quick question, sorry if someone asked this already, but i’m now at the start of knight of the crownless king (fire title btw) and i searched for skalná hora on a modern map and i can’t find it. did you think of the name? did you do research and found the name somewhere? i just found it interesting and the best way was to ask you directly, i think. also i love reading the story so far, the effort and time is surely incredible!
The place is indeed fictional. I do enjoy writing a historically accurate-ish story and the big picture events are largely adhering to what really happened. But when I started working on Of Lilies and Lions, I decided that I'd rather write an engaging narrative than something that sticks perfectly to history. I still wanted it to feel plausible but I didn't want to bind myself too much to actual events and irl people from history. So I decided to just invent a bunch of stuff and try to make it seem like it could have happened. Like the OCs could come from real world history and the places feel like they could actually exist.
Some OCs and settings, like Lord Žerotín's castle and the man himself, are completely made up (even if I like to pluck cool names from history). And some like Smil Flaska in Of Lilies and Lions are inspired by actual people. With Skalná Hora, I pictured a castle that was sitting atop steep rock like a crown, so I tried to pick something that sounded "rocky" and used what I hope fits that in Czech.
That's a really long-winded way of saying "I try to get away with as little research as I can", lol. Honestly, I think it's really neat that KCD manages to make you feel like you're playing a history book, even though they do bend a few things to create an engaging story. We've got people playing important roles who were dead by the time of the game's events, like von Aulitz. Sometimes characters' ages are changed, Hans is older in the game than his irl counterpart was in 1403 and Liechtenstein seems to have been de-aged a little. I just ran with that concept and took it a step or two further.
But tbh, at the end of the day, I just want to write something that's entertaining and feels lived-in, to the best of my abilities. So, please don't take the trilogy as a history book. I really don't wanna be responsible if anyone fails a history test, lol.
