The problems with Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

AKA “Why the huge timeskip?”

When I sat down to write Beneath the Dragoneye Moons, I had some story beats that I really liked, and others that annoyed me.

One story beat that drove me up the wall was that stories were never set close to creation, no. There were always endless “Lost empires” and “hidden dungeons” and “they used to be so much better at magic than we are now.”

Examples of this would be The Stormlight Archives and The Wandering Inn, but nearly every single fantasy series falls victim to this.

I thought that was dumb as a brand-new reader. I wanted to see what it was like “shortly” after creation. Not so shortly that everyone was still in tribes and trying to figure out this “fire” thing, but during the first civilization.

What was it like? Everyone talks about the great old empires, nobody writes what it was like living in the great old empire.

Hence, Remus, the Rome analog.

It was all fun and games at first, but even before I started posting, I realized I’d screwed up a bit.

The reason people didn’t write about the first civilization was a lack of depth.

The main conflict is people vs nature. I didn’t write about Remus’s neighbors, because they didn’t HAVE any. The only conflicts and issues are internal. There are no hidden dungeons that I can pull up to make a new adventure. There are no ancient archives to raid.

Everything is new and shiny!

This lends itself to having a much, MUCH earlier natural “stopping point” to the series than I wanted.

So I plotted. I planned. And I laid down the seeds of my great big “reset” button.

I thought it’d only be, like, 100 chapters tops.

HA.

300+ chapters deep, and here we are!

As I continued working through things as I wrote, I realized I had screwed up a number of other small worldbuilding things. Magics that I didn’t realize my System allowed, but that could and should exist.

Like shapeshifting. [Form of the Dinosaur] should totally be a known skill, but we’ve seen nobody use it. Potions. Alchemies, tens of thousands of different things.

Well, I have an excuse. Instead of “Oh hey we rediscovered the lost magic” AKA the usual “whoops! Fixed that!” that many authors use (there’s no shame in it!), I’m going more with “It wasn’t well fleshed out and developed yet”.

This has also given me the time to properly sort out countries. Cities. Cultures, races, and so many, many more things that give a world its rich feel. Well established organizations, relics and treasures, religion and more!

I’m also fairly restricted right now. I can’t do glass, or things with glass in Remus. I need to stick to pure Classical Rome things. There aren’t a ton of other cultures out there.

I’m not super interested in writing endless “Elaine, the only human, deep in elf/dwarf/orc/ogre/centaur territory, occasionally at war with shimagu/others.” I’m not sure you’d all be that interested in reading it.

Another thing is the “global level” so to speak. There’s only so many people living, and there’s only so high levels can get. I have an end in mind, but with the current worldbuilding it’d take some massively absurd timeskips to get there.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Then Elaine lived happily for the next 900 years to get another 300 levels” isn’t exactly gripping storytelling.

I needed a shakeup. So I prepared.

As I said, as early as chapter 5ish I started to lay down the groundwork for one day fixing, revamping, and overhauling everything.

I believe it worked… mostly. I’ll occasionally think of something interesting and go “well shit that changes things”, but I’ve had almost two years of thinking at this point. Things are a lot stronger than they used to be.

Hence, the Great Shakeup.

Iona was the early introduction to the shakeup and the new world. I have essays to write about her, but those are for another day.

I worked with a number of early beta readers to try and figure out the best “shape” this will take, and broadly speaking, we found an excellent way to make it happen. Many of you have guessed at some of it, but I don’t think anyone guessed the full thing.

I’ll let you find out soon what it is 😉

Thank you all for understanding!

On a different, medium-low spoiler note, I’ve had some people approach me concerned that Iona’s time is “bog standard medieval fantasy with the serial numbers filed off.”

This is a somewhat valid concern, because Rolland IS bog standard medieval fantasy with the serial numbers filed off! However, not all of my countries are. Here’s a breakdown for those concerned: