Tales of a land far, far away.

So this week my writing has taken a rather different turn to the usual, rather than concentrating all of my efforts on Vinland or even direct development on the mod I am working on, Prophesy of Pendor, I have been working on something related, yet very different. We have a large and very active community of fans at the Tale Worlds forums, and one of them asked me if it would be OK to run an RPG based on the lore of Pendor. This was something of a nice endorsement for the team, as I know that James Landes and I (along with a plethora of other writers and contributors) have invested a massive amount of time into producing the backstory for Pendor and fleshing out the world in which hundreds of thousands of characters live in.

One of the hallmark features for Pendor are the “Knighthood Orders” which are essentially organisations inspired by the Knights Templar or Knights Hospitaller. The reason I joined the Pendor Team after the release of Prophesy of Pendor 2 was to flesh these Orders out, and give them a real sense of being and belonging in the world, because before they were simply normal knights pimped out in some rather sweet gear. Part of my work on joining the team included creating a rivalry and conflicts between the various Orders of Pendor, and generally bringing them to life, they now act as non-state military forces, each with their own story, goals, objectives, heroes and of course a political agenda.

The result of this was a nice range of different Orders, each with their own personality and individuality. A few examples follow below;

The Order of Dawn : A fanatical Order dedicated to the ideal of justice and to the mission of destroying the evil cult of Heretics that plagues the realm. Over time their execution of this sacred duty has turned them into zealots and they will punish anyone for even the smallest of crimes or even by the tiniest affiliation to the heretics. This is truly a story of evil encroaching on even the best of intentions.

The Knights of Eventide : As the Order of Dawn becomes increasingly paranoid over the effects of the Heretics, there remained a small faction who believed the way to fight the heresy was to understand them properly. However as part of Dawn’s slide into zealotry, they banned any manuscripts or items considered heretical in order to stave off corruption. A schism occurred and the Order of Eventide was formed by those who sought to use their knowledge of heresy against the perpetrators. The irony now being that the Order of Dawn’s greatest fear seems to be realised as there are rumours that the heretical corruption has spread to the inner circle of Eventide, and threatens to undo all the work they have done to destroy the heretics.

The Order of the Ebony Gauntlet : There is an ancient race of beings that live just outside of human society known as the Noldor, or more colloquially as the elves. The Ebony Gauntlet believe that the Noldor want only the complete destruction of humanity and fight to promote human supremacy in the world, using any tools at their disposal to achieve this goal; xenophobia, racism, genocide. After all, the Noldor are not human, which makes them mere animals that deserve to be trodden under the iron-shod feet of humanity.

Now the players of this RPG have taken on a role from the various Knighthood Order’s that both appeared in Prophesy of Pendor 3, and will be appearing in Prophesy of Pendor 4. The setting is immediately following the events of Prophesy of Pendor 3, where the one hero prophesied has risen to power and united Pendor under one sovereign. Prophesy of Pendor 4 is occurring in another war torn continent which is home to Pendor’s greatest enemy, the Snake Cult.

Not much work had yet been done connecting the events of end of Pendor 3 to those in the beginning of Pendor 4, but now the results of this RPG could well bridge the gap, and better yet it has been done by the community itself so that they have more of an emotional tie to the game; it is even possible that their characters may appear in Pendor 4, who knows?

Oh, yeah and in a little aside, they made me play the King...

The end of the beginning continues!

Welcome back! I know that I meant to publish this next part last week but with one thing or another it kept being delayed, then with the riots being rather distracting over the weekend and into this week it just kept being sidelined. Without further ado, here is the rest of the planning process;

Last week we left off creating the overview of what each character does, and put them in chronological order. This is essentially the very framework of the plot, in a somewhat readable (albeit bare bones) format. You could actually read this tale now, and be able to understand what is happening but it would not be much fun. The next step is to add flesh to these bones, and do the actual writing that turns a plan into a story.

I

·         Bjarni finds America

o   Bring out the superstitious element

o   Make Bjarni appear a coward to his crew

 Becomes;

A raven black as midnight flapped weakly onto the beached ship and hopped on to the mast which was now leaning on the rocky beach. Its strength left it then, and it tottered and fell to the small stones below, wings outspread in a grisly parody of flight.

“Odin has sent us a warning” murmured Snorri softly, eyes not leaving the corpse

“An evil omen! The gods are warning us that this land be cursed!” said Jorvik, his voice high. The superstitious crew all stepped back from the dead bird and then stood regarding it with their mouths agape. 

Bjarni, still in a trance was once again heaving at the ship, trying to push it back to sea. His crew needed no second urging and added their strength to his. Slowly the ship, timbers being eviscerated under the grindstone effect of the shale beneath uttered tortured screams and slid slowly back in to the ocean.

Now we have the manuscript in rough comes the part I am dreading most the editing phase. It is here that I call up all my friends and beg their help as I am well aware that spelling and grammar are not my strongest suits. We then go through the text with a fine toothed comb and make sure the final copy is readable, and that the messages it presents are those I intended. I bring out my notes on the characters and ask my guinea pi... err volunteer editors for their impressions on the cast and see if the two are more or less the same. From there I intend to get some professional editors involved so as to give me a full critique on what is good and what is not. These criticisms will then need to be acted upon and changes made to the script.

Once all of this is done, I should have something that I actually feel comfortable in selling to the general public, and the book is done.

The end of the beginning

“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning” is one of my most cherished Churchill quotes, and rings very true of the status of Vinland at the moment. Following my foray into the countryside of Dorset last week, I have been surprisingly industrious in working on my novel.

As you know, I met with the editor, Leila Dewji some time ago now, and have since then been refining the plot of the story to be rather more dramatic and less epic in scale. This process is thankfully nearly done, and I will soon be returning to what I enjoy the most anyway – actually writing the book!

I am sure you are getting rather curious about how I actually go about writing the book, I have given many hints over the months of my blogging here, but have never actually gone over the process. To start with, I have my notebook (a tool most good writers will have on their person at any one time) which is filled to the brim with ideas, people that i’ve met, strange situations. Anything really that crosses my overactive mind every single day. I then go through this notebook and take out anything which could be suitable to the plot, and note them all down in another, bigger notebook. This I entitle “Stuff to happen”. 

Example;

• Discover America
• Game of Hnetafel
• Warrior arrives
• Sit in hall eating meal ignoring enfolding drama
• Merchant thrown overboard
• Find prince
• Find natives

As you can see this is pretty basic, just an overview of things that could happen. The next step are the characters, and very unlike the plot these are remarkably organic, beyond some general traits and noting down major events I do not plan them overly much. Instead I go through the “stuff to happen” and apply those events to the characters, or if something especially good needs to happen, I create a suitable character for it to happen to.

Example;

• Erik the Red
• Central character. The reason Vinland succeeds
• Thorvald
• The voice of the warrior spirit
• Leif
• The voice of intelligence and reason

See, even the character overviews I have posted on this blog are more in depth than the notes I followed initially. Now we have the rough story and the characters, we need to turn this into a plot. Therefore I cut the events up into “sections” and arrange these sections into a chronological order. This is what we are left with;

I

• Bjarni finds America
• Bring out the superstitious element
• Make Bjarni appear a coward to his crew

II

• Leif loses to Erik at Hnetafel (Viking chess)
• It is a very close match. Mock anger from Erik to display his pride in the skills of his son.

IV

• Kai arrives
• Sits in hall eating meal ignoring enfolding drama

VI

• Edvin, Rorik and Anneliese arrive
• Edvin thrown overboard by Rorik

Addendum

• Find prince
• Dropped, terrible idea and horrifically cliche.
• Find natives
• ?

But how does this contribute to the finished script? Find out on Thursday!