Now, I know my writing skill is poor, but I have a few different aims I’m trying to accomplish with how I’m doing this. My problem is, I know what I want to do, I’m just not that accomplished a writer to do it smoothly. :)

The first thing I want to do, is really present the same terrain description from two different viewpoints. Jessie and Terin are two very different people, Jessie in particular has an incredibly narrow understanding of the world outside her valley. Jessie would be astonished to find out that the name her clan has used for the valley, the “Valley of Bitter Winds”, isn’t even shared by the other four northern clans in the valley.

Jessie has soaked up a lot of information from her father and the family, but at it’s heart, and this is also never really specified in these terms in the story, the MaqQuarrie steading was a holding of a landed Knight made Lord, and it consisted of the Lord and his personal family, his personal men-at-arms who were not knights, their family retainers, and then all the common folk that had followed the MacQuarries to have land of their own to live on and work under his protestion as their lord and steadholder. It’s an extremely common situation in the Borderlands. It does not take a Lord to be a steadholder, the way the Borderlander laws work, is simply that a man (yes, man, I’m not sexist, but I’m working with a setting here) has the right to strike out on his own, to seek out new, unclaimed lands, and if that person holds that land against all comers for a period of no less than 5 years and forges a productive community, then the man can go to his local lord or higher, and have the land permanently and officially recognised as his, and to belong to his family.

Boy, this went pretty far afield, didn’t it. Sorry.

There are lots of reasons for this, the biggest one being how the diaspora came about in the first place, and this being the return of man to these lands to reclaim the continent spanning Empire that was lost. The basic principle was that anyone working to push out and reclaim land, tame it and make it part of the new Duchies could keep it.

This is why, even though the Duchy of Madrigal is completely overrun and lost to the Orcs, Terin is still the Baron of Mosley Vale. He is the last living male descendant of the original Baron Trendel, and even though not only is Mosley Vale lost to the orcs, but also the entire Duchy of Madrigal, and the family line of the Duke of Madrigal, he is still a Baron. And if, someday, Mosley Vale is reclaimed in the fighting, those lands belong to Terin Trendel, Baron in exile.

Yes, I know. But it’s really not that far fetched, and I’ve spent a good bit of time working out how it all works, and why. It’s not meant to be a system for a perfect government, far, far from it. It’s a system that easily lends itself to ‘one strong man’ tyranny, no matter what kind of fine and noble tradition it springs from, and that’s the whole point of Mordant.

So long as there is one male heir of direct descent of the founding steadholder, the steading is considered to be claimed and owned, even though it is lost in war afterwards. This is the foundation of Imperial Law that the nobles in exile held onto during the diaspora, and which they used to maintain their social control over the others. Yes, their homelands were lost to the enemy and the hordes, but the nobles were still nobles, their lands were still their lands, and one day they would return to reclaim them. In time, the descendants of those surviving nobles DID return and reclaimed the coastal kingdoms, and the descendants of the armed forces that sheltered them and protected them in exile became what are now the Borderlanders, those that live on the borders between the wilds of Felwaithe and the civilisation of the coastal kingdoms. Enough generations have since passed that the Borderlanders have pushed deep into Felwaithe, all the way to the mountains, and have begun to break apart into seperate cultures and Duchies, and except for the Duchies that directly border the wild unclaimed mountains, most are settling in and truly developing their own lands and infrastructure. The core of law is still that what a man takes and holds, is his, and once confirmed before a court with the power to grant lands and titles, it remains in his family from that point regardless of what happens to it, so long as a male descendant yet lives.

Which of course brings us to Jessie, who is the last living member of Clan MacQuarrie, and who is determined to make such a name for herself that she will be able to challenge tradition and someday openly claim her family’s lands in her own right, but who is currently trying to pretend to be her slain brother Lauchlin in front of strangers.

Back to my poor writing skill.

So, Jessie’s worldview is very insular; her family came to the valley to live their own lives, far from their respective families. They’ve made their own home, and don’t concern themselves with life outside the valley. She has her own frame of reference, and the MacQuarrie steading is the center of her world, from which everything out radiates. Ask her how far the valley entrance is, and she’d say, “About 5 leagues northwest of the steading.” And she’d likely be wrong, it’s further.

Terin’s worldview, on the other hand, is that of a man who is not only a trained military strategist, but also an amateur military historian with a fascination for piecing together everything he can get his hands on, to try to make sense of what has gone before and put everything into a bigger picture. He is a man who anticipates coming trends in warfare based on previous successes. He’s the type of fellow who will study the progression of arms, and knows exactly why fancy heavily armored cavalry charges are suicide if the enemy has a sufficiency quickly reloadable crossbows with armor piercing heads, and can go on about it at length.

When Terin looks at the valley, he sees it in terms of how defensible the area is, how bottled up it is from outside support, how the heights are controlled by the enemy who have their own, untouchable supply lines, and the local forces are limited to a few families and their retainers.

Finally, and my biggest obstacle… I’ve got to try and get across how primitive some aspects of the borderlanders are, most specifically, cartography. The sand table is being used specifically because map making to consistent dimensions is a lost art, and frequent sets of eyes going over the same ground, and reporting on perceived distances and directions in the mountains, and guesstimates on paces and conditions is so poor. The flag system for marking is advanced, but is far too complicated by our modern opinion. It requires great skill and practise to be able to really get a lot of information out of it, without having information overload. Terin’s ability to read it isn’t a sign that the flag markers are a mature technology; it’s a sign more that Terin is just that amazingly skilled at reading it.

One of the things I tried to get across is, to Terin it’s clear that Mordant Keep directly butts up against the east face of Tor Baldwin… and Jessie and Clan MacQuarrie, on the other side of the mountain chain, never even had a clue, because the chain itself is really that massive, and because the only easily accessible entrance is at the far northern end of the valley.

There is a mountain pass in the southeastern part of Arneghal’s land, heading roughly southeast that leads into a narrow valley where the 4 clans are located. Going further southeast, that valley opens up to the larger area that we’ve seen in Jessie’s story, a roughly circular area that is bordered on all sides by mountains. On the far west side of that valley is Torr Baldwin, the massive mountain that marks the eastern border of Mordant lands. So from this description, the entrance to Jessie’s valley is found along its northwest border, which is the general direction of the “hunting lodge”.

Regards

Kolan

Or even that there were, in the long past, elf Legions who were allied to the humans. Or if she does know, it was eased past gently enough not to register with me :-/ Must re-read this from the start and get it all back properly in brain if there’ll be more soon.

Thanks for the writing and thank you for your time!

What makes me sad, and challenges me at the same time, is that on the one hand, who and what the Legion are isn’t meant to be a mystery in the game/story. After all, Terin knows right well who they are and what it means.

I’ve got extensive histories of the world laid out by, well, story arc, if you will. Mostly by culture. Like how if you wanted to relate the history that led up to the events surrounding the film Gladiator, it wouldn’t be enoug to discuss Rome unless you included it’s foreign adventurism and empire building, or the placating of it’s citizens. So some mention of the wars with the northern ‘barbarian’ tribes comes into play.

But I don’t feel right about just posting that stuff up so folks can, if they wish, get a better idea of the background, because I’ve read it said that, if you as an author want to tell the reader something, it is far better to show it through the characters than to just recount it like a history.

Take the difference between following the characters through day to day activites, and what I did with Samuel the Undying. With themain story, what you learn you learn through following the story as the characters encounter and deal with things. With the story of Samuel, it was presented as a history. You don’t live through the events with him, you are hearing about them as if told around a campfire.

Okay, I got off track. My point is, I haven’t posted something like that because you don’t see other authors post a history of the world so the reader knows whats going on. If it’s important to the story or something you want the reader to know, you work it into the story as you go, when it’s time.

Which, and let me be honest here, is one of the reasons we’ve got Squire Mikkelson along. He’s gothis own part of the story, but he also makes a great “I’m too young and ignorant to know about the wider world, higher politics and secret histories, so whats going on” type of foil.

When it’s suitable and convenient and you can spare the time, more please?