Hey. Sten here.
Still waiting on Steam, the process takes time, not much we can do about it. So this week let me show you something from the very start of a new game.
Before your world gets built, you can make one of the peoples living in it yourself.The world normally holds five cultures and the game rolls all of them very randomly. Now you can hand-place one. Yours takes a slot, the rest generate like always. One cultre per game is yours, cool, yes?You do it by typing plain words into boxes, asnwer simple questions. Hair. Skin. Face. Markings. What they wear. What colours are theirs. Anything you leave blank the game rolls for you, so two fields is fine and twenty is fine.I made a people called the Ashvenni. Salt-priestesses of the burning flats who beat gold into their own skin. Six boxes, that is all I filled in, because I'm lazy and because I was busy with the world cup.Then the game went and made them.Every face came back carrying all six. Indigo hair with the gold rings and the little bones in it. The gold leaf sitting on the cheekbones. The white scarification on the brow and down the throat. Black silk and a heavy collar. I did not draw any of that, I only described it.One thing I did not expect. The gold ages with them. On the nineteen year old it is perfect and freshly beaten on. On the woman of forty four it is cracked and worn down into the skin. Nobody wrote that rule. It just fell out.And they look related. Put them side by side and they are one people, not five strangers in costume. That was the part I was worried about, and it is the part that works best.It saves too. Build a people once, drop them into every world you play after. Once generated they are forever yours on your hard drive.More next Friday.Sten.