A Taste of Questline

When you mention fantasy worlds to people there are some typical ingredients that come to mind: an evil that has grown musty on the shelves of time, a chosen hero that goes from whiny farmer to magnanimous hero (we’re not throwing names here), and a suspiciously New Zeeland backdrop.

My mind treated those constraints like my newborn treats the boundaries of her diapers—with absolute disregard.

Questline exploded into life with a few audacious thoughts one day while I was working on a farmhouse remodel for a friend. The only immediate evidence (incidentally like my previously mentioned newborn) was an unconscious smile and a chuckle that implied, “Yeah, that’s a good one.”

The thought was one crisp line.

What if everything was a sham?

Story May Contain

What if being a hero wasn’t a birthright or some spam call from destiny. What if it was a showy bureaucratic act of theater?

Enter Questline.

Now what if they pulled it off beautifully and no one ever saw it or cared to look into it?

Now we’ve got a society.

But what if one person did see it? And what if they did care to look?

Enter Donivar.

And finally, what if he believed that this manipulation was a real danger that needed to be uncovered and taken down…But he is a lovably inept hero-wanna-be?

Now we’ve got a story.

Locally Sourced

The story takes place in Wiltonburg, a mining town that hit a bit of a boom when two things happened: the King’s Highway came through and linked the town into a major vein of trade with the capital, and a crown-sponsored Questing Academy sprang up almost overnight to use the remote but accessible area to train the heroes of society.

The people of Wiltonburg (humans, gnomes, dwarves, wood elves) live a more or less normal life around the strutting nobles that come from afar to be in the academy and the merchant depots that pop up to manage caravans that come through and distribute goods into the Wiltonburg market.

All is pretty peaceful, other than the touring bands of orcs, the brittle boundaries with the trolls and the frequent rumors of a sorcerer in the Henroot swamp to the north.

Additional Seasonings

Fantasy worlds have to have magic, right?

Yes!

Aaannnndddd hard magic has kind of been the hot thing, right?

YES!

So, let’s break it.

Huh?

Imagine you had a group of wise sages (because there’s always a group of these old guys floating in the stuffy confines of lore and magical legend) that did some impressive magical smithing in bygone years and took the formless wild magic of old and shaped it elegantly into a shapely hard magic system. They then realized that each of them had a variation of the rules they wanted to add but didn’t tell any of their compatriots (we’ve all done group projects with these types). The result was a clever mess. The wise sages essentially lost their username and password for the most potent force in the universe and had no clue how to gain it back.

So, what happens when someone starts to rediscover it?

Now we have the secret seasoning blend.

Initial Cook Time

I’m loving how this story is coming. And I’m having a ton of fun with the absurdities it lends itself to. If the plan keeps moving the way I see it going, then this manuscript should be wrapping up this spring.

I’m hoping to launch the rough edit of this story on Royal Road in the next month or two and then give it the old bristle brush scrubbing this summer and fall so that it can go live on Amazon as a finished product by late fall or winter.

Questline is a story about systems, secrets, and the dangerous act of asking questions you’re not supposed to ask.

I’m excited to share it with you soon.