Category: Writing

Chapter 8

Celia and Mordecai are out in the woods near a mining town doing scout things to power level Celia’s shiny new class skills.

“Two crafting jobs left.” She swallowed. “One of them will probably have to be smith, if I want to— If I want to follow in Mom and Dad’s footsteps.”

“Because of Emmet?”

“Yeah. And more like him, someday. So I’ll probably need Tinker too, like Mom had. So I don’t have a lot of room to learn more stuff.”

We’ve finally got the maximum number of jobs nailed down. Also a suggestion that maybe the ultimate plan here is to build a drone army with which to take over the world, which is surprisingly munchkin for people who can’t figure out how to use public quests for power leveling. Maybe “more like him, someday” means, like, five.

We usually sends little golem birds back an’ forth.”

“So THAT’S what they’re for!” Celia raised her hands. “I asked him and he wouldn’t tell me! He’s got a whole hutch of those things, and they come and go and I never found out why.” She frowned. “Wait, why would he need a dozen of them to talk with you?”

“Ah…” Mordecai shifted. “I ain’t the only one he talks with.” His eyes flickered, and his face darkened. “Though I reckon a lot of his friend up north ain’t gonner be talkin’ much wi’ him no more.”

“What?”

“Nevermind.

Celia is bizarrely underinformed for a native to this world. I half suspect that the idea here is that by making her so uninformed, other characters have reason to explain things to her, and thus to the audience, but most of the exposition she gets is either unimportant (who cares if the world used to run on AD&D rules?) or could’ve been demonstrated (we could learn that Caradon communicates via golem bird just by watching him communicate via golem bird – the concept is intuitive if depicted).

If you rip out 100% of all setting exposition from most fantasy or sci-fi stories and hand it to a reader, they can usually pick up what’s going on with no further assistance. What exceptions exist are almost exclusively abstract concepts like politics and religion, and even these can be worked in without expositional info-dumps if you’re willing to do some rewrites to, for example, depict the king’s men clearing a dungeon instead of talking about it. The tradeoff there is time. If you have a lot of complex politics to explain, having each policy and allegiance depicted might take up a hundred pages or more before you can actually get the plot rolling, and that’s like one-third of a decent size fantasy novel, so there’s definitely a time for expositional summary. That time is not “anytime I need to explain anything, ever.” A lot of this feels like the author writing their worldbuilding directly into their draft and then failing to edit it out rather than maintaining a world bible to drop their worldbuilding into.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Nosedive” →

Chapter 7

Our chapter title today is “Randahm Encountahs,” so presumably it will be exactly like the last six chapters but in a funnier voice. Maybe also happier and with your mouth open.

The Raccants chased Celia and Threadbare around the hills for the better part of a day.

I suspect that what’s happening here is that the author wants the two day time limit on this quest to actually mean something, but in order to make that work has to find some way to burn through a bunch of extra time, so instead of just having the encounter, we instead have half a day gobbled up in the first sentence.

Celia and Threadbare get turned around, start going the wrong direction, and Celia decides to keep going anyway because she’s afraid of encountering the raccants again. They end up in a graveyard full of tombstones that have those spoopy little poems as epitaphs:

Threadbare moved to the next stone, and checked it for words. Celia followed, reading as she went. “Here lies Sandra Schtupp. Pissed off a vampire, never looked up. Here lies Barry the Bold. Went into my mausoleum to get out of the cold. Here lies Dorothy Gunn. Looted my lair but failed to run.” Words started to repeat, here and there as she went, and Threadbare’s mind expanded.

INT +1

Midway through the morbid recitals, Celia stopped, as a spreading look of horror crossed her face. “Oh. Oh no.” And from behind her, from the darkest part of the trees, she heard the slow, steady sound of leather smacking on leather, as someone clapped their gloved hands. Trembling like a leaf, she turned…

…to see a girl just a bit shorter than her, leaning against a tree.

This chapter has all kinds of weird whiplash in it, mainly just because I’ve gotten really familiar with the really good and really bad parts of Threadbare and they’re layering themselves pretty much directly on top of one another. That snippet there, for example, is funny. It’s got a great pace, Celia’s smart enough to figure out the obvious, and unlike what happened in chapter 2, the book doesn’t feel the need to spell it out for us.

Immediately afterwards, this happens:

“Finally, somewahn gets it!” The strange girl said with a nasal accent. “Good on yah! Four stahs! Now scram, kid, befahre I eat yah.”

So now I’m waiting for the part where it gets happier and with your mouth open.

Continue reading “Threadbare: In Which Threadbare Meets An Anarcho-Capitalist Vampire” →

Chapter 6

I keep waiting for the point when Threadbare starts to get repetitive and I enter into more long form summary mode instead of going chapter by chapter, but it still hasn’t happened. Partly that’s because Threadbare started strong, so I spent a lot of time praising it, and then got weaker, so I spent a lot of time criticizing it.

Early on in Chapter 6, Caradon decides to send Celia off with Mordecai to learn the ways of the Scout (read: gimpy proto-Ranger), and does so by formally offering a 1,000 XP quest for it. Now, we’ve already established that offering quests is a means for one character to transfer XP to another, presumably in exchange for some act of service. The details haven’t been explained, but it seems like the best use of this would be to offer trivial quests for assloads of XP. It seems like anyone can accept the quest (probably within a certain radius), so this could lead to accidentally draining several times more XP than anticipated when a bunch of randos complete the quest in advance of the person you want the XP to actually go to, or accidentally giving the XP to whoever shows up first if the quest ends for everyone once completed by anyone, but there’s ways around that. One of the most foolproof but logistically difficult ways around it is to hand the quests out in a secluded area, but the logistical difficulties aren’t actually a problem for Caradon, Celia, and Mordecai, because they already live in a secluded area.

It’s not entirely clear to me whether XP affects just level or job rank as well and how important it is to level up individual abilities (which appear to level only when used) as compared to just raw stats, but it is certainly true that Celia could be walking around with a much higher level if Mordecai offered her trivial quests for large amounts of XP – XP that he, being fully grown, already high level, and presumably with a high job rank, can much more safely re-acquire. The entire plot of this chapter revolves around Celia needing to get a higher level (and when discussing it in the last chapter, it was specifically her level they used to measure her overall power, which implies that level is more important than anything else, although this might just be because they haven’t realized they can hand out XP wildly disproportionate to what someone of her power could safely acquire on her own and thus expect levels, job ranks, and ability upgrades to be roughly consistent with one another even if that’s not necessarily the case when power leveling), and the chapter opens up with Caradon busting out a trick that he (or especially Mordecai, who seems to kill monsters more frequently) could easily use to power level Celia and not even noticing that he could use it for that purpose.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Yet Another Random Encounter” →

Chapter 5

“And if I let her go after every adventuring job she wants, she’ll fill up her choices before we know it, without the one we need. Then we’ll all be sunk. You know the stakes, Mordecai.”

This is approaching the worst line I could possibly imagine in this situation. I’m sure you could come up with some contrived even worse thing to write here, but this feels like it may actually be the worst actual thing to write into the early pages of this chapter without actively trying to be bad. “The plot has stakes, I promise,” the book says, without elaborating at all. Fantastic! Tell me what they are.

“Nah, lessn’ you fink. Dye her hair, mud up her face, take ’er into town as me apprentice from a family out in the hills, won’t nobody bat an eye.”

“Mordecai, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Then you sure as hell won’t wanna hear this. Right now she’s eleven. In a year or two she’ll get her woman’s blood. And if you fink she’s restless now, what d’ya fink she’ll be like then?”

Mordecai’s accent was grating enough before he started using “charming colloquialisms” to add a whole extra layer of creepy to this conversation between two older men deciding the fate of a girl without consulting or even informing her. She is literally a child, so that’s not actually unreasonable or anything, but it’s a sign of two things: First, Mordecai’s accent is grating and things that draw attention to it in a weirder way than normal make it grate worse, and two this conversation is boring. It’s full of promises that the plot is right around the corner for sure without actually delivering anything. Threadbare has three chapters of good will to burn through, and they’re getting through it pretty quick right now.

Continue reading “Threadbare: That Is What Bemused Means” →

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 introduces us to the idea that it is possible to offer a public quest, which Caradon (the guy what made Threadbare) does, specifically, a quest to clean all the decaying corpses out of the basement. So apparently corpses rot in this world, rather than remaining preserved forever or dissolving completely after a fixed amount of time, both of which were also plausible for a LitRPG world up until now. The chapter also opens with some more familial conversation, and it’s still kind of petty and mellodramatic, but I’m wondering if maybe it’s supposed to be the emotional core of the story? Because the emotional core of this story is a one-armed teddy bear tearing his own arm off while yanking a shelf down on top of a marauding rat king. It’s a Rocky Balboa underdog story. To the extent that Celia is important at all, it’s because she can play the role of the kid in this picture:

Adding in family drama on top of that would be fine, but it has to be, like, actual drama. Not this “I can’t believe you had me doing laundry when you had a spell for it this whole time” shit, particularly since as far as I can tell Caradon’s position on this is in fact completely indefensible. He’s apparently just making his daughter do an unnecessary chore purely for the Hell of it.

I mean, look at this:

She snorted laughter into his chest, as she hugged her Daddy for all she was worth. “In fact, I’m proud of you for confessing what you did… what you THOUGHT you’d done. So I’ve come to a big decision.”

“Yeah?”

“I was planning on stepping up your lessons, telling you some of the things I’ve been holding back. You’re mature enough to handle the truth now, I think.”

The context doesn’t make it any more impactful. In fact, probably the opposite is true: Without any context, you can imagine that this is coming at the end of a conversation where some kind of actual character development has occurred, but no, Celia has confessed to something we didn’t even know she wasn’t supposed to do until she was confessing to it (she left the cellar door open), and this is apparently the impetus for Caradon to start teaching her the big girl magic, for some reason. Particularly coming on the heels of chapter 3’s “I could do laundry effortlessly but instead it’s your job to do it by hand because of reasons,” I am not feeling a single shred of this family dynamic.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Going In Circles” →

Chapter 3

The explanation of how regular animals can interact with prompts in order to become monsters is split across two pages and I don’t want to bother going through the trouble to highlight both fragments and combining them, but basically what happens is that if, for example, you are a rat and you are particularly good at being a rat by, just hypothetically, sneaking into someone’s cellar and finding all of the food, this gives you a rank up. If you happen to express approval rather than negativity in response to the rank up prompt, you will become a monster.

This brings up again a question first raised by Threadbare’s own ranking up shenanigans earlier: Why is there even an option to say no? Shouldn’t the only answer be “OK?” Is there some kind of opportunity cost for leveling up?

Anyways, the rat king is sending its children to eat Pulsivar and Threadbare alive, because apparently it cannot tell that Threadbare is inedible.

Pulsivar moved with lightning speed, sweeping out with his claws as they came at him, dancing back and batting them away as they came, but there were too many angles to cover. One larger rat took a bite out of his tail with its chisel teeth. Another one latched onto his ear and the cat howled, spraying blood as he shook his head, sending the rat flying as a red number ‘5’ floated up to the ceiling.

Apparently the cat vs. rat match-up is way less lopsided in Threadbare than it is in Outside.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Kill Ten Rats” →

Chapter 2

If he’d been capable of reading, they would have let him know that he had a choice to make.

NEW SPECIES JOB UNLOCKED – BEAR DO YOU WISH TO ACCEPT THE BEAR JOB AT THIS TIME? Y/N?

Just in case readers forgot what the prompt said between chapters, I guess.

Everything spun, and then WHUMP, the teddy bear landed on the bed. He sat up, shaking his head—

—and found himself in a pile of stuffed animals. Frozen, stiff, they stared at him with mute eyes.

The teddy bear trembled as he poked at them with his paw pads. They didn’t move. They looked just like the skunk had after he’d killed it, with the, the same unnatural stillness.

Ha. This is an interesting misunderstanding. It’s a fun exploration of the idea of a teddy bear golem, though. Threadbare isn’t just having the protagonist be a teddy bear and then giving him otherwise perfectly ordinary LitRPG adventures, it’s telling a story that would only work for a teddy bear (or similar toy golem, anyway). I’m kind of killing it by drawing so much attention to it, but if you wanted to experience the book yourself, you should be reading it on Royal Road.

And the teddy bear’s young mind jumped to exactly the wrong conclusion.

…yes, Threadbare, you’ve been more than heavy enough with your implications, pretty much any reader can suss out that-

I am among the dead. She means to kill me!

Goddammit, Threadbare.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Magic Tea Party” →

Readers, I owe you an apology. Several months ago, when I haphazardly updated this site’s look to serve as more my personal platform than anything with a particular purpose, I changed the tagline to “I guess this is a LitRPG blog now?” And since then I have not done any LitRPG blogging. This is clearly a complete betrayal of the sacred bond that exists between a plant commonly used to make tea and an unhygienic space messiah, a Romanian who blogs about blogging, a creepy little horned thing, and the rest of the ragtag assortment of followers my literature blogging carries in its wake.

Today I’m restoring that trust. Today we’re talking about Threadbare: Stuff and Nonsense, a LitRPG book that began as serial fiction on Royal Road Legends and is now on Amazon. I went ahead and bought the more up-to-date and edited Amazon version of this, so I can say I gave it a fair shake in case I end up hating it.

Chapter 1

It didn’t know that the hard thing it was sitting on was a wooden shelf. It failed to comprehend that the brown thingies lashed around its limbs that ran down through the holes in the wood were ropes binding it in place. It had absolutely no concept of books, which were the things that filled the shelves across the way. It couldn’t tell you that the oddly-shaped thing three slots down from it was a wooden hobby horse, or that the thing two slots down was a stuffed ragdoll, or that the black-and-white shape next to it was a taxidermied skunk.

People interested in incessant ranting may find this series of posts disappointing, because there’s some pretty decent signs that this book will actually be good. On the one hand, there is an apparently completely extraneous prologue that I have entirely skipped over, but on the other, it’s like two pages long and so far as I can tell mainly serves to reassure jittery LitRPG readers that yes, there are stats and such in this book, regardless of whether they’re shoved in your face in the first two or three goddamn pages. LitRPG readers are weirdly obsessive about the presence of numbers in the text. Not the presence of numbers in the setting, mind you, but the actual presence of numbers in the text. It’s not enough to say that people have HP, a decent chunk of the LitRPG audience will not be satisfied until you show them exactly how much they have and how much they’re losing to any given blow. So probably that page and a half of prologue is just there to say “look, a character sheet, now calm your tits and read the goddamn story.”

Looks like I was able to worm some ranting in about things other than the story, so that’s good.

This first paragraph does a pretty good job of setting up our protagonist and our location, fixing in mind the presence of various props (the skunk, the horse, etc. etc.) that presumably will be relevant in the ensuing scene, while also establishing mood. Making these early paragraphs pull double duty like that is a pretty good sign for the story overall.

Continue reading “Threadbare: Cheering for the Protagonist” →