A Lego Project, Among Others
My 365-day weekend continues. Aside from playing too much Animal Crossing, I’ve also been working on games, fiction, business planning, and Lego projects. Let’s begin with the Lego.
Last year I built the Tree House kit, #21318 (view the original here). Even as I was putting it together, I knew I would someday want to tear this model apart and convert it into an airship. The set has lots of great ship details (and plenty of wood) and is clearly a “Swiss Family Robinson” kit.
Last month I finally decided which airship this would be. It’s the Skylark from Carrisor.
To catch you up: I’ve been crafting three different fantasy worlds over the last few years, as settings for games. Two of these worlds have airships. Actually, Dew Point has loads of airships, but Carrisor has only one. I needed to learn more about the Skylark, so I did what I often do in these situations: I built her.
The AV Skylark is a 92-foot lighter-than-air caravel, constructed secretly at the shipyards in Meere. It is held aloft by dozens of lift pods, or “kettels,” which are magical floating spheres. These kettels are arranged in 22 “hands” of roughly 12 pods each, distributed throughout the underside of the ship’s reinforced main deck, and they can be accessed from the lift deck below, which is also the cargo hold. The lift deck includes a winch and two loading doors, and the hull has six retractable landing talons.
The Skylark doesn’t use sails for propulsion, but does have some canvas used for steering. Some of these sails are fixed, and some can be trimmed from the helm, where the pilot stands beneath an awning called the tiller’s cope, just one of many details carried over from contemporary sailing vessels. The ship’s primary method of propulsion is “leaning-to,” which is a redistribution of lift caused by raising the strength of some hands of kettels, while turning down others. The ship tends to lean as it moves, moving like a massive helicopter. When used properly, the sails can compensate for this. Unfortunately, almost no one aboard the Skylark is a sailor of any kind. And the crewman who knows her best has been confined to quarters.
Our heroes take over the Skylark after a long series of adventures I’ve dubbed “season one.” Originally, this story was conceived as a TV series (actually, as a parody of a TV series), which in turn was the backdrop for a card game. In the course of plotting out the first season, I realized that the team would coalesce and end up with the airship towards the end of the first story arc, setting them up for a new set of adventures in Season 2. Or maybe the entire pre-Skylark story is told in flashbacks. I really don’t know yet.
This Lego model is clearly a bit janky, and that’s because I limited myself to using only the pieces in the tree house. I may someday build a better Skylark, with white canvas, proper flags, more consistent coloration, and less-ugly landing gear. But the real goal of this model was to learn more about the ship, and for that job it works fine.
At the risk of burying the lede, here’s a quick update of some other irons I have in the fire.
Here All Week with Kelly and James: I make a podcast inspired by the pandemic, with my friend Kelly Wright! We manage to release a new episode almost every week, and we just recorded number 32. Join us anytime for a lighthearted half hour of news, trivia, and sometimes a funny fake ad. Get the latest episode here.
Gloria Mundi: I mentioned this game in this blog post in August, but failed to write a post when I actually uploaded it in November. Apparently all I could muster was a tweet. Anyway, here’s the product page for Gloria Mundi with all the details and links, including Print-and-Play and Tabletop Simulator versions.
After the Fog: I am currently working on a new public beta of After the Fog. The game is fun, but it still needs balancing, and my group isn’t big enough to do that. To create this version, I just need to replace the “borrowed” art in my current version with some copyright-free images. Because I can’t tolerate a game with blank cards. This conversion will take about a week, so I should have a Tabletop Simulator version ready by mid-December.
Patreon: In January I hope to (finally) launch a Patreon for Crab Fragment Labs. Essentially, this will be a newsletter subscription, designed to make it easier for fans to follow all the things I’m doing, and help you tell me what you’d like to see next. Since I actually have no idea what I’ll be doing in 2021, I think this sounds like a great plan.
Animal Crossing: If you would like to visit my Animal Crossing island, the dream code is DA-1442-5888-2116, Crab Cay. You will find a tiny Epcot Center, a Willy Wonka house, a nine-hole mini-golf course, a Starbucks everywhere, and many other surprises. I work on this island literally all the time, and I push a new dream update every few days. Because really, nothing helps pass a never-ending weekend like building your own private island in a video game.
World Building: If you’d like to learn more about the worlds I’m creating, two of them already have their own pages at World Anvil, with character descriptions, history, maps, and more. And the third is coming soon. Here are links:
Carrisor: An epic fantasy setting where the Skylark flies. These pages are actually a bit old, so they don’t yet say anything about the Skylark or her crew. But there are lots of characters from the game!
Dew Point: The medieval-with-airships setting of After the Fog. These pages are just a bit more developed than Carrisor but still pretty stark.
Vinlant: This world has no Wold Anvil page yet. It is a colonial-era “wizards school” setting with magic and politics. I already have maps and even short stories in Vinlant, just waiting to be posted.
Crab Fragment Cay: Bonus world! This is just a stub right now, but Crab Fragment does indeed have its own page at World Anvil. It’s an island in a fictionalized Caribbean, related to the setting for Littlebeard.
Chances are good that you will see some short fiction from me in the next few months, because writing stories doesn’t require a regular group of playtesters. Who knows, if the pandemic drags on long enough, I might even write a whole book!
