[Branch Notes]

Hey folks! It can, at times, be difficult to tell what one of these things has in store when you crack open a story, or a branch of a story. So I wrote this up to help give you a better idea of what it is I'm working on here.

Tone

The hero here isn't precisely, well, a hero. He certainly thinks of himself as being in the right, but his morals are as flexible as he thinks they need to be. He's an honest broker, but that's less a matter of personal principle than fundamental nature—which is something that gets explored as the story goes on. In any case, aside from keeping his word, and making sure that others do, the main character is perfectly content to twist things to his benefit, and he's going to surprise a lot of the other characters with how much he can twist.

I'm planning a healthy mix of dungeon-building, dungeon-defending, and questing content, alongside a helping of local-scale politics and a dollop of character drama. Questing-style adventures are going to most prominent early on, when the protagonist doesn't have much to work with, but I don't expect it to ever go away entirely.

Smut

I'll be writing my own kinks for this one. Harem stuff, maledom and fembsub, light bondage, ****-play, eventually some free-use and probably a cute femboy. I plan to label pairing types and kinks in chapter titles, like so: [M/F, Light Bondage], or [M/F/F, ****-Play]. That way, you can navigate around any scenes you want to avoid.

Narrative & Mechanics

I tend to think of game mechanics as a sort of magic system in the world of the story. As such, I bow to Sanderson's First Law of Magic: "An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic." Basically, no ass-pulls.

Worldbuilding

I'm a lore junky. Codices, lore books, whatever, I love that shit. So I've got a lot of ideas for how the world of the story works. But since this is a purely textual format, all I've got to go purely with exposition, which I tend to be a lot more critical of. Especially exposition dumps—those are really easy to mess up, so I'll be limiting that as much as I can get away with. But I really like my worldbuilding. It's mostly going to come through as drip-feed and implication, little terms and suggestions scattered through the text. So, something you don't need to pay attention to for the story to work, but fun if you're into that sort of thing like I am.

But fair warning, when I start saying things outright, they'll start getting trippy. I've read too much Kirkbride to not have a love of the weird shit.