Writing Books: How To

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Delia
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Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2005 11:22 am
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Writing Books: How To

#1 Post by Delia » Fri Apr 03, 2009 8:17 am

(This is a scribe guild advertisement)

One of the most niftiest features of Geas, the current book system is truly wonderful. For you to start writing your own books you need feathers, some ink, an empty book, and a room with a bookshelf.

Remember to read help books and help editor beforehand!

There are two kinds of books. Books that can be studied for learning bonuses towards a certain skill or 'regular' books with just the stuff you write in it. Reading and studying a book will increase the skills needed, that is the font and the language the book is written with. A regular passable font skill is around 40.

You'll start with the command "write 'title'" after which you will be asked your signature and what the book is about. Should you write a learnbook you'll write the name of the desired skill here.

Other choices involving books are choosing the font, language, level and illustrations. Level(easy, medium, complex) of the book determines how hard it is to read it, that is, how hard your character made the book to read. You should bear your subject matter in mind when choosing this as you can make books impossible to read for characters with low skill. If you have superb skills your writing is easier to read. With learnbooks it is a bit different matter. The difficulty determines how much of your knowledge you write in the book, that is, up to which point the book gives a learning bonus.

Now that you have chose the title you will be again presented with choosing a font, page, language, level and illustrations. You can choose different settings for each page. Bear in mind though, that if you started to write a learnbook the initial choices before entering this step hold true for the first page! That is, you cannot change that later. Usually it is better to leave the first page of learnbooks without text. You can, however, add illustrations to your liking.

Few things to keep in mind:

All illustrations are shown first and as expected, they do not require any skill to "read" correctly so try not to write any elaborate texts as illustrations. The choice between ASCII art and pure descriptions is solely yours.

When writing a learnbook it can be tempting to just to leave it as it is, that is, having the book without any actual text and still having the powers granted by the code. It is immensively rewarding to actually write about the subject the book teaches about though. You don't have to be an expert and errors are perfectly allowed(no character is perfect after all). With the tools the internet provides you can access a wealth of information regardless of the subject, for example just google it or try wikipedia.

Remember that you do not have to actually finish your book the first time you start to write it! You can always come back to it and "edit book".

Books have "ownersigns"(creator of the book) that determine who can handle the book. That is, only the 'owner' can edit the book.

Hmm...guess this is it for now, while all of this being quite commonsensical someone just might appreciate this. If not, hopefully this has atleast some value as an ad :P
"To be is to do" - Sokrates
"To do is to be" - Jean-Paul Sartre
"Do be do be do" - Frank Sinatra

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Desiderea
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Re: Writing Books: How To

#2 Post by Desiderea » Mon Aug 03, 2009 3:44 pm

Also, when it asks you what you want your alias to be, it is asking for what name you want for the author. I.e. put "So-and-so" if you want "A book" by "So-and-so". I did not understand that the first time and ended up with an oddly named book... :)

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