomplished in their minds, and what was accomplished as far as the K'tath were concerned remain separated by a grand canyon.  The epic scale of the Empire of Tallux's efforts were altered by a couple of dozen adventurers, not so much by the military defeat they suffered at the hands of the Kel warriors and the adventurers, but by ripples of cause and effect that have yet to be fully revealed.  My writings today take Sha'te into account, and at least in my current project, shape much of what happens. 

     I'll write more about Sha'te with my next post, perhaps a retelling of what happened, and hints at the changes that are still happening...

Clear skies,
Jim

Round 1--- Jim 2, Inner Critic 1

     Round one of the bout:  I think I'm ahead.  I ceded the first minute of the round to IC, and let him convince me that a large section of stuff I'd written from november thru march really didn't fit, style wise.  It was stilted, disjointed, and just didn't feel right.  Inner critic moved it to the dump file (after saving part in a notes file for future reference).  So, word count has dropped to a little more than 64000.  One point for IC.

     However, while IC was gloating over his early victory in the round, I sneaked out on a break at work, leaving him in the control room grousing over the weather while I jumped back in on where I'd left off, some dialogue between Cerryn (one of our heroes...) and the unbeknownst to her villains, Min and his stooge (and presumed boss), the march warden of the western confederacy.  For once, the dialogue flowed smoothly.  In my half hour break, I churned out nearly 500 new words, and rebuilt some badly needed confidence.  More importantly, it felt good.  One point for me, and a bonus point because...  I'm looking forward to continuing tonight at home.  Total, 2 for me...

     During my writing session on a break at work, I noticed that my mood seemed lightened from previous attempts to write at work.  I've a strong suspicion that the headaches that I'd dealt with since late october last year, the ones caused by my vision issues and that I just accepted as part of  dealing with work (or just getting old), has had a huge impact on my desire and ability to write.  Because the headaches were almost always low grade, I'd assumed I could just ignore it.  Coworkers and family, however, have commented that I'd been rather...  Grumpy through the winter.  Yeesh, I never knew. 

     I thought I was normal...  ;-)

Jim

    

Somebody shoot that inner critic...

     My inner critic really laid into me this week, from "this is going too slowly", to "you started in the wrong place, now everything will have to be rewritten when you start at the right place".  I did manage to silence the chorus of "the plot is going nowhere".  I am having a near crisis over the starting in the wrong place, at times I've almost agreed with IC to stop work on Imperfect Hope and start from the beginning.  But...  What is holding me to my original plan is the fact that, dammit, I need to finish the first draft!  Come on, Jim, keep grinding...

     Because of the inner battles, I got little done on word count, though I did flesh out a bit more detail in my notes on where the story goes, both to the ending I'd originally plotted for IH, and through a good portion of what now appears to be part three of the series.  I also pondered some ideas for part one, though nothing seemed to come together yet.  I am going to let my muse wander around that forest, though, see if it can find any magic mushrooms...  ;-)

     While muse was wandering last week, it did unearth another plotline that begs to be written about.  The early empire, centuries before the Sha'te days, faced a long war of unification.  I envision something a bit like the shogunate period in Japan, with an inner conflict over the future of the empire waged between the powerful warlords and the educated scholars, each with their own agenda.  It would seem most logical that the powerful would win, but I've an idea, a larger than life scholar who manipulates politics and religion to build his powerbase such that he rivals the warlords in strength.  I envision this scholar, whether victorious in the end or not, becomes directly responsible for the shape of the coming empire, even though he struggles to prevent its foundation.  For now, this tale goes on a back burner, along with a dozen or so other ideas.

     At any rate, I'm battling inner critic tonight after work.  Round 7...  Wish me luck...

TTFN,
Jim

Writing and rewriting

     First, a correction.  A couple of weeks back, I referenced Foundation, and mistakenly assigned that work to Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001 and many others.  It was Isaac Asimov who wrote Foundation and the books that followed.  Now I'm going to have to go back and reread it (not that that's any real form of punishment)

     It's been almost 2 weeks without a headache. Man, what I'd been missing the last 5 months.

     I've done a little work on Imperfect Hope, added a couple thousand words, though I'm not happy with what I'd done over the weekend.  My inner critic is snarling at me, in part because I picked up where I had left off, rusty and a bit off rhythm, so the writing sounds stilted.  I'm fighting the urge to redo it.  One way I'm considering ignoring the inner critic is to jump ahead to a new chapter, then go back when I'm feeling more in tune with the mood of the writing.  I'll let you know how it goes.

       I"ve resigned myself to the fact that I'm writing the middle part of a lengthy novel that will probably be broken into 3 parts, and that I'd started at part two.  Part one, as I'd mentioned in the past, would introduce the main characters as individuals, then show their paths converging as they got to know each other.  I've some rough ideas for the plot of part one, and I may jot down some more specific notes/outlines as I grind through Imperfect hope, but I don't want to sidetrack myself just yet.  However, depending on how the part one shapes up, Imperfect hope will likely need a good deal of rewriting to bring it inline with what I come up with in part one.  I still intend to finish the first draft of IH before I jump to any other projects, though.  I hope...

Anyway, more to come as I get back into the writing swing of things.

TTFN,   Jim