Ghyll talk:Cranee Historical Society

I've decided to work on some of the details of distances of Ghyll, using the facts that one nanit is "small" according to Bindlet Ball, and 18 nanits seems quite large as the basis for Ghyll distance terminology. I feel that sugro-nanit is really quite an irritating term, but I've used it and made it equivalent to a mile to give it some more substance. Cranee is to be between the Evesque Valley and Folktown, eighteen miles from Folktown and twenty five from the Evesque Valley. I'd say that a nanit could well be 20cm; that'd make the boxes 3.6m across, which seems about right for huge magnetic whatsits. A mile is 160934.4cm according to Google, so that means that there are 8046.72 nanits to a mile. Okay! That means that there are 144840.96 nanits between Cranee and Folktown, and 201168 nanits between Cranee and the Evesque Valley. To tie it back into earthly distances, I can say that Cranee -> Folktown is 18 * 5280 "paces", and then hope that Ghyllians are roughly the same size as humans--and I think that they should be, but I guess there's no way of knowing. Everything in the Ghyll universe could be different, so it's a case of making all the relative distances work. This section should go in the Talk page.

--Sean B. Palmer 03:44, 18 Sep 2004 (EDT)

[A Call To Order]

Ladies and not-so-ladies: this is, in some respects, a protest and parody entry. As I've already confided to Morbus, I'm slightly worried about the direction that Ghyll is taking on many levels, and I am here proposing a reform. The main problem is that we simply do not have enough reading and discussion time in contrast to the writing time. We have ten to twenty entries per turn: we've had eighteen this week, and it's simply too much too keep up with. Keeping up with the entries themselves isn't even the biggest problem, it's that it leads to a proliferation of entries that are written in complete isolation from one another.

I propose that instead of having a week of writing time and zero contemplation and discussion time, we should try to balance it out somewhat more. Perhaps every five turns, we could have a period of two weeks where no one is allowed to contribute to the canon, and we have to discuss what's been going on in the wiki, what we hope for the characters, where we want the game to develop. There is simply no out-of-game discussion about the game at the moment, whereas I think that ought to be its principal feature! I think this comes from us wanting to keep our ideas to ourselves so that we can surprise people when we publish them, but I also think it comes from us not planning our entries out in advance, ot wanting to seek others' input, and often from just rushing the entries full-stop. We had three entries in the half an hour before the turn's deadline, and that's silly: as Morbus suggests, we ought to place a moratorium on entries before the deadline, but I think that it should be quite a bit longer than Morbus is probably thinking. A week may be too short a time anyway, so I'm thinking about having five days to soak up the entries and discuss future directions, and then five days in which to write all our dibs. So the process will be day 1: dib; days 1-5: discuss and plan; days 6-10: write entries. That we had three entries in the last half an hour of the turn seems to indicate that a week is simply not long enough for people to catch up with Ghyll (and I must admit that this is partly spurred on by me having some commitments over the next week or so that's going to make it difficult to play Ghyll), though the period that we had for turn A seems too long.

Cranee was written quite extempore, but when you look at the structure it's quite obvious that the top section is pedantry gone mad (the distance measures) and the rest is whimsy. I'm kinda irritated that people haven't been able to look into the easter eggs and puns etc. that I hid in my previous two entries, and I decided I wasn't going to waste the time on this entry doing the same--but I've also had not much time to check out the puns and cool references in other people's entries. Perhaps each time an entry is written up, people ought to discuss all the references in the Talk page instead of just leaving them all hidden. I don't think that just banging out entries every week can really be thought of as all that playing Ghyll consists of: you have to care about creating a large and consistent lexicon here, and I'm not sure what percentage of the players really feel that.

--Sean B. Palmer 03:44, 18 Sep 2004 (EDT)