Frothing Blood Peaks

This region has a relatively cool climate, largely due to its high elevation. During the mild summer, the gradual warming of surface ice and snow encourages the growth of rosy algae and the tiny creatures that enjoy these as food, giving the mountains their famously macabre pink tinge.

As I drew this map, it occurred to me that I could change the process. This happens periodically, usually as a result of repeated encounters with unresolved (or unsatisfactorily resolved) parts of the process. Other times it just happens, pow, this is the process now. One recent example is the effect of glaciers and jungles—I stopped worrying about imbuing them with unique resource qualities and instead focused on how they affected the surrounding wildlife. This was a problem that had gnawed at me for a while (can people really get resources from under a glacier?), and I’m sure I could have come to a different resolution (ie. “yes, tell me how”), but this one was simple (ie. “nah”) and that is best. Adding in a reliable, objective process for glaciers in the first place was more one of those “pow” fixes— “ah yes, this is the way to do it, finally.”

So what am I talking about here—I’m talking about ships. Ships have been part of the process for a long time, and have undergone many changes. It started with seaworthy fishing ships. Putting fish in the ocean has been part of the process from the beginning—a fishing ship takes all those fish. I added merchant ships to provide lore and food based on the number of cities and colonies, with which I’m fairly satisfied. Research ships gain lore for every land mass in the region—currently this is based on land masses that form around dice, not the little islands that emerge when mountainous regions have nowhere to connect to; I’m still mulling this over, I want to do more with the second type of island. Pirate ships and navies emerged fairly naturally as a means to look for social outlets in under- and over-productive cultures (people would rather become sea bandits than starve, for example). Both these types simply gain a cut of their existing relevant resource base (pirates take half the food, navies take half the lore—this is all additive as well; the pirates don’t take food away from anyone, they just find enterprising ways to make it to half).

The friction lately has been in how many times ships can be replicated, and what the process of replication is. The concept now, which has been wavering a bit, is that only one type of ship can exist at a time. But because ships can double up over the course of generations, I’ve been letting it slip into same-generation doubling (people innovate, they look for new angles, &c). So, in the way a pirate ship can take half the food off a merchant vessel, a second merchant vessel finds competing routes worth half the first route’s value. One problem this causes is that later-generation pirate ships and navies can sometimes generate huge amounts of resources, because they capitalize on earlier generations. I don’t object to this in principle, but it does create complicated accounting and that’s tedious. Because do they capitalize on resources that have already been capitalized on by pre-existing pirate ships? I would think no, but the process is grey here. Ships also have the tremendous incidental advantage of providing resources without imposing a cost—for example, colonies become cities, which need to be fed themselves, can introduce conflicting traditions, and may draw in unsustainable amounts of lore when your culture is just looking for more food.

The solution I’m contemplating is to make ships last only within the generation they launch—they furnish resources in the following iteration, then cease to exist. This significantly scales up sustainability challenges for big cities, because the ships no longer establish a stable resource base, but on the other hand it seems pretty natural to me (you need to replace all those planks on the Argo for it to remain a ship), and while the process allows itself to extend many generations, typically we only do one (which makes sunsetting ship resources more of a 100-year problem). I think this creates interesting opportunities as well, along with providing clarity. Discontinued shipping can isolate colonies and allow them to develop as their own culture, for example. Civil wars might end up being more common as well—or less, if kingdoms split up more naturally. I’m sure there will be other developments, all of which disrupt the consistency of the mapmaking process and its outputs, but in the long term I think it will make it more fun.