ideas

A few ideas

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I know I haven’t written here for a while, but I haven’t had much to report. Texting until 5:30 AM is enjoyable, but (at least earlier this week) it means sleeping until 1:30 PM, which, like every time I sleep past about 10:30 AM, makes me feel like I’m wasting the day. Today I only was texting until about 5 AM, and got the 5 hours of sleep I was desiring. With 2 cups of coffee, and writing 1849 words for my Crusader Kings 2 after-action report of Orkney beginning in 769, I feel like I’ve had a reasonably productive day.

Playing Windward, a recently released game on Steam where you control a sailing ship and can do quests, trade between towns, or hunt pirates (or, I suppose, possibly turn pirate yourself), has put me into a maritime mood, and made me want to write something involving boats, ships, and large bodies of water. It would be difficult to integrate that into my ongoing game as the Duchy of Chariton in the CK2 After the End mod, considering, with the exception of the Missouri River and a few other minor rivers in the region, there aren’t many major bodies of water in the lands known as Northern Missouri. Orkney, by virtue of being some islands off the coast of Britain in the North Sea, has slightly better odds, but I’ve decided to consider starting yet another idea.

For a while, I’ve considered writing an “after-action report” involving Sardinia, Corsica, and/or the Balearic islands, in the Western Mediterranean. At one point I actually did start one for the original Crusader Kings involving Sardinia, but that fell by the wayside due to computer issues, loss of interest, or other reasons after about 20 years of gameplay. I also tried starting one for Corsica at one point, but, again, that didn’t happen. I’ve tried playing games in Sardinia and the Balearic islands, at least, in Crusader Kings 2, but I have yet to actually start an after-action report. I thought it might be interesting to write a “narrative”, much like my Master of Magic project, where I write it more like a historical fiction novel and less like a history written by a monk.

According to my historical research, the Balearic islands were colonized by the Phoenicians before they were taken over by the Romans. The Vandals took the Balearic islands shortly before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the Eastern Roman Empire took the Balearic Islands back in the 530s (around the same time that Sardinia and the province of Africa was taken from the Vandals). After Carthage fell to the Umayyad Caliphate in 698, the Byzantines effectively lost the Western Mediterranean, and in 707 (per Wikipedia) the islands submitted to the generous terms of a Muslim fleet, which rendered them, in name, both Byzantine and Umayyad.

This is the last thing written in the Wikipedia article before mentioning that they were sacked by Vikings in a 859-862 raid. As I’ve been thinking lately, Crusader Kings 2, as I suspect of most video games, doesn’t handle multiple overlords very well. There are other historical examples of lords that had to choose which liege lord to obey, but in Crusader Kings 2, in the 769 bookmark, the Balearic Islands, like Sardinia, is Catholic and considered part of the Byzantine Empire, ruled by an Iconoclast emperor (considered a heresy of the Orthodox church). If I’m not completely mistaken, the distinction between Catholic and Orthodox didn’t really happen until the Great Schism in 1054, but it would vastly complicate things to add that in, and there were probably differences in practice before that point anyway, if I remember what I’ve read correctly.

In general, in Crusader Kings, I seem to be fascinated by alternate history, obscure rulers that didn’t historically exist, and, in general, playing as obscure, weak rulers and changing history. For example (though I haven’t done it for a while), playing as a Welsh ruler and becoming King of Wales, or uniting Ireland. Where’s the fun in playing as the Byzantine Emperor or Sunni caliph when you can play as the lord of a desolate bunch of rocks in the North Sea?

Anyway, as for my nascent Balearic game, I haven’t had much happen in the first 4 years. I’m not really sure how I’d write the whole “being de facto independent”, considering that isn’t really an option in the game (and no rebellion for independence yet), but I’ve already thought I may have to make some stuff up about the Byzantine navy and government, so what’s a little bit more fabrication? They do, after all, call it “historical fiction”. 

Master of Magic

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Master of Magic is a single-player turn-based strategy game originally released in September 1994 for MS-DOS. The player is a powerful wizard whose goal, along with their computer-controlled counterparts, is to dominate the two worlds of Arcanus (similar to Earth) and Myrror (more magical and with various flora, fauna, and minerals that aren’t present on Arcanus) through military or magical might. In this game, magic is (like Magic: The Gathering) divided into six schools of magic: Arcane (available to everyone), Life, Death, Nature, Sorcery, and Chaos. Instead of the technology tree available in most strategy games that requires you to research technology in order to advance, you spend turns researching various magical spells, until (if the game lasts long enough) you can research the Spell of Mastery and win the game.

You begin the game in January 1400 with a small town populated by one of the races. If you start on Arcanus, you can choose from the Orcs, three flavors of human (High Men, Barbarians, or Nomads), High Elves, Halflings, Lizardmen, Gnolls (like the D&D race, basically humanoid hyenas) or Klackons (insectoid, basically giant ants), while Myrror is populated by Dark Elves, Beastmen, Trolls, and Dwarves. Not all of these races are necessarily present in any particular game, and each one has its differences. While the Orcs can build any building, the High Men (for example) can’t build Fantastic Stables, so they aren’t able to build a unit like the Nomad griffin cavalry. Other differences include population growth (slower or faster than “normal”) and diplomatic relations – some races get bonuses to “unrest” if their city is occupied by another race that they don’t get along with. Additionally, a few races (High and Dark Elves, and possibly Beastmen if I remember correctly) have magical populations that generate “mana” (i.e., power that can be used by the ruling wizard) directly, without requiring construction of religious buildings. Additionally, various roaming heroes may offer you (or your opponents) their services or be summoned via spells that can lead your armies to victory with their various abilities and skills.

I don’t remember now when I first heard of Master of Magic, but it was probably at some point within the last five years or so while reading about strategy games and/or fantasy strategy games. At some point in the last three or four years, I found it via Good Old Games (gog.com), which has (or used to have) the most recently patched (March 1995!) version available bundled with DOSBox, which I’ve played on my Linux computer with the aid of Wine (software that allows Windows programs to be run on Linux, not the alcoholic beverage).

At some point within the past month, I had the idea of writing a story set in a game where my actions, as the game player, were in the background of the story. I decided to do this with Master of Magic, so instead of writing from the perspective of the ruling wizard I would write from the perspective of his subjects. After some “random” generation with a list of heights, Myers-Briggs types, hair colors, and possibly a few other characteristics I can’t remember offhand, I’ve concocted (so far) 4 viewpoint characters, including an ENTJ soldier, an INFP scholar, and an ISTP merchant. Due to my playing the High Men, intending to base their religion on medieval Catholicism, and having a variety of viewpoint characters, I feel like I owe George R.R. Martin (author of A Song of Ice and Fire, also known as the Game of Thrones series) some kind of apology. Since I really enjoy his work, maybe no apology is necessary. At any rate, so far I have vague ideas for how I plan to start the story and I’ve played the game for 16 years (1 month per turn). I should probably start writing soon, but I feel like I need a better title than “the Master of Magic story”.

Character generator idea

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Recently I was suffering from an attack of ennui. I was bored and having trouble thinking of anything to do that sounded interesting. This came in spite of my impending move and need to clean my room, finish the books I checked out from the local library a couple weeks ago, and then the various projects I’m currently sporadically working on or at least thinking about working on.

Then I re-discovered another saved game of Crusader Kings, and I think that my most recent attack of ennui might have passed. Heck, if nothing else, I have a blog I can write on now, right? 🙂

I think I’ve thought about something like this in the recent past, but while at work earlier today I was thinking about writing a program to generate characters for role-playing games or stories. Now that I think about it, I should probably write a post about Crusader Kings II. Anyway, in brief, Crusader Kings II is a combination of a grand strategy game and a role-playing game in which you play as a dynasty in medieval Europe. Technically, it’s medieval Europe and the Near East – modern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. For example, instead of playing as the Kingdom of France, you might play as the Capet dynasty and try to keep your family on the French throne while also trying to put your relatives on other thrones in Europe through marriage, assassination, warfare, and various other stratagems.

In Crusader Kings II, each character has a variety of traits that affect how the AI acts and, in the case of the player, gives you certain events to respond to. For example, if a character is Lustful, they are less likely to remain loyal to their spouse and more likely to, say, have an affair and father or give birth to illegitimate children. Conversely, if a character is Chaste, they are loyal to their spouse, though this has a cost of a slightly lower chance of children.

Before this turns into a Crusader Kings II post, I was thinking about using at least some of the traits from Crusader Kings II in this character generator. I’ve already sort of written a very basic piece of software to generate a basic physical description (hair and eye color, height, weight, and age), which I think could be, at some point, fairly easily combined with software to generate a list of traits that might make interesting characters.

I was thinking each character would probably have three to five traits, which seems like a number small enough to not be overwhelming but large enough to have some dramatic potential. A character that’s Tall, Kind, and Slothful would, of course, be different from a character who is a Cruel, Diligent, Drunkard. I was thinking earlier about somehow having a (pseudo-)random way to generate what list to choose the traits from. A character with only negative traits (e.g., Cruel, Lustful, Drunkard) or conversely only negative traits (Pious, Chaste, Temperate) would, or could, be boring, while a character with a mix of positive and negative traits seems like it would be more interesting.

I was thinking earlier that this idea for a character generation program seems like an indication that either I’ve been playing too much Crusader Kings (which I’ll readily admit is possible) or not enough Dungeons and Dragons. Technically, I’ve only played D&D a few times, and the last time I played any kind of tabletop roleplaying game (in this case, Pathfinder) was last November. I’m hoping to join or find a gaming group once I move, though.