28 KiB
[RT] Glimwarden, Prologue and Chapter 1
-
Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
-
Score: 61
-
Created: 2016-05-06T12:48:39
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+21] Time flies like an arrow (3 minutes later)
Glimwarden is about small town politics in a fantasy land where magical lanterns are the only thing stopping an incursion by vile creatures. The glimwardens are powerful magic users who have made a sacred covenant with the city of Light's Hollow and pledged themselves as protectors. The story follows three people -- two boys and a girl -- during the construction of the town's eighth lantern.
I should be posting chapters three times a month from here on out.
u/None [+2] (4 hours later)
Similar to RWBY's concept, I see, given that their whole civilization is besieged by creatures of the grimm.
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (15 hours later)
Yup. Civilization in a losing war of attrition against some huge threat is one of my favorite tropes. RWBY, Attack on Titan, Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, Aeon Flux ... heck, even Wayward Pines. I think I like the isolation and near claustrophobia of it, it's somehow cozy.
u/PeridexisErrant [+3] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (18 hours later)
My problem is generally.... how the hell did civilisation arise in the first place???
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Read and find out!
u/Kodix [+3] (a day later)
Between this and the protagonist's name, I have definite proof you like Sanderson.
I don't yet know what I will do with this knowledge, but I'm sure it'll come in handy someday.
u/None [+3] (2 days later)
Jokes aside, one of the reasons I picked up Shadows of the Limelight was that the writing is very similar to Sanderson. Great worldbuilding, clear style, and just enough prose to work with.
u/Kodix [+2] (2 days later)
Gotta say, I love Sanderson's prose. I've seen some criticism of it being simple, but it's perfect for me - I can just devour pages of it easily, but it doesn't feel simplistic. It fits really well with his doorstopper books.
u/None [+1] (6 days later)
Hmm - yeah, as much as I like the plots and worldbuilding and such, Sanderson just doesn't have Lynch's humour, Rothfuss's prose, or Mieville's way with style. It's great for thinking about, great for consuming, but it doesn't have many moments where you think "oh, that is just a lovely way to say that" - though there are some.
u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (a day later)
This is the best plan :)
u/whywhisperwhy [+2] (a day later)
That's something none of those series even hint at, which is a wasted opportunity to me. It'd be so easy to throw in the implication that the world wasn't always as brutal, that something changed in the past- which makes it a mystery story as well. If you've ever read The Games We Play, that's one of the main draws in my opinion, but even in canon it could fit well- the Grimm themselves don't seem like a natural phenomenon, and what happened to shatter the moon? Given the way the world works on myths, it seems like it's easy to theorize and fill in the gaps for yourself.
Attack On Titan has the same implications to me, it seems hinted that the Titans were created by humans and finding out what happened is more of an incentive than the action, imo.
u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (a day later)
The Games We Play
Yes, this handles it really nicely. Now if only we could get Zenith finished...
u/whywhisperwhy [+1] (a day later)
Zenith? Is that the continuation?
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (a day later)
No, it's one of Ryuugi's many (many, many) unfinished fics - and probably the best Worm / Exalted cross around, set after the Golden Morning.
u/whywhisperwhy [+1] (a day later)
I guess I'm fairly spoiled because the only story by him I've read is one he actually completed... I can't imagine how frustrated I would've felt if he stopped halfway through.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
RWBY is implied to be a post-apocalyptic setting, given that they named their world Remnant and that there's a cracked moon.
At least, that's my speculation.
u/None [+1] (6 days later)
Future fantasy is how I think they blurbed it. But given that the world was based on a food stain, it's not the future of our world.
u/None [+1] (6 days later)
I never thought it was a future Earth, but I am pretty sure that people don't just name their planet Remnant without a very good reason.
u/daydev [+2] (a day later)
But is it a losing war? From what we've been shown so far, it seems that civilization is slowly winning the war of attrition. Something along the lines of Steerswoman meets Dragonriders of Pern (with or without the Lost Technology angle). I suppose, glimlight-resistant darklings could show up just in time for the plot to mess things up :)
u/None [+4] (a day later)
The problem with RWBY is that we are continuously told that Grimm are a big threat, but we don't see it on screen. If that was the case, cities would be actively defended. But Hunters aren't guardians - we don't see them defending borders. We see them hunting - offensively, in small groups of people and far from civilization. Only exception was when Grimm invaded city because of human fault. And Ironwood said that only Atlas has any military besides Hunters... There obviously is a lot more going on behind the screen, but it really doesn't feel like the world is threatened by them.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Perhaps modern civilization is robust enough and focused on happiness enough that the Grimm aren't drawn in?
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Maybe you're right. But, well, if Grimm aren't drawn to civilization, then they aren't such large threat anymore anyway. I mean, there is still high risk of death by grimm, but not apocalyptic-world style.
u/None [+19] (2 hours later)
The darklings appear to have HP bars and they drop XP orbs.
u/VorpalAuroch [+4] Life before Death (17 hours later)
Which are also MP orbs.
u/xamueljones [+6] My arch-enemy is entropy (33 minutes later)
Ooo! New story from alexanderwales? Time to get back to pledging you on Patreon.
Say whatever happened to your plan on posting one more appendix for Shadows of the Limelight?
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (55 minutes later)
I'm probably going to wait until either I'm rearing to go on the sequel series or putting Shadows out as an e-book (which will probably wait until I've finished writing and editing some of the other stuff that's in the backlog). I mostly just got burnt out on the second appendix, because it's partly a survey of the history of illustrati and the history of the science of illustrati.
(I've lately been trying to get better at managing my writing efforts so that I'm producing things at a steady pace, and one of the ways I'm trying to do that is in recognizing where that effort will get the most returns. The second appendix is on hold until its effort/output ratio is better, which mostly depends on my enthusiasm.)
u/None [+7] (an hour later)
Sequel series
Yes please Mr. Writer Man. Yes please.
If you're planning to do the age of gunpowder illustrati, by the way, the Powder Mage series has some excellent uses of that ability.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
Oh, I'm a big fan of the Powder Mage series. I actually met /u/brianmcclellan at GenCon two or three years ago; he was on a few panels at a writer's symposium and had a lot of interesting stuff to say. There definitely isn't enough gunpowder in fantasy though, so I don't think I'll feel too bad about covering a little of the same ground.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+2] Champion of Justice and Reason (10 hours later)
A sequel to Shadows of the Limelight? YES PLEASE
u/triangleman83 [+6] (5 hours later)
I really enjoyed Shadows of the Limelight and Metropolitan Man, have to read your other works still in my huge backlog of stories. I hooked it up on your Patreon for $2 which is really a pittance but I hope more people will do the same for you!
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (6 hours later)
Thanks! Be sure to check out The Case of the Sleeping Beauties, which should be in the creator posts on Patreon, since that's one of the only ones that's not web published.
u/elevul [+1] Cyoria Observer (8 hours later)
I really need to finish that. Got about 10% in and then stopped because I'm not a fan of Noir.
u/None [+5] (a day later)
I wonder if the forcefield means people build vertically more. I also wonder what the effect of a highly-concentrated field is - if two fields overlap, is the effective field strength at the point just the higher value, the additive value, or something else? If it's additive, then it might be more efficient to build in rings, so you get a good deal of area too far from any given lantern to be safe consecrated by the influence of overlapping fields. Especially if the lanterns are moveable.
The other thing I'm curious about - do smaller darklings spawn more or less easily than larger ones, or is it the same? If smaller ones spawn more easily, and a trained professional with tools can dispatch them fairly easily, then working on the peripheries of the field is probably pretty safe, so long as there are guards. You wouldn't want to sleep there, maybe, but arable land is arable land. Also, if you have a hill or mountain with inhabitable or arable slopes, putting the lantern inside it might consecrate more surface area than otherwise - just as a lantern tower in a valley would, come to think of it
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
I don't think there's a strong incentive to build upward. Here's my reasoning as to why:
The UN FAO says 0.5 hectares per person. That means that if you want to feed all 11,000 people within Light's Hollow, you need 55 km^2 of land. Average American household size is 2.5 people, average American single-family detatched lot size varies greatly, but Seattle DCI has a great PDF that shows their range, from 5,000 square feet to 9,600 square feet. If we're being pessimistic, that means [roughly 4km^2](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(11,000+%2F+2.5)+*+9,600+square+feet) to house everyone. R/C/I ratios vary a lot, but let's say 2:1:1, which means a total of 8km^2 in order for everyone to have space to live.
In other words, with a lot of unfavorable assumptions, we've got a 7:1 agriculture to living ratio.
If you perfectly selected a 63km^2 plot of land, you might be able to get better than 87% arability, especially if you could convert non-arable land to arable land through chemistry or landscaping. But eventually you're going to reach a point where you run out of farmlands to feed the people, and I think in most cases you're going to hit that point far before space is so precious that you're pressured to build vertically. This does mean that proportionately more buildings would probably be on cliffs, hillsides, etc.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
The UN says 0.5 hectares per person - does that assume modern farming using fertilizers and pesticides? It seems like that might mess with your assumptions, unless you've taken it into account.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
I looked around for the paper, but all I know (from other sources) is that it was published in 1993, which is a problem since the FAO puts out about two hundred papers a year and I don't know the title (and their website only has the papers from 2007 forward as searchable).
However, this factsheet from the FAO [PDF] shows the following:
Average number of hectares of cultivated area needed to feed one person in 1961: 0.45 ha
Average number of hectares of cultivated area needed to feed one person in 2006: 0.22 ha
I'm taking a little bit of liberty in just thinking of those as "before the Green Revolution" and "after the Green Revolution".
Also, I'm pretty sure that
these numbersthe first number takes into account food security and reasonable diversity, since you can get a lot lower if you go monoculture and assume an optimized farmer who never makes mistakes.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
The Green Revolution is still way after the advent of industrial fertilizers, which allow much more use of the land without crop rotation and such.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Well, if you assume that a person needs more land than 0.5 hectares, then my point about not really needing tall buildings only gets stronger, doesn't it? If it's 1 hectare per person, then it's a 14:1 agriculture to living space ratio, which means only 7% of their land is used for living space.
(The tech level is a little screwy here though, in ways that will become clear later if they're not clear now.)
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Ha, I kind of forgot my original point at some point there. I was mostly concerned with how everything worked. But there's runecraft already mentioned - which seems to generate energy for free - so there's that.
u/RMcD94 [+1] (14 days later)
What about downward? Basements and the such should be more common too.
Brings up a curious question was if you dug deep enough would things start spawning in the hole once you got out of reach of the lantern
Also the less land you use for living the more you can use for farming no?
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (15 days later)
Building downward works as well. The sphere of influence for the lanterns is large enough that you would run into some massive engineering problems before you reached a place where the lanterns' shine doesn't reach. But the economics for building down are roughly the same as for building up; even in the real world, whether it's better to build on a second floor or build in a basement is largely a matter of geography. People have basements, sure, but probably not second basement levels, especially if they're close to the water table.
The less land you use for housing (and other things) the more available for farming, but eventually you run out of arable land and using less space for housing doesn't actually get you much more farming. Even that's assuming that you're running up against your space limits really hard, which probably doesn't happen if it's possible to expand your area with another lantern.
u/Bowbreaker [+3] Solitary Locust (5 days later)
Question regarding the prologue:
Eventually a second lantern was constructed, doubling the available area and making the town more secure.
If a Lantern's sphere of influence grows over time then how come the second Lantern immediately doubled the available area? Or is the growing hava thing only something that was true for the first Lantern? In which case it is still interesting that a new Lantern apparently is immediately of the same size, indicating that the original was somehow diminutive at first?
Care to shed some light?
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (5 days later)
Lanterns have a permanent ball of hava sitting in the center of them that grows or shrinks in size as darkling hearts (which are really just balls of hava themselves) are added to it and shrinks in accordance to the burn rate and evaporation effect.
The process for building a second lantern usually involves something that looks a lot like mitosis; grow the ball of hava in the center of the first lantern, then when it's grown large enough, quickly split it in half and carry it over to where the second lantern has already been built and slot it into place. This obviously takes some engineering efforts in order to make sure that service isn't interrupted for long enough that the darklings attack.
In this case the original was diminutive in size, since it was a travelling lantern only engineered to allow for a caravan to travel west relatively unmolested by the darklings. The first thing that the glimwardens and engineers did when they founded their town was to begin increasing the size of their lantern, which made it more efficient, which gave the glimwardens some breathing room because they didn't have to collect quite so many hearts to feed into it.
(There are other rules and engineering concerns involved, but some of that is to be revealed later and some of it is just worldbuilding wankery.)
u/Bowbreaker [+2] Solitary Locust (5 days later)
Doesn't that mean that the creation of a second Lantern initially didn't increase the protected area at all until both Lanterns were once again stocked up to the pre-mitosis hava levels of the first Lantern?
Also, I assume that Lanterns can either only hold a max amount of hava or that there are considerable diminishing returns after a certain point? Because otherwise the smartest thing to do would be to just dump it all into one uber-lantern.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (5 days later)
As Sander says in the first chapter, gliminance follows the inverse-cube law. Since surface area increases by the square and power needed increases by the cube, that means their relationship is given as power^2/3 = area.
Or to put it another way:
Power Area Radius 100 21.5 2.6 200 34.2 3.2 ... or for that same 200 you could instead have two circles that give you 42.5 area. Except they're not actually circles, that's just useful for doing math. Instead, they're fields. So if your safe field strength cut-off is x, then making a second lantern of equal strength to the first doesn't just double your available area, because there are going to be places where both lanterns would individually be below x but sum to above it.
I haven't actually done the math to see what the result is, but I think doubling is close enough, especially since every writerly bone in my body resists putting something like this in the prologue.
(There are other reasons not to build lanterns smaller in order to get more coverage, namely the evaporative effect which dominates cost-benefit analysis at the low end.)
Hopefully I haven't screwed up the math anywhere here, if any of this makes it into the text itself I'll have to take some time to triple-check my numbers and actually do some field strength calculations.
u/Jello_Raptor [+5] The Last Tool User (6 days later)
I was wondering about that. The inverse cube law is a really weird choice for something that seems to work like EMR. You usually see an inverse square law because of 3D spatial symmetries. The only inverse cube laws that come to mind are from dipole moments.
Was that on purpose? Why that choice of falloff function?
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (6 days later)
Yes, it's on purpose. The reason will be explained (much) later.
u/Jello_Raptor [+1] The Last Tool User (16 days later)
Wait what, they produce radio waves too? Assuming that it's not just translation convention for something else, are lanterns rapidly rotating magnetic dipoles? they'd have to be doing something to ensure they have a nice high dipole moment ...
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (9 days later)
Say, could the town maximize their area of influence by making six lanterns in an overlapping circumference surrounding an empty area like a fence? I notice that the set up is similar to what I proposed, but with the seventh lantern in the middle which sounds like a waste of lanterns for more farmable land, unless they are very cautious of darklings breaking through any one lantern and devastating twice the area. Or do darklings just form out of thin air where there are no lanterns instead of sexually reproducing?
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (9 days later)
Yes, you could do it like that. There are reasons that they don't (which I think you could probably surmise and will be touched on later) but I won't say that what they're doing is necessarily the same thing that everyone else does. There will be more on different governmental, city planning, and social configurations later on.
u/yuridez [+2] (an hour later)
The premise seems promising. Weekly chapters sounds great.
Glad you're still writing.
u/RebelWombat [+2] (10 hours later)
Looking forward to reading more of this. The setting reminds me slightly of the Demon Cycle.
u/biomatter [+2] (11 hours later)
Oh man, I'm so excited just to see your 'avatar' show up on my feed. More alexanderwales! I'm so hype :D
u/redstonerodent [+2] High Council of Gallifrey (a day later)
immigrants from the east, those fleeing disasters or seeking a simpler life than the great cities of the west could provide.
Light's Hollow is west of Tor Ellsum; so presumably this should be the great cities of the east?
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Fixed that, thanks.
u/blazinghand [+2] Chaos Undivided (3 days later)
I enjoyed your last book, and I'm looking forward to reading this one as well. I have resubscribed to you Patreon.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (3 days later)
Thanks!
u/Meneth32 [+4] (6 hours later)
Interesting. I'm sensing a lot of Dark Souls inspiration here.
Edit: and also a bit of How to Train Your Dragon. :)
u/Kerbal_NASA [+1] (16 hours later)
Great story so far! If you're taking typo's, I found:
but he’d taken to thinking of Merry a his honorary replacement mother.
(a=>as)
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (16 hours later)
Fixed, thanks! I've been thinking about how to set up some kind of system for typos that works a little better than using comment threads. I don't (necessarily) want an e-mail alias like typos@alexanderwales.com, since maybe that's an extra cost, but perhaps something like that.
Also, I was thinking of having some kind of bounty for typos, but don't really know what that would entail.
(That e-mail does work though, if anyone would like to use it.)
Edit: I'm now using Mistape, which is a Wordpress plugin. Highlight the offending text, hit Ctrl+Enter, and you can send an e-mail to the above address for processing. If you have ever placed a comment on my site, it will include your identity and I will give you credit on a future "People who helped me" page. I'm not a hundred percent on this solution, because there's no way for the user to include explanatory text, but I think it probably will help A) reduce the effort needed for people to report typos and B) help me with typo correction workflow.
u/None [+2] (17 hours later)
Install some script like Orphus on site. It allows the reader to select the typo, press a key and voila
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (17 hours later)
Wow, that's really cool. Thanks for sharing!
u/None [+2] (17 hours later)
And thank you for a high quality story
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Just something like adding a comment to the next chapter thanking everyone who caught a typo would be enough for most, I imagine. You could also list the number of typos each person caught. People like it when their imaginary internet numbers that everyone can see go up; I know I do.
u/Kerbal_NASA [+1] (17 hours later)
If email is too cumbersome, PMs could also work if that makes sense from your end. Edit: just saw the other suggestion, that looks good too!
Whatever you do with bounties, I'm just happy to help out : )
u/redstonerodent [+1] High Council of Gallifrey (a day later)
They melted away faster than ice, leaving no trace of their power behind.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Fixed, thanks!
u/MoralRelativity [+1] (2 days later)
Great start. Looking forward to more.
u/None [+1] (6 days later)
Does hava exist within the darkling before it dies, or does killing it create hava? What powers the runes? Are these questions I should just shut up and wait for the answers for?
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (6 days later)
All that will come later on. I mean, don't hold your breath, because it's not going to become relevant for quite some time, but you might be able to draw your own conclusions before any of it becomes explicit. (I have a buffer of four chapters right now, and I think you could make a good stab at both of them by the end of chapter 5.)
I don't mind the questions at all, but will probably hold off on explaining anything that's going to have in-text exposition at some point, because I think that's the better way to learn it.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (7 days later)
I strongly approve of that last part. I'm annoyed when authors answer many questions about their ongoing stories in forums or comments because it often means they're not going to address the underlying ambiguities. Drowtales comes to mind.
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (14 days later)
Quick note on the "handsome soul" part, I think I've better identified what I liked about it: it allows the imagination to fill in how his personality can make his features more compelling. Now that I've noted that though, the phrse itself "handsome soul" rubs me the wrong way. Maybe better worded as "lively soul?" "Kind soul?" "Bright soul?" Handsome just isn't a word that usually rolls well into a remark about someone's soul, but maybe that's just personal preference.
u/TotesMessenger [+1] (a month later)
I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
- [/r/glimwarden] Glimwarden Discussion Link: Prologue & Chapter 1
^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^(Info ^/ ^Contact)