Apparently it is always pajama party time in Tel Vos or something. I don’t know why, but whenever I write the scripts for these comics, people end up in their pajamas. I guess it highlights the fact that Steen never leaves Tel Vos and basically lives there. Also, I thought it would be hilarious if Master Aryon wore one of those nightcaps that you always see in cartoons but nobody actually wears anymore.
Right. Recursive alchemy. We’ve all done it, just to see what would happen, of course. And we’ve all taken it to an extreme. By the end of my experiment, my intelligence was astronomically high, and the potions wouldn’t wear off for a kabillion hours or something like that. It was really more of a curse.
I made a strength potion, and it made me super strong! But I was so strong that as soon as I would strike a monster, my katana would break. The monster would die instantly, of course, but I’d have to repair the katana. And as soon as I’d repaired it, some other monster would come by, and bam! One strike later, my trusty katana would be broken again. I was so strong, I could no longer meaningfully interact with objects hewn by mere mortals!
I made a levitation potion. But I would levitate so fast, that gently moving forward would launch me on a complete circuit of the planet in a second. So I couldn’t really move or go anywhere, there was no finesse or control.
I made a personality potion. But then everybody loved me, even bandits, and nobody would ever attack me for any reason so it was very boring. I’d go into some dungeon and all the ne’er-do-wells would look up in glee at my arrival. “Oh my gosh, it’s Steen! Oh wow, she is soooo cool, I want to hang out with her!” Come on, you can’t attack people after that!
Pretty much most of the potions I tried were disasters. But it struck me that shooting your intellect into the stratosphere – shattering your mind by forcing the transcendent awareness of a god into your puny mortal meat brain – sounded like a very Telvanni thing to do.
I’d recently been studying Rune Staves and how they were used as perpetual calendars on the 19-year Metonic Cycle, and I got to wanting to make my own.
The idea is pretty simple: three rows convey all the information you need.
The middle row depicts all the days in a year by repeating the first 7 runes of the Younger Futhark ~52 times. So kind of like F U ᚦ A R K H F U ᚦ A R K H etc (in Younger Futhark, th is a single character represented as ᚦ). Or, if we did it using the Latin alphabet, it would be A B C D E F G repeated ~52 times. Keep in mind that this is just a convenient way to split the year into chunks of 7, it does not represent days of the week! Because, for example, Monday will not always fall on the same day every year.
The top row has illustrations that indicate which of the days are “feast days” or “good days” or “evil days” or whatever else special days they’d want to indicate.
The bottom row has all the letters of the Younger Futhark (plus 3 “bonus runes” made for this purpose) to represent the golden numbers 1 – 19. So, depending on where you are in the 19-year cycle, you look and see wherever that year number appears in the “golden numbers” row, that is when there will be a full moon. According to the Metonic Cycle, the moons fall the same day every 19 years.
To summarize the three rows:
Keep in mind that the golden numbers are not in order 1 – 19 on the staff, however. Based on when the moons occur, the order of the golden numbers is actually:
19
8
16
5
13
2
10
18
7
15
4
12
1
9
17
6
14
3
11
Also keep in mind that not every day has a golden number assigned to it! I guess not every day was cut out to have a full moon fall on it.
I wanted to get the full pattern so I could make my own, but all the photos of rune staves were segments, and they did not show one complete cycle of the 19 golden numbers, so I could not recreate the whole pattern! Until I found the piece MS 2913. This is a calendar drawn in Norway in 1636 which is apparently a sort of rune staff inspired / parchment calendar hybrid. They use the Latin letters ABCDEFG instead of the runes FUᚦARKH, and use a different numbering system for the golden numbers (not runes), and they also include the days of the month (which traditional rune staffs did not have), but the whole idea is represented there with the three rows serving the same purpose.
To save you the trouble, I have “translated” MS 2913 into something that I find more easily readable, so that I can begin to make my own rune staff:
The Norwegian calendar from 1636 translated into an Excel Spreadsheet
You should notice a couple of things. First, that the golden numbers 19 and 8 alternate every other cycle between having a gap between them and having no gap between them. Second is that the golden number pattern is (gaps represented by ‘-‘):
*This gap alternates between being there and not being there
I looked up a 2017 full moon calendar, and found that this calendar from 1636 totally accurate for 2017, and that we are currently on golden number year 18 in the cycle! I thought that was super cool. There were some days that the modern calendar predicted as being 12AM on the next day as predicted by MS 2913, which is I think due to daylight savings time shenanigans (I couldn’t find a full moon calendar not in daylight savings time, alas), but that I found to be an acceptable failing.
Then I looked up a 2018 full moon calendar, and compared it to the golden number 19 cycle on MS 2913, but unfortunately there were a few days in the second half of the year that were 2 days off – no longer could this be explained away with daylight savings time. This is hardly surprising, apparently every 300 years the rune calendars need to be adjusted by a day. What was really surprising was that it was 100% accurate at predicting 2017’s full moons!
So then I thought that, if I wanted to make my own rune staff, I would want it to be accurate for beyond 2017, so I tried to lay out my own rune staff. I’m thinking I’ll put my own “feast days” on it, like my birthday and Doc’s birthday and our anniversary and my siblings’ birthdays, along with some of the old feast days that I can find from photos of old rune staffs.
Again, there’s the issue with the daylight savings shenanigans, and I couldn’t find lunar calendars that always agreed with each other, but overall I checked this layout against every single full moon calendar from 2017 – 2050 and it is never more than a few hours off (which, recall, according to where those hours fall might predict the full moon a “day” early or late, but that’s it). I might tweak it some more before I actually carve it into a piece of wood, and of course my staff will have actual runes carved into it, but for laying it out I find using Arabic numerals and Latin characters the easiest (because that is what Excel supports). I also will not include month names or days of the month on my rune staff, because I want it to be very traditional, but I’ll admit those were very handy for quickly checking its accuracy against those online full moon calendars.
What I don’t like about this layout vs MS 2913 is there appears to be no consistent pattern, the gaps seem random and move around everywhere. I might have to study the Metonic Cycle a bit more to see how to get it updated for modern time, but still have a predictable spacing to the golden numbers. I dunno. It might also be weird spacing to accommodate leap years, which apparently the rune staffs did not traditionally account for. Despite the chaos this layout does seem to work very well for a very long time.
Feel free to use this layout for your own rune staffs, and/or tweak it to make it better, etc:
My tweaking of the spacing of the golden numbers to more accurately predict future full moon cycles
But, even though the spacing is chaotic, notice that the order of the numbers is preserved. The order should always be the same.
Hopefully this gives everybody enough understanding to make their own rune staves! And happy golden number 18 year!
I drew a comic based 100% on real, actual (Morrowind) events. I’ve also written a prelude to it because I think those events were hilarious as well. At least everybody in Morrowind is so cynical that nobody even pretends the guards do anything other than participate in an exploitative system that does nothing to deter actual crime.
Steen was tired and beat-up and dusty from trekking all across Morrowind. She was feeling bad about always crashing at Aryon’s place, and besides the local inn was closer, so she went in and asked to get a room for the night. She paid the innkeep 10 golden drakes.
“Alright,” he said, “the room is yours for the day!”
“Cool!”
“To get to your room, you just have to go down the first flight of stairs on your right,”
“Uh-huh”
“Then at the bottom, go 10 doors down, and go through the first door on your left after that,”
“Okay”
“Then, you head down that corridor, and go 10 paces until you get to 3 more doors,”
“Hold on, I think I better be writing this down or something…”
“Then go through the eastern-most door, and immediately turn left,”
“Uhh…”
“Then you will be at the part of the inn we all like to call ‘The Maze'”
“Oh god”
“Go up a half-flight of stairs at the end of the hall, and there will be 5 doors on each wall. Face to the West, and your room is through the door directly in the middle.”
“Is there a room number or something?”
“No room numbers.”
“Can you… can you walk with me to my room?”
“Sorry, no, I gotta stay and keep bar here. Can’t have those ruffians drinking all my sujamma without paying for it!”
Steen followed the directions to the best of her recollection. The inn was HUGE, and all the rooms looked totally identical.
“Well, I’m pretty sure this is the right room. Besides, I don’t think anybody would care if it isn’t, none of these rooms are being used.”
She put down her pack and put on her pajamas. She could feel her eyelids growing heavier at the promise of a nice, soft bed. So soon! She pulled back the covers, and started to crawl into the bed.
“YOUR CRIME HAS BEEN REPORTED!” shouted a guard from somewhere down the hall.
“Huh, I wonder who they’re arresting, I didn’t see anybody else down here”
Suddenly, Steen saw two guards bolting toward her at break-neck speed. They grabbed her and pulled her out of the bed before she could even close her eyes.
“You filthy fetcher! You didn’t pay for this bed! YOUR bed is over there!” the guard gestured at the room next door.
“Well, I think you can see how somebody could make this mistake…” Steen explained, kind of thinking the whole thing was a prank.
“All I see is a mouthy little outlander who thinks she can come to Morrowind without bothering to learn the local customs, and just be a hooligan all day!”
“I… now hang on!”
“Quiet, n’wah!”
“OK look, I’m cooperating, alright? Can I just send a message to Master Aryon? I’m supposed to be gathering ingredients for some experiment of his, and if I’m going to jail he should know about it, so he can plan the experiment around that or something.”
“Master Aryon?? You’re Aryon’s protege??”
“Yeah…”
“Holy shit, that dude is loaded!”
“Can I just send my message…”
“Sit over there, and keep quiet!”
The guards huddled together and spoke in low voices.
“She said she’s running some errand for an experiment, right? Well, if we lock her up and she gets delayed, probably all of Aryon’s… frog tongues or whatever will spoil, and his experiment will be delayed! When he finds out it was all because we arrested his protege, he’ll take it out on us!”
“OK, new plan. Instead of taking her to the clink, we bring to Aryon’s place, and try to ransom her off for some of that sweet, sweet Telvanni gold.”
“Yea, we’d be doing him a favor! But… what if he decides he’d rather blast us into Oblivion than pay up?”
“OK, if it looks like he’s going to blow us up or whatever, then we tell him that we just wanted to escort her home safely, and we’re letting her off with a warning.”
“Got it. Good plan.”
The guards turned back to Steen and raised their voices for her to hear, “Get up Outlander, you’re coming with us!”
Apparently it is always pajama party time in Tel Vos or something. I don’t know why, but whenever I write the scripts for these comics, people end up in their pajamas. I guess it highlights the fact that Steen never leaves Tel Vos and basically lives there. Also, I thought it would be hilarious if Master Aryon wore one of those nightcaps that you always see in cartoons but nobody actually wears anymore.
