I'm working on the third book in the series, Shadeborn, right now - a crime and heist novel set in Calliasha itself. After that, there's going to be Scarlet Bard, Dragonchild, The Tyrant's Compendium somewhere in there (stories about the bad guys), and then it all comes together.
Thank you for letting me know! I really appreciate hearing this.
Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work.
"Can you provide me the full error message on the screen? I need more information than 'it doesn't work'."
The Maw is the deepest part of the oceans of Taeliana. No one has ever reached the bottom and returned to tell it. The area is also very cold, and the waters are unusually rough, so not a lot of people want to go there.
Well, you have the Inner Sea right in the center of the Empire. And there is a lot of water travel.
Then there is, in the northeast, the Maw.
MonthlyWorldbuilders prompts daily feed card #FebruaryWorldbuilders Hosted by Kira of the Wind Week 1: Physical World 7. Any notable bodies of water? The background image shows a misty forest with a mysterious tower in the background. It has a cold, mysterious vibe.
Just to give an example: the preemininent necromancer in Taeliana, Maergos Wretchbinder, murdered twelve children and locked their souls in their rotting bodies, then fucked a priest and murdered him at orgasm. This was to see what a pregnancy powered by necromantic power would be like.
If a necromancer decides they want to, they can also rip out the life force, or the minds, of beings and use them as power sources for other experiments, or to kill the body while they keep the soul around for other reasons.
A powerful necromancer has almost certainly given up any form of conventional morality for their own twisted one. They kill purely to know how things die, and what happens to them as they die. Then they bring their victims back to some kind of fake life, and use them as slaves.
Necromancy, in Taeliana, is literally taking magical power and tainting it through the processes and turning it in the process into an energy that is horrific. It burns the living. It can bring the dead back to a parody of life. Necromantic power is a rejection of the energies of life itself.
The final kind of magic requires a certain horrific kind of soul. It's almost always a wizard that takes this path, although there is one being that will do pacts to give you the power. That is the power of necromancy.
Some pact with the gods or the saints, which is where the priesthoods get their powers.
And some pact with things that should have been forgotten, but weren't.
The kind of power the pacter gets depends a great deal on the patron they've made their pact with.
Some pact with fiends, who often give the abilities of channelers, increasing their physical prowess.
Some pact with the faerie, who bring enchantment and the power of stories to their pacters.
The next kind of people with magical abilities are pacters: they form pacts with other creatures, who provide them a source of power other than their innate talent to draw on. In return, the patron gives the occasional request for their own plans.
Some wizards smirk at them as "muscle mages". Often this lasts until that wizard gets things broken by someone they insulted.
Then are the channelers. They have more limited powers, and most of them channel it into their particular physical skills. (For Shadowrun players, these would be like physical adepts.) Some of them are capable of incredible physical feats.
when I say "the elements", there are six: earth, air, fire, water, wood and metal. There is also life-energy and shadow-energy, so most adepts are one of these eight. It usually occurs because of a tie to one of the other planes, from close association or a local nexus.
adepts: aspected mages, usually one of the elements or a specific force. Many of them have an instinctual knowledge of the power they can use. Some of them can break free of the aspect and become a full wizard, but that also tends to damage or destroy the instinctive knowledge.
So we have:
wizards: generalists, can use any kind of magic as long as they known the way to shape the power. They do exercises to increase how much they can channel, but can knock themselves out if they push too hard.
So now I knew the source of magic and how people can get better at it.
Then I worked out some of the things I wanted to have, borrowed from other things.
I stand on the shoulders of giants, after all.
With that, I had some ideas for how to make things work the way I wanted. I never liked the spell-slot system, preferring a channeling, where power is gathered and then used. With the talent idea, I realized that the most talent you have, the more power you can pull. AND you can work it out.
The first thing I wanted for Taeliana is that anyone could be a hero if they tried it. So I established that everyone had some ability to use the energy in the world called "magic". Since in pre-history the world was reshaped by the Maker, the idea that magic was unleashed by that act took root.
Originally, Taeliana was designed as a D&D game setting. After the OGL Idiocy of 2023. I started repurposing it for my writing world. But some of the things it had from D&D were still fundamental ideas. So I had to figure out how to make it mine.
OK, time to pull back a lot of curtains here.
The fact they do exist is a sign that some of the horrors made by the Corruptor pale before the darkness of human imagination.
The Temeto Fens are right next to the blighted landscape of Temeto Groapa, where the former rulers were necromancers and biomancers, and that is not a good combination to have working together, I assure you.
There are things in Temeto Groapa that shouldn't have existed.
The problem is that blood-rose creepers tend to grow to be about ten feet long with a lot of thorns, AND they grow in groups. Your average person, if they think fast, can get free of one easily. When there's ten, however... well.
When it senses something nearby, it shoots out thorns on tendrils, very sharp thorns that can poke through leather, and then starts to drain blood. It'll kill small animals quickly, and most humanoid-sized creatures can get free if they act fast.
Why?
Because the blood roses don't get their name from their dark color. They get the names from the fact that the flowers don't bloom unless the plant is fed with actual, living, fresh blood.
The creeper is a vined plant, but its leaves can detect motion.
The other one, also in the Temeto Fens, but spread across much of it, is the blood-rose creeper. It's a ground plant, and prized for the lovely rose-like flowers that bloom in the late summer.
It's also illegal to cultivate in the Empire.
