I consider my primary goal as a writer is to entertain the reader (and myself, as I first set out to write a story I can enjoy and then hope others can share that enjoyment). That being said, I don’t want to just go the safe route and write the SFF equivalent of Hallmark movies (not that I don’t have some respect for the simple business model of delivering what the target audience wants). I do want to challenge both the reader and myself sometimes, and that leads us to the topic of today’s post. I’ve talked before about how my early novels tended to have more Boy Scout-type protagonists, but my protagonists have become more morally grey as I get older. I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly cynical sort, but no matter how sour you think you are, age has a way of souring you further and that gets reflected in the characters I write. Somewhat related to this is the idea I’ve floated before about creating an unlikeable character that the reader is nevertheless invested in. How many bad things add up to a bad person and how bad does a person have to be before it turns people away?

I bring all this up because it’s about time to debut the Welcome to the World series and I plan to be going into some dark territory. That’s not to say I haven’t gone into dark territory before, but there are lines I haven’t crossed with my protagonists that are going to get crossed here. I’ve had my doubts about going forward as planned, but I want to experiment with the audience’s tolerance for a character’s moral failings. Will the character’s good be only seen as hypocrisy or is it part of a more rounded and nuanced individual? Ultimately, this isn’t something I’ll decide but rather the audience. It may be rejected, but I’ve decided to give it a shot and see what happens.

I’ve drawn some inspiration from Westworld (Season 1, at least) for WttW in that there’s an environment where there’s a power imbalance that encourages people to indulge in their lesser nature. People succumb to temptation with varying degrees of enthusiasm and I want to see how they deal with their own internal moral conflict and how that either resonates or clashes with the moral core of the reader. As a creator, I’m dancing in a minefield of my own making. Here’s to it yielding a better result than just me getting gibbed.

There’s definitely going to be a followup post when the aforementioned line gets crossed, so we can have a chat then. Until that time, though, stay tuned.

The primary religion in the World centers around the worship of a pantheon known as the Twelve. The Twelve consist of six gods and six goddesses considered by some to be distinct individuals and by others as different manifestations of a single godhead. While it’s possible to worship the Twelve as a whole or certain combinations therein, devotion is typically focused on a single member. This is mostly due to the fact that Players must choose a single god to act as their Patron. This is less relevant for People of the World, but they also tend to focus on a single god as a matter of convention.

While the Twelve are associated with numerous aspects of Nature and society (often overlapping with others), I’m just going to list them with their primary attributes here and may do more extensive coverage in the future.

1. Luxion, the God of Light
2. Nyxia, the Goddess of Darkness
3. Manaan, the Goddess of Life
4. Tantalion, the God of Death
5. Parthena, the Goddess of Order
6. Kontos, the God of Chaos
7. Pyrion, the God of Fire
8. Maara, the Goddess of Water
9. Thoros, the God of Wind
10. Genaan, the Goddess of Earth
11. Denaan, the Goddess of Wood
12. Zoltan, the God of Metal

Obviously, the way Players view the Twelve and the way the People of the World view them are different. For Players, the benefits of a Patron are more tangible. A Patron determines the type of magic a Player can use and conveys Blessings that influence things like weapon proficiency, resistances, and more. Now, it is possible for Players decline to have a Patron, but there are few benefits to this other than avoiding the weaknesses of any single alignment.

The center of worship is the Great Temple in Axios. This is where Players are first summoned. There is a separate chapel for the Faithful of each of the Twelve. Because People of the World do not have access to magic or Blessings, Players comprise the whole of the clergy and are supported by dedicated layfolk among the People of the World called tertiaries. Each Cult is headed by a Pontifex supported by an Archbishop for each domain (two for Axios) and any number of Bishops (which is not restricted to the Job class of Bishop but includes all Tier 3 Clerics). Simply having the Job of Cleric doesn’t automatically make a player recognized clergy of a particular Cult. They must complete a term of Temple Service in order to be eligible to wear the official vestment and must maintain good standing with the Cult to retain that privilege (and wearing vestments without the Cult’s recognition can result in prosecution for the crime of impersonation).

Different days of the week are assigned as sabbaths to each of the Twelve. Furthermore, there are weekly cycles for each season, excluding the weeks of the solstices and equinoxes, which have their own celebrations. Beyond that, there are monthly and yearly cycles (akin to the Western and Chinese zodiacs respectively), and whenever these align, it marks times seen as especially holy. Other observations commemorating saints and martyrs and such have varying degrees of observation depending on your location.

Outside the worship of the Twelve, traces of animism and other folk religions can be found among the smallfolk, as well as ersatz versions of various Earth religions, particularly a pseudo-Buddhism observed in parts of the Hidden Trials of Murakumo and Shangri-La. In many cases, there is a syncretistic blending of these other belief systems and the worship of the Twelve.

As a brief overview, this should suffice for now. I may do expanded commentary on particular aspects of religious observation in the World at a later date. Stay tuned.

I wasn’t going to mention Monday’s progress because it really wasn’t worth mentioning, but I’ll make note of it for the sake of continuity with yesterday’s work. I was rereading what I’d already written on Chapter 20 of EM3 to get me back into the mindset, but by the time I was ready to actually start writing, I didn’t even get two sentences in before conking right out. I was able to make up for this shortfall yesterday and complete the chapter. Yay.

To make Monday look slightly less bad, I’ve also been doing work in the peripheral materials for WttW. Tax law. I’m sure it’ll come up at some point in the story. You’ll see. Anyway, that’s all for now. Stay tuned.

Since I’m going to be kicking off the Welcome to the World series in the next couple weeks, I thought I might go ahead and give you a quick overview of what the World is and how it works before we get started. If you’d rather let the World reveal itself over the course of the story, you can ignore this post. Anyway, without further ado…

Whereas the Planet in the Tellus Arc is a parallel world to our Earth with the same overall dimensions, the World of WttW is a little more abstract. Rather than a sphere, it’s a helix, starting with the Royal Capital of Axios in Upper Midgard (what one might term “the Zeroeth Trial”) and terminating in the Womb of the World, the site of the Twenty-first Trial. The World is divided into twenty-one zones known as the Trials, with an additional four Hidden Trials that branch off the Golden Path running from one end of the World to the other. The Trials vary in size but are limited and bound by invisible walls known as the Barrier. There is one way in and one way out of each Trial (excepting the ones that branch off into a Hidden Trial). The Exit Gate can only be activated after defeating the Trial Master, the boss monster of each Trial. Because each Trial is not connected by ordinary geography, you could face wildly different biomes going from one Trial to the next. The further you descend, the stronger the monsters are, and as a general principle, if you’re strong enough to beat one Trial Master, you will be just strong enough to survive in the next Trial.

There are two kinds of humans in the World: the Summoned (Players) and People of the World (NPCs). The People of the World are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the World, while the Summoned are brought into the World from Earth to participate in the Game. The goal of the Game is to complete the Trials and defeat the final Trial Master, the God-Dragon Ur-Tiamat, who is said to be the root of all evil in the world. The Summoned have greater potential than the People of the World (in numerical terms, the People of the World are level-capped at 40 while the Summoned are level-capped at 80) and are therefore the only ones with any chance of winning the Game. One way the World ensures the division between between the Summoned and the People of the World is that the two cannot interbreed. Another is that it is very difficult for the Summoned to survive without adventuring, but adventuring also has a high mortality rate (with a single annual cohort typically being reduced by half in the first year alone). Players are able to have children with each other, but a small portion even survive long enough to reach child-bearing age, much less find the stability to raise children, then Second-Generation Players have challenges of their own, such as a high risk of being orphaned and being pushed into adventuring too early with fatal results. Second-Generation Players are valued because they inherit some of their parents’ abilities, which gives them an advantage over the newly Summoned, though overconfidence in this potential often leads to the aforementioned fatal results.

Tied to the goal of winning the Game is the concept of the Brave. It is believed that the Brave is the only Player capable of reaching Level 99 and therefore most likely to stand a chance against Ur-Tiamat, who is also said to be Level 99. What’s more, it is believed that the Brave will possess the Blessings of all of the Twelve Gods of the World. You see, each Summoned chooses a Patron among the Twelves and receives Blessings as a reward for their faith. These Blessings can be inherited from parents to children, so in theory, a child with all twelve Blessings could be achieved by the fifth generation, but efforts to orchestrate a breeding program have failed to yield fruit, as it were.

I’ll stop here as I could keep on going for a good long while if I let myself. I’m thinking of doing little featurettes on different aspects of the World and the game system as we go, breaking things up into digestible chunks (though I may actually publish the full game guide on the site at a later date). I don’t know if we’ll have one of those featurettes next week or if we’ll do something else. Stay tuned.

I made progress on Chapters 12 and 13 of NagaTen and did more work in the peripheral materials for WttW. I plan on making some progress on EM3, but I’d also like to finish those chapters of NagaTen as well while I’m at it. Stay tuned.

I made a little progress on Chapter 7 of TWH and did more work in the WttW peripheral materials. I really need to buckle down more on making story progress, but we’ll see if I can actually buckle down during Golden Week. I’ll make a goal of finishing a chapter in TWH and NagaTen each. Will I pull it off? Who knows? Stay tuned.

The main thing I accomplished was writing some of Chapter 8 of RttW, but there was also some work in the WttW peripheral materials, though not as much as previously as I’ve been goofing off a lot more. Work is starting up again, which will probably do more for actual story progress (as the story progress mentioned here was done during the days I was called in to sub). I suppose TWH needs some attention, so I’ll try to work on that. Stay tuned.

I spent the whole week on the peripheral materials of WttW, to include starting up the encyclopedia, which is a bit odd, because it’s usually one of the first things I do when starting up a new world. Of course I had to further increase complexity of the systems. I’ve added a decimal place to the weights, which forced me to go back over all the item entries, and also started to factor in volume and item dimensions. Loads of fun. Keeps me out of the beer joints, I suppose. We’ll see if I accomplish any story progress this week. Stay tuned.

As you can see, I got Chapter 5 of TWH done in time for the update, and, as you’d expect, I spent the rest of my time continuing my work in WttW. And I haven’t just been working in the peripheral materials either. I’ve gotten up to Chapter 7 in RttW. That one decision I’ve had misgivings about is pretty well locked in at this point, so I’m just going to have to deal with the consequences. World-building yet character-destroying, though hopefully as I develop the story further, the context will at least make it feel organic. Just going to have to roll the dice, I guess.

Expect more of the same this week, though I will try to at least finish another chapter of NagaTen while I’m at it. Stay tuned.

I at least accomplished one of my goals, rounding out Chapter 7 of NagaTen, but I didn’t touch on TWH any. You guessed it, I spent most of my time on WttW. However, rather than the peripheral materials, I spent a fair bit of time writing on RttW. I completed Chapter 1 and then got through Chapters 2 and 3 and started on Chapter 4. I may end up scrapping a fair bit of it, though. The main character does some things I’m not happy with. It sets the tone and establishes some concepts I want to convey, but I don’t like that he’s the one to do it. I need to try writing an alternate version and see how that fits. There’s a lot of juicy conflict that can be born of the original version, but I feel I’d lose the vast majority of the audience by doing it. I don’t know.

Anyway, I need to at least get the chapter of TWH that’s due out this weekend done. I’m sure WttW will continue to occupy plenty of my time as well. Stay tuned.