I mentioned last time that I wanted to debut the kid versions of Lia, Rachel and Carlo along with Annabeth and I got everything together to make that happen. I then proceeded to do a bunch of renders of Annabeth, most of them silly, just for funsies. Most won’t end up getting posted.

I then did some profile work on the KoG charas. As I was both thinking of how to adapt Mark’s backstory to the Alkoresh setting and also looking up relevant Japanese terminology, I came to discover that the Orthodox Church doesn’t have religious orders like the Catholics. The Church of Antioch in the Tellus Arc has its origins in the pre-Schism Church, albeit generally more Eastern than Western in character, though their Western Rite more closely resembles Catholics in practice. The Heilegers (as in the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church) much more strongly resembles the early medieval Catholic Church as its origins lie with later arrivals to the Planet. Anyway, point being, the Order of St. Arita shouldn’t exist. (The Order of St. Niccolo can squeak by as coming from the Western Rite.) The order as it existed really didn’t have a presence beyond Whiteheart Abbey, so the fix isn’t that incredibly difficult, but it’s another thing I need to be thinking about when I put the KoG series through a round of revisions.

Another thing that may be up for change is the name of the Kingdom of Gladius itself. When I made the name change back in 1999, I was mixing my still recent Latin study with the idea of a naming convention with Japanese sensibilities. However, I find myself questioning that choice now and for the time being, I’ve taken to calling Gladius “Branstock”, which is canonically the Saxon name for the region back on the Planet. In-universe, I explain the name as being derived from a saying by the Patricians about the land falling to a single stroke of the sword. After all this time, I’m rather attached to the Knight of Gladius name, so I don’t think I’ll be changing the original, but derived works like the Alkoresh Cycle stand to be a different story.

Again, as always, there was assorted work in the peripheral materials for this and that. I didn’t lose quite as much time to being unconscious as the day before, but I still don’t get half as much done as I’d like. So it goes. We’ll see what I can get into next. Stay tuned.

On Thursday I once again further enriched DA by purchasing not just one but two character packs. I was actually thinking about making characters from Tzipi’s Garden, but what I ended up doing was creating a selection of charas from KoG, namely the original six members of Mark’s party (Mark, Sonia, Edward, Jasper, Jill and Teresa), Randwulf, Vincentian and Adrienne; and I followed them up with a sextet from TBP: Seth, Cassandra, Aurelia, Drago, Rafael and Umbriel (Rafael is going to be a bit of a problem because that also happens to be the name of Maya’s father, who may or may not find his way into the system one day, though I’ll have to think about how to distinguish him from Mikel as they’re suppose to be quite similar in-universe and Count Rafael is still too young in Elven terms to look that much older). While I could’ve just had these Tellus Arc charas there as their canonical selves, I got to thinking how I could integrate them into the Alkoresh timeline. In the thousand years since the end of the Second Great Demon War, there was a period of several centuries where humanity was struggling to recover the technological level they could no longer support without Earth’s backing while the nations of the Grand Alliance descended to in-fighting in the absence of a common enemy and fears about the human newcomers role in disrupting the balance of power. As I thought of it, I figured I could fit the early Brynhildr Cycle in first, follow it with the Trident War, The Brothers Pendragon, possibly Tellus, and then KoG. As for KoG itself, setting the events in northern Valeria makes sense and the Camp Gladio where Luka and Carlo’s father served can be a cultural artifact from that period.

Anyway, the concept for the KoG charas is that the Demon Realm rather than the Dark Eternal is the source of all the evil plotting (though I suppose I could adopt Dox as one of the Ancient Demons if I wanted). Instead of being a way to regulate the balance of power with magic in a world where magic is dying out as in the original continuity, here the Elemental Knights are a sort of test for humanity to see if they can wield the power of magic responsibly and the roles of the Council of the Elements and the Shadow Clan are rolled into one. In this new combined role, the Shadow Clan is a circle of Elven sages who observe and test the younger races of the world as a way to foster their progress, operating outside the mainstream of society in El-Ashara. (In fact, the way they involve themselves in the affairs of other races is seen as heretical.) You then have Shadowbright (later Shadowblight)’s corruption and betrayal of the order and everything that follows from there.

The eight principalities of the old Kingdom of Valeria correspond to the occupation zones of the UN task force sent to Alkoresh. As Gladius and Byrn are analogues to England and Russia, the former British and Russian occupation zones make for a good fit. While Valeria was warring with her neighbors, she was riven by internal conflicts as well, to include a number of separatist movements with varying degrees and duration of success. In this continuity, rather than full independence, House Dumont (the Mountain Kings) simply achieves a greater measure of autonomy, to include allodial rights to their territory. It’s only when Randwulf deposes Edgar that the region goes full separatist. Here Randwulf has become Partially Demonized as part of his bid for greater power, as have all of the Marauders and most of the Gladian Guard. This will naturally up the challenge level a bit.

I’d been considering an If Arc story that has Mark going to Gladius without abandoning his vows, thereby increasing the internal conflict when it comes to him taking up the sword again. I realized that this would be as good a place for it as any, and so we have Mark heading eastward (as the locations on the Alkoresh map are in the opposite position) still as a monk. That should help shake things up and further ensure that I’m not just retreading old ground.

As for BroPen, I have the idea of casting Lother as Adam Penwood, the illegitimate son of a knight with delusions of grandeur who takes on the name Pendragon and seeks a crown for himself. The heck of it is that he actually has the right combination of skill, luck and fortuitous personnel choices that allow him to carve out his slice, a little petty kingdom with pieces of the Duchies of Sigrdrifa and York. Unlike Tellus Arc canon, his dynasty won’t be lasting any 400 years, but it’ll take a bit for the original occupants to reclaim their territory.

Establishing the new timeline is going to take no small bit of work, but all this and more remain on the horizon. Stay tuned.

I guess I just have to accept that I’m not going to have productive evenings during the workweek. However, once I came back around, I actually did manage to make some decent progress on Chapter 11 of CoP. It’s nice to get over quota for a change.

Besides the work on CoP, I was also doing some work in the Tellus Arc peripheral materials. You see, I was thinking about how Mark from the KoG series got his name and I came up with the idea that when Gregor the Guardian married Flavia Corinthia, his father-in-law Flavius Sapphirus adopted Gregor and created House Aran as a branch of House Flavius with the cognomen Aquila. (I had previously intended for an Aquila branch of House Flavius in Eagle but decided to rework it.) As a result, Mark was born with the Patrician name Marcus Flavius Aquila Anselmus Minor. (The former Hiram the Guardian is getting his name changed to Anselm and he was also given a Patrician name after Gregor’s marriage. Mark would then be named after him.) Mark would later change his cognomen to “Christopherus”  after joining the High Templars. Now, Luther had no particular love for the Patricians, but he was at least level-headed enough to see the political advantage of maintaining inroads in Patrician society, hence the choice of Mark’s naming.

In other news, I’m getting close to wrapping up my work-work for a bit, so that will hopefully translate to more writing time. Stay tuned.

I spent another day focused on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials, primarily focused on House Wulf, but I did a number of other things like significantly rework Mark’s encyclopedia entry. In case you were wondering, I intend to put this material out in the wiki once I start to put it together. In fact, I may start adding entries there in the very near future so I can officially launch it.

I do have to share one story that came out of yesterday’s work. (Warning: Spoilers for Knight of Gladius: Volume III) You remember Claudius, right? Randwulf’s kid. Mark’s half-brother. (Or would it be three-quarter-brother?) He rode off into the sunset after KoG3, but what happened to him? Well, up until now, I’d said that he returned to the ancestral homeland of Gotland, had a son Roderic and most likely escaped the Planet during the Great Crossing. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but the Great Crossing is a mass exodus of humanity from the Planet. The events of KniTwi are some of the foreshocks of the calamity to come that drives humans away.) Well, now he not only returns to Gotland but specifically to the family’s holdings in Wulfbach and reunites the two branches of the family by marrying the Radwinda the daughter of Friedhardt, the head of the Gotlander branch of House Wulf at the time. (If you’re inclined to get squicked at this, I should note that their common ancestor is six generations back, so don’t get your banjos out just yet.) I expanded his family so that he now has three more children in addition to Roderic: Antonia, Rodwinda and Friedric. The idea was for Claudius to take over the newly unified House Wulf, but you know how he’s not quite built for a fight, so when Lord Friedhardt died, his half-brother Adelhardt took over instead. (Claudius is still listed as a claimant to the title of Lord of Wulf, though.) If Claudius had actually inherited the ancestral gear of the Conquerors, he would’ve had a stronger claim, but Randwulf took it with him.

A fun bit of trivia is that I have since given Claudius a Gotlander name, Rodwulf, which happens to be the same as the eldest son of Wulf the Conqueror. (It wasn’t a coincidence, of course.) Also, his full Roman name is Lucius Claudius Antonius Lupinus. Randwulf’s idea was to have his son start a new branch of House Claudius to maintain standing among the patricians. (I may not have mentioned it elsewhere, but when Nyssa married Randwulf, she called herself Claudia Antonia, posing as a daughter of one of the patrician families of Eagle, hence Claudius’ name.)

Anyway, I continue to flesh out my world. I dipped my toe a bit in House Hassani, but there’s a lot of work that needs to go into that. My sources over 20 years ago for Arabic names weren’t great, so it’s a bit of a mess. Also, dealing with fecund polygamists is, oh, so much fun when building genealogies. As fun as that prospect is, I really do need to turn my attention to RttW and I’ve got some other stuff to deal with as well. Let’s see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

I didn’t feel that writing a couple sentences to finish off Chapter 3 of CoP was quite enough to warrant a post (though I know I’ve done it for such minimal work before). I did go ahead and do most of the work for the review post, so it wasn’t like I was spending the day idly. Anyway, we had a rather sharp contrast with all the work I’ve done on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials since. I’ve been focusing on the houses of the Eight Stars, especially House Leon, House Crucis and House Wulf. I decided to have House Leon belong to a line of rí túath (a sort of tribal chieftain/petty king), so I ended up creating a thousand-year line of succession for it. However, the main line eventually gets excluded, which explains how they ended up in Gladius. There’s a similar story with House Wulf, where the family ends up splitting into the half that carries on the Conqueror’s mantle and the half that rules the freehold granted to Wulf by the Emperor after the War of Ban. If this was not enough, the Gladian lord Ingwald of Glasford (a fiefdom in the area of Stormtree) provides the glue to bind the two houses together.

You see, Gearalt the sixth Defender was not chosen to be the tanist to succeed his father as rí túath, so he ventured out to seek his fortunes abroad. He spent a spell in Titan as a mercenary before returning to his homeland of Fodla to be rejected a second time, so he then went to the Greater Gotland Empire, where lent his sword to the faction supporting the future Emperor Reinhardt III. This faction also included Ingwulf the sixth Conqueror. Ingwulf was already connected to Lord Ingwald of Glasford and when he and Gearalt forged a marriage pact between their grandchildren, Gearalt was added to that connection. This was what led his son Leander to participate in the Gladian War of Unification, which brings us to the status quo you’re familiar with from the Gladius Cycle stories. In fact, Percival’s maternal uncle Ingwald (the grandson of the previously mentioned Lord Ingwald and the head of the cadet branch of House Wulf that took possession of the family’s Gotland holdings) was the one acting as his proxy as head of House Leon during his minority. You might find it ironic that the two families are so closely knitted together given what happens in the stories, but this sort of thing wasn’t all that uncommon in real world history, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise in fictional history inspired by the real thing. For some real fun, did you know that House Hassani has married into House Crucis not just once but twice? That’s a story for another day, though.

I’m having a lot of fun with this, of course, but I really do need to redirect some of this energy. We’ll see if I manage it or not. Stay tuned.

It took me some digging, but I was able to sort out the issue with the T3W spreadsheet. The problem was that there was an offset in the entries of the private forces to account for neutral parties that threw off my formula. Well, now that that’s fixed, maybe I can actually turn my focus back to TWH. Stay tuned.

I didn’t do any work on the website, so I might as well talk a bit about what I did instead. You may recall that I mentioned doing some reworking of the House Wulf family tree. Of course, if I did it for one of the Eight Stars, I’d have to do it for the others, and some were a lot more effort than others. I was just kinda picking at it until I just went in full-bore and devoted a whole day’s efforts to it.

One of my dictionaries, one with encyclopedic material, included a section on the etymology of names and that was my first reference when it came to naming characters. I would go on to transcribe by hand a dedicated dictionary of names and compile numerous other sources as well. That being said, when I was first naming characters, I was only looking at the meaning of the name. I wasn’t thinking about the heritage of the character, whether the name was anachronistic or not, etc. I’ve gone through one or two passes of revisions over the years, but amid the reconstruction efforts (and my earlier campaign of proofing my manuscripts), I started thinking about these things even harder and working to amend incongruencies where I found them. While doing this, I was also painting a clearer history of the families. For instance, House Wulf was originally based in Gotland before moving to Skadia and later Titan (then to Gladius and ultimately back to Gotland). Despite the heirs of House Wulf ultimately becoming more Northman than Gotlander, they nevertheless maintain an old Germanic naming convention. Claudius is actually the first exception (which shows that Randwulf regarded his queen more than family tradition).

Anyway, it’s been a lot of work and the results are going to reverberate throughout the Gladius Cycle. Instead of making piecemeal changes here and there, I’ll just wait to fully implement the changes when it comes time to proof the manuscripts. Fun, fun, fun, but before that, I should get back to work on the site. I imagine other detours will crop up amid the slog of plugging in the remaining 1926 reviews, so I’ll be sure to comment then. Stay tuned.

I did pretty well for myself today. I got through KoG2 and 3, T3W and KniTwi, as well as adding a fair number of teasers. From here, I can focus on the remaining Cross Arc stories and any other odds and ends and that should wrap up the Stories section of the site. I should be able to get all that done by the time the weekend’s out. From there, I can start getting the reviews back up, and once all the content is restored, I can start fighting with Drupal so I can get things looking the way I want. By my estimates, it’ll probably take another two weeks. We’ll tentatively set our goal at being fully functional by Easter. Now it’s back to work for me. Stay tuned.

P.S. While working on T3W, I did get sidetracked a bit doing some renaming of characters for greater consistency. Ended up renaming about half of Randwulf’s family tree, and that’s just for starters. I still have the other seven of the Eight Stars to go, but I’ll save that for another time, and maybe explain things in a Commentary post.

I finished Chapter 8 of TWH for the update and made some progress on Chapter 9 as well. I was spinning my tires a bit mid-week, so I found myself doing a re-read of KniTwi and catching a few errors that slipped past me in earlier drafts. I’ll be shifting gears to NagaTen. As I’ve got a bit a lead time, I’d like to go ahead and finish Chapter 9 of TWH, but we know how those plans usually turn out. Stay tuned.

Getting back to work meant getting back to work… work on writing, that is. I managed to get through Chapter 21 of KniTwi and went on to do Chapter 22 and then finish the epilogue to wrap up the book. Maybe I can finish EM2 when its turn comes around next. Stay tuned.