Every Kind of Craft

If anyone is confused about yesterday's post, I should point out that I'm talking about version 3.5. Someone clearly noticed that when they were re-jigging to version 5 and tweaked the Prestidigitation spell so that it just cleaned one 30 cm cube worth of stuff per cast, rather than per round. There are many reasons why I like 3.5 better than 5, and this is a new one.

Anyway, yesterday was a day of finishing things. Most importantly, I finished the first draft of the book; it will require a full edit, and I also need to rewrite the ending significantly (the book starts with the death of the evil Lord Solgliss, and there are some really good plot reasons why it should end with the death of his widow, loth as I am to kill her off, because she's a really nice person who did not deserve to be stuck with Solgliss and his awful mistress for all that time), but I have at any rate got to the point where there is a readable story. Once I'd finished, it all rather caught up with me and I felt very tired, but now I already have plot bunnies chasing me for the next book in the series! I just had one spark of inspiration in January, and I had absolutely no idea it was going to turn into a trilogy. (No, I am not going to start on that yet. I have far too much else to do.)

I have also finished that terrifyingly intricate capital B - well, let me qualify that; I have finished copying the line art. I now have to paint it. Even so, that's a lot more than I thought I could do, so I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself. The painting starts today, and that won't be quick either, but at any rate I have the fine detail brushes to do it. I will not be using an identical colour scheme to the original, but it will probably be broadly similar.

And, as if all that wasn't enough, I also finished one string bag and one baby hat yesterday. Inevitably, there's now another string bag on the netting frame and another baby hat on the needles, because that never stops. But still, finishing one always feels good.

Today I've got a course assignment to finish. I think I can manage that!

There is a baby in this story. Quite an important baby, as it turns out.

Let's see if I can summarise briefly. Lord A took a mistress, B, who eventually became Lady B because Lord A managed to wangle her a title (mostly on false pretences). They had three children including a daughter, X, who, despite being illegitimate, was Lady X because both her parents had titles. Lord A then died, and his son immediately threw Lady B out of the house as she was a serious offence to his mother; this left Lord A's son as effective guardian to Lady X, along with his mother.

Meanwhile, a long way away, High Lord C and High Lady D, the regents of an important province, had twins, Lord Y and Lady Z. Lord Y was very slightly older than his sister, so he became heir to this province.

Lady X and Lord Y were both wild and badly behaved, so both sets of guardians had the same idea: send them to a monastery (this is a D&D monastery, of course, so it's what you'd probably call spiritual rather than religious - the important thing is it's very disciplined). The two aristocratic brats managed to escape from the monastery together, and they made for the capital city. At some point, Lady X got pregnant, and Lord Y promised to marry her.

Unbeknown to either of them, Lady B reached the capital before they did. She had tried to find her actual legal husband after being thrown out, but he was no longer on the Material Plane (and, besides, although he was a very kind man, he would not have taken her back after she was complicit in very nearly getting him killed); so instead she decided to go to the royal court and demand a dower house, given that she wasn't being allowed to live in the one on the late Lord A's estate. The King and Queen were a little puzzled by this, especially since they had recently heard information about Lord A's estate which conflicted with what she told them; so they did some investigations which ended with them decreeing that Lady B should not have been given the title. So she was not only stripped of the title, but, due to her behaviour while in the capital, ended up being put to work in the royal kitchens. That, in turn, meant that Lady X also lost her title, though she didn't yet know that.

Our party, for plot reasons, was looking for Lady X. They found her by means of spells, and simply waited at the east gate of the city until she and Lord Y walked through it, at which point they had to break the news to her that she was now just plain X and tell her what had happened to her mother. Lord Y promptly dropped her like a hot brick ("do you expect me to marry the daughter of a kitchenmaid?"). While X had caused the party a good deal of trouble, that still did not go down well, shall we say.

Needless to say, High Lord C and High Lady D were informed. They weren't worried about the simple fact that their son had got someone pregnant - had he taken full responsibility, it would have been fine; but they were very upset that he'd abandoned mother and baby like that. So they decided that Lady Z should now be the heir. Lady Z, however, could not have children, following a very difficult stillbirth which had almost killed her; so the obvious solution, which X was entirely happy with, was to have Lady Z and her husband adopt the child, keeping X as its nurse (her nurse, as we find out a little later). The succession therefore continues just as before, but bypassing the dastardly Lord Y.

So this is why the baby is so important; and, obviously, she now has to be transported from the capital city to the distant province, which could be up to six weeks' journey by carriage. And babies need nappies; and, while you can certainly wash nappies en route, what you cannot do is get them dry.

Enter the Prestidigitation cantrip.

Prestidigitation is one of the simplest and (ostensibly) least powerful spells in D&D. You can do minor illusions with it. You can clean things with it, so magic users never need to get their robes cleaned. You can colour or flavour small amounts of stuff with it. You can dry wet clothes if you've been out in the pouring rain. And so, of course, I thought... that's what they'll need to use; let's work out just how many terry nappies one cast of the cantrip is able to clean.

So I looked it up. One round in D&D is six seconds, and Prestidigitation, once cast, lasts for one hour. According to the manual, the spell will clean 1 cubic foot of stuff per round. All right, I am incapable of thinking in feet, so let's say 30 cm; that is pretty close. A 30 cm cube I can imagine.

Now, a terry nappy is not going to be more than 60 cm on a side, so if you fold one of those in four it will fit in a 30 cm square. Let's say that is 3 cm thick, at a reasonable guess. That means you can get ten of them into your 30 cm cube. You can clean 10 nappies every 6 seconds, so you can do 100 of them per minute. That means you can clean 6000 nappies during the time the spell lasts. That's... well, they're travelling in two carriages, but even so they're not even going to have room for 6000 nappies. (They decided in the end to bring three dozen.)

If you cast Prestidigitation yourself, it costs you nothing; however, if you cast it from a scroll, it costs you 12 gold pieces and 5 silver pieces (which is to say 125 silver pieces). So, for interest's sake, I worked out how much it would cost you in the D&D universe to have that many nappies washed in the normal way. You can hire an unskilled labourer, including a laundrymaid, for 1 silver piece per day (D&D, thankfully, does not have a gender pay gap). Assume your laundrymaids work 8 hours a day (again, they'd have worked much longer hours in a historical setting, but D&D generally assumes 8 hours), and it takes one laundrymaid, on average, 10 minutes to get a nappy properly clean, including the time taken to hang it up to dry. (Some nappies will inevitably take longer than others.) Do all the maths, and it turns out that that'll cost you... exactly 125 silver pieces. It's the same. You just have to wait longer for the turnaround.

I'm pretty sure nobody's ever worked that out before. But don't anyone tell me in future that Prestidigitation isn't extremely powerful for what it is!

We have a thing going on in the SCA at the moment called "100 Days A Scribe". It started in one of the transatlantic kingdoms (I can't remember which one - may have been Ealdormere, not sure), but it rapidly became worldwide, and it has its own dedicated Discord server. The idea is that you do some kind of scribal activity - whether actual calligraphy/illumination, research, making your own scribal materials, wordsmithing for a scroll, basically anything that falls under scribal - on each of 100 days throughout this year, which don't have to be consecutive (although I have managed consecutive so far, which is why I'm sitting at the top of the leaderboard along with a couple of other folks). We've got one person who's doing it solely at weekends, and that, obviously, is going to work. They'll get their 100 days in this year.

Now I am finding this extremely helpful, because, you see, I started copying a ridiculously ornate twelfth-century capital B. (I picked a B because I generally like to start scrolls off with the phrase "Be it known...", which covers all contingencies.) I mean, there's knotwork on the knotwork. It's so intricate I can't even look at the thing for more than about 10-15 minutes without boggling. I must have been crazy to pick that one; and, fairly naturally, I rapidly got very bored with it. But the scribal challenge is forcing me to do a few minutes on the wretched thing every day, and, as is the nature of these things, the end is now in sight. I've very nearly finished copying it.

I am doing this on 5 mm squared paper, the original intention being to trace it from there onto perg. That is clearly not going to happen. While you can easily trace a simple design through perg (I do believe the stuff contains actual magic, since you can still trace through it even when it's 230 gsm), there is no way you can trace something as intricate as this B. So plan B (appropriately) is that I stick it to the perg, hide the join with a very slightly raised gesso border, and paint it.

I have no gesso. I don't need a vast amount, so I'm not spending £20 on a big tub of the stuff. I'm going to make my own. I researched online yesterday (that was my scribal session for the day) and looked at a number of different recipes for it; and it turns out I can make a decent one that will do what I need it to do by dint of making a very small amount of starch paste (I have both potato starch and cornflour in the house, and it doesn't really matter which I use) and mixing that with a little titanium white acrylic paint, of which I have plenty. Indeed, I can make the paste, use that to stick the B to the perg, then add the paint to what is left to make the gesso. I think 2.5 ml of starch should be plenty. This is going to be one heck of a scroll blank.

And in other news, the party got collectively knighted yesterday (for disposing of a doppelganger which had infiltrated into the royal court and was therefore a serious threat), which meant they all had to choose heraldry and mottos. I had a vast amount of fun with Darg, as usual. Darg decided that his motto was going to be "I bash evil things", which is very typical of Darg - concrete and to the point. (It wouldn't occur to him to say he fought evil. Evil, as a concept, is too abstract for Darg. It's not something you can whack with a greatsword; you have to whack whoever is doing the evil.) The heralds pointed out that this was awkward to translate into "the old language" (naturally represented by Latin), and suggested using "smite" rather than "bash".

Darg didn't mind whether it was "bash", "smite", or indeed "wallop", but he did not want his motto translated into a language nobody could understand. He pointed out that it wasn't fair to expect evil creatures to go and learn Traditional Heraldic or whatever the language was called. He wanted them to be able to read the motto so they knew exactly what to expect. To this end, he was very happy for the heralds to put several translations under the motto, in languages such as Orcish, Goblin, Giant, Abyssal, and Infernal, to ensure that it could be read as far as possible.

There was only so much Darg-logic the heralds were capable of handling before their brains broke. They hastily agreed to leave the motto in Common (using "smite")...