World Building: The Details

Over on Tales From The Great Sea I started something I thought to be cool: dedicate posts to a single character from the Swords of Fire Database. With over 6,000 characters I could write a post every day for nearly twenty years.

It was a good idea, but on just my second randomly generated character I discovered I am going to need some of the unfinished work I have. So, as I indicated there, I am returning to my extremely detailed work in determining military structure for 6,000+ people over 3-1/2 centuries.

Also hope to get some job assignments completed.

The database contains 48 tables of information. The one table, tblYearlyArchive, contains a record for every character in the database for every year of their life. There are 541,348 records. Let me tell you that was fun to generate.

That is the key table for what I'm working on now: Military Assignments Through History. Most of the records don't matter as they refer to years when characters were too young, or too old. But I'm still left with a considerable number to weed through. For instance, I have completed four of the thirteen groups: Arts, Crops, Healers, and Defense.

Arts: .. 22,328 records
Crops: . 45,658 records
Healers: 23,643 records
Defense: 58,279 records

These records need to grouped into groups. I need to know where all military aged characters were in any given year. So the groups will be by village (29 villages) and year. That's the easy part. I should be able to complete that within a week or so. From then on it gets complicated. I have to monitor each character to know when they had children. You see, the family has a formal law in place: No parent can serve in the military if they have children age five or younger. Further, at least one parent must remain home with children until they reach the age of sixteen. This creates a significant complication in that children are being born every year and ALL Defense members are part of the military all their lives. I have to separate their active service from their home duty, and know when they can return to active service, which most of the best warriors (and all of the Defense warriors) will do.

It's incredibly fascinating, actually. Doing this seems to make the Swords of Fire history so very real. I can go to any year right now and tell you who was born, who died, who got married, where everyone lived - to the house. I'm now in the process of adding military history to this instant knowledge. And jobs.

Incredibly fascinating.

Really.