Boat Trolls planning thread! (full of spoilers, non-players enter at your own risk)

look at the little thumb hugger aaaaaaa

 

I think Lord Aspera would have been a baron? and held a fairly decent chunk of land, and managed it well and kindly. So he wouldn't really have been an important guy to keep tabs on. Stable borders, steady imports and exports, no uprisings.

 

btw it turns out german has a specific word for seaduck, Meeresenten, so the aspera castle is now Meeresentenkrieg. Probably built on cliffs over the sea. Somewhat notorious in certain circles for taming and then breeding war smews, which are equal to lowland swamp dragons in temper and dentition, but somewhat less prone to exploding.

 

shit, it's four, i should snooze.

 

(i've always translated an ankh-morpork dollar into about ten or fifteen bucks, american.)

 

klatch is roughly equivalent to a middle eastern nation, right? they have a seriphate, with deserts and camels, and plenty of semi-similar neighbors that seem to stretch from india-ish to north africanesque. but ankh-morpork is london plus the grungier bits of new york, so i'm sure there's a big population of second and even third-generation klatchian kids. klatch-morporkians? there's a mouthful.

 

ok i decided that vampire erskin, when turning into bats, basically sublimates. he'd look like a human-shape chunk of dry ice dissolving: no single bat is his elbow or his eyeball or whatever, but beneath the big mess of flappy wings and squeaking there's just less and less of a human shape. it also probably happens in like two seconds when he's genuinely freaked, so it would be hard to analyze.

also, i'm not sure how to fit that together with 'so he's missing a leg' so... maybe he's not? or he'd already lost it in a hunting accident before being vampired? what do you think?

 

erskin would very clearly have no idea what coffee is, why it's so fucking bitter, and that you don't have to drink the grounds, too. but shyness and uberwaldian formal manners combine to make him extremely fucking gracious about accommodating absolutely any weird and horrible thing his host may do, which is great for uberwald, when god only fucking knows what weird and horrible thing your host may do.

 

Do you think klatchian coffee would have an effect on vampires? I think maybe it could go either way for Erskin, there seem to be so many different types of vampire in the discworld.... not sure if it would be entertaining or just a boring trip to angstville.

 

all available accounts say it strips away illusions and reveals how harsh and miserable and meaningless reality really is— considering that erskin's just sort of come free of being cloris's toy, he might actually be in that harshly bummed-out state already. stripping away whatever last little hope he has that people could be nice and he might be able to have a new life seems really cruel, but i'm not sure what else would happen.

 

then again, i'm not sure if i'd agree that that hope is an illusion. statistically, good things will almost definitely happen to anyone, should they live long enough. also statistically, some people are nice, and you will meet them, again if you live long enough. the idea that everything's useless and hopeless and will be awful forever is itself a comforting illusion, because it lets you give up.

edit: okay maybe that's what's cute about erskin getting knurd, is that this is what he thinks of reality right now anyway.

 

how did it get to be 5 why is this my life argh

im snooze

 

yeah he doesn't get that you heat the kettle up PAST hot and then add it to a WHOLE TUB of cold. he's only ever had hot baths prepared by servants, and i figured he'd be unclear on the mechanics (he probably mostly bathed when his dad was like OK YOU SMELL TOO MUCH LIKE HORSE AND DEAD BOAR, INTO THE TUB YOU GO). so he's confused about how one kettle of warm water would be enough for whole tub of warm bath. it was just a knowledge gap i thought would be kind of cute and appropriate, and confirm to jethro that he was definitely an ex-noble.

 

the map of ankh-morpork is an absolute joy to pour over and i really should buy it one of these days. here's a link: http://www.abload.de/img/255118afjku.jpg
and here's the zoning: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kYiiX7_i7...AMDw/Zx6iFx2UlcM/s1600/ankh-morpork_board.jpg

i suggest jethro's shop to be located somewhere between the street of cunning artificers and the dragon's landing redevelopment zone, especially if the redevelopment zone has been 'redeveloping' for about twenty years now. real estate pressure would be enormous in a walled citystate, and the citizens seem fairly belligerent, so i'd guess that survivors around the blast site would simply grab up the rubble and help themselves to some new lots for houses and shops, then get into a big legal fight with any official efforts to rezone the place, especially if official efforts would rezone the place into somewhere much more high-class and expensive. outcome: kind of a scrappy, working class neighborhood, even years later. though not service-class like dolly sisters and the scours, and not rip-your-head-off class like the shades.

ankh morpork's map was the rough seed of hemostuck's capitol, years ago. i really loved building that city...