The Game of Writing

 So, in my last blog, I spoke about how I was now officially writing for the Kings of War source books and I just wanted to do a quick blurb about what that is like.

For starters, it is a very different beast to write something that reads more like a history book than a narrative novel. It makes a word count much harder to achieve when you can't build out descriptions or explore situations through nuanced dialogue. That being said, it was a lot of fun to work almost exclusively on world-building. You know, that thing that we always did when we were sitting in a boring lecture at school instead of paying attention to the teacher? The hard part was making all of those ideas palatable and interesting for a casual reader.

The simplest solution was to weave in numerous narrative short stories to help flesh out characters or provide additional perspective on the events as they unfolded. This also gave me a break from the overly formal constraints of writing from a strictly objective historical basis. The end result, I feel, is greater than the sum of its parts because it brings together wide, sweeping narratives involving nations, while still allowing it to feel cinematic and intimate. It achieves this by engaging readers' emotions and making the grand, sweeping narrative more relatable from an individual perspective.

I primarily worked on the portion of the story involving the Trident Realm and their attempts to halt the invasion of the Xirkaali, a Chinese-inspired faction of gnolls and humans. There was much swashbuckling and beach assaults in my narrative, and I got to bring out an old friend, Shesh'ra from Drowned Secrets, to play. My favorite part isn't in the book itself, but rather will appear in later internet posts where it will detail specific factions within the society of the Trident Realm which people will be able to take and build their armies around.

If any of this sounds interesting, I would urge you to pick it up. The expansion book is called Invasion and can be found here.

As always, thanks for coming along with me on this journey, and I hope there are many more adventures ahead of us!



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