Episode 168: Fantasy Worldbuilding In The FROSTBORN Series

In this week's episode, we take a look at some of the fantasy worldbuilding decisions that went into the FROSTBORN series. I also discuss finishing the original HALO trilogy on the Xbox console.

It’s time for a new Coupon of the Week!

This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STONE, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STONE for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

GHOSTSTONE

The coupon code is valid through September 29th, 2023, so if you need to listen to something while raking leaves, it might be time to get yourself a new audiobook!

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 168 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 15th, 2023 and today we're going to discuss fantasy worldbuilding in the Frostborn series. We'll also talk a bit about how I finished the Halo trilogy and comments on last week's episode and some updates on my current writing projects. But before we get to all that, let's first have Coupon of the Week for this week.

00:00:28

This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Stone as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Stone for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code GHOSTSTONE. Again, that's Ghost Stone spelled GHOSTSTONE. It will also be in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through September 29th, 2023. So if you need to listen to something while raking leaves, this might be a good time to get yourself a new audiobook.

00:00:57

What I am working on right now is Ghost in the Serpent, the first new Caina book in two years and the first book of new Ghost Armor series. I'm currently 36,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 8 or 9 of 20. I can't remember which, I'll double check and we will talk a little bit more about that later in the show.

Once Ghost in the Serpent is out, I'm hoping to have that out in October and then I will start in the next Nadia book Cloak of Embers. I haven't done a Nadia book since April, which is a bit of a time delay, but I wanted to spend the summer finishing things. As I mentioned with The Dragonskull Series and The Silent Order series and now both of them are done. So it is time to start something new, which would be the Ghost in the Serpent and Ghost Armor series in this case.

00:01:46

In audio book news we are doing audio book proofing for Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians right now and hopefully that will be wrapped up this coming week and then we can get the audiobook out before too much longer.

00:02:01

Before we get to our other topics, I wanted to read a comment from longtime reader William about last week's episode about finishing The Silent Order series, and William has to say: It's hard to put a number on it, but writing different series and different genres probably helps bring in new readers. Silent Order was the first of your series that I started reading specifically because of a post on William King's blog about your experiment with Eclipse Hand followed by Cloak Games, Demonsouled, The Ghosts and eventually Frostborn. Even if Frostborn and its sequel series at your best sellers (and they are), I might never have picked up the Gray Knight if I just stumbled across it on Amazon. An example would be Games Workshop, which started out making a lot of odd games and spin offs aside from its two massively popular miniature war games. These both help pick them new players and encourage writers to explore new themes which fed into and enriched the main games.

Naturally, they didn't sell as well as the main games, and occasionally they didn't sell very well at all. So gradually the marketing and sales department managed to shut down any such projects, and for a decade or so, their two main games grew staler and sales stagnated, and then they started trying to diversify their offerings again, as well as improve community outreach and other initiatives and sales improved.

The post he's referring to was one about Eclipse Hand, where you'll remember if you listened last week's episode, I had written Silent Order Eclipse Hand entirely with free software like Ubuntu Linux, Libre Office, Office Writer, Sigil, and so forth, just to prove a point that it could be done and I did. So it it's funny how there are many different ways that readers can feed into your books. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to persist with that Lit RPG series, which I'm working on the side right now in hopes of, you know, bringing in new readers. But that reminds me of a verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes, where it's cast your bread upon the waters and in seven days it will return to you. There's a couple different interpretations of that passage, but one of them is that sometimes it's good to take chances on things because you don't know how it will come back to you later.

And so if you have any other comments or questions that you would like answered on the show, leave a comment or question on my website or Facebook page, and we'll see if we include it.

00:04:18

And now some more information about Ghost in the Serpent. When I mentioned that my next book would be Ghost in the Serpent and that got both an enthusiastic response and a few questions. So let's answer them here.

When will Ghost in the Serpent come out? Hopefully October if all goes well and nothing drastic comes up.

When in the series’ timeline does Ghost in the Serpent take place? Just about a year after Ghost in the Sun, which you will recall was the last Caina book I wrote back at the end of 2021.

How many books will the Ghost Armor series have? I am planning for six.

Will there be an audiobook for Ghost in the Serpent? We are hopefully planning to record Ghost in the Serpent in November, if all goes well.

And do you need to reread the previous Ghost books first, before reading Ghost in the Serpent? The answer is, if you want to. The truth is, I can try to make Ghost in the Serpent as stand alone as I want, and I will try to, but people will still want to read the previous books anyway, like I had to laugh when I saw some of the coverage for the Ahsoka TV show with the show’s creators insisting that you didn't need to watch Star Wars Rebels or the Clone Wars first to understand the show. Meanwhile all these content mills are coming out with articles like 27 essential Rebels episodes to watch before Ahsoka.

So if you've never read any of the ghost books, the first book, Child of the Ghosts, is free on all ebook platforms, and the bundle of the first three books, The Ghosts Omnibus One, is only $0.99 in U.S. dollars on all platforms at the moment.

Next question was when are you going to write another Nadia book?  After Ghost in the Serpent is done. It will be called Cloak of Embers and will hopefully come out in November or December.

Finally, what will Ghost in the Serpent be about? Well, you'll just have to read and find out. One preview: we never did find out why the surge someone send Kylon back to New Kyre.

00:16:48

One amusing thing that happened recently was that I accidentally finished both Halo 2 and Halo 3 on the Xbox. I've mentioned before that I didn't play any console games at all from about 1998 to 2019, so I missed out on the entire Halo series, but in 2022 I got an Xbox and after I used it to beat Skyrim, I started in on the Halo Series and I beat the original Halo single player campaign in October of 2022.

This year I fired up Halo 2 and started playing through the main campaign. I sort of got distracted for a while in May, but I came back to it in August and picked it up again. I kept plugging away at the main campaign and to my surprise I suddenly beat it. Halo 2 ends on something of a cliffhanger, so I could see why Halo 3 was such a big deal back in 2007. Naturally, I had to keep going, and since Halo 3 is included in the Master Chief Collection, which is included in Xbox Game Pass, I started up on Halo 3. Apparently in its first week of sales back in 2007, the game made more than $300 million, which is like major motion picture territory, and in my opinion, Halo 3 totally deserved it. There are some amazing levels in that game, like the bit where the Master Chief has to take down the two giant enemy next simultaneously or the final level when Master Chief and the Arbiter have to escape the collapsing Halo with Master Chief driving the warthog and the Arbiter running the machine gun on the back, it's like Mario Kart, but with firearms.

I think the original Halo remains my favorite because of its relative simplicity. There are only so many weapons and so many enemy types, but the game puts them to good use. I have to say console gaming is a very different experience than PC gaming, I said I didn't play any console games at all, from about ‘98 to 2019, but that isn't to say I played no games, I just spent a lot of time PC gaming in the 90s and 2000s and in the 90s, that meant fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys and making sure emm386.exe was configured properly. Oh, and making sure the sound card was configured to use a different IRQ than the other devices on the system. Granted, if you were born in the 90s or the 2000s, you probably have no idea what I was talking about just now, but if you know you know, whereas with the console you just download the game and it almost always works. Very different experience!

Though I have to say my favorite part of Halo has to be the parts where you get a tank and start blasting away at the enemy. Very satisfying. We had a couple of good comments about Halo when I posted about it on Facebook. Reader Jeremiah says: My son and I played the Master Chief collection together and of course use the skulls which he had previously collected such as infinite ammo, etcetera. I forget which Halo game it was, might have been 3 but not sure. One of the skulls allowed you to practically fly by jumping and holding that button down. You had a blast on that. You'd crash into a wall going fast and die, or just slide past all the enemies and keep on going. I think that's one of the reasons why Halo is so enduringly popular, much like Mario Kart is because it gives such good multiplayer experience that hopefully you can build some positive family memories around.

Our next comment about that comes from JK who says: I used to do PC game phone tech support in the late 80s and had to actually talk people through editing their autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Well my hat is off to you, JK. That sounds extremely difficult. By the time I started doing tech phone support, that was in the age of Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows Millennium Edition, I don't know if any of your listeners out there remember Windows Millennium Edition, but it was deeply terrible and broke frequently, so I spent a lot of time dealing with phone support with Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition, especially Windows Millenium Edition, but that was still less complex and less aggravating than trying to talk someone through fixing their autoexec.bat file over the phone had to have been.

00:10:12

Now on to our main topic this week, a question about fantasy world building in the Frostborn series. This comes from reader Paloma, who asked a question about Andomhaim:

A question: The Magistri get married and have families, but I don't remember any Magistrius in the books having any woman or man, though it's hard to think like that with mentality of the Middle Age world with them, I hope not that the men in this situation are like monks because I hope Joaquin has someone amazing in his future.

In answer to that question, we're going to talk about it for a while. In the Frostborn world, the Magistri can get married. Minor spoiler if you read the Frostborn: The Shadow Prison, the Magistrius Camorak marries a widowed baker after the Frostborn War after she essentially bakes her way into his heart. The Magistri were founded at a time when Andomhaim’s population was low and so everyone of every station of life was encouraged to have children.

A few of the first Magistri wanted the Order of the Magistri to become a monastic religious order that happened to wield magic, but there was sufficient opposition to the idea that it didn't happen. They sort of compromised halfway where all magic users in Andomhaim would be required to join the Magistri, but could still have possessions and get married. That said, the Magistri do tend to get married at a much lower rate than the nobles and commoners for three reasons.

First reason is that Andomhaim has an overall suspicion of magic. It's much stronger among the commoners than the nobles, but it's still there among the nobility. A lot of people remember that a significant portion of the Order of the Magistri sided with Tarrabus Carhaine and the Enlightened of Incariel during the Civil War, and the Frostborn series.

There are many, many stories about Magistri going bad that have worked their way into the folklore of Andomhaim. The evil wizard is as much of a stock character in the songs and tales of Andomhaim as it is in modern day fantasy novels.

This isn't entirely fair to the Magistri, of course, but the belief is there, though people who have been healed of serious injuries by the healing spell of the Magistri often they have a much higher opinion of the Order.

The second reason is money. Magistri can get a stipend from the Order or from the noble in whose court they serve and they can't hold land. So though the Order as a whole can hold estates to support itself, marriage in Andomhaim, especially between nobles and wealthy merchants, is usually more about property and producing heirs than romantic love. Since the Magistri don't bring any property to a marriage, that's often a nonstarter, especially among nobles. Commoner Magistri like Camorak are much more likely to get married.

The third reason is that Magistri frequently becomes so enamored of their studies that they simply don't have time for marriage and very little interest in pursuing one. Magic, to paraphrase an old comedy sketch, is one heck of a drug, which is one of the reasons why Magistri do go bad. They become so obsessed with magical power and learning more secrets that they lose their connection to the rest of humanity.

That said, it's not terribly common for male Magistri to have mistresses in the form of “housekeepers” and so forth. It's a bit like the Western Church during the Middle Ages. One thing that perpetually vexed clerical reformers in the Western Church throughout the Medieval period was how many priests had common law wives and concubines. Remember that life in the Middle Ages was frequently very harsh and while the village priests often would work lands and farm alongside the rest of the peasants, he nonetheless had had better income and more prestige than many other villagers. Becoming the priest’s “housekeeper” was often a more attractive prospect than the other available options. In fact, in some reasons, this arrangement became so frequent, so common that a frequent effort of clerical reform was attempting to keep a priest from passing his office down to his eldest son via his common law wife. In Andomhaim, the church has evolved to a structure more similar to the Eastern Church during the Middle Ages. Priests could be married, but bishops and abbots were expected to be unmarried and be celibate.

While less frequent than the Magistrius with a housekeeper, female Magistri sometimes become the mistresses of the nobles in whose court they serve. It's a frequent enough occurrence that the beautiful young Magistria and the grim Lord whose eye is caught by the beautiful young Magistria are stock characters in these songs of Andomhaim like the evil wizard described above. Though, depending on the personality of the individual Magistria, bard who sings one of those songs within her earshot might gain a lifelong enemy.

The Swordbearers, by contrast, are much more popular than the Magistri. Partly this is because they integrate in Andomhaim social structure more easily. Swordbearers can and frequently do hold land. Constantine Licinius is a Swordbearer and a dux of the Northern Land and Ridmark Arban is the Commons of Castarium and the Constable of Tarlion. And they're both Swordbearers. Since Swordbearers are supposed to protect the people of Andomhaim from dark magic and knights and nobles are supposed to protect the people of their lands, the two roles to use rather neatly.

While both commoners and nobles have become Magistri and Swordbearers, there's something more aspirational about becoming a Swordbearer, a wandering knight who wields the sword of white fire against monsters.

Knights of the Soulblade, of course, can get married even though they are more likely to leave widows and orphans than the Magistri. And consider the Swordbearers and the Magistri from the perspective of common peasant who doesn't know any of this, a Magistrius or Magistri would be a remote, aloof man or woman wielding abilities you don't understand, and that he or she might have gotten them from the devil. You've heard stories about how Magistri can serve dark powers. Maybe they can heal injuries, but at what cost?

But then an urvaalg starts, probably around the forest near your village. It kills three of your cows, and it also kills the blacksmith’s son and two of the Lord’s men in arms. Nothing can kill the monster. And everyone locks themselves in their houses at night, fearing that the beast will come out of the darkness for them. Then a grim taciturn warrior arrives at your village, maybe alone, maybe with a few trusty companions with a sword of white fire. He kills the monster that's been terrorizing your village and leaves its head mounted on stake. And then he also kills one of the village elders. Apparently the elder had been controlling urvaalg with dark magic, using it to attack his rivals’ livestock, and in some cases, his rivals themselves. With that done, the sword bear moves on to his next quest. So both the Magistri and the Swordbearers are feared. But the Swordbearers are more respected. However, because of the violent nature of a Swordbearer's career, the Magistri in general tend to live much longer.

00:16:29

So I hope that provides a good explanation of some of the worldbuilding behind the FROSTBORN series, and that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.