I don’t have an intuitive sense of how long a cubit is, but I know it’s a real unit of measurement, and if I go to Wikipedia I can put in “cubit” and the information I need will come right up, which is a benefit that “ammat” doesn’t have. I guess I’m with Drew on the value of a clean internet search, although I don’t mind a footnote or tooltip either.
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(In good humour of course. I think a cubit is finger to elbow? I could be completely wrong, lol. That’s what I recall from reading Horrible Histories 7 years ago.)
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For what it’s worth, I thought a cubit was the length from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger and had no standard and that a sheckle was a unit of currency… granted, I might have heard sheckle in the context of a sheckle of silver and in a time when precious metals were used as currency directly.
But yeah, the Mesopotamian units are so exotic they might as well be entirely made up while cubit and sheckle impart an ancient times flavor.
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Yep! A cubit originated as the distance from elbow to fingers, but it was standardized—the same way a “foot” used to be the length of your foot, or a “mile” was a thousand paces (Latin milia), but eventually some ruler had to standardize them properly for commerce to work. “Shekel” is a borrowing from Akkadian shiqal, but “cubit” is a translation—cubitum is Latin for “elbow”.
The shekel started as a unit of weight, back before centralized currency—you would pay your taxes in grain, or fruit, or livestock, or whatever you had available. But after a few centuries of this, the lawgiver Hammurabi decided to convert all of these to one standardized commodity—silver—so that if someone’s taxes increased by 50%, and they paid one goat last year, you can now determine objectively if one goat and two chickens is sufficient tax or not. Just convert whatever they pay into silver, compare the amount, and then you can be sure if it’s too much or too little.
And of course, the easiest way to specify an amount of silver is weight! So soon, shekels of silver became the standard unit of currency.
A few more hundred years passed, the Hittite Empire collapsed, the Iron Age started, and one of the Iron Age Hittite states had the brilliant idea to have the government produce little disks of silver with a royal stamp on them to guarantee purity and accurate weight, so that if you wanted to use silver for your transactions, merchants didn’t have to weigh and purity-test it every time. And thus, coins were invented! As far as we can tell, at least in the West, they were a Hittite invention.
But when sources about the Bronze Age world refer to shekels (e.g. anything in the Old Testament), they generally mean it as a unit of weight. So for example, Exodus specifies that the Temple priests should make the anointing oil out of 500 shekels of myrrh, 250 shekels of cinnamon, and so on; that’s specifying the weight of the ingredients. And when it says that every citizen should pay an annual half-shekel tax, it means that much weight in pure silver.
…this has nothing to do with names any more, oops.
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Of course, not every country agreed on how to standardise “feet” or “mile”. England alone had different definitions of “mile” between the north and south of the country, as well as the environs of London, in the Elizabethan era, and Scotland defined “feet” differently as well.
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This reminded me of something I think game designers absolutely should NOT do though. I find myself unamenable to Biblical translations that use too much modern language. For example, using “barrels of oil” instead of “baths of oil” or “bags of gold” instead of “minas”. Not only does this induce modern visuals (barrels of oil typically means crude oil vs seed oil), but they are less specific than their antiquated counterparts (how big a bag of gold? vs mina is 50-60 shekels).
In that sense, I too prefer the 2nd option.
Terry Pratchett made footnotes cool.
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Now, which translation of Exodus are we talking? Because I’m pretty sure the Bible has had more than its fair share of debates on how each passage should be translated as well as on which passages are to be taken literally versus allegorically… Plus is another case study for names*.
*Case in point, I understand Jesus is an atypical English rendering of a name that would otherwise be rendered as Joshua and that even then, Y is closer to the correct initial consonant so Yeshua might be a more accurate Anglicization. And then we have Jehovah versus Yahweh as proposals for how to render the Tetragrammaton pronounceable, not to mention the translations that bypass the name of God issue and replace all mentions of the Tetragrammaton with the Lord(often stylized in small caps) or treat God like a name. Plus, I believe Mary is routinely referred to as Maria in some Romance languages. Of course, at this point, using anything but the names used by the King James version for any famous biblical figure or location would just confuse the hell out of most readers, and the Bible already has more issues as a work of literature than most magazines.
Probably doesn’t help that the Bible is a collection of texts from several different genres, written by many, mostly unrelated authors, so claiming to be important historical figures long dead at the time of writing, over a period of several centuries if not a couple of millenia, in several different ancient languages, some of which have no modern descendants, and a lot of the included texts in more conprehensive editions being hotly contested as to whether they should be included, and many likely older than the oldest known surviving manuscripts.
I expanded the example a bit and added footnotes.
Kassu slams the butt of his spear into the ground, glaring vaguely out toward the harbor. “The Ahhiyawa[1] are getting bolder. Their raids are getting more common. How long’s it been since they burned down a half dozen cities on the coast?”
Sayanu shrugs. “Bolder, maybe. Not any more successful. Wilusa[2] controls the shoreline, and it would take a miracle to get through those walls. We’ve cut off all their trade[3]. How could they be a real threat now?”
“You don’t think it’s a sign of something? That rebel leader Piyama-Aradu[4] disappeared right around the time the raids picked up.”
“The day the Ahhiyawa figure out tactics and strategy is the day the Great King will finally start paying attention[5]. Until then? They’re a nuisance. Nothing more.” Sayanu twists his beard between his fingers, leaning over the table. “You know they don’t even have cities of their own? Just a bunch of barren rocks in the ocean. They can’t even farm them, that’s why they keep raiding the coastal cities for slave labor. They don’t know how to build anything, only to burn it.”
“They’re pretty good at building ships,” Kassu points out.
“Ships to burn cities with. Those black hulls[6] aren’t good for anything else. You know what they call their king? The City-Sacker[7]. That’s the only thing they value out there. Anything good in their lives they stole from someone else, so all that matters is how well you can pillage and burn.”
What do you all think? Does this seem readable and interesting? Does the dramatic irony (of the Hittites disparaging the Greeks right before the Trojan War) come through?
Achaeans—that is, the Mycenaean Greeks ↩︎
Troy; modern Hisarlık, Turkey ↩︎
Possibly the first trade embargo in recorded history. ↩︎
The rightful leader of one of the Arzawan kingdoms on the west coast of Anatolia, deposed by the Hittites to install a more loyal vassal. Some historians equate him with Achilles. ↩︎
The details are unclear, but it seems an earthquake destroyed the walls of Wilusa, letting the Ahhiyawa sack it. The Hittite Great King then started treating the Ahhiyawa as his diplomatic equal. ↩︎
Long, narrow warships sealed with pitch. ↩︎
Poli-porthos, an epithet of Odysseus and several other heroes in the Iliad ↩︎
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I like the “name footnotes” (e.g. Ahhiyawa) but the “fun facts” (e.g. first trade embargo, earthquake [that doesn’t even happen in this plot], hulls) seem unnecessary. You can add them at the end if players are interested, but they don’t add anything to the player’s ability to follow the plot.
I guess it’s the difference between “present-day” (with some clarifications on who it’s talking about) and “future looking back” (obviously it’s not the first trade embargo until others happen, and the earthquake is in the future too). The “black hulls” footnote is on the fence for me, since it does clarify why Sayanu disregards them but “black hulls” on its own is not confusing to the reader. Maybe you can rewrite that to include the footnote information in the dialogue?
The dramatic irony is there if you look for it, but it would be clearer if there is some reference to the Trojan War later in the text. I’m assuming there will be, but as it stands I have no idea where in the timeline this is.
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I like it a lot! Definitely both readable and interesting to me; I love footnotes/annotations, so I am 100% here for all of them.
Putting exposition in dialogue is generally not good practice, as it makes the dialogue unrealistic. Here, both characters already know what “black hulls” refers to, so the speaker would feel no need to further explain it. The footnote approach lets a reader choose to get that context if they’re like to, but they’re also free to skip it if they don’t feel the need to learn more.
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I mean, the fact that they’re pitch-sealed doesn’t add much to the context of the scene, except to paint a clearer picture of what the ships look like. I think you’re better off adding this information to the end, too (if that’s what you’re going to do).
I make the distinction between footnote and endnote because in my experience, footnotes are read as they come up, while endnotes are extra information. It’s more imperative to know who the Ahhiyawa are to understand the story than the fact that the Ahhiyawa were able to sack Wilusa due to an earthquake.
It could also be helpful to have a glossary with the footnotes/endnotes.
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I agree with hidnook. the annotations of who is who makes sense to be embedded, the random historical details can be optional–toby’s nose is a good pull I think, as it allows you to toggle on a mode that notes all the sherlock references. otherwise it feels unnecessary. also didn’t really get the irony re: the trojan war, I’m not a history (?) buff.
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Thanks all, this is exactly the sort of feedback I needed!
There are over 60 footnotes in Repeat the Ending. They’re all important to me, of course–I wrote them! And they’ve been important to a number of players I’ve heard from, too.
But I also know that a non-trivial number of players have read none or next to none of them.
My observation as someone who made a game with a lot of footnotes: people who don’t want to read them, won’t. I don’t think that’s hurt reception of my work. People can decide what they want to consume.
That’s really true for any kind of paratext. The guide, footnotes, and the PDF that come with Repeat the Ending aren’t required reading. There are no solutions hidden there. Even though I wanted everyone to read all of it, I decided people would only begrudge that.
My advice would be to do what you want and write what you want but leave it all optional.
It’s deeply, profoundly gratifying to read a reviewer discussing everything in Repeat the Ending, optional or otherwise. Makes it all feel worthwhile.
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