Meme-Free Zone

A small request to authors:

Back in 2008 I wrote Forgotten Futures X: The Tooth and Claw Role Playing Game, based on the novel Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton. Since characters in this setting are intelligent dragons living in a vaguely Victorian setting I had to write a lot of material describing their life style, personalities, etc. One of the character traits I came up with was this:

It very belatedly occurs to me that

1. I appear to be the only person to have ever used this word, at least so far as Google is concerned. Also
2. There is currently a lot of material being published about dragons, some of them described as being intelligent and having complex societies, and that
3. This is potentially a very useful word for such stories. Therefore
4. If enough authors use it, it may end up in dictionaries.
5. Dictionaries always like to point to the earliest possible use of a word.
6. Which would be the Tooth and Claw Role Playing Game, of course...

Therefore, I have a slight chance of being recorded as coining new word in e.g. the OED if enough people use it (although looking back the word seems to have been suggested in part by jugglergreek on livejournal. I had something similar in mind, spelled a little differently, but this was much better.)

Use my word, and help me (and/or jugglergreek) become immortal! Metaphorically, anyway...

Jo Walton's novel Tooth and Claw, the source for Forgotten Futures X, is now available as an etext from various sources, most notably Macmillan, at $2.99

An absolute bargain!

This is the current contents list for the distribution CD for the Tooth and Claw RPG; it's about 319 MB all in, though a lot of that is the movie of The Lost World and three versions of A Voyage to the Moon. Does this sound OK? What else would people like to see up to say 350-400 MB?

( contents )

While I wait for Jo to get back to me with corrections, I've been finishing off the cutout model paddle steamer I designined a while ago. Basically, I've added assembly instructions and pictures of the ship, fixed a few problems, and added floor plans for the below-deck areas. I'm not going to try to model the machinery in detail, steam engines are too bloody complicated, but I do want to show where all the bits are, e.g. the boiler etc., so I've spent most of the day with Micrografx Draw, and though I say it myself, the results could be a lot worse. This is the engine room - it's ludicrously simplified and maybe looks a bit reminiscent of something that Mamod or Mecanno might sell, but I think it will just about do.



I'm especially proud of the mesh overhead walkways, which is NOT something that's easy to do with this software. The crank shaft was a total pain, and doesn't look as good as I'd like, but I think it's just about OK. This is a paste-up of two screen dumps since the engine takes up about half a page (with the boiler on one page and the rest on the next page, unfortunately - I couldn't find a way to get everything on one page without putting a page boundary somewhere even more awkward). The slightly mottled appearance at a couple of points is down to jpeg compression, it isn't in the PDF.

The rest of it was comparatively easy, apart from some silly problems getting blankets to look vaguely like blankets on the cabin beds - that took a ludicrous number of separate elements per bed to get right.



Anyway, it comes out at 14 pages and a little over a megabyte, and I think that on the whole it's good.

Anyone who wonders why I'm bothering - remember that the next release will be space travel, and if there's one thing people are certain to want in a space travel game it's deck plans for their spaceships. I might as well get up to speed now!

Friday AM: Fixed the crank shaft, not perfect but a lot better.

I gave FF X to Jo Walton yesterday. While the primary version will be PDF, I also want to publish an HTML verson, so I've now got start thinking about converting it to HTML once she's given final approval. The idea of sorting out the coding on a 170-page document is just a little daunting. I wrote the previous games in a text editor and added the HTML code as I wrote - this time I'm starting with a large Word document that contains dozens of tables, text boxes, images, etc. and lots of text formatting. I've also got a bit rusty with HTML, since it's 2-3 years since I've done anything substantial with it.

Word's "Save as HTML" is pretty useless, it tries to micromanage the layout of the document and the sidebars and tables etc. come out as graphic images for some reason - I have no idea why, but it's VERY annoying. I tried saving to HTML from Acrobat, but while it works for simple documents, with something this complicated it comes out as a horrible mess, with the stuff in sidebars, tables, etc. hopelessly jumbled. The tables in particular will be a real pain if I can't find a good way to convert them automatically.

So what I think I'll have to do is paste each section into an HTML editor separately and sort out layout etc. there. I REALLY don't want to hand code this, it could take me a month, so can anyone recommend a good Windows WYSIWYG HTML editor that is preferably (a) free or cheap, (b) not horribly verbose in its coding, (c) I can paste in text and still have italics etc., and (d) I can paste in e.g. tables from Word and get a properly coded HTML table out.

Many thanks!

Revised text for the magic thing

Another possibility is that a serious investigation of magical legends will reveal that dragons and their related species were created by Yarge magicians who wanted fearsome monsters to protect their homes, but underestimated their creations. The first dragons turned on their masters, destroyed them, and used the last vestiges of their magic to attain their full size. There is no other magic in the world because dragons absorb it from their environment and by eating each other. This implies amongst other things that there might still be magic in countries that ban dragons (such as Rasdogah Erofal) or on the continents that dragons have never visited. In such a situation dragon flesh will definitely be the most potent source of magic around; if any Yarge magicians remain they will be very interested in acquiring some. But if dragons actually absorb magic, Yarge wizards (especially player characters) may find that attempts to use magic against dragons backfire, making them bigger and stronger, and that consuming dragon flesh has unfortunate side effects, their exact nature left to the imagination and sadism of the referee…

I've changed the back cover of the PDF of the Those Who Favor Fire chapters Jo published. Basically, this was an edit of the graphics, which has somehow had the side effect of reducing the size of the file as a whole by about 50k, it's now about 850k

Remember that there are major spoilers and "what happened to so and so..." for Tooth and Claw, so read that first!

http://forgottenfutures.com/game/ff10/fire.pdf

Please let me know if you find anything that looks like a typo or have trouble reading it.

The reason I did this may be interesting to anyone creating PDF documents. When I put together the first version I had a semi-transparent text box on the back cover which slowed the loading of the page to a crawl, and printed poorly, with a mesh effect I didn't much like. As a quick fix I made the box completely opaque, which worked but wasn't ideal. For the revised version I've simply taken the original graphic and added brightness to the area. The result is much better - it loads fast and prints the way I want. I'll be using the same trick for the back cover of the RPG.

papersky has posted the first few chapters of the Tooth and Claw sequel Those Who Favor Fire for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.

http://papersky.livejournal.com/385046.html

VERY nice, but I shall have to change a few things in the RPG...

This is what I've ended up with as the Tooth and Claw RPG cover; I'll use the same illustration as background for the one or three volume covers.

I've managed to avoid using the word World three times on the cover, just once in "World Fantasy Award." It prints well, it looks good and is legible at a distance or when it's reduced in size, none of the background seems to be particularly obtrusive, and it's more interesting than any of the "lots of coins all the same" ideas I previously tried.

In short, I think that this one is the keeper.



Click to enlarge. Click twice for the largest version I've transferred, about 60% of full page size.

The icon is still the early version, I'll replace it eventually.

I've decided to ditch the old version of the cave complex, which was a pain so far as getting a coherent view of the whole thing was concerned, and go with a flatter version which has most of the same features but a lot more connections - natural and artificial tunnels - between different areas, which is good for plot purposes. Basically, it was originally a natural cave complex that became a mine, then was converted for residential use by dragons after it became too uneconomic to work - some areas (such as the ballroom and guest caves and most tunnels) are entirely artificial, others are natural, most have been improved to some extent as far as making it a desirable residence is concerned. However, it's designed for dragons, not humans, so you get things like very steeply sloping corridors.



Needs some rewriting, but I think that this is a lot easier to work with than my original version; I'd be grateful for comments