I didn’t intend for it to be up there before, since there were some problems with the illustrations. If you got a copy there already, go back and get a good one — which I believe should be free.

The crystallization method is an advanced, poorly-controlled, and poorly-understood enchantment technique for making buildings pervaded by magic, generally much larger on the inside than the outside. It puts Locador in places where even Locador was never meant to go, and introduces economies of scale on a frightening scale.

• Crystallization lets one make very large buildings. Making the same kind of building by other means would not, generally, let one make buildings as large. For one things, crystallized buildings do not require supports; each room held to its place in the underlying Locador lattice, supported by the structure of space itself, rather than putting its weight on the more fragile walls and support columns of an entirely physical building.
• Unfortunately, the buildings can get too big, inside. It is not uncommon for them to grow without bound. Of course the outer boundary of the building is fixed, but the space inside will grow with the building. Furthermore, as it grows, the spaces get weirder and weirder, so the unlimited size is of limited value.
• Crystallization can let one magic item serve for an vast number of residences. For example, a water-creator that can create ten gallons of water as often as desired, will usually go idle even in a very large noble’s house. With crystallization techniques, one such item could supply water for an entire city. The power of the item is used in many places at once.
• Unfortunately, as one gets deeper into the edifice, the power from such items is used in increasingly peculiar ways. Their effects are refracted and distorted by their conduction through the crystal; they are blended and superimposed; they become strange and stranger. As crystallization is fundamentally a Locador construct, magical effects that are not related to buildings come off worse than those that are. For example, most crystallized buildings have air-freshening spells, and those spells work adequately more or less everywhere inside of them (though with occasional regions of intense temperature or smell or foggines or what have you deep inside). One early crystallization experiment included a continual healing spell that should have applied to everywhere inside; it was rapidly distorted to chaotic Corpador spells almost everywhere, and that experimental building is not safe to enter.

Structure and Disstructure

The crystallizer, as part of the process, designs a Plan for the edifice. The kinds of rooms are detailed; there may be some dozens of sorts of room. The preferred arrangement for their assembly is also described. Kismirth, for example, has several kinds of rooms for restaurants: a big kitchen with a double door and counters and stoves, a pantry with shelving and cooling, a large dining room, and corridors and bathrooms that are shared with other sorts of places. The Plan indicates three ways that these may be assembled: a simple small restaurant with a kitchen and one dining room; a larger one with three dining rooms; a banquet hall with five kitchens in a row and sixteen dining rooms surrounding them in a 3×7 rectangle.

The crystallizer must acquire magical devices (or spells, but usually it’s devices) capable of making all the desired rooms and magical effects in the building. These devices had best be capable of unlimited use; they will power all the magic in the building, both the magic of creating it and the magic of any continuing effects. There is no need to make the effects perpetual, as the crystallization technique will re-cast them form the device as often as necessary. These spells are called the Solution [in the sense of a chemical solution, not the answer to a problem.] Some good examples:

1. Creation of rooms, corridors, plazas, etc.
2. Lighting. We have one sort of lights for dwelling-places (gentle and controllable), and another (bright and nourishing) for farm-rooms and atria.
3. Fresh air — crucial in a building which may be arbitrarily or even infinitely large, with windows only on its outer surface.
4. Water
5. Waste disposal
6. Temperature control
7. Furniture creation
8. Fireproofing and other invulnerabilization
9. Scrying Windows. In most crystallized edifices, most of the rooms are indoors. People who come to live in a floating city do not, I think, wish to live indoors and never see the sky! So Kismirth apartments have windows which show the outside, even for rooms deep in the interior of the city.
10. Gardening — an atrium or indoor garden every few blocks does wonders for the comfort and sanity of the inhabitants.
11. Pools and bathing facilities — crucial if you’ve got Orren.
12. Animata to be servants to the inhabitants. After some considerable debate, we didn’t do much of this for Kismirth. But there are animata doing a few of the most unpleasant or widespread tasks, plus the farming-golems and the like.
13. Animata to provide directions to those trying to make their way around the place.
14. Internal Teleport gates: A straightforward teleport spell has a range of, say, twenty feet. The exterior of Strayway is only fifteen feet from tip to tip. Teleport spells built into the crystal go by real-world distance, so a very simple teleport can go from anywhere inside Stray to anywhere else. I did not do this in Strayway or Kismirth — I did not think it was safe, with so much Locador around. I hope it is, in fact, as safe as the mathematics says it is, since I have found two distortion-induced teleport gates in Strayway.
15. Levities: places where people and objects are levitated and whisked from one spot to another.
16. Time Distortion: Our Quick Quarter and Slow Section are expanded by crystallization.
17. Levitation and transvection, if you are building a floating city from scratch.

The crystallization method exploits these items mercilessly, but does not add to their power. If, for example, you were to use a device that cast a day-long light spell 12/day, only twelve cells in your city would have light each day. (But if you used a device that cast perpetual light 12/day, twelve new rooms in the city would get perpetual light spells each day.) An unlimited-use day-long light spell device, or even an unlimited-use one-second-long light spell device, would be enough to illuminate every room in the building constantly.

(Unfortunately, deep in the crystal, the power of these items is distorted and recombined in troublesome ways.)

Then one constructs a Form, the outer surface of the edifice. It could be as flimsy as a gigantic cage in the right shape, as for Kismirth, or as solid as a thousand-year-old fortress as in Talujjan’s original crystallization project. It is simply used to guide the crystallization and establish its outer boundary. One may also establish certain large features, such as the radial avenues of Kismirth, by including them in the Form. There’s a bit of enchanting or spellwork required to get the Form to be a Form rather than a simple cage: nothing too hard, and, in the case of a Kismirth-sized building, something that can be done by making a suitable magical tool and giving it to an enthusiastic non-wizard.

The actual edifice will start out more or less following the plan, where it starts. Easy crystallizations start with a single room (or suite of rooms — the technical literature calls it a cell, but I rarely remember to call it that. It’s not a jail-cell or a monastic cell, in any case. It’s either a big room like a restaurant kitchen, or a suite of rooms for an apartment, in Kismirth.) More elaborate crystallizations create cells lining the entire border of the edifice — I did that for Kismirth. I believe that the first cell to be grown will follow the plan precisely. After that, there are no guarantees.

Crystallization proceeds from the existing rooms. The initially-created rooms are called “first ply”. The rooms created next to the first-ply are “second ply”. Those next to only second or later ply are “third ply”. Alarmingly, this pattern continues and proceeds, giving each room a ply number. To a first approximation, the first-ply rooms are normal and Planly, the second-ply rooms nearly so, and each ply a tiny bit less Planly than the previous ply.

Each cell is attached to the one-lower-ply cell that inspired its creation, and, generally, to all the cells in the area whatever their ply. The connections are architectural or Locadorical. Ideally, a door in one cell will simply open into a door the next cell; the wise architect will include a certain number of doors on the outside of each cell. But if there are no doors, the crystallization will make its own openings: perhaps a mirror on the wall of one room is a mystic portal into the arch of a pair of trees in an atrium. If the design of the room fails to include any such proto-portal on each relevant wall, the whole wall may become an oversized portal, which rather defeats its purpose as a wall. (In the extreme case, a cell that is simply a cubical room without doors will get every wall, floor, and ceilining converted to a portal, resulting in a room which only levitation can use — even touching the floor will send one elsewhere. This is very silly and only happens in one sector of Strayway, and not at all in Kismirth.)

If one tries to draw a map of what cells connect to what, one will surely be disconcerted, or become drunk. Under no circumstances will even the second-ply cells fit properly into [Euclidean] three-dimensional space. A cubical first-ply cell should have five neighbors, one for each face other than the one on the boundary. The first cells of my various essays in Strayway had between six and eleven neighbors.

Incidentally, from the inside, a cell always seems to be of a simple shape — a cube, say, or whatever was designed. But from the outside, cells are tiny, and decrease in size with each ply.

A sensible crystallizer will attempt to rein in this process, making each ply a fraction of the size of the one before it, so that the whole edifice will be of finite size. This is not guaranteed to work, even for the best crystallizer. Often an inner-ply suite will wind up following a mutant Plan which has lost the controls on the size of the process.

This will lead to unboundedly large sections of the city. (They will not be infinitely large — at any given time, the whole edifice has a finite size. But parts of it will constantly be growing, and there is no limit on their growth.) These sections get increasingly off-Plan, making them interesting or troublesome to inhabit. After some point, they can get uninhabitable in any number of ways. A waste disposal spell, intended for kitchens and toilets, might destroy any organic matter that doesn’t resist it, including clothing and children. An atrium cell might mutate into a vast jungle, or a solid cubic mile of thistles. A fresh air spell might make fresh but unendurably cold air, or air full of a deafening sound of birds chirping. In general, the usable part of the edifice will be finite; beyond a certain point it will be useless or impassable.

On Tinkering With The Crystal As It Grows

The beginnings of the crystallization are fairly slow. One has plenty of time to stroll through the cells as they begin to exist, to note flaws and infelicities in the Plan. One may wish to — shall we say — include a light-spell that one has forgotten. Or, out of a spirit of whimsey, to see how big a dining hall one can create. It is straightforward to add new first-ply rooms, with their own Plans which need not have anything to do with the original Plan. These new first-ply rooms will start to accumulate their own plies of architecture around them. (One may wish to destroy an unfortunate-seeming cell. Resist this temptation! It will probably do horrible things to cells for a dozen plies all around.)

The excitement of that happens when the crystallization with one Plan meets that with another. The border between the two will evolve its own compromise Plan. The results are quite confusing. But Strayway does have eighteen regions with their own consistent — and somewhat different — architectures. We generally lived inside of one of them and didn’t visit the others very much.

For Kismirth, we actually used all the room-creators and such, following the Plan ourselves, and tinkered with things before we started the crystallization. The first-ply rooms in Kismirth are greatly satisfactory.

On Tinkering with the Crystal After It Is Grown

One of the peculiar concerns with crystallized buildings, as different from real space, is that doing things to one cell may influence the cell’s neighborhood. In Vheshrame, if you install a new door in your house, nothing at all will generally happen to your neighbor’s house.

In Kismirth, if you do so carelessly or unluckily, you change the flow of magic through the crystal. So, installing a new door in your house might create a similar door in your neighbor’s house — or, more likely, will cause a new sofa to appear there, or make the lights a few percent brighter, or cause their air to smell faintly of lilacs.

(Only very rarely does the appearance of a door in the neighbor’s house inspire a door to appear in the house beyond that. Such a chain reaction is possible, but each cell in turn will attempt to resist it, and usually succeed in resisting it, and if a single one succeeds, the chain ends there.)

Major changes may have drastic effects for several houses around. Knocking out a wall between rooms in one cell might replace all the kitchens within three cells’ distance by swimming pools, or cause bedrooms and all their mundane contents to vanish, or cause ceilings to shrink to three feet high. We did this thrice in the depths of Strayway to see what would happen, and those are the three effects we got. We are trying to keep people from doing this experiment in Kismirth.

Crystallization and Kismirth

We used the technique to fit a whole household in Strayway, using the space distortion to the fullest. This is traditional for architectural crystallization projects. And by “traditional” I mean that the dozen-or-so crystallization projects that weren’t purely experimental up to that point all did that.

For Kismirth we took the opposite approach: the greater part of inhabited Kismirth is first-ply cells, almost comprehensible as if they were ordinary space if you don’t think about it too hard. (If you fret that, though those apartments that have front doors three feet apart, both those front doors open onto twenty-foot-wide rooms, you are thinking too hard.) Even the second ply of Kismirth has a distinct semblance of reasonability to it, though if you inspect too closely you will discover that it is actually spatially impossible even if you can’t tell the difference between three feet and twenty. We expect people to live mainly in the first ply, or perhaps the second.

In fact, we tried to stop the crystallization after the second ply. This failed. Failure was mathematically inevitable, according to hCevian and Feralan, and we knew it in advance, but we had to try. There are so very many rooms on the second ply. Each room on the second ply has its own slight variation of the Plan — or rather, a variation on a variation on the Plan. Some few of those variations admit a third ply … we know of fourteen such places, but there might be more.

So there are fourteen places where the third ply has started to grow, and they will presumably evolve their fourth and fifth and twentieth plies, and in time they will be wild chaotic regions bigger than the ordinary part of Kismirth. This is one of several reasons why we made the city walls of Kismirth so strong and so adjustable: one never knows for sure, but there might at some point be something in those regions which we wish to keep out of the downtown.

Kismirth carefully includes plenty of doors on the edges of each cell. No mystic teleportation mirrors in every apartment for us! Furthermore, these doors are all very heavy: solid eight-inch slabs of meng [comparable to bronze -bb], reinforced with internal lattices of Sir Glass [not far from steel -bb], and equipped with heavy bars and bolts on both sides. You sometimes see such doors at the fronts of banks in Vheshrame. The crystallization method requires that you have doors into to your neighbors’ houses. But they don’t need to be doors that either of you can open. (But, if you do want them open — e.g., if you occupy a first-ply apartment, and your family becomes large, and you want the uninhabited and barely-visited second-ply apartment behind it too, it can be arranged quite easily.)

Some Technical Details

• The various Plans of Strayway each fit on a single scroll of some thirty feet. The Plan of Kismirth takes up a substantial book of two hundred and eighty pages.
• I did not mention the Boiler (Boil the Architectural Construction) spell, which is a rather heavy Creoc Mutoc Sustenoc Locador Tempador Magiador Spiridor ritual spell, required to get the Form, the Plan, the other enchantments, and the seed to actually start crystallizing.
• One can control the speed of crystallization. Strayway grew at hundreds of rooms per day. Kismirth started at dozens per day; we turned it up to myriads per day for a while, when we were satisfied that it was going well, and then down as low as possible when the first and second ply were largely finished. Unfortunately ‘as low as possible’ had gotten to be … we’re not quite sure, but hundreds per day, mostly in the fourteen third-ply-and-beyond regions.
• The Form has to be enspelled by a simple but regrettably twisty spell.

Comparison with Other Methods

There’s really nothing to crystallization that you couldn’t do in more traditional ways. The city of New Kottarnu on Aradrueia, for one place you may have heard of [In the World Tree novel A Marriage of Insects -bb], has been doing it the traditional way for a thousand years.

We used crystallization because it is super-cool because we wanted to distribute the benefits of a number of magic items throughout the whole city. So, rather than requiring the dwellers in each room in Kismirth to provide for their own water, fresh air, fireproofing, and so on, we do it all at once for everyone.

Traditional approaches are a bit less frenetic. While one does, not infrequently, accidentally construct huge (or sometimes honest-to-”Here” infinitely) large places with dubious and dangerous content and eccentric local rules, crystallization all but guarantees it. Perhaps more troubling is that traditional approaches usually construct a new space and are done. Crystallization is not done; it continues and proceeds and goes on, probably forever.

Given sufficiently skilled people (and especially if you have a Locador demon helping out, and a Glory of one of the relevant gods), crystallization might well cost less than other approaches: perhaps as little as half as much.

Game Mechanical Hints

[There are no concrete rules for crystallization.]

[The intent is that a mage (or a group of mages) with relevant magical arts of 30 or so, and Enchantment and Ritual magic of about 20 could undertake a Strayway-size crystallization project, taking a handful of years' total effort -- which is how long Sythyry took. Much of this time is required for the Solution: a dozen unlimited-use magic items will take some dozens of weeks. Another significant chunk of time will take place after the crystallization is started: watching it grow, and guiding it. Building a Kismirth-class city is a larger effort, but could be done by half a dozen well-chosen prime mages whose best arts were in the 40's, with a few having Enchantment 25 and and at least one having Ritual magic of 25, in a handful of years.]

Let’s ask them!

What, all of them?

Yes! Let’s ask all of them!

1. Hops and 48%: I don’t think about it very often. Why would I? It’s not as if I could be anything else very easily. It has its good points and its bad points, more good than bad I guess.
2. Greenstripe and 43%: I am very glad to be a Herethroy. Other prime species are so low on limbs, it’s just pitiful! I rejoice in my smooth carapace, tough and protective yet light and sensitive, so easy to adorn with gems and metal inlay. I rejoice in my swift and graceful body, my highly expressive antennae, my exceedingly-useful Creoc knack! I love being, I love being, I love being a beetle!
3. Coriander and 15%: I am not fond of being an impoverished peasant. This doesn’t so much have to do with being a Herethroy.
4. Fennel and 15%, mostly male: I am glad to be a Herethroy man (or an attractive co-lover). Aside from having a very nice body, I have a dessert of extra status over other Herethroy — and that means, all the sex I want, and girls and cosis competing for my attention, and generally lots of treats.
5. Chickory and 10%, mostly female: This concept of “too many women” is awful. I’m never going to manage to get married, and probably never even going to lose my 3-virginity (even if I somehow manage to make it with one other Herethroy). It’s not so much having a Herethroy body that’s so bad, it’s the general Herethroy social structure.
6. Casamint and 8%: The problem isn’t so much being Herethroy, about which I have no complaints. It is about rustication. I don’t want to live in a sleepy socialist Herethroy village. I want to live in a big, bright, exciting city! This is not always easy to do if one wishes have a reasonable Herethroy life, e.g., getting married.
7. Marjoram and maybe 1%: Real strong, four arms, built-in armor. Why would a tough adventurer want to be anything else?
8. Mynthë and a tiny fraction of 1%: I hated being Herethroy! I hated it more than anything else in the world, save one thing, and that one thing was Sythyry putting words in my mouth — especially after I died and had no useful way of objecting any-the-more. So zie’d better stop it.

A typical spell, when it is cast, has an appearance of power about it, much as a flame has a brilliance or luminosity. Different casts of the same spell vary in power — even for the same person, they vary somewhat. We measure the power of spells by the intensity of their appearance.

Often, the measured power is correlated with something measurable in other ways. A simple spell of power [5] makes [one yard] of rope-vine; a spell of power [10] makes [two yards]. I typically make about twenty-some yards with that spell, with a typical power [of 100 or a bit more].

[I translate spell powers as well as distances into English; Sythyry uses different units for both. -bb]

There is a separate dimension, of spell complexity. More intricate spells (which generally do more, or do more subtle or harder things) are more complex. The rope-vine-making spell is the simplest quantum, called 5 (because it takes 5 cley to graft that spell on — no spell takes fewer, and all spells take multiples of 5, hence they are proper quanta.) A good professional mage has a couple of complexity-20 spells in her specialty. The best healers have a couple of 30′s. My most complex spell, Dancing in the Garden of Statues, has complexity 100; I do not have many that complex, or even close. (Vae can improvise spells of complexity 80 on nearly any topic, and power [150-200], without any effort at all; this makes her a truely fearsome creature indeed. My best spell is better than her efforts in that topic — which is impressive indeed! — but she is nearly as good as my best in everything. And I have very limited cley, and she has no limits whatever. )

[There is no need to translate spell complexities, since those are simply numbers that have a simple physical explanation.]

Spell effects are often exponential in the complexity. A complexity-5 spell can make a few yards of rope-vine. A complexity-10 variant can make the same number of tens of yards of rope-vine — and a mage who has both variants grafted and can cast both, will cast them at precisely the same power [or, more accurately, at the same distribution of possible powers. -bb] A complexity-15 spell will make so many hundreds of yards; a complexity-20 spell so many thousands of yards. The rate decreases after that, typically, so a complexity-30 (rather than 25) spell is required to make so many myriads of yards, and a complexity-45 spell so many tens of myriads.

For extra confusion, not all topics behave this way. Attack spells increase very slowly; a complexity-25 spell does only slightly more damage than a related complexity-5 spell.

Of course, high-complexity spells are hard to learn, hard to cast, hard to invent, and hard to box; they are tremendously expensive, and very few people can actually cast them.

The power of one’s spells is only a mediocre measure of how good a mage one is. Two mages might be able to achieve power [40] on the average, say, but if one only has complexity-5 spells and the other has several complexity-30′s, the second will be far more effective with her magic. [Also, a mage who averages power 40 in a Noun+Verb combination will probably be able to cast spells of complexity 30 or so, but probably not more. Sythyry thinks this is too obvious to need mentioning, but zie is wrong. -bb] However, a bit of money — well, a lot of money — and a few months’ work could give the first mage all the second one’s spells, and make the two be roughly equal.

Anyhow, it is easy to measure spell power, and spell power is strongly correlated with everything else that matters about a mage — except for a number of important disciplines, but never mind that — so we measure by power as a convenient shorthand.

There is no power level at which one is given a title of advanced magic, like “sorcerer” (meaning “very impressive spell user”) or “wizard” (meaning “even more so”). These titles are awarded informally: if enough sorcerers and wizards call you a sorcerer or wizard, you can call yourself one too and nobody will sneer. Usually one must impress the people of the rank one aspires to, in some way. I did it with a very clever time-distortion enchantment, plus surviving a century of nendrai wrangling (and, more to the point, breaking many of her curses despite having nothing like the necessary power or complexity of my own spells.)

There are of course many further elaborations and important details not mentioned herein, but I daresay I may have already melted your ear if not your brain, so I will shut up now.

[They can be found in the World Tree sourcebook. Rather to my surprise, I've only deviated from the sourcebook in a few ways in a decade of Sythyryzing. E.g., the attitudes towards transaffection are moderately different in Sythyry's world than in the sourcebook, and the rules on making other people immortal seem to be rather harsher for Sythyry. The sourcebook is lots of fun to read, and only half of it is game rules! Buy it, read it, and see where else you can catch me contradicting it! -bb]

Rakeela and I [ragarth] are interested in putting together a World Tree RPG group. Neither of us have used the system yet, but we both have source books demanding attention! Alas, we’re also both cursed with black-thumbs when it comes to GM’ing, and so we’re forced to stalk down someone else for that task. Additional players up to the prospective GM’s comfort level are in demand as well.

The ideal GM will have their own source book, be capable of running games on either Thursday or Friday evenings, and have an AIM account to make coordination easier (but not for the gaming). I can run a maptool server if that’s the GM’s preference, but any live-chat medium with dice-rolling capability (IRC+bot, Muck, maptool, etc.) should work fine. It’d also be preferable if any players have source books as well, since the system relies rather heavily on bookly materials.

Any prospective victims or Dungeon Gods can either respond here with contact info, send me a message over LJ, or email me at kokishin at.t gmail.com and include “[worldtree]” minus the parenthesis in the subject line.

(Refer to this for basic Diamond Chess.)

Mega-Macro-Super-Large-Monumental-Diamond-Chess isn’t just played on a stupidly large (38 × 38) board with the regular pieces. It has exotic pieces. Lots of exotic pieces. You start with several dozen of them arranged in a square around your town — the arrangement is up to you — and then you can move more pieces onto the board as usual (“mustering”) or, sometimes, in unusual ways (see below).

Some additional terms:

“capture by grapple” is capturing by landing on a piece (as in terrestrial chess). It goes with the standard “capture by spear” (in which a piece moves orthogonally next to an enemy piece and takes it) and “capture by arrow” (similar but diagonal).

“Promotion”: Various pieces change their identity at various times. This is sometimes compulsory and sometimes optional, depending on the piece. In many cases it is a demotion: several very powerful pieces get demoted to weak ones when they capture. For your convenience and safety, there are several pairs of pieces (e.g. the Delighted Child and the Extremely Noisy Neighbor) which have the same move, but promote differently. About half the pieces in the game cannot be mustered; they must be acquired by promotion (if at all). Promotion is marked on the piece in various ways — in a real set, it is done with rings or decorations. Feralan and Wexiset are using small wooden home-made pieces, little more than blocks of wood with names written on the sides. Fortunately, the longest chain of promotions is five: Troublesome Rassimel Girlfriend promotes to Foreign Herethroy Banker promotes to Hideous Neighbor promotes to Street-Performing Balloon Artist promotes to Drunken Masked Prince. (This sequence of events rarely, if ever, happens in real life.)

Orren Butler: can move as far as possible without running into anything else (like a piece or the edge of the board) in any direction, followed, optionally, by another move as far as possible in any direction. It may carry one piece that was adjacent to it when it started; the piece must end up adjacent to it, though not necessarily in the same relative position. It cannot capture. If it could move to the owner’s home town, it can promote to a Perspicuous Rassimel Butler (which is like the standard piece “rassimel”, but can only be taken by arrow.)

Drunken Masked Prince: One of several masked pieces. The mask is a wooden cap that fits snugly over the top half of the piece; the bases below the mask are identical. The mask can be pulled up halfway to reveal a colored band — red, for the Drunken Masked Prince — and all pieces with the same color band have approximately the same move. If you want to make this move, you only have to reveal the band. (If you want to use any other special powers, you need to reveal the whole piece.) None of the masked pieces can capture while they are masked. The Drunken Masked Prince has a knight’s move, or any number of squares forward. When it is revealed, it can also move as a (3,1) or a (3,2) knight. It captures by grapple, and, when it does so, it may take another move (which may not capture).

Masked Undiapered Baby: A red-banded piece. When its mask is off, it cannot move, capture, or be captured, but the 3×3 square centered on it is considered to be all water squares, like the river. At any point thereafter, its owner may promote it to a Pissing Drunkard: Any straight line between a pair of Pissing Drunkards is considered to be river.

Conservative Cani Curmudgeon / Radical Rassimel Rabblerouser: The CCC version of this piece can move any number of squares vertically, or to the right horizontally or diagonally. It cannot move to the left at all. If it gets into a position where it has no leftward moves (even if it has vertical moves) it can be transformed into the RRR version. [The names of these pieces have been mercilessly anglicized.] The piece has a little flag on its head pointing to its current direction.

Psychotic Bladed Warbler: This piece moves exactly three squares horizontally or vertically. It captures all pieces precisely two squares away from it — belonging to either player. When it captures, it automatically promotes (or demotes) to a Frenetic Cowardly Epistemologist. Its capture is counted as being of all forms — e.g., pieces which resist any form of capture, such as herethroy being immune to capture by arrow, resist the Psychotic Bladed Warbler.

Frenetic Cowardly Epistemologist: Moves precisely nine squares backwards, jumping over pieces in the way; it captures by arrow. If it cannot move, it can be promoted to an Apartment-Dwelling Humbug (a very minor piece).

Fragrant Woodcutter: A double herethroy. It must make two orthogonal herethroy moves (rook moves). On an empty riverless board , it could go to nearly any square, except for the squares that a herethroy (or rook) could reach. Its move must end with precisely two captures by spear. If it cannot capture two pieces, it cannot move at all. If it captures one herethroy (and one non-herethroy), it promotes to a pair of herethroy, which may be placed anywhere on the owner’s side of the board.

Insane Locador Wizard: My personal favorite. Behaves like a zi ri. Recall that the basic zi ri piece can teleport other pieces, viz. pick them up and make them take a knight’s move to an unoccupied square. An Insane Locador Wizard can, also, muster a piece from the square that the victim was teleported away from. If you can get your Insane Locador Wizard on the enemy side, you can build up quite an army there pretty fast.

The Judgment

I couldn’t even finish reading the rules once before my eyes glazed over and became ocular donuts. I can’t imagine playing the curst thing.

or, On the Triumph of Socio-Prosodical Research

Dear Students,

I am afraid that you have utterly misunderstood and misapplied the methods of socio-prosody. I simply permitted you to explore your obvious misperceptions in the hopes that you would quickly set them right after a bit of further understanding. This hope is clearly vain. Obviously, instruction is wasted on yourselves — Experience is a slow and bitter master, but a fool will learn from no other — the old proverb is amply justified and verified with references to yourselves.

“How could we do otherwise than make a thousand errors?” you ask? The answer is clear! You, being yourselves, could not do otherwise — you have no chance of ever achieving anything of particular correctness! You, not I, chose to use the Translating Dictionary of Gi-Shozempi the Great! Who was it that recommended using that of the Noetherian Institute instead? Did you follow that recommendation, which was made with decades of experience in academe? You chose not to — so you faltered and fell!

Socio-prosody concerns itself with the Poetic Essence of the Spirit of a People. This is perhaps obscured to your eyes by the use of the word Prosody in the name socio-prosody, but that is what the term means. Are tofyofs the poetic essense of the spirit of Hanija? Well, in your misreading of the poetry of that country, perhaps! In reality — no, not so!

It is quite reasonable for a poet to describe his lover as “hooklike”. Æloch-dü Verter, the Chopistau Poet, used that very word to describe his wife, who, hooklike, drew him into battle with cleavers and blades.

You clearly intend to promulgate a foolish and pernicious new discipline in this “socio-vacationing” of yours. You wish to found a new academic department, independent from all others, under your control, with access to an ample supply of funding which you seek to liberate by calumny from the funds of Socio-Prosody! With this you will travel and experience luxurious vacations in many lands! The difference between this and embezzling is that you shall write pretentious and fallacious studies of your deeds!

But know this! I am a might professor in the halls of academe, and I shall not permit the slightest iota of your plan to come to fruition! Know that now, I am your nemesis, the force of justice which brings your nefarious schemes and foolish theories to the executioner!

The Reaction

Invincible Fire Demon: “He sounds really quite upset.”

Prince Rastomil: “He does, I’m afraid. A pity. With a slightly different approach, you might have found quite amazingly helpful and cooperative — in the sense that any help or cooperation from him would have been quite amazing.”

Invincible Fire Demon: “Oh, what do you mean?”

Prince Rastomil: “If Hrone had been right, transaffection would be much more important than it actually is. Outside of this rather peculiar skyboat, I mean. Which would be a major boon to one Mump, Professor of the Study of Transaffection. It couldn’t but help him, perhaps a lot.”

Prince Rastomil: “Still, for whatever reason, he seems to have been moved to quite an astounding fury. What will you do now?”

Hrone: “Write a humble conciliatory letter and hope to get back in the graduate program, at least enough to get my degree.”

Alzagonde: “My plans are unchanged. I have no great use for degrees — several important societies and organizations support me and my intended works!”

Invincible Fire Demon: “Go back home after this trip, study accounting, and go into the Exchequer. I never was much for this theoretical transaffection stuff really.”

Dear Sythyry,
I fear that the most promising avenues for the treatment of Feralan have been explored, and most of the medium-promising roads as well. What remains are either in the form of wandery and root-ridden deer trails with ominous beasts howling in the distance, or a few very grubby back alleys which may or may not be free of muggers. We could, of course, spend more time doing research and investigation, inspection and analysis, measurement and meditation. We could spend a full Rassimel lifetime on that, in fact, and perhaps a full Zi Ri one. However, the longer we delay, the more deeply intermingled Feralan and hCevian become. Therefore, I recommend that we declare an end to the research, and prepare for the spirisection.
With considerable affection mixed with considerable trepidation,
Saza

And Strayway is more or less repaired, and as well-defended as it’s likely to be any time soon. And my crew is all sick of Eigrach and Srineia.

So we’re going back to Ketheria. We’ll collect Feralan and Saza in Oorah Thrassen, and head over to Lenkasia, to use some equipment that one Professor Czirsnatch has generously agreed to let us use but not to move outside of Lenkasia.

A Farewell to Thenel

Me: “Tomorrow we are taking off for Ketheria, never to return.”

Thenel: “Never — truly, never?”

Me: “I have no plans to return, anyhow. Though I cannot say what future years may bring.” (Note to self: Be More Cryptic! This is barely adequate.)

Thenel: “Will I see Bluelark before she departs, do you think? I know the reason she has been scarce of late, but she stirs in me an intensity rarely matched.”

Me: “I suppose you might…”

Bluelark: “…But not for anything that we should not do.”

(We proceed to do some things that we should not do.)

((Though, at least, things that would simply get us a stern scowl from Rehit should he chance to walk in — which he could not do, since it was in a pocket universe with its own time-flow — rather than ones that would actually disrupt their ever-so-slowly-upcoming marriage.))

(((Still, I am better off being far from Thenel.)))

Bluelark: “Farewell, Thenel! Farewell forever!”

Thenel: “Alas! Bluelark, I shall remember you in moments of private erotic intensity!”

Bluelark: “One of which may well be coming as soon as I leave the room, if the topography of your unremoved and uninvaded trousers is any indication.” Sleethy? Oh, no, not me!

Thenel: “Do thou likewise! Promise me that thou wilst!”

Bluelark: “An easy enough promise!” Which he took as me making it — perhaps because of another kiss — but I didn’t actually do so. Nor do I promise to describe my own erotic moments in this journal: neither what I am doing in them, nor what I am thinking.

Both: “Eventually, final farewells!”

And that, alas, is the final end of that affair. I enjoyed his passion and his company. If there hadn’t been that regrettable same-species fiancé around, the matter would have gone quite differently…

Farewell to Rehit

And, of that regrettable same-species fiancé: several of us took luncheon with him today.

Rehit: “Well, I must say, it has been both an interesting and an educational time for me.”

Me: “How so?”

Rehit: “If I may speak frankly, I have never been quite so socially involved with the transaffectionate before. They are scarce in Eigrach, and, I believe, quite furtive. I doubt I know any.” I hope it is a long, long time before he loses this particular illusion. “But I have, I think, learned to respect you. You two, Jyondre and Yerenthax, are as mighty and capable a pair of heroes as any in Eigrach, and I am sorry that our stipend is not sufficient to keep you here.”

Yerenthax: “Ah! But we seek adventure — excitement — drama!”

Jyondre: “Blood and glory!”

Yerenthax: “New branches!”

Jyondre: “Nay, whole new worlds!”

Yerenthax: “Nor do we expect to live long enough to get much good from the stipend.”

Jyondre: “We don’t?”

Yerenthax: “We don’t!”

Jyondre: “I think we are going to need to have Another Little Discussion about this topic!”

Me: “In any case: you have been quite generous with time and effort and official intervention on our behalf, especially considering that we are foreigners and deviants. I quite intensely hope that we have been tolerably generous with you in exchange, and that whatever accidental trespasses we have made against you have small doom and are easily mended.” I hope he doesn’t find out why I worded it that way, too.

Rehit: “I’m sure there is nothing worth noting! In any case, I am quite happy indeed with Festina Lente; she is a wonderful and mighty sword, and I have found her of great use already.”

Me: “May she serve you well forever!”

Everyone: “Assorted additional farewells.”

A Farewell to Bwipin and Mmixamk

Bwipin: “Goodbye, blast it!”

Us: “Goodbye!”

Which is to say, our relationship with the administration of Eigrach has never quite recovered from the thumbscrews.

On the first week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• A Nendrai on the World Tree

On the second week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the third week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the fourth week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Four Gormoror
• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the fifth week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Five Herethroy
• Four Gormoror
• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the sixth week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Six Orren Offering
• Five Herethroy
• Four Gormoror
• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the seventh week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Seven Cani Caroling
• Six Orren Offering
• Five Herethroy
• Four Gormoror
• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the eighth week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Eight Rassimel Racing
• Seven Cani Caroling
• Six Orren Offering
• Five Herethroy
• Four Gormoror
• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the nineth week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Nine Khytsoyis Kissing
• Eight Rassimel Racing
• Seven Cani Caroling
• Six Orren Offering
• Five Herethroy
• Four Gormoror
• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the tenth week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Ten types of Trouble
• Nine Khytsoyis Kissing
• Eight Rassimel Racing
• Seven Cani Caroling
• Six Orren Offering
• Five Herethroy
• Four Gormoror
• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the eleventh week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Eleven Drams of DOOM
• Ten types of Trouble
• Nine Khytsoyis Kissing
• Eight Rassimel Racing
• Seven Cani Caroling
• Six Orren Offering
• Five Herethroy
• Four Gormoror
• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree

On the twelfth week of Vacation a Creator God sent to me:

• Twelve Feet of Cley
• Eleven Drams of DOOM
• Ten types of Trouble
• Nine Khytsoyis Kissing
• Eight Rassimel Racing
• Seven Cani Caroling
• Six Orren Offering
• Five Herethroy
• Four Gormoror
• Three Zi-ri
• Two Slinky Sleeth
• And a Nendrai on the World Tree