June Q&A Answer Post

Welcome to June's Q&A post! Enjoy!

I was just wondering if you were going to write any future works highlighting Genneser. I was just rereading "noblesse ablige" and it came across as if Genesser university was the ideal place to go to in the... continent? Creme de la creme world... I'm sorry 😅

Gessner definitely thinks it's the ideal place to go, and so do a lot of Westerlind aristocrats! It's one of the oldest universities in the world and has a very prestigious history. I see it as similar to Oxford or Cambridge in our world - very rarefied and with a lot of name recognition, but not right for everyone or for every subject.

It has big expansive college buildings, garden quadrangles, student rooms in towers, and so on. There are probably whole suites available for some students, especially Music students who need space for practising their instruments. I could totally imagine writing something set there, though when I was thinking about Honor Bound, I knew I wanted a break from Westerlin.

I haven't quite put together a university idea yet. Although actually, one of my concepts in the collection that contained the Honor Bound concept involved the PC being involved with archaeology at a university in Zaledo (though not technically studying), and one involved the PC being a Jezhani student doing a project. One day maybe! One of the sticking points is that the subject the PC is studying needs to be both easy for players to grasp even if they haven't studied it themselves, while being fun to write about and sparking off lots of scenes. Writing essays and having discussions, which was what my undergrad experience mostly consisted of academically, isn't all that thrilling to play through.

That said, the dark academia of it all does really appeal and I'm very enthused by campus fiction in general (as is probably obvious!)

now I want to ask if your going to give the world/continent a name.

O, maybe one day… but not today. Kind of for the same reason why I haven't made a map - I haven't figured out all the pieces of the world yet and don't want to pin things down before I have a game in which I need them. Trivia: did you know Thedas, of Dragon Age, came from the placeholder title "The Dragon Age Setting"?!

** (Spoilers below about Dominique in Royal Affairs!) **

First, in your interactive fiction games I generally choose the romantic option that puts out and generally has the best lines. Surprisingly in Royal Affairs, this was Dominique, who won the put out section by quite a bit and then held on by being a generally good person. Anyway how does she fare in the Westerlin military? I kinda speculate that she might give the top brass some headaches since they can’t be super mean to her since the Queen might take her calls. Anyway do they put her under Florin Kraemer and make her his problem? I think Dominque and Florin would be total buds.

Aww, I'm so glad you had a nice time with Dominique! I really enjoyed writing them - they and Beaumont were the major characters where I most commonly found their dialogue and actions "flowing" the most smoothly.

I don't know if even Westerlind brass would be silly enough to put Dominique with Florin, haha! I could see them being total liabilities!

I could see them being friendly with each other though. Dominique is generally so easygoing that they wouldn't necessarily care much when Florin is spiky… and I do think Florin is pretty spiky when they first join because they don't like being there and aren't there by choice. (Neither is Dominique really, but at least they have some hopefulness about it, whereas for Florin it's framed as rather a punishment.) I have so many thoughts about what direction Florin might go in!

I'm not sure that Dominique would be super happy at first because they find it hard to be in a routine-heavy environment - but at the same time they don't have to organise themselves and their time is parcelled out for them, so at least they don’t have to think about that. They would enjoy the travelling aspect but would struggle with all the physical endurance and such - they're just not very disciplined or possessing much aptitude for physical challenges. But: unlike Florin they are good at making friends and keeping them, and I could see them forming close bonds with those around them even with all that.

If they were romancing the Royal Affairs PC, I don't see them staying in the military all that long but they would want to keep in touch with the friends they made. I could see the Queen potentially stepping in to get them out of trouble in some situations too!

Second should I be getting Colorado/ rural American West vibes from the Teran landscape. By this I mean a dry windy place with cobalt blue skies and snow clad mountains in the distance?

Rural American West yes! Colorado I'm not so familiar with, but I have been taking a lot of inspiration from landscapes in Southern California and Southwestern US including plains, mountains, lakes, bristlecone pine forests, and hot springs. Elsewhere it varies a lot across the landscape - there are a lot of temperate rainforests and some very cold inhospitable mountains, and on the islands it goes more towards subtropical and tropical climates - but the Elene's Prospect is inspired by some areas of Southern California, and the size/geography of the town itself is strongly inspired by Bishop, California.

What are some of the inspirations behind Honor Bound?

Teran originally comes from a short tabletop roleplaying campaign that my wife, the author of Heart of Battle and Asteroid Run, ran for me and a dear friend about ten years ago. (It was much more fantastical, with mysterious psychic powers, and Teran was currently at war with its neighbour Messimera, a country which now appears in the Heart of Battle universe. It also had a Queen rather than a President, among other things.) A few years later, she graciously allowed me to steal the whole setting for a novel I never finished, about an ex-soldier being assigned to an ambitious politician. In Crème de la Crème, I amused myself with an offhand reference to it - and then, when I started fleshing out the world further with Noblesse Oblige, I realised I wanted to go all in on it and include it in the world properly.

As for Honor Bound specifically, when I was starting to put concepts together around Christmas 2022, I knew I liked the idea of playing as a bodyguard. I went through a few different ideas - being an "Asher" type of younger character with a peer, being a political aide like in my unfinished novel, and then I semi-settled on being the bodyguard to a young Jezhani Potentate or other royal, in a boarding school in which the town was going through some grim worker rights troubles. But! As I started getting on with that, I found that the worker abuse storyline was too dark for my liking and it also didn't quite draw the PC in enough.

So then I diverted down a route where there was rebellion in Jezhan and the royal you're looking after wasn't happy and wanted to disown their family. Again I quite liked that, but it didn't totally click and I wasn't too keen on returning to royalty straight after Royal Affairs. (I do think Jezhan is moving towards something historically dramatic, though. Maybe next game.) So I wondered about being the bodyguard to the child of a luminary of some sort. I liked that idea. I could set it in Zaledo!

Meanwhile I had been thinking of a university-set game set in Teran which involved archaeology. Astute readers will find this concept familiar from a few paragraphs up. As I developed both ideas, neither were quite clicking with the cultural stuff I knew about both countries. When I swapped them round it felt just more right.

Then I took some time thinking about what kind of school I wanted it to be. I didn't really want it to be explicitly a military school, especially as I wanted a younger teenage student to be your charge. I wanted a solid age gap between you and your charge to steer clear of anything inappropriate, and to also make use of the particular brand of chaos produced by fourteen-year-olds, and to make it feel different to the older students in Creme and Royal Affairs.

I thought of quite a few different options before recalling that I really love the landscape of Southern California and also Deep Springs exists. That was when it fell into place for me: a rarefied and very fancy environment but very different to the Gallatin and Archambault schools, and a place where you could befriend or romance staff around you. (One day I will maybe make a game about being a teacher. I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.)

I was very interested in making the school and its surroundings have a cosy, if maybe stifling for some, community and to be entwined in a way Gallatin town isn't. So when I was thinking of major characters, I wanted to have some of them be explicitly connected with the town itself, and - as will become apparent - there will be plot concerns around it too. I had a bunch of character ideas that had been floating around for a bit and figured out which ones I wanted and developed them into something more fleshed out.

After my first outline draft, my editor pointed me towards strengthening the story of the PC. In the first draft they had simply been assigned to this post after an injury and needed to do well to keep their job going: she nudged me towards the idea of being from the town originally, and of having a reputation problem to overcome around the circumstances of the injury. Without her input - and Fay's continued assistance with untangling me when I'm tying myself up in knots, being a great sounding board, and for coming up with the setting in the first place and letting me steal and change it - it would be a very different beast indeed.

So the short answer is that it came from a lot of places and went through a lot of changes, big and small, before settling into what it is now!