Four more, on the other side

The morning's post said the Tearers were six Callings and not yet a side, because a side is more than the roles it offers: it is the peoples who belong to it, the rule that a character's side follows from its people, and a character screen that offers one side's Callings and not the other's. By the afternoon two of those three existed, and the third is a matter of drawing two buttons.

The peoples first, because that was the open question. The Weavers have four -- the Reedfolk, the Ashborn, the Deepbound and the Wanderers -- and the answer was to mirror them rather than invent beside them: the same four stocks, after the tearing. The Rotfolk were born to the marsh after the reeds died. The Ashgnawed are children of the burn who never rebuilt, and eat what the fire left. The Deeploosed were raised under stone and cut loose from it. The Strayed belonged to the road between places, and then the road forgot them. Each is drawn, in the same hand as the Tearer Callings, and each is a draft until a person paints over it.

Then the rule. Every people and every Calling now names its side in the database, and the service that creates a character refuses a Calling that is not of the people's side -- by name, so a client can say which of the two choices was the wrong one. The creation screen narrows what it offers to the chosen people's side, but the narrowing is a courtesy; the refusal is the rule, because a client is a client and the server answers for the world.

With a people behind the side, the six Tearer Callings went into the data too, and their abilities mirror the Weavers' number for number: the same cost, the same resource, the same cooldown, cast and range, read off the Weaver ability rather than typed a second time. A mirror, not a handicap, is a claim about balance, and the honest way to make it is to make it true by construction. What differs is what each does to the world: the Warden's calm is the Goader's stampede, the Binder's servant is the Unbinder's feral.

What is not done is the part a player would touch. The screen that creates a character has four tiles for peoples, which is one side's worth, and the button that chooses a side is drawn in code and not yet in the interface. And the starting region has to learn where four new peoples arrive, which is a change to the map itself. Both are content rather than code, and both are next.