Characters in The Broken Hourglass have an almost unlimited ability to customize their spellbooks through the use of the Tinker Spell interface. A "tinkered" spell is one defined by the player, selecting from a menu of spell sources and effects and given a player-defined mana strength.

Tinkered spells may employ any number of the five elemental magic sources (Physical, Fire, Earth, Air, Water) and one or more of the following standard spell effects:

• Heal.
• Regenerate.
• Armor.
• Attribute Bonus.
• Damage.
• Repeating Damage.
• Life Drain.
• Lower Resistance.
• Attribute Penalty.
• Summon.

The Tinker Spell interface. This happens to be an Earth+Fire+Water Magic enchantment, causing Lower Resistance and Attribute Penalty effects, targeting all visible enemies.

The mana requirements for each spell effect are summed together, then multiplied by the target factor. In addition, a spell's base cost is multiplied by the number of distinct types of magic (e.g., Earth, Air) involved. Thus an Attribute Penalty spell with both Earth and Air costs twice as much mana as an Attribute Penalty spell with only Earth, but the first spell also inflicts twice as many penalties as the second one. Spells which affect an indiscriminate radius of targets are more expensive than those affecting just a single target, while spells which selectively affect all allies or all enemies have a still-higher multiplier. You may tinker a spell to use more mana than is strictly necessary, to create a spell with a greater potential effect.

Why tinker spells at all? Although your characters will start with a well-stocked spellbook containing many common and useful spells, there are so many different ways to combine these effects that we cannot possible account for them all. A character who specializes heavily in Air and Fire Magic may find it more beneficial to combine multiple damage sources into a single spell rather than alternating between airbolts and firebolts, for instance. Or such a character may wish to cast a single party-enhancing spell to boost strength and agility (from Fire and Air Magic, respectively) rather then split them up into separate casts. And as characters become more powerful, they may wish to devote more mana to a single spell than the default spells in the book specify.

Moonshine concludes this month. Klavel, junior partner in one of Mal Nassrin's illicit pitfighting rackets, is trying to find out why his former business associate met a violent end. Missed the earlier chapters, or our earlier serial On the Fly? See our complete list of serials here.

Moonshine
By Sonja Littell-Trotter
Chapter 4

"I thought I'd find you here."

I look up and see Roye leaning two doorways down on the opposite side of the street. "Good for you, Roye. Keep earning that Watch stipend," I say. The rain has slowed to something like a mist. It beads on my hair and face, feeling unpleasantly like somebody else's sweat.

He laughs. "I came to tell you that you had a tail trailing after you, my friend. But I guess a smart man like you doesn't need someone like me to tell him that." He sounds genuine. But who knows? I don't trust a smiling man any more than I do a crying woman.

"I hadn't noticed," I admit. "I can handle myself just fine, but thanks for looking out for the cripple." I hate the defensiveness I can hear in my voice.

"In your line of work you should be more careful, my friend," he says.

"Gods, Roye, my own ma didn't scold like you do," I tell him and make my way down the street. "I don't make any man fight that doesn't want to."

Roye crosses the street, falls into step beside me. "You hold life cheap."

"I don't think life is cheap. I think sometimes life is cheap."

Halima is one of the characters who may join your party in The Broken Hourglass.

I cannot put off nominating that new senior assistant any longer-that insufferably smug Badem remains the most qualified, although I fear I might shove him off a cliff as soon as entrust him with anything important. But the position must be filled, as my Chief Assistant, H. Phaenon, has decided to spread her wings and fly.

(Did I just write that? Age rears its ugly head in many forms, it would seem. I had not expected trite metaphor to be one of them.)

Yes. Halima is gone, leaving tomorrow for Mal Nassrin, wherever that is. Never to return? I doubt that. The same easily-given affection and near-depthless capacity for sentiment which urges her to her birth family will bring her back to us in time. Probably far less than is average for those on Tour.

They all have it difficult, these young men and women. No matter what they recall, or what word their correspondences bring from the mainland, they invariably have an impossible, distorted view of what Tour means for them. Halima, I suspect, will find it more trying than most. She will seek anyone and everyone who was a part of her life before her training here, and whether they find her over- or underwhelming, they will not, and cannot, be what she expected. And oh, how Halima hates unmet expectations, most of all her own failure to meet them. As many years as she has worked under my tutelage, it never ceases to amaze me how she can project such a calm air of rationality one moment and the next, explode, a ball of nerves and emotion. As if, unsure what the best response to a given problem would be, she decides to try them all, to show how earnestly engaged she is in the situation.

On the fourth Monday of each month, we explore the code underneath The Broken Hourglass, the game environment called "WeiNGINE." This month, we look at the _encounter function, a way to quickly generate semi-random, tailored groups of creatures.

WeiNGINE can generate and place creatures in numerous ways. We have already discussed the placement of static creatures in an earlier installment of our engine tutorials. Any CREATURETEMPLATE may also be deployed at will, any number of times, using the _create_creature command. It is possible to customize a creature as it is generated with selective attribute upgrades, but a more convenient and automated way to do this is the _encounter statement.

_encounter provides an extremely powerful and flexible system to generate anything from random, "wandering monster"-type encounters, to heavily customized variations on established creature types. As such, it can be useful both for incidental combat situations, as well as for planned, "fixed-piece" encounters which simply could benefit from scaling or on-the-fly flexibility. _encounter can create one or more instances of a creature, from one or two CREATURETEMPLATEs. This means _encounter can be used to build a random encounter of "pick one of these six monsters, make four of them, and send them after the party", or to build a "Unique 'captain' and pack of soldiers" fight.

For purposes of illustration, we will stick with something simple—a comfortable cliché, even—a fight with giant spiders. Our sample spiders have a CREATURETEMPLATE which looks like this:

<<<<<<<< creaturetemplate/spider
<xml>
<Name value=~Spider~/>
<Appearance value="spider"/>
<Starting_Item value="bite"/>
<Strength value="10"/>
<Agility value="20"/>
<Toughness value="10"/>
<Health value="20"/>
<Brawl_Precision value="10"/>
<Movement value="10"/>
<Cannot_Loot value="0"/>
<Cannot_Manipulate value="0"/>
</xml>

The function arguments for _encounter make quite a formidable list—as most of them are optional and not strictly necessary to create a garden variety encounter, we will not exhaustively discuss each one.

Here goes. Don't be frightened.