For many thousands of years, the Great Lands remained divided. The early Smith-folk had the northern continent to themselves, while the Common-folk spread across the southern continent. The two land-masses approached one another in the narrows of what would one day be called the Sailor’s Sea, but there was no land bridge to facilitate interaction. Only at the height of the glacial age did the two peoples finally come into sustained contact.
In the north, the Smith-folk had evolved a distinctive way of life. A few bands wandered far and wide across the northern continent, following a primitive hunter-gatherer existence. Others gathered in specific upland areas, alpine valleys or mountain slopes that proved especially congenial. There, they used their growing skills with spirit-magic to build and support extended communities. Hundreds of people might live in close proximity, staying in the same area for years at a time, supporting skilled specialists in the arts of tool-making and spirit-binding. These early tribal communities were the first seeds of the Smith-folk holdfasts of later millennia.
The Smith-folk had long since been aware of the southern continent, but it was not until the Last Glacial Maximum (about 25,000 years before Krava’s time) that some of them found a way across the narrows. Overcoming their natural aversion to the sea, enough tribes made the crossing to establish two new communities on the southern continent. There, they came into contact with the Common-folk, leading to trade and the exchange of ideas. The southern Smith-folk tribes soon became the largest and wealthiest of their kind.
From their new neighbors, the Common-folk learned of the vast new lands to the north. Some of them soon began to venture their own crossings of the narrow sea. It was a slow process, taking many centuries, but over time the Common-folk became well established on the northern continent. Some of them turned west, living in caves and sheltered coastal areas, mostly living on fish, shellfish, and small game. Others, more ambitious, turned north or east, hunting the megafauna of the plains. When the Ice began to retreat, tribes of the Common-folk were there to take advantage . . .
While I do world-building for my fantasy novel-in-progress (The Curse of Steel), one frustrating feature of the process is that I have a hard time keeping all of my ideas for the back-history straight.
Now that I’ve managed to finish a world-overview map that I’m happy with, the idea came to me to build a series of “historical atlas” maps, some taking in the whole continent-scale view, others narrower in scope. Inspiration comes from sources like Colin McEvedy’s Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, which is full of nice, clean schematic maps describing the Western world through late antiquity. Here I’ve decided to try my own hand in the same style, using some color instead of David Woodroffe’s extensive use of cross-hatching.
The earliest history of the Great Lands begins about 100,000 years before the time of Krava the Swift.
At this time, the world had been enjoying a long period of warm climates, with almost no glacial ice and forests reaching up into the polar regions. The planet was inhabited by a humanoid species, the “Elder Folk” (Homo antecessor). These people were small and gracile, not very bright by modern standards, but capable of simple language, tool use, and some exploitation of naturally occurring fire. They had evolved in the southern continent of the Great Lands over a million years before, pursuing a flexible hunter-gatherer lifestyle that permitted them to spread across much of the planet.
Now a new evolutionary challenge was about to arise, one that the Elder Folk were ill-equipped to meet: the resurgence of a deep glacial age, longer and more bitter than any that had come before. As the climate shifted and ice began to move south, the Elder Folk were driven before it. Many of the scattered bands perished, unable to adapt to the new conditions.
It was at this juncture that something intervened, rescuing thousands of the Elder Folk from the western regions of the Great Lands. The rescued people were moved across the sea, and then into the oceans of heaven, to live among some benevolent spirits or gods. There they grew and changed over many generations, someday to return to the world in a new guise.
The survivors who remained behind adapted or died out. At least three new human species appeared over the tens of thousands of years of the Ice Age, all descended from the Elder Folk.
In the northern continent, the people who would one day be called the “Smith-folk” (Homo faber) appeared. These people were taller than their ancestors, and much more robust, stocky, tough, and very strong. Even early in their history they had a gift for making, for adapting the natural materials they found into useful tools. They also had an unusual relationship with spirits of the natural world. They learned to capture spirits, bargain with them, and bind them into made things to produce powerful artifacts of enchantment. All of these new skills gave the Smith-folk the chance to survive the worst that the Ice Age world could do to them. They preferred the hills and mountain slopes, where they could hunt both beasts and spirits, and where they eventually learned to find the ores of useful metal.
In the southern continent, the “Common Folk” of later eras (Homo sapiens, the analogues of our own humanity) arose in the sahel zone south of the great desert. The Common Folk grew even taller than their northern cousins, but not as robust or strong. They failed to develop the same spiritual gifts, tending to fear spirits rather than think of them as partners or servants. On the other hand, their capability for abstract thought and spoken language was more sophisticated, destined to help them develop the richest cultures on the planet. Slowly, they spread along the coasts of the southern continent, keeping away from the heart of the desert.
Far away in the east, another population of Elder Folk survivors evolved in a different direction. Amid a rich archipelago, the “Island-folk” (Homo insularum) grew small and nimble, but also bright and quick of mind, the better to hunt the abundant game (and avoid larger predators). The Islanders remained far distant from the rest of the world, to appear in a far distant era.
All four of these survivor species grew in isolation, as the abandoned Elder Folk populations dwindled and became extinct. Not for many thousands of years would they all come into contact, in the centuries leading up to Krava’s time . . .
Lately I’ve been working on back-history and geography for The Curse of Steel, and for the EIDOLON-based world-pack I’m writing for parallel publication. This has caused me to experience greater and greater frustration with the world map I built last fall . . . so yesterday I bit the bullet and got to work revising that.
Fortunately, the Wonderdraft tool makes this kind of work very easy. As of this evening, here’s the result – a full Version 2.0 of the Great Lands map:
This is a big step forward! Next I’m going to be using this map as the basis for a kind of “historical atlas,” a series of schematic images that will help me nail down the historical timeline. Some of those may end up going in the world-pack too, but we’ll see how well they turn out. If this does nothing more than help me visualize how Krava’s world evolved, mission accomplished.
Just a quick post to report on how things are going here.
We’re all in lockdown, with my son the only one who’s still leaving the house for work each day. He works at a small factory that supports the food-delivery industry; as you can imagine, they’re doing an absolutely booming business right now. He’s earning lots of overtime, and he and I joke that he’s the only one in the family that’s really “essential” at the moment. At least my job is secure for when things start getting back to normal, and I’m still getting paid in full for the duration. We have plenty of savings in any case, so as long as money remains good in the first place, we should be able to weather the storm.
The psychological toll seems more acute. I have plenty to do, and my son has his work and his online friends. On the other hand, my wife misses her classes and social contacts, and I think my daughter is going slowly mad, stuck in the house without her usual busy school schedule.
For my part, I’ve been having the usual upper-respiratory issues that always hit me, when the dogwood and maple trees do their thing every spring. I’ve been watching my symptoms like a hawk, and taking my temperature regularly, but so far I haven’t seen any reason to push the panic button. All that means is that I’m in a constant state of low-level apprehension rather than mortal terror, but if that’s the worst I have to live with over the next few months, I count myself blessed. A lot of people are having it far worse.
As for the creative work which is the normal reason for this blog, I’ve been nicely productive ever since I came home. I’ve been working on a more extended system for designing Iron Age villages, an expansion of the “extended character” work I’ve posted about recently. That, in turn, is helping me to visualize the social setting of The Curse of Steel much more completely. If and when I start the second-draft rewrite – which may now be a matter of days – I think I’ll have a much better picture to draw upon.
Meanwhile, I’m also working on the first draft for the EIDOLON “core book,” the basic character-description rule set that I’ll be self-publishing as a basis for releasing world-building material for the game market. I’m also working on the Tremara “culture book” that’s likely to be the first major release for the EIDOLON system. There’s still plenty of work to do on both items, but there’s real progress.
I think April may be the first month that my Patreon campaign gets started again; I’ll have enough new material that patrons might find interesting or useful. If you’re interested in signing up as my patron, please have a visit to my creator page and drop a pledge. Thanks!
My employer has sent me home for what may be the next couple of months, since I’m in a “high-risk” category for COVID-19 (over 50 and with a chronic health condition that might complicate if I come down with the disease). So here’s a great opportunity to work on EIDOLON and some of the world-building for The Curse of Steel. I may be posting a lot more frequently for a while . . .
For today, here are some notes I’ve put together over the past few days. Here I’m starting to puzzle out how the EIDOLON “extended character” will work in practice. I’m working with the home society for The Curse of Steel here – the Tremara or “Mighty Folk,” a tribal Iron Age culture somewhat reminiscent of pre-Roman Celts. These notes aren’t polished rules material, but if you refer to last week’s post you may get some insight into what I’m working on here.
In Tremara society, the smallest monetary unit is the copper
penny (cp). A copper penny is roughly the value of a pound of barley.
As a practical matter, most Tremara tribes don’t coin copper
pennies. Most transactions at that level are handled through barter or exchange
of favors. The most common coin in circulation is the silver penny (sp),
which is worth 12 cp. Very wealthy Tremara sometimes use gold coins for big
transactions; these are either obtained in foreign trade or minted by the richest
tribes. The gold piece (gp) is worth 20 sp or 240 cp.
Tremara agriculture is based largely upon barley. A bushel
of barley weighs about 48 pounds, and so is worth about 4 sp.
Assume an average person requires 600 pounds of barley per year. This constitutes a subsistence diet, without much variety or luxury, but enough to support a healthy life. This comes to 600 cp per year or 50 cp per month. Assume another 10 cp per month for other expenses (clothing, tools, maintenance of housing, and so on). Hence the bare minimum for subsistence living will be 60 cp (5 sp) per month, or 720 cp (60 sp) per year.
Proposed rule for Social Standing in EIDOLON:
In any EIDOLON setting, the benchmark figure for Social Standing is a cost-of-living equal to the bare minimum for subsistence living in that setting. Social Standing for any individual equals log-2 of (his personal cost-of-living expenses, divided by the benchmark figure), rounded to the nearest integer.
Social Standing can be modified by conditions of legal or social privilege, although these modifiers will not normally amount to more than plus or minus 1.
Farming in the Iron Age
Tremara Agriculture
Tremara characters can own several Assets related to agriculture:
Crop Land (measured in acres) – cleared flat
land of good quality that can be used to raise barley. Only half of the Crop
Land is planted each year, the other half being left fallow.
Pasture (measured in acres) – cleared land
that doesn’t have to be flat or of the best quality, which is set aside for grazing.
Can also include land left forested for pigs to forage.
Horses
Cattle
Small Animals – some combination of sheep,
goats, and pigs.
These Assets are operated by three classes of Workers:
Farmers – a character serving as a Farmer
must have the Professional Skill Farmer at +2 or better.
Herdsmen – a character serving as a
Herdsman must have the Professional Skill Herdsman at +2 or better. Each
Herdsman is assumed to work with a pair of dogs trained for animal handling.
Farm Laborers – a character serving as a
Farm Laborer needs no specific Professional Skill, but must have Strength,
Dexterity, Vitality, and Intelligence at +0 or better. A Farm Laborer provides
unskilled labor, which is often seasonal in nature (grain harvest, shearing,
milking, herding pigs, and so on). Farm Laborers may be slaves.
Agricultural Assets must be supported as follows, or else
they can produce no profits:
One Farmer for every 24 acres of Crop Land
(round up)
One Farm Laborer for every 12 acres of Crop Land
(round up)
One Cattle for every 6 acres of Crop Land (round
up)
One Herdsman for every 80 Horses or Cattle, or for
every 120 Small Animals (combine fractions and then round up)
Farm animals must be supported by Pasture: 0.5 acres of
Pasture for every Small Animal, and 4 acres of Pasture for every Horse or
Cattle. Any animals not supported by Pasture are lost.
Each year, Agricultural Assets will produce profits:
Per acre of Crop Land: 210 cp (350 pounds of
barley, of which 140 pounds must be set aside for next year’s planting)
Per Horse: 150 cp (loan or sale of animals, possibly
stud fees)
Per Cattle: 100 cp (milk, leather, meat)
Per Small Animal: 20 cp (milk, wool, leather,
meat)
Each year, the farm workers must be paid:
Per Farmer: 2,700 cp
Per Herdsman: 1,800 cp
Per Farm Laborer: 900 cp
Example: A Prosperous Farmer
An independent Tremara land-holder maintains his own small
farming settlement:
48 acres of Crop Land
60 acres of Pasture
12 Cattle
24 Small Animals
The land-holder himself is a Farmer. His wife and eldest son serve as Farm Laborers, without needing to be paid (they are supported by his profits). He has also hired a second Farmer and a Herdsman as farm-hands, and he owns two slaves who serve as additional Farm Laborers. All his labor requirements are met. He has enough Cattle to support his Crop Land.
The land-holder’s farm produces 11,760 cp per year (10,080 cp in profit from the barley harvest, 1,200 cp from the Cattle, and 480 cp from the Small Animals). He must pay his labor 6,300 cp per year (2,700 cp for the Farmer, 1,800 cp for the Herdsman, and 1,800 cp for the two Farm Laborers). He makes a clear profit of 5,460 cp per year. Divided among himself and his four dependents (including his elderly mother and a daughter too young to work), this comes to 1,092 cp per year per person. His Social Standing rounds up to +1.
Example: A Chariot-Lord
A Tremara chariot-lord owns three small farming villages,
scattered across several miles of countryside. These amount to the following
Assets:
1,000 acres of Crop Land
1,400 acres of Pasture
40 Horses
260 Cattle
400 Small Animals
None of the chariot-lord’s personal Company (his household)
are working as Farmers, Herdsmen, or Farm Laborers. He needs 42 Farmers, 84
Farm Laborers, and 8 Herdsmen to maintain his lands. He has more than enough
Cattle to support his Crop Land.
The chariot-lord’s lands produce 250,000 cp per year (210,000 cp in the barley harvest, 6,000 cp from his Horses, 26,000 cp from his Cattle, and 8,000 cp from his Small Animals). He must pay 203,400 cp per year for labor (113,400 cp for his Farmers, 75,600 cp for his Farm Laborers, and 14,400 cp for his Herdsmen). His annual profits are 46,600 cp. Divided among himself and three dependents (wife and two children), this comes to 11,650 cp per year per person. This chariot-lord’s Social Standing rounds off to +4.
Some final comments:
So far, I’ve been working mostly on the left-hand side of the diagram in last week’s post: the income and profits generated by a character’s Assets and Workers. I haven’t done too much yet on the right-hand side: the hirelings and support staff that can make a wealthy character’s life better. I’ll need to develop both sides before I can lay out what a wealthy Tremara chariot-lord’s household really looks like! More on that as my enforced vacation continues.
As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve been working on a way to not just model individual characters in the EIDOLON ruleset, but to model their social connections. The idea is to have a simple set of rules that I can use to describe the intricate web of relationships that any character will have, as a member of a complex society.
I think I may be getting close to what I want. Consider the following diagram:
A model for the extended character in EIDOLON
You’ll notice a certain confusion of vocabulary here; I’m not sure yet what words would be best to describe the various components of this model. Here’s the idea, though.
At the top, we have the extended character itself. Perhaps this is a single individual, perhaps it includes that person and some of her partners and dependents. Or perhaps it’s a group of unrelated characters who have agreed to throw in their fortunes together: an adventuring party, the officers of a mercenary band, the crew of a privately held starship, und so weiter. In any case, all the Members (or Household, or Company, or whatever term makes sense in the setting) will share their finances equally, sharing the same social standing score once the model is complete.
On the left, we have various forms of Income. Some of this may be External Income – simple pay for the professional occupations of the Members, say. On the other hand, the Members may also own certain Assets, pieces of wealth-producing property. Most likely these Assets will require some kind of labor to actually produce their own Income. A medieval lord will need peasants to farm his land, an ancient tycoon needs slaves to operate his mines, a starship captain needs crewmen to run his ship. These workers, employees, or vassals will be paid for their labor, but by working on the Assets they produce Income for the owners, in the form of profit.
Income is on the left, outgo on the right. The Members will probably spend some of their resources on simple consumption – food, clothing, housing, luxury goods, entertainment, all at whatever level they can afford. They may also have people hired to provide them with personal service: a wealthy woman’s impeccable butler, a warlord’s kept courtesan, a personal clerk or physician, whatever might be available and appropriate in the setting. These hirelings or henchmen are also paid, but they produce no Income or Profit, they simply work to improve the quality of life for the Members.
The Members have to make sure the books balance – they can’t spend more on luxuries and personal service than they bring in! Any given setting book written under EIDOLON would lay out various structures like this, with rules for various Assets and how they would have to be worked, and lists of available workers and henchmen.
Here’s one simple result of this system: the Social Standing score of all the Members depends solely on the amount spent on Consumption and Staff. I’m taking an almost Veblenist approach here, claiming that status in almost any society is strongly correlated to the level of conspicuous consumption. Not a bad assumption, I think, for most RPG worlds and fictional universes.
There’s one more neat feature of this model: it’s possible to nest it. The character(s) who make up one set of Members may be getting paid for their services by someone higher up. Likewise, each of the workers or henchmen that one character pays may be keeping her own Household at a lower level.
For example, I’ve started to work out the details here using features of Tremara society, the setting of The Curse of Steel. A given Tremara chariot-warrior will own many hundreds of acres of cleared land, with peasants to manage his herds of cattle and horses and raise an annual crop of barley. If we wanted to zoom in on those peasants, then each peasant household could be described at finer detail using this same model. Meanwhile, the spearmen, bards, and other specialists who live in the lord’s hall and provide service for him could also have families, dependents, or property of their own.
This is a model I think I can use extensively in worldbuilding work, in a variety of settings; it should make an interesting innovation for the EIDOLON ruleset. Progress!
Well, this has been a year. Twelve months of doing my best to pass by the madness that seems to be sweeping the world, keep my family prospering, excel at my day job, and keep making progress on my creative projects. With some success, as it turned out.
Let’s be honest, this is the year a lot of things seemed to come together, as I built workflows I could use to set up and finish creative projects. I designed my first full constructed language, one which is actually usable for literary work. I drew up several maps. I hacked my brain in such a way that I could do world-building work in service to an actual story for a change.
I managed to write (at least in the first draft) my first mature, full-length, original, publishable novel: The Curse of Steel. That’s a pretty big deal.
So while 2019 wasn’t altogether sunshine and roses, I do feel as if I’m in a reasonably good place in my creative life. Still more work to be done, to be sure, but I’m more confident that I once was.
This blog seems to have reflected that. I’m still not sure who is reading this thing regularly – most of you don’t have a lot to say – but traffic keeps growing, slowly by steadily. The top ten (new) posts for this year were:
As usual, about 40% of the hits on the blog just start at the home page and go from there. There’s also a lot of perennial interest in some of my old Architect of Worlds posts from 2018, as well as that extended exercise in world-building I carried out based on the Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna games. That’s always in the back of my mind as I consider what to work on next.
As always, let’s hope that the coming year is prosperous and productive for all of us . . . and that the world manages to hang onto sanity in the coming months.
I’m taking a bit of a break from working on The Curse of Steel directly. One of the things I’ve done is to tinker a bit with representing some of my characters in GURPS terms. A bit of a challenge, since these are clearly superhuman characters (they’re the descendants of gods, in a setting where that basically makes you a superhero). As a sample, here are what are shaping up to be my two lead characters, at least so far:
Kráva the Swift (400
points)
Age 20; Human; 6′ even; 160 lbs.; Strong, athletic warrior-woman, usually wearing fine-quality clothes decorated with raven feathers.
ST 22 [120]; DX 14
[80]; IQ 12 [40]; HT 14 [40].
Damage 2d/4d; BL 97
lbs.; HP 18 [-8]; Will 14 [10]; Per 12 [0]; FP 14 [0].
Ally (Raven sent by Sky Father) (25% of starting points) (12 or less) [2]; Ally (Raven sent by Sky Father) (25% of starting points) (12 or less) [2]; Ally (Tarankláva) (150% of starting points) (15 or less) [30]; Appearance (Attractive) [4]; Blessed (Heroic Feats of ST) [10]; Charisma 2 [10]; Combat Reflexes [15]; Enhanced Move (Ground) (1/2) [10]; Fearlessness 2 [4]; Patron (Sky Father) (6 or less; Highly Accessible; Minimal Intervention) [15]; Status (+2) [5]; Super Jump 1 [10]; Wealth (Wealthy) [20].
Disadvantages
Bad Temper (12 or less) [-10]; Code of Honor (Tremára) [-5]; Enemy (Servants of the Dark God) (medium-sized group, some formidable or super-human) (9 or less) [-30]; Vow (Hold and defend the Thunder Blade unless its rightful owner should appear) (Minor) [-5].
Kráva is very much a physical hero – very strong and fast, with a bit of Extended Move (Ground) and Super Jump to make her very mobile. She’s by no means stupid, but her talents mostly involve punching (or cutting) her way through problems.
A couple of notes about her Allies: I’ve drawn up her raven familiars as characters, and they both come in well under 0-point characters, so they’re fairly cheap.
I’ve also drawn up Tarankláva, her sword, as a character. As a practical matter, it works as a fine-quality broadsword with a bonus to skill rolls, but it also has certain powers of its own, which it uses to feed her information. The “curse of steel” has to do with the fact that it doesn’t feed her all the information it could in theory gather for her. On the sword’s character sheet, that’s set down as Reprogrammable and Slave Mentality, with a Divine Curse that prevents the sword from telling its bearer everything it sees.
Lóka the Clever (400
points)
Age 25; Human; 5′ 7″; 150 lbs.; Well-built man in a white vaita‘s robe.
ST 11 [10]; DX 13
[60]; IQ 15 [100]; HT 12 [20].
Damage 1d-1/1d+1; BL 24
lbs.; HP 11 [0]; Will 15 [0]; Per 15 [0]; FP 12 [0].
Appearance (Attractive) [4]; Blessed [10]; Cultural Adaptability [10]; Detect (Divine presence and children of the gods) (Rare) [5]; Eidetic Memory [5]; Magery 2 [25]; Modular Abilities (Cosmic Power) (Per point of abilities (+6); Trait Limited: One specific trait (Languages Only)) [30]; Musical Ability 2 [10]; Patron (Kórsata) (6 or less; Highly Accessible; Minimal Intervention) [15]; Social Regard (Respected) 1 [5]; Vaita Rank 1 [5]; Voice [10].
Disadvantages
Secret (Child of a god) (Utter Rejection) [-10]; Sense of Duty (Friends and companions) (Small Group) [-5]; Social Stigma (Second-Class Citizen) [-5]; Vow (Never admit his divine ancestry or the name of his divine parent) (Minor) [-5]; Xenophilia (12 or less) [-10].
Quirks: Congenial; Despises slave-owners and slavers; Likes to show off his cleverness; Proud [-4].
When I was developing this story, and considering how to represent magic, I messed around with a bunch of different models. In the end, I decided to go with bog-standard GURPS, at least for now. Some characters will have superhuman powers that are innate to them, represented by very high Attribute scores and Advantages. Other characters will be able to use “charms” or “spells” that are learned, powered by personal resources – hence, standard GURPS magic. So far, that seems to be matching the story I want to tell pretty well.
One note about Lóka: in the story, it’s a plot point that he seems to be able to understand, speak, read, and write any language he encounters. That’s kind of difficult to represent in GURPS, but the Modular Abilities trait used here seems to be the best way to proceed. As it stands, Lóka knows two or three languages by natural means. He can also “miraculously” use other languages that he’s never encountered before, although it takes him a few seconds to switch to the new script or tongue (he has to “get the trick of it”). At the moment he could get native-level fluency and literacy in one language at a time, or speak two strange languages like a native and act as a translator (without being able to read either of them), and so on. Useful!
More characters to come, I think, and I may make a post or two about world-building assumptions. This setting wouldn’t make a bad GURPS world-book, actually.
Since last Friday evening, I’ve been able to put down something like 5,600 words on The Curse of Steel.
This is a pretty good rate of work for me. My personal best was probably the time I produced the last seven chapters of a Mass Effect fan-fiction novel in a single three-day weekend – over 24,000 words in those three days. Usually, I’m lucky to get more than a thousand words down in a day, and that’s assuming it’s a weekend day when I don’t have to worry about the office.
But then, this is why I do a lot of world-building.
As a writer, I seem to be able to produce very short pieces off the top of my head, doing all the scene-setting and character development in the back of my mind and just pouring the vignette down on the page. Most of the vignettes I wrote as flavor text for various GURPS books were done this way.
As soon as I get into the longer forms, though – pretty much anything above the level of the short story – I always get bogged down in setting detail and have a hard time proceeding. Unless I spend the time and effort to build those details in advance: constructed language and culture to help me get into characters’ heads, maps to help me see how places and people are related to each other, astrophysics for SF stories, and so on.
One reason fan-fiction always seems easier for me is that most of the work of setting up the story has already been done. Any original details I want to add, I can just graft them onto the existing structure and keep moving. I can concentrate on just writing story, and the words just flow. As witness that amazing, enormously satisfying weekend of something like 8,000 words per day.
I spent months wrestling with backdrop for The Curse of Steel, never writing more than the one chapter that started the story (which, by no coincidence, worked pretty well as a short story on its own). I tried several times to move forward, but every attempt failed until I had the setting worked out to my satisfaction.
Now the investment pays off. There’s a good chance – knock on wood and hope I don’t jinx it – that I’ll be able to put down about half the novel, a total of 80,000 words or so, without a pause. If the current rate of progress keeps up, that sounds like it should be doable by the end of the calendar year.
Feels good. I will admit to kicking myself sometimes, for being the writer of stories who never seems to actually write a story. If I’m starting to find ways to hack my creative mind and get actual stories written, that can’t hurt.
Meanwhile, I think I’ve done enough work on constructed language, development of names for tribes and places, and filling in details on my overview map. At least for the moment. Now I can get back to the story and write . . . probably about half of the planned length for The Curse of Steel.
Here’s the result: a clipped piece of the overview map, still missing some details around the edges but more than enough to help me keep all the pertinent features in mind.
Ravatheni tribal lands, and their neighbors
The first part of the plot has Kráva and her companions traveling from Taimar Velkari (“hill-fort of the wolves”) across Ravatheni territory, into and through the Silent Forest, and over a mountain pass into the western lands by the sea. With plenty of detours and adventures along the way, of course. As the raven flies, it’s a distance of about 220 miles, maybe eight or nine days’ journey if everything goes well. Everything is not going to go well.
