Caravans

Beggars can’t be choosers.  I’m short on ideas for anything to write today, so I opened up a code/design Q&A on the Astaria line to see if anyone asked anything interesting that might prompt something to write about.

Lyric [astaria] you could write about the creativity of players vs
wizards when it comes to the old caravan items
Kizayaen [astaria] That'd be a really short article.
Kizayaen [astaria] "Oh my fucking god creating these items made my soul
hurt."
Kizayaen [astaria] done.
Lyric [astaria] its still an article is it not
Kizayaen [astaria] Actually not a bad idea, though.

I’m going to stray beyond the provided scope and talk more generally about what a caravan looks like from the wizard end of things, though.

For any of you who may not be native Astarians, a caravan is a completely manually handled event wherein players are given a set of guidelines by which they can order and receive completely custom items; usually weapons and armour, and sometimes extra toys.  The wizard staff then codes them all up and a week or two later we have a weekend-long social event where “merchants” arrive with the goods and distribute them to players for exorbitant amounts of in-game cash.

First of all, all Astarians have already heard that all caravans are a lot of work.  They really are.  That’s true.  But not necessarily invested the way you might expect.

When I ran the September 2008 caravan, the very first thing I did was create a template for each item type that we were selling: one for bags of holding, one for armour, one for jewelry, and one for weapons.  That pretty much relegates the actual item creation to just filling in the blanks with text provided by the customer.  Needless to say that can still be time-consuming (there were approximately 170 items in that caravan), but that’s still only a couple or three hours to get all done.  Easily handled when, as was the case last time, you haven’t got much to do at work and never have to cut into your free time.

I actually would estimate I spent a lot more time figuring out the pricing points for the various items and their enhancements than I did actually creating and filling out the templates.

I probably spent more time mailing back and forth with players confirming specifications and pricing than I did on both pricing and order fulfillment combined.

But the thing that felt the most difficult and time consuming wasn’t any of these.  That honor would have to go to the items that were created to be auctioned off to a lucky player during the course of the caravan.  Those couldn’t simply be templates; they had to be neat and unique items coded to usual wizardry standards, while having enough interest and detail to provide the purchaser with a satisfying experience for what was, all in all, likely to be a horrendously expensive purchase.  I ended up falling down at this point at the very end of my preparation time and enlisting other wizards to help come up with ideas.

So it did take a lot of time, work, and creativity, and by the end I was mentally and emotionally exhausted and totally ready for it to be over.  I’m reminded of an anecdote concerning a musical artist (I forget who, alas) who was asked about the possibility of a next album during an interview for his brand new just-released record.  WIth a little disbelief, he made a comment to the effect of “Can we finish delivering this baby before worrying about getting pregnant again?”

As to Lyric’s suggestion, I’ll now dedicate a few paragraphs of my thoughts on the creativity of players’ caravan items.

While I can be pretty misanthropic, and this undoubtedly has a lot to do with my opinions on things, I don’t generally think that the hoi polloi have writing and creative skills which are up to my personal standards.  That said, my standards are pretty high, and a simple majority of historical wizards also don’t have writing, creative, and code skills which are up to my personal standards.  There are a few bright points, but those are by far the exception rather than the rule, and only a couple of items have ever really made me blink and go “Man, that’s actually pretty awesome.”

But here’s the one that did come immediately to mind:

a bag fashioned from a beholder carcass
This bag is the leathered corpse of a juvenile beholder.  The eye stalks
have been laced up and formed into a shoulder strap while the large central
eye cavity has been left open and serves as the bag's opening.  The innate
magical qualities of the beholder serve to give it immense capacity.

Probably not something I would ever have come up with personally, but it’s creative, setting-appropriate, and generally well done.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I won’t call out specific items I’ve actively disliked, but I will say that I’ve rejected a number of ideas.  Bongs, perennial favourites though they are, are just not something which I feel needs to have a place in a fantasy setting to which I contribute.