long live the queen
Intrigues and Influences
Since last May I’ve been working intensively on a new interactive fiction written in ChoiceScript language, titled Turncoat Chronicle. My previous attempt at writing a ChoiceScript game did not go well, but with a year’s worth of writing experience I decided to revisit the draft of the old game and re-spin it into a new story, told from a different point of view. Restructuring the narrative gave it a new lease of life, and my strict adherence to limiting the scope of the story means I have great hopes of completing it in a reasonable time frame.
Like the game it spun out of, and like several of my other writing projects in progress, Turncoat Chronicle occupies a complicated fantasy world, alien to our own, but without magic and religiously agnostic. Its setting, the kingdom of Koth, is known within its own world as a militant and battle-ready nation. Despite this, combat does not form the bulk of the story’s plot, nor the game mechanics. It lives in an uncomfortable subgenre, where talking typically solves more problems than stabbing: political fantasy.
Search Terms Q&A
If my search terms are any indication, there are a lot of frustrated people skipping over my blog. As a writer I aim to entertain and inform, so I took these suggestions to heart. And so I present, answers to questions I didn’t know people were asking:
- “sunless sea warrant of redemption” – try Gamepedia’s Sunless Sea wiki, they have an article on legacies in the game. Personally, I recommend against the Correspondent legacy, no matter how badly you want to raise your Pages skill. Starting with a blank zee chart might seem like a pain, but the fragments that you earn from exploring convert to secrets, which are hard to earn otherwise early in the game. If you’ve created unique engines or cannons, go for those. You should know that 50% of a skill means accumulated skill, which doesn’t include the background-specific bonus at the start of the game.
- “dark parables game order” – TV Tropes lists the games in order of release. If you’re a new player just trying the series out for the first time, skip The Curse of Briar Rose and start with The Exiled Prince or Rise of the Snow Queen. They showcase the games’ strengths much better, I think.
- “barbara gordon porn comics” – uh, all right. I guess try scans_daily on Dreamwidth, they’re the best source for fancomics.
- “that which yields is not always weak” – I assume this caught me because of my meta about diplomacy skills in Long Live the Queen. This is actually a quote from Jacqueline Carey’s delightful Kushiel’s Legacy books. I don’t have a review of these up, but I read them years ago and found them delightful.
- “who is oracle in dc universe” – excellent question, anonymous Google user. Oracle is the second persona of Barbara Gordon, the Silver Age Batgirl. Along with Dinah Lance (the Black Canary) she founded a team called the Birds of Prey. As a world-class genius and master-hacker, she became a networking nexus for superheroes small and large, and maintained an absolutely alarming database of secret identities. She’s the best.
- “how does dialogue develop hazel’s character” – I think I’ll leave this as a reader participation question. If you mean the character from The Fault in Our Stars (which I have never read) try SparkNotes.
- “queen at arms romance” – well, I romanced James the first time around, and it was pretty cool.
[Image by Alexis Wilke via WikiCommons.]
Hazel Gold 