Ride the Giants Development Blog, Part 2
This matters not only in general gameplay but because theinitial concept of the game was ‘a game in real time’; an adventure lasting twoto three hours, with a gaming session lasting the same two to three hours.
There would be some, but little, compression of time. Thetime-limit was meant to add impetus to the PCs choices and get them makingdecisions faster. It was also meant to add a bit of interest and challenge tothe choices made.
Estimating the Gait
I began by asking people on Discord for advice onestimating the gait of the giants. That is, when one takes a step, how long isthe step.
If they stood up straight, the Giants are nearly 3,000feet high. Hunched over as they are their heads are about 2,000 feet high. So Istarted with the step-length of an imaginary 3,000 foot high man. Using variousmysterious means, including reverse-engineering an equation used by the policeto derive height from step-length, the Discord homies came back with a steplength of just under 1,300 feet per-step.
That’s just under 400 metres per step or a little under aKilometre per double-step.
The Chronology of a Step
Estimating the timing of each step is moredifficult. Giants of this size are physically impossible anyway. Largelong-legged animals have to take care of their steps as they can easily breaktheir own legs with their weight.
I essentially just ended up eyeballing it. Each steptakes roughly a minute and a half. 90 seconds.
10 to 15 seconds at the start for the weight to rise andthe foot to accelerate, then 30 seconds in the air, then another 10 to 15seconds landing time for the weight to fall, the foot to settle, and weight tobe transferred through the hip to raise the other foot.
I estimate the Giants are is moving roughly 14.4 feet persecond. Which makes I think its total movement being just under 10 miles perhour.
This sounds.. really not totally insane. Like areasonable synthesis of the impossible and pseudo-realism.
A good one-to-three rounds of slow-foot time for you toleap up and grab on. A big "whoosh" as you travel 400 meters in 30seconds. Then the settle time at the end.
So a human could run away from it, someone on horsebackcould run faster than it. It could be 'boarded', but with real difficulty asthe foot is only slow and close to the ground for not that long. To match theirspeed a human would need to be jogging or running. To overtake you would needto run pretty fast or have a horse.
And a continuous 10 mph walking speed sustained essentiallyforever, would be very hard to keep up with for a long period of time I think?
Boarding the Giant
If you were trying to ‘board’ a giants foot, you couldprobably catch up with it, via sprinting, or if you had a horse. The reallydangerous part would be when the foot comes down. If the giant trod down ontosomething like the soil of a field, it might send up fountains of soil like animpact crater all around the foot. If the soil was wet or the water table washigh, it might send up actual fountains or more likely, dangerous torrents ofwet mud.
In the area around the foot-fall it would be like anearthquake hit. The earth might crack open, or roll like waves. Horses mightbreak their legs and men would fall to the ground.
If you survive all that, you have about 15 seconds at theweight of the foot settles and transfers where it will be relatively still.
All you need to do is get to the huge curved wallof the foot, I estimate it to be about a 100 foot climb, but you don’t need tomake it immediately, just hang one, hang on hard.
Because that foot is going to rise up into the air. Itslateral speed at its going to be about 15 miles an hour during the swing of thefoot but its speed measured across the whole of its curve till it hits soil onthe next step might be more like 20 miles per hour.
Not insanely fast. But jarring as hell. Plus theangle of its motion is constantly curving and shifting.
What Strait do they Cross?
Depending on if or how much time we leave fororganisation the actual giant-riding part of the game might range from one anda half hours to three hours. Lets assume two hours of actual giant-riding.
Assuming ‘real time’ that means the Giants would travelabout 20 miles.
The idea of the game is that you only have the length ofthe game itself to solve the problem of the giants – by the end of the gamethey will have reached the Nightmare Continent and if you get off the giantafter that you are DOOMED
Looking for real-life places of roughly the rightdimensions the first that comes to mind is the Dover strait.
Between Dover and Calais is almost exactly 20 miles
But nowhere near deep enough – its only 50 meters deep!
That’s only 164 feet! About up to the giants Knees!
Well I suppose it’s acceptable – in their hunched overposture their knuckles will be grazing the ocean surface as they walk. It alsogives the PCs a fair amount of time to get up over the knee. Though if they arestill dicking about with that half-way through the mission is probably failedanyway.
Climbing the Giants
There are several problems; the linear nature of thedirectional choices on a larger scale, the curved, flowing and non-intuitivesurface of the giant and the shifting position and orientation of the limbs.
The Linear Nature of the Choices
The main problem here is that the arrangement of thegiants limbs is very much not like a dungeon. There are only a few routes andrisks. Large parts are semi-visible from various points.
Most of a limb-climb is just getting up that limb, and to make the adventure interesting at allI would need to make actually falling off relatively rare. Instead I would haveto produce something like the climbing in VotE; everyone can do it a bit andfailure leads to ever more nightmarish fail-states without ever quite booting youoff.
Once a climb is begun, the route-choice is largely madeand any tension or interest comes morefrom how challenges are met than what they will be.
The Curved and Flowing Surface
Lets Envisage the Giants Skin -What is this like? A curved,slightly-flexing, rocky surface. Even ‘smooth’ parts are like a rocky, and infact most of the giants skin is deeply corrugated.
If you look down at the skin around your knuckles. If youmake a claw with your hand so the skin bunches up there, all those littletriangles and oblongs of skin where the lines of compression meet and cross. Imagethat as a karstic landscape, but much more wrinkly – like a very old personsskin, and much deeper in its corrugations.
Smooth parts – like a cobblestone road, but with the cobblesjagged and not smoothed.
Intermediate parts – like clambering over or uplarge boulders.
Very Crinkly parts – like clambering over and throughsharp man-sized or larger boulders
Which tilt and grind together or apart – big enough thatthe gaps make an ‘interior of sorts.
So the smooth parts are actually very easy to fall off& quite dangerous while the rough parts where the limbs meet – the crinklyplaces of our own bodies, are relatively safe – even though they are moving andflexing, there are many holds and handholds and spaces where you can placeyourself to avoid falling off (these might be dynamic holds though).
But, maybe if I think about the actual shape and detailsof each part of the leg, arm and side, and think deeply about how each mightmove I could come up with some general ideas or abstract some rules which wouldhelp to form encounter spaces, or interesting encounter ideas?
The Shifting Gravity
The limb orientations are shifting regularly fromnear-vertical to sloped, from climb to overhang, or from climb to scramble.
Will you wait for the position of the limb to change - itcould shift from overhang to climb, or from climb to scramble and the potentialdanger of an opposing encounter might grow larger or smaller if you arewilling, or able, or forced to, wait.
So that idea of having to make up, lose or gain timefeels appropriate.
OR - you hear movement, or sense something above you, andif you wait you might be able to get a better look - but that will cost youtime.
TIMING – if this is ‘real-life’ timing then there couldbe a metronome or something. Or you could time the giants steps minute byminute.
I don’t know if someone’s done this before but if each 90seconds is a real-life round and an in-game round, a single step of the giant. Couldit be made to work? You would have to roll fast!
Climbing a map of the muscle groups
Another possibility is - making some kind of map of theMUSCLE GROUPS of the limbs and making THAT a sub-map of each ascent.
like you can LEAP from one muscle group to another toavoid an encounter.
POSSIBLE DANGEROUS CLIMBING ENCOUNTERS
These could be quite minor - the main danger is that theycould drop you. They should also be 'rock beasts', cliff beasts really. (Ididn’t put pigeons in as they suck.)
Seagull-Griffons; micro-Griffons based on seagullheads and wings but with the bodies of racing dogs. That sounds sufficientlyawful.
Goats
Condor-Riding Snow Monkeys – they bathe in the hotsprings atop the giants backs and form a symbiotic relationship with thesemi-intelligent condors, travelling on their backs and performing tasksinvolving fine motor control – they can crack open bones with flints andactually they have learned to work in close co-operation with the condors, the monkeyscan pull open flaps of skin, bare muscle, expose the joints of dead animals,brace cutting surfaces and put flesh under tensile strain so it cuts moreeasily.
SUPER-TICKS – these feed upon the giants magmicblood. [The giants are tectonic inside so their ‘spots’ or pimples might bepopping lava and their sweat might be steam or thick bubbling oils. A walkingmountain has to be generating a pretty serious amount of heat. The giants back– hot, even steaming, would carry a moving column or a trailing flag of hot airabove and behind it, a layer or a stream of cloud following each of them like apennant in the atmosphere as that pillar of air rises, cools and probablycondenses. The heat of the giants would make them of much more fecund than manyother forms of similar mountain.] The blood does cool quite a bit in them butit’s still pretty hot and dangerous. Plus this is still a tick as big as a manor maybe horse.
Animated magical kites that won't die - These werethe creation of some ancient empire of magicians far away who wanted to studythe giants – the kites were so well made they have a basic self-repair functionand can weave the substance of cloud into solidity to act as canvas or waxedpaper to sustain them – the kites are more like solid memes, or paper golems,semi-intelligent but not really alive, men can ride them but their actions maybe very unpredictable – possibly they will obey commands in the language of thelong-dead wizards. They might do slightly bonkers A.I. stuff based on garbledcomprehension of their original instructions.
