Twenty-five years ago, a map was drawn by hand, a map of a fantasy world.  Little more than the rough geography— continents, mountains and rivers.  Slowly, that map gained details— rough nations, major cities. Over time, with the help of some friends, the cultures within those countries, the histories behind those cultures, began to take shape.

It was a project that I kept finding myself coming back to, adding more detail, digging deeper. The world gnawed at me, it wouldn’t let me go.

Around 2000, through a friend-of-a-friend, I was brought into a project involving a fledgling gaming company.  They were gearing up to release a new RPG system, and a series of rulebooks to go along with it.  The game was supposed to be a sort of universal-system, usable in any fantasy setting, but they wanted there to be a “house setting” that they could present, and the worldbuilding I had done was the setting they wanted.

So I started to put more detailed work into it, getting things together in a format that would make sense to someone who wasn’t me.  That project ended up completely falling apart— as so many projects like that do— but now I had that work.  And I the beginning of something resembling a novel, a beginning that was for all intents a travelogue-in-discussion.  Really.  While the was plot and story, said story was more or less an excuse for the main characters to be able to discuss each nation in the world in broad brushstrokes.  While it was very rough, a lot of what was in this bit were the beginning seeds of what would eventually become the (deservedly trunked) Crown of Druthal.

Crown had some good bits, but it was mostly a plotless meander, a travelogue novel where events of the story were dictated by where I wanted to take the characters on their tour of the worldbuilding work I did.   It was very much, “I have done all this work, and now I must show it to you.”

But as I was finishing Crown, I started to come up with the core ideas that would eventually evolve into those first books of each Maradaine series: Thorn of Dentonhill, Murder of Mages, Holver Alley Crew and Way of the Shield.  Now, these were especially rough core ideas.  A sense of the characters, and what kind of stories they would be.  I had now figured out that I needed an outline to break a story down before I got started with really writing it.

And I needed to figure out the place.

I came to realize that all these stories were part of a larger story, the story of one city in this world: Maradaine.

So I dove in to the city itself, learning it well enough to give it breadth and life it deserved.  My philosophy was, if I was writing a story set in New York or Paris, I would have to know that city well enough that I could present those cities in a genuine way, so that denizens of those cities would feel their places were known and respected.  I had to know Maradaine in that same way.  I needed to make it feel like it was a city with thousands upon thousands of stories within it, and while I’m not telling those stories, the city and the stories I am writing have to give the feel that all of the other stuff is right there, just outside of your field of vision.

Which brings us now to Lady Henterman’s Wardrobe, where the Rynax brothers and their crew from Holver Alley now find their story pulls them toward the other side of the city, and they have to deal with a new situation that is out of their usual element; and at the same time, other stories are imposing themselves on their part of the world.

Everything in Maradaine has wheels within wheels, gears that interlock.  And it’s time for the Rynax brothers to throw a wrench into those works.