The disc of Railan

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Daxion
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The disc of Railan

Post by Daxion »

"The round mistery"
by Holdoras Aleryn
This book is a collection of wisdom on the disc of Reilan, one of the most misterious known arkan artefacts. A great many speculations on the nature of the disc have been made, but the true character remains in the dark. There was once a time when every mage tower, every school of magic worshippers, and almost all Kings had a replica of one sort in their libraries. Those times are long gone, and it seems that the original disc has dissapeared into the shadows of history.

It seems to be clear that the disc was used in some kind of magic ritual. The disc itself does not seem to wield any magical powers itself, but must be some sort of description or guide to the acts of the ritual.
What ritual Railan has performed is not clear, many believe it was to create a weapon or be the weapon itself. But this is wishful thinking of those who want nothing but war and destruction.
The disc shows stars, and therefore a natural assumption is that the disc shows us the sky at night. This has lead some to say the disc is a kind of calendar.
Gazing into the night sky many have discovered that no stars in it, show the constallations shown on the disc. Some do believe that the disc marks a place by showing us what the night sky there has to look like. But at what time of year, and day. How do we construe center star? Is it the sun? We do not know. However, as my friend Naylen Waudom has pointed out, for both theories to work we would have to see some constallation shown on the disc in our very own sky.
railan.png
This is still a work in progress, comments are welcome.
I'm not happy yet with the names, if anybody has some nice ideas, just throw them my way. Same is true for other ideas.
I'm not a natural english speaker. I do believe the text can be improved (quite a bit). It suppost to resemble an (old) book found in a library (the royal wesnoth library perhaps?). I think the actually expressions might be way to modern.
The lines on the disc are not just made up, they mean something. I do hope to add some more text symbols or further nifty stuff, when I can figure out what would make sense on the disc. The colors are somewhat flat, I know, but I don't know how to improve that at the moment.
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melinath
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by melinath »

So you're writing a book that would be put in the Royal Wesnoth Library? Sweet! It would be great to know (just for our purposes) what exactly everything means, even if the theories in the book say something different.

Also, what time period is the book from?
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Daxion
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by Daxion »

The Idea is to create that artefact that, for simplicity reasons, I just call "the disc of railan". I think it is kinda boring to have artefacts that always have an ingame background (for example: The Hammer of Thursagan, The Scepter of Fire).
The book "merely" serves as giving the disc some background other than: look its beautiful. By making the disc well known, and not magic (but somehow important to a mage if he know how to use the information on it) it creates a nice contrast to the other magic artefacts/weapons that almost every mage knows how to use (or at least you get to use them in the campaigns) but are themselfs hard/impossible to find.

As for the background:
Since I want to keep open a possibility that someone can use it in a campaign, I'll keep vague at certain details, so that a campaign creator can still invent what he needs in his campaign.
Railan, possibly a powerful mage, created the disc for his own use. It is also possible that he did some (magical) research, and the disc is the result, but he himself was never able to actually put the results to real use.
Spoiler:
Railan should be a mage from a time long gone (maybe on the green isle?) since the only thing that we (that is the author of the book) still know about him, is that he created the disc. The book itself then will be rather old, but I do not have an idea what that means what time in Wesnoth that would be. After the landing of humans in Wesnoth (so after "The Rise of Wesnoth"), I would think. A bit like a book dated to 1900 on Troy (and if Hissarlik is actually Troy or not).
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Zigg
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by Zigg »

Good idea.

:-)
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melinath
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by melinath »

A couple points:
- If it is a pathway-maker, the chances of it being forgotten are fairly low - this would have great strategic importance, even if movement along it were limited to a single person. (Unless the spell is extremely complicated and only for one person... but even then.)
- If Railan was from the Green Isle (or earlier) then the script on the tablets would have to be different. The script you're using right now is from after TRoW.
- If it's like a Stargate, then there would either be a limited number of discs, or it would have to add points each time a disc was added. Would each point represent a disc? How do you know which one the disc you're holding is?

Great ideas! Keep it up!
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Daxion
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by Daxion »

melinath wrote:- If Railan was from the Green Isle (or earlier) then the script on the tablets would have to be different. The script you're using right now is from after TRoW.
Could you provide me with a link to a fitting script? Changing it isn't that much of a problem. Alternativly I can use a script "invented" by Railan (for example some sort of sign language)
melinath wrote:- If it is a pathway-maker, the chances of it being forgotten are fairly low - this would have great strategic importance, even if movement along it were limited to a single person. (Unless the spell is extremely complicated and only for one person... but even then.)
This is true, however I do have a couple of solutions in my mind:
-Railan was never able to pass this information on to somebody. He preferred to use it himself (or died to early, or both)
-The strategical value is much diminished. For example by having a random exit location. This would mean it would be useless in waging a war.
-Railan was only able to document the pathway system, without actually being able to use it himself. It is also possible, that for a successful traversal of the path one component is still missing (an spell, you need to cast to actually exit, if you are at the proper "location", or the solution to the maze, see below)
-movement might be restricted to one person (as already mentioned)
melinath wrote:- If it's like a Stargate, then there would either be a limited number of discs, or it would have to add points each time a disc was added. Would each point represent a disc? How do you know which one the disc you're holding is?
The disc is just a map (actually the map is still a maze). How to enter the maze, is not documented (on the disc, at least not currently. I'd be grateful if anybody has ideas on that...the disc still has a backside that could be covered with symbols lines and whatnot...)
Spoiler:
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melinath
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by melinath »

Daxion wrote:Could you provide me with a link to a fitting script?
Unfortunately, no. Esr had asked me to work on a pre-Wesnoth script, but I haven't gotten to it yet. :oops:
uzytkownik
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by uzytkownik »

melinath wrote: - If it is a pathway-maker, the chances of it being forgotten are fairly low - this would have great strategic importance, even if movement along it were limited to a single person. (Unless the spell is extremely complicated and only for one person... but even then.)
!
Well - imagine one civilisation which managed to create a paths between disks. It had strategic importance but it could be attacked locally. If the path needs to be maintained from both sides (like every day ritual) and traveling takes longer the reinforcements might never arrived. Other possibilities is epidemy or somthing like that (which killed the race of precursors/old ones or something like that).
AI
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by AI »

Did you all read what Daxion said? The disc isn't magical. It describes a frighteningly difficult maze that must be navigated inside an otherwise-useless portal to make it go somewhere.

So, to recap:
-There's a rather simple spell that creates a portal that doesn't seem to go anywhere
-Railan did a lot of research into this subject
-He managed to find out the topology of the pocket dimension that the portal gives access to, possibly including its exit. (that might also need to be summoned)
-He inscribed this on this disc
-Because the maze is so complicated (among other possible reasons), he never actually managed to use it
uzytkownik
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by uzytkownik »

AI wrote:Did you all read what Daxion said? The disc isn't magical. It describes a frighteningly difficult maze that must be navigated inside an otherwise-useless portal to make it go somewhere.
Ups. Sorry - I missed one post. However it still does not explain how the maze was created. Also why the disk look like star map?
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Zerovirus
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by Zerovirus »

Just stating how impressed I am with this. The graphics, backstory, idea, potential for UMC. So awesome. Wesnoth needs more fluff like this.
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Thrawn
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by Thrawn »

Holy O_O That sprites amazing zero!

As to your post, I agree. More of this would be cool.
*starts imagining campaign*
...please remember that "IT'S" ALWAYS MEANS "IT IS" and "ITS" IS WHAT YOU USE TO INDICATE POSSESSION BY "IT".--scott

this goes for they're/their/there as well
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StandYourGround
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by StandYourGround »

Woww... This is like a flashback of some of those mystery puzzle books with deep storylines I used to spend so much time on. I love it!

Now I'm going to lay awake all night dreaming up amazing stories of my own. Grr...
I will now resume lurking silently.
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Daxion
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by Daxion »

Zerovirus wrote:Just stating how impressed I am with this. The graphics, backstory, idea, potential for UMC. So awesome. Wesnoth needs more fluff like this.
Thank you.
StandYourGround wrote:Now I'm going to lay awake all night dreaming up amazing stories of my own. Grr...
Then I hope you have some good ideas along the way. This story is still mightily uncomplete.
AI wrote:It describes a frighteningly difficult maze that must be navigated inside an otherwise-useless portal to make it go somewhere.
Actually it is an easy maze, if you know how to solve it. However it requires a very different approach than normal mazes.
uzytkownik wrote:Also why the disk look like star map?
This is a very good question. The current answer is: because the rectangular version is not very fantasy like. Mages like stars. It seems fitting, it looks nice. However I agree, that there should be a good
explanation as to why Railan actually used a star-map like appearance. I begin to think that this might have to do with the way he figured out
the topology of the maze.
Spoiler:
This is a new version of the disc. It gets rid of the script issue. I now use a script that I made up based on Kaadamba script (5th century AD). This script is not a standard pre Wesnoth-script, but more of a script Railan and/or other mages used at the time of creation of the disc (probably on the green Isle)...(so it is pre-Wesnoth, just not standard pre-Wesnoth, probably very speciallised, just to get around any other issues with the script subject)
Things I'm currently not happy with:
-the center star (the small one in the middle) doesn't have any function
-the last blue circle is pretty empty

So far I wanted to leave the actual "mechanics" of the portal system open, but I feel I should explain/make up a bit more.
(this is a rough draft, of course it is up for debate):
Spoiler:
Zerovirus wrote:potential for UMC.
One of the restriction of using this disc in UMC (at least if you use the portal idea behind it), is that you have to explain how the "poral-knowledge" was found, and somehow find a way to forget them again (just one Mage knows how to do it, and he dies for example). Having such portals common knowledge would destroy the world. And once known, it would spread rather fast.
In other words, the UMC also needs to explain how the portal-knowledge wans "unfound", otherwise it'd be somehow incomplete.
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melinath
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Re: The disc of Railan

Post by melinath »

Destroy the world? Why?

Unfound: just need a Quest: destroy the discs and erase the knowledge to save the world!

Could you post the script you've used in the Wesnoth Scripts page? Maybe it would be ok for general use.
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