A couple months back, I asked if anyone would be interested if I were to just start writing about my story here. I’ve been low-key planning a novel series for years now, and I need an outlet to gush where people might just start to care. Given that there was at least some positive reception, here goes nothin’.
One of the first things I wanted to think about with this world was how it came to be, and how the concept existence happened. I originally started by building a setting for a homebrew DnD campaign, but as so many campaigns do, that one was defeated before it began by the highest-CR enemy known to humanity: scheduling.
So what do you do when you have a world that you’ve created for DnD, but nobody who’s interested in playing it, and no time to really devote to developing it into a campaign setting? That’s easy: you use it as the setting for a novel. In my case, I advanced the world by about 1000 years from the events of the campaign I’d been planning to run, and came up with the setting for what I’m going to call the Shards of Goladica.
This story takes place in the valley of Pafellis, a spanning region on the world that contains a nexus of magical leylines, and which is largely controlled by three city-states that have, through the centuries, established a tentative peace. There is Godsbythe, which is an industrial city with a theocratic system of governance, Landes, which is a totalitarian military state, and Troyd, which is a progressive utopia of art, culture, and trade. However, because the world is still fairly wild, the city-states each only exert their influence over the lands within their immediate vicinity. They have established a general rule of law for the rest of the valley, but they all understand that maintaining beyond their immediate borders that law is largely beyond the ability of any of them. And as such, they don’t really have border conflicts, because they all have a shared interest in maintaining peace within the valley.
The valley used to be part of a kingdom, whose capital city was Landes (hence the military presence there). However, certain events caused the monarchy to fall, causing the region to devolve into the still largely shattered, disconnected collection of city-states.
We’re going to focus on Godsbythe here.
Godsbythe is a city of industry, and is home to the major temples to the gods in the land. While all of the gods in the Pafellis pantheon have a showing in each of the city-states, Godsbythe is where most of the worship historically took place. People would pilgrimage from all over the world to come to these temples, providing succor to their gods and tithes to their temples. As such, the churches were able to build up massive wealth, and due to the city’s deference to the kingdom of Pafellis, they were able to gain unprecedented power within the city itself, and acted as its governing force. The population of the city then turned to industry, as the temples began to tote that hard work was a form of deference to the divine, and that people could honor the gods and live blessed lives if they devoted themselves to their labors in their gods’ names.
As with all industrial cities, this began to have an outsized impact on the poor. Pollution began to run rampant, and the impoverished only became more so, as income inequality began to skyrocket. Those in the church were the owning class, and those who toiled were the poor. However, there was one means of upwards mobility: invention. Those who could invent newer and better machines to help fuel the fires of industry would be elevated and proclaimed as blessed by the gods—and the same went for the most skilled artisans and crafts workers in the city. The temples would often reward these people with financial status and political influence, though many of them would be taken advantage of by the parasites in the upper echelons.
Yes, for as with all societies where income inequality is rampant and the rule of law is written by the gods, corruption began to rule supreme. Money and divine favor were interchangeable. Clergymen were law enforcement, but they could be bought and paid for just as easily as anyone. And this was the will of the gods—surely they would intervene if they had any problem with it, right?
The first book of the story I’m writing largely concerns Godsbythe, and the tensions that come from this sort of intricate landscape. One girl is able to escape: Everetta, who is the main protagonist here. She is special in a narratively significant way, and one which I may discuss at a later time. However, one thing that is tangentially important here is the advent of steam technology.
Magic hasn’t really been well-documented in this world yet. Its practitioners in the past were always incredibly secretive, and hid their knowledge away, fearing it would be abused, while those who had a natural talent were ostracized at best, and hunted at worst. There hasn’t been an open practitioner in centuries, and while rumors suggest that there is still magic in the world, it’s not very well-known. That is, until a certain enchantment was discovered by an enterprising young individual some seventy years ago. Certain divine knowledge houses contained the rudimentary elements of spellcraft among them, and this person snuck in and gained access to them. They were able to conceptualize and realize two different ways to magically generate heat: persistent enchantment, and manually augmented. Persistent Enchantment is the harder, more expensive of the two, and produces less power, but it creates a mechanism by which a plate will heat itself. Manually Augmented, by contrast, is easier to implement and creates more energy, but also has a tendency to drain the operators.
So naturally, this leads to an industrial city that has begun to realize the power of steam. Of course, they knew it before, but now it didn’t require massive boilers or anywhere near the same level of fuel consumption. The main industry, then, is steamsmything, which is the art of creating these enchantments and building machines around them. This largely involves creating the enchantments, but also forging the finer equipment required to handle steam under pressure. Steamsmything is considered to be a noble profession, however because of its popularity, it is incredibly difficult for anyone to gain status through it.
Steamsmyths tend to take on apprentices from a young age. Some are parents teaching their children. Some take in orphans. Some find random children on the street who show an aptitude for thinking a certain sort of way. But all of them leave the grunt work to their apprentices, teaching them gradually over time, while the smyths themselves do most of the complicated and heavier work. Of course this leads to situations where some of the apprentices face abuse, but that’s true of any sort of society.
Around the time the story starts, because of the errands that the apprentices have to run, and because of the shortcuts they often take, they’ve been given an affectionate—if derogatory—nickname by the people in the town: sewer rats.
Everetta is one such sewer rat, and her story begins near the beginning of a period of great upheaval within the city of Godsbythe.
