alexanderwales

This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 1-3

Added 2021-08-05 20:06:52 +0000 UTC

This Used to be About Dungeons is a comfy slice-of-life adventuring story that occasionally features dungeons.

Mostly it's about walking in the woods with a friend, looking for mushrooms to put in your soup, or haggling with the guy selling squash, or taking care of a neglected garden. It's putting some jam on shortbread biscuits. And yes, sometimes you go down into the dungeons with your friends, and you kill monsters there, or disarm traps, but when you come out, you realize you've found the perfect magic item to give to one of the local kids who helped you out when your cat was sick. Look, the dungeons are always going to be there, and sometimes you need to make a journey to one of the Spirit Gates, or make a pilgrimage with the local Cleric of Symmetry to a holy shrine. Your tour through the local dungeons can wait. You'll have rivalries with other groups, and find some dungeon eggs that need to be carefully incubated in case they turn out to be something valuable, and help a friend to build a fishing weir. There's a big world out there, a mostly tame place with lots of magic, and even more to do and see. Join me, won't you?

The first three chapters are available right at this very moment for Early Birds:

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Due to the way RoyalRoad works, the chapters will be up there some time in the next 48 hours. After that, chapters will first be here on Mondays and (maybe) Thursdays, and then there two days later on Wednesdays and (maybe) Saturdays. There are sixteen chapters written so far, which means a fairly sizeable backlog and at least two months until there's any risk of the "bonus" chapters not happening.

This is a bit of a different thing from Worth the Candle, but it's the kind of thematic and subject matter departure that I think will be creatively healthy. Depending on how much people end up liking it, it might go on for only 200K words, or possibly a lot more, but it also depends on how long I continue to have fun with it.

If you have your Patreon linked up to Discord, you can discuss the serial here.