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"There’s a big trade in senet idols and artifacts, and Fraternal Gefendur scripture." Huh, wonder whether a certain general - now a bit less than half the man he was before - would have liked those scriptures.

Oh, he had read them and was absolutely intrigued by them. It was Yerta that came to him of course, but Bell was very sympathetic to the Fraternal sect. Hetr too.

In the timeline where Composer Duane was killed in a duel, would Lemuel still have looked after Leysa and the kids, or would Duane's unceremonious death have been the last straw for him?

That would be a more difficult situation, since the family would have been moved to Valyne. I can't say for sure whether Lemuel would move to Valyne to be with them and join a Soud ghers there, or if Leysa's brother would move the family back to Durlyne and Lemuel would have married her there. Either is plausible.

But Lemuel would absolutely make the family his priority. He loves them all in his own unorthodox way, and while he certainly has raised Mikaila in a manner that NO ONE in the ghers or the household approves of, it's all coming from a place of love and a feeling of personal responsibility. So there'd be no "last straw" as long as his wife and kids need him. And he does think of them in those terms.

Though he and Leysa do have a weird relationship. You'll see.

Just received my Kickstarter books and I love them! The covers look beautiful, and I really like the logo redesign for them. My only "negative" feedback would be that I wish the gutter was bigger; some of the pages come a little close, and I fear damaging the spine by opening the pages too wide.

So glad they arrived safely!

Moving those balloons was a toughie because I only had flattened tifs to work from - otherwise I would have had to convert all nine chapters again and there just wasn't time. They're definitely better than they were in the old indie books but I agree there are a few pages where they could be even more out of the gutter.

Books 3 and 4 are worlds better. I moved the balloons WHILE doing the editing, so I had layers available, and so every single balloon is an inch away from the gutter on the binding side. Not only the balloons, but sound effects too and any panels that were really important. These are my best books ever o_o

And as of today, they're officially done and submitted to prepress halle-effing-lujah. Back to drawing Aldishmen beating each other up.

What do Durlyne’s exurbs and hinterlands look like? Is it all frozen wasteland?

Not at all. Durlyne is both the name of the entire ginnal (state) and the capital city. All of Alderode is set up like this, even Valyne, where the national capital city is. Within Durlyne there are many medium sized cities and many, many villages. It and Valyne are actually the two most densely populated ginnal in the country. Durlyne's second biggest city is Bershingul at the intersection of the Grattaerin border and the Sisters' River. Duane's magery is half a day's ride from it. Winalils the famous pleasure city is back to the west on the tip of Cape Sal Curie, surrounded by farmland, old surface quarries, evergreen forests, and dozens of quaint villages like Seferpine, where the Quigleys lived.

While the northern coast sees a steep dropoff in temperature year-round thanks to the cooling effect of the Frost Giant grasses, the bottom two-thirds of Durlyne have four seasons and a short but warm summer. Here's a shot of a highway inn on a clear summer day, with the Temple way on the horizon. Pleasant!

Could Bastion have actually helped Prakhuta, or was he only trying to cling on to his last remaining "friend" at that point?

He was very successful in helping him avoid capture by the Peaceguard :) If you mean could he have helped him in a more existential or spiritual sense? Probably not. The Lady does not relinquish her servants.

I've never seen anyone point out how Lady Ilganyag did nothing to stop Bastion from visiting the Black Tongues even though she surely knew he'd lose his memory of Rahm there. And how much sense this made because it left him all the more isolated with her.

Buying fake senet stuff is cringe. If you’re interested in it in a religious sense, just join a real cult, and ask your new senet god for some water or a fang or whatever. (Although actually if I were an efheby I would not rip out a whole fang. Sounds painful :0)

They shed them and they grow back, but yeah, only their besties are going to get to keep one, same with their scales >( When Jab Beadman's grandfather was a boy, he made a decent living selling fishbone fangs to lovelorn sailors. Supposedly they can move a woman's heart if you pray on them. Which is kinda creepy when you remember how efheby mind-influence works~

While he hasn't had the opportunity to speak with Sette, due to all the current circumstances, has Duane had the clarity to realize that "Tirna" was not in fact who she said she was, even if he doesn't know precisely what she was?

He remembers very few details of that entire encounter. She was ripping his mind apart during it all, it'd be weird if that didn't have consequences. He knows what happened actually happened, but he needs to talk it through with Sette and get it straight. It'll be a good conversation~

Do any senet other than Minnow remember Sette?

Well, Lady Ilganyag does :3

Otherwise Sette and Jac were always born in a certain forest in southeast Kasslyne, and the only senets they ever saw were Wand'ring Roots that are gone now, and the occasional wandering efheby or waterfolk. Sette and Jac were to do with a Gefendur cult, mind you, and the Gefendur were pretty stabby towards senet beasts for much of their history.

How much is known about the Coldlands in-universe? The way you describe it, the place sounds like every wright's wet dream, so it surprises me that (not counting the senets) only the inak are interested in going there.

No one knows about it but a few senets. It's not for humans.

What “banned religious paraphernalia” was the Nevergreen smuggling?

There's a big trade in senet idols and artifacts, and Fraternal Gefendur scripture. A lot of the senet stuff is fake - fake efheby fang talismens, fake First Salt, fake vials of Stormfolk water - but people swear it has magical properties and cures their ills.

Is the story going to veer into scifi more and leave fantasy behind?

I'm not a huge expert on either - in fact I've been actively bored by most of the quote-unquote scifi I've tried partaking in so my knowledge there is super lacking - but is there all that much of a difference between the two? I don't think anyone likes any fantasy that doesn't have a consistent logic and at least a setting plausible enough to survive a long look and a narrow squint. When you've got a lynchpin of scifi media like Star Trek letting humans reproduce with whatever alien species the writer likes, and summoning whatever food they want out of a magic box, and travelling to any point in history through magic portals...

I mean, I just don't see a lot of difference between the two genres outside of the flavour of the jargon used to "explain" it all. Your mom's half-elf is your dad's half-Vulcan. Your sister's Teleportation spell is your brother's Warp Drive.

I wouldn't worry about it. Genre-policing seems to keep a lot of fiction stuck in the mud. I've avoided a lot of fantasy all my life, too, because it just seemed like desperate reiterations of that Tolkien guy. Whom I believe wrote most of his stuff as a sandbox to play with the science of linguistics. Talk about science fiction.

Anyway, the tone and priorities of the story will remain consistent in the second book right through to the end. A lot of the stuff we talk about here never comes to the forefront of the comic :) It's like, "If you know, you know" stuff.

You’ve probably answered this before, but Timofey is made of First Light, which is effectively unheard of as a material nowadays since suncrumbs are gone. So what were Iori’s ghosts made of? Jivi never seemed that surprised about the existence of ghosty pymarics, which makes me think they’re not that uncommon.

If you look on the kitchen table, you can see their pymarics. One's a sailing boat, one's a little dolly. They're projections from these :)

Given the timeless nature of the khert, would adding new words to the Old Tainish language have any sort of temporal relevance, or would the alteration affect the entire timeline of the world?

What an insightful question! Yes, it could crash reality.

What if someone thought they knew a nonexistent word a thousand years ago in a spell, they didn't, the spell failed. Well, if you install that word into the database (so to speak), now that spell executes, and the consequences could potentially ripple through history. If the consequences are large enough, they destroy the world. Doc Brown's losing his mind!

A khert-fire is a protective measure. It makes spellwork too hazardous until the system's repaired itself and calmed down. There is no safeguard like this inside the khert; no adjuticator that will bounce your mistake back on you rather than Core Leech the whole continent. You could easily end the world there if you make the wrong move.

So ... you get into lots and lots of politics in ways where people of varied persuasions really get into it all and simply assume you or a favourite character are on "their side" - was that intentional or simply a result of being able to see people as people, or good Dungeon Master habits?

My politics follow: "What is the most rational and scientifically promising course of action and which systems will benefit and encourage the flourishing of the largest amount of people?"

Any other routes are irrational magical thinking or grift, far as I can tell.

You definitely are on target mentioning Dungeon Master impartiality. Storytelling can be for the purpose of persuasion and you can definitely have an agenda - I don't think there's anything wrong with that - but I think you have to put it aside if you want to write a diverse cast of characters believably and authentically. It helps to live among diversity. I have all my life been surrounded by lots of people whose politics and personal beliefs I cannot stand, but I also know they don't think they're bad people, and they'll help a friend move or bankrupt themselves for cat surgery.

So yeah, most people are just people. A few people are monsters and should be separated from their pulse, but most people just get caught up by grifters and take on causes as a personal identity. This makes them do the selfish thing, the evil thing, the irrational thing, but they don't view their actions as selfish, evil, or irrational at all. So as a writer (or DM), you can't either.

I'm always a little glum when I see or sense a reader is just looking for characters on their side; just looking for a hit of confirmation bias like a meth head on 34th Ave N (Pinellas heads get it). Stories are a space to safely explore all kinds of people and ideas, not furtively steal more bricks for that wall you've built up around your beliefs.

If Khette had killed Sette in a more violent way that caused dismemberment or blood loss (eg cutting her open, or ripping her up) would the First Soul still have been able to revive her?

No :( Feels like it would be silly to say the First Soul ain't magic - it's super magic! - but it has hard limits. The First Soul can cheat a little, but it can't rebuild a busted brain or make a bunch more lost blood. Sette is very far from invulnerable. If Duane was less polite he might call her a real shit zombie, and then she'd rip the eyes from out of his putrid skull and throw them into the sea~

Where's the line between page cleanup and George Lucas-ing? No shade but if you're gonna go big you gotta render Ruck in CGI whenever he's on screen

I think we know the George Lucas line is changing characterization, since he made that atrocious edit to show Guido shot first, which instantly made Han less cool and interesting. Also that added floor show in... wherever that was. It and a lot of the other CG wasn't ready for primetime yet, so anywhere it shows up instantly drifts cartoony and just totally wrong for the films.

George Lucas flubbed all that, but I think he also did a really important service to artists everywhere by showing them what NOT to do when editing work. Also gave us Mr Plinkett and RLM, which are precious to me~

But nah, nothing at all in the print books that changes any context. If anything, it sharpens context since now you can read things better.

I'll say if there's anything in danger of trimming, it's the last chapter. It did get a bit away from me, and there were specific pages where, before I posted them, I told myself I was gonna do a final edit for print and this version was just temporary (I'll always sooner post a page I'm unhappy with than miss an update). So we'll see how that turns out.

But I'm not looking at it again until the end of the year so I can have fresher eyes for it :)

How many pages would have to "updated" on the site when you get around to it? This is just for clarification, since you did mention having to rework a lot panels for Books 3 & 4, so if we count the first two books, as well as the last two ones that will come in the future, how many changes would be noticeable in a reread?

Hard to say. Some of the tweaks are as major as a whole new page inserted, some have new panels, some have new figures within panels, some are minor tweaks to fix wonk. There is only I think one cut line, and there are a few added ones. In 3 and 4, anyway. I edited the first nine print chapters quite a while back at this point, so my memory of the changes is spotty. Outside of that Toma page that's only in print, anyway.

Book six will be the most changed because I have to reimagine certain sequences. And those'll never get added to the site of course, they're specific to the books.

I'm really proud of the work I've done on the upcoming 2. I'm doing my final proofread tonight, then they're ready to submit. There is just a lot that reads better now.

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