One of the things about writing is that you don’t always get to choose the perfect idea and write about that. A hundred percent of everybody has this problem to some extent or another, because there are only so many ideas a person can have, and you don’t get them all at once. You are choosing from a short list of of potential ideas in the best of times, trying to figure out what you can write the best.

The first two times I wrote books, I got very lucky in this process. The Deadworld Isekai and How to Survive at the End of the World series were both ideas I liked:

1. A man shows up to a planet too late to save it and spends the book mostly alone.

2. A man skips through most of the apocalypse, shows up at the very end, and is desperately trying to catch up with everyone else in time to do something meaningful to help.

I liked both of those ideas and had a good idea of how I wanted to write them. Getting to work on them was easy and I maintained an insane writing pace. Even better, other people liked the concepts and made those books pretty good-sized successes. I got to be pretty good at being a writer instead of being pretty bad at being an insurance adjuster or whatever, and life was good.

The next book series, Demon World Boba Shop, had both the idea-I-like and I-can-write-this aspects of the first two books, and a small but really dedicated group of enthusiastic fans that made it really fun to write and be involved in. It wasn’t really as commercially successful as you might think if you just read the comments on it, but it was a good time and did well enough to get us through to the next thing.

After that, stuff got interesting. The next book, Infinite Farmer, was an idea I was fine with, and given that my job was writing and there weren’t any better ideas to write at the time ended up being what I went with. I also thought I had a good idea of where the book was going. For a bunch of reasons, the book ended up getting off that trajectory in the first novel and never really got back on it.

After that, I wrote a one-off novel for myself (that nobody loved, I think) and now I’m here.

As you probably know if you’ve read any of my other stuff, I write one of these notes after every book. The notes themselves have found me in a lot of different states, ranging from horrific depression to trying-out-various-anti-depressants to doing-pretty-good and then all the way to here, at just a fairly normal average place as judged by the last few years, plugging away at books.

If my mood is a mix of all those above, this book feels like the starting places of them all at once. I like the idea of a boy coming of age, finding out that the class he worked so hard for is considered to be a problem by the powers that be, and being forced to run away to sea, to drown/get eaten/get killed with a cutlass or to become an unstoppable legend, with not much margin in-between.

I thought I could write it and feel pretty okay about how this book turned out, and yet it didn’t go the direction I thought it would.

There were originally ideas of it being an Isekai in the technical I’m from another world and there’s a system here sense. The ship was originally going to be a ghost ship, and the main character’s skills were going to revolve around that. The book was going to open up (mostly) on a deserted island populated by just MC and an old, slightly crazy man based roughly on the ship sidekick guy from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.

Having just read the book, you know none of that happened. Which means that everything that happens over the course of the next several books is in some ways writing itself; it’s flowing out of those changes.

In the meantime, I’m also not as capable of assessing my work as I once was. I’ve written 18 novels in about 24 months, or about .75 novels a month, for people who like keeping track of pacing. That’s probably not an actual world record for sustained effort writing, but it’s pretty damn close.

If you average that over a 200-day work year, that means I’ve gotten up every day and written 4500 words through writer’s block, deaths, nervous breakdowns I’ve thought of as stress events, horrific events in friend’s lives. I’ve done it while raising two children, converting my garage into a writing space, fixing cars, and maintaining a house.

It’s never quite enough, somehow. In the fast-moving world of Gamelit/litRPG/Progfic, I haven’t quite gotten a hit big enough that I can say, “okay, let’s do a novel every every two and a half month like normal people, and take a six month nap to recover ideas”. That said, it’s also not horrific torture. Writing is what I do; it’s the one thing I’m good at. On worst day day, it’s only about as bad as a normal job I’m not very good at; I can live with that.

And then, on the good days? It’s a hell of a thing. The words flow. I get to tell stories, and somehow people even read them.

All that to say that if you decide to walk the path a story idea drags you down, it’s often going to be real work, and you are entering a world where people want and need new things to read all the time. It won’t always be easy and it will sometimes (hopefully rarely!) hurt.

But it is still, as a much longer book puts it, a good work. It’s worth doing.

What follows is my general thoughts on this book, a basic rundown of how I think about every character, every setting, and every mechanic. In between the lines, I’ll try to pack as much as I can into the idea of how it was written, how I approach writing, and how I think I could have improved it.

In doing so, I hope you learn some things, but I also hope you disagree with some of the things I say. I think that disagreement - that part where you think “I would do it differently” - is the place where your writing lives. If thinking I’m wrong helps you crack the door to that place, all the better.

CHARACTERS

MARCO

Around the time I started writing this book, an internet friend and I were having a conversation about the definitional borders of Fan Fiction. It’s an interesting thing to think about, since basically every work of writing ever was built on the back of some other kind of writing. If everything is derivative of everything else, that means that (in some ways) everything is fan fiction, and also that (in a Syndrome from The Incredibles way) that nothing is.

In the course of that conversation, we got down to a fundamental disagreement. He thought that taking basic character configurations from other books was over the line into something like fan fiction, even if it wasn’t in-universe, exactly the same, or using any of the same names. I thought there simply had to be a line where a work learned from another work without being a direct tribute to it.

With that in mind, I decided to steal from Harry Potter and see if anyone noticed.

Marco is the least similar of the three early-book main characters. As a Harry Potter, he’s characterized by being seemingly stupid, not anywhere near actually smart, and just sort of brute-forcing a lot of his problems by virtue of practicing the fundamentals, being the main character, and surrounding himself with a lot of good friends.

Where he differs from Harry is in his motivations, his origin, and pretty much everything he does. He isn’t trying to establish himself at a school while dealing with a yearly death threat, and he doesn’t have to learn the entire workings of a world from scratch like Isekai’d Harry Potter does.

Harry wants to live up to his potential, mainly. He wants to honor the legacy of his parents, fulfill a prophesy, and marry a redheaded girl. Marco just wants to tool around the ocean at a relaxed pace, and has had that relaxed, fun pace bit stolen from him.

Marco lives in a world where the class system rewards early-life effort in a vague doing your best probably helps sort of way. Having learned this, he spends the entirety of his childhood min-maxing accomplishments until he’s cobbled together enough power to make pretty damn sure that vague promise resolves into a real result, to leave as little up to chance as possible. He’d rather do all the work than whine about it later.

Just as in our world, doing the right thing rarely comes with the rewards it promises and often comes with costs it never mentioned. Marco is troubled by this, but he’s not as traumatized by the experience as a lot of my other protagonists are. Unlike Matt or Tulland, he trained really hard for stuff that wasn’t an “evil class,” but when things are hard or painful, he’s kind of ready for that. He’s also different from most of my protagonists in that he’s really good at what he’s doing right from the get-go. He’s sort of a jock, and he brings that general “I am as good at everything physical as a person can be” to a swordfight.

It was fun to me that from pretty much the beginning this shows in how he fights. He doesn’t get scared to death by enemies, he doesn’t fumble a lot, there’s not a lot of tripping and desperation to get out of various troubles and problems. He’s worked hard for competence, and he’s now competent, and that’s working underneath the surface to make sure his class works better than it should. Some of it is the very good duelist class that makes up the combat side of his class, but he’s also just fighting several levels above where he should.

In terms of his relationship with Aethe, I wanted him to have a situation in which both of them were reasonably involved and moving at about the same speed. She’s a very individual person (more than him, really) who thinks fighting well is a great thing, admires him for it, and thus wants to date him. He thinks the same thing about her. When they then go on to not actually do a whole lot of dating or romance stuff, it’s pretty normal for both of them. They both know it’s pretty important they stay alive and focus on their tasks, and they are both serious, focused people.

ELISA

The Hermione of the trio, she’s a book reader who knows a lot of things. I didn’t want Hermione’s whole smarmy-book-reading-is-my-whole-thing attitude, and I also didn’t want her to be the real power in the group or clearly superior to the others. Her main contribution is that she knows so damn much, but that’s only as powerful as it is.

I think most scholars in this world are like the married couple we meet later or like Elisa’s dad. They are inside kids who just want books, who don’t have to see anything they can read about in their pages.

Elisa, by nature of her long exposure to Marco, wants more. She likes watching him be Marco, and is used to it. At some point, a lot of her dreams started to be built around the idea of experiencing things with Marco there as a contrast to her own reactions, to show her the things a very different person would see and inform her own experience.

Does she love Marco? Absolutely yes. Are they attracted to each other? Not at all, at least not at this point in their lives. I don’t think we have a good handle on what Elisa is actually looking for out of love, if she’s looking for anything at all. To her best guess, though, it’s not Marco. She likes him a lot, she’d die to keep him safe, and she doesn’t want to give him smooches at all.

It was only too late into the writing process to change anything that I realized, man, I probably should have made it clearer that they weren’t romantically interested in each other at all, since being very dedicated to someone of the opposite sex and romantic love usually go hand in hand. Reading back, though, I’m not sure there was anything I could do outside of small tweaks that would have helped much. Without them taking long expository sentences to go “just so everyone knows we’ve never really thought of each other that way!” you mostly get what you got, a boy and a girl who just function as very close friends until there’s finally a reason to explain to someone that they don’t have any interest in the other kind of relationship.

Elisa’s main power set is her scholar stuff. She can read very fast, she can remember better than most people, and she can organize information in her head in a way that lets that different thoughts interact with each other quickly and more easily. This feeds out into basically letting her do anything that relies on knowledge but not a lot of practiced muscle-memory skill to do.

Elisa can do things like navigate because they are knowledge-based and because she’s read books on how navigation works and remembered the vital parts. What she can’t do is do what someone with a navigation skill or class might. She can’t make the ship go faster, she can’t tell where she is if it’s very cloudy (since she can’t use the sun or stars) and she doesn’t have a great way to know if anyone is approaching before a spyglass could show them.

This is all very useful, but it doesn’t help her fight anything unless it has a weak spot she’s read about. She’s not an expert tactician, either, so she needs something to buoy her up.

The system obliges by giving her an arguably powerful elemental palm technique that I try very hard to limit in power. It’s useful, but at close range that’s only true because electricity itself is pretty overpowered. Fire and ice, both of which she can do, would leave her too vulnerable. Since she has basically no defense, she has to rely on using electricity to stun people while waiting for Marco and Riv to clear their foes and help her out.

Being able to load it into the cannons felt fair, since cannoning is sort of a group affair for the team. It comes off as something that the whole crew can do, via the ship, much like sailing is broadly downstream of Riv tying good knots even though it’s Marco spinning the wheel.

RIV

Riv is the Ron analogue. He’s dependable, sort of a thug, and in a lot of ways the group’s wisecracking muscle. Like Ron, he would rather be in a lot of other places, but (also like Ron) he’s too generally loyal to actually leave his friends.

There was originally going to be a kind of revenge arc where he went back to the island, dealt with things, proved there was a limit to the amount of trouble the bad boys from his island could be bought out of by the rich dad, and confirmed he was just friends with the girl the leader liked.

None of that happened because by the time the story got to where that could actually happen, there was a lot of book written and still not a lot of plot happening. Riv at some point indicates he’s sort of sticking around because this is as good of an opportunity for growth as he’s likely to get, then slowly grows closer to Elisa and Marco over time.

Riv’s fighting style is low-skill tank, but with enough strength that his club swings are a serious threat to anyone that can’t dodge them. Essentially, the Sturdy class makes him a general strong-guy at his base, and he has a combat specialization on top of that. This makes his class a little worse than Marco (a full combat class + most of a ship captain class + some special things) at pure fighting, but good enough that it makes sense he’s there.

Riv has expressed almost no interest in anything but pickles and snide comments, but he’s also still looking for what makes sea life make sense for him long-term.

Riv and Elisa are not interested in each other romantically. That’s not a fake-out, at least for now.

CAPTAIN FRISK

Frisk is the most normal kind of evil. He’s an adult that wants to do well, and true good is standing between him and success. He has a stretchy sort of morality that justifies things related to his job as “duty,” and he tries (and succeeds!) at not thinking about those things very hard.

In the same way, Frisk has been thinking about people he’s catching/fighting/chasing/hurting as objectives in missions instead of people so long that he gets mad at them for disagreeing with him in any substantial way, or “getting in his way” by defending themselves.

At the same time, he’s not irredeemable. Frisk wasn’t always a jerk, even if he is one now. Like a CEO, he can sometimes be made temporarily guilty if you point out how much evil he does from behind the cover of the corporation. Seeing the bad makes him have to face it, which can sometimes force him to do the right thing.

When he lets Marco go, the decision is a combination of guilt, not wanting to deprive the world of the kind of good Marco does, the reality that his reputation will take a hit if he goes through with it, and that he hasn’t quite figured out the old woman and doesn’t know how much damage he’s going to take or have to do if things come to war with her. A big visible slaughter of an entire island is entirely beyond the price he’s willing to pay, and as soon as Marco’s victory makes that the only option, he backs off.

Mechanically, Frisk is interesting to me. People presumably go on getting levels their whole lives, and when levels get incrementally harder to get, it means that eventually there’s probably going to be one guy who is called upon to face all the toughest tasks. He’s going to be sopping up all the good local experience from that, and as a result he’ll enlarge the gap even more, then more, until he either dies or gets crowned the local king.

Since Marco is a new adventurer and Frisk is a successful outlier, the difference between them is unspeakably vast. Eventually, Marco is going to go out into the wider world of the endless system sea and face threats the small-town hero Frisk can’t even imagine, but that day is not today. For now, he’s so much impossibly stronger than Marco could ever manage to be that combat is completely pointless between them. The only hard part for Frisk would be making sure he didn’t accidentally kill him.

If we stick with the flawed Harry Potter analogy, Frisk is more akin to the meddling of misguided educators than anything else. He’s there to be outmaneuvered, not fought.

STEED

Steed is the fightable captain everyone loves to hate. When the team encounters Steed on the pirate base island, the first thing they pick up from him is fear. He’s from the outer ocean, but he seems to have failed there. Having picked up some kind of treasure map, he’s returned to a relatively safe region to hopefully pick up some kind of advantage that will let him compete once he returns back to the greater endless ocean.

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When you see this, it makes more sense why Steed assembled an armada of almost every single pirate he passed on the way in. He wants distractions, little bite-sized problems whoever is potentially chasing him would have to plow through to get to him while he ran away.

In other words, he’s the kind of guy Frisk would beat the everloving hell out of, but he’s still significantly stronger than Marco. The really important bit is that he’s not so very much stronger than Marco that he can take Marco AND three very dedicated backup fighters.

It’s not really stated, but he also serves as proof of concept that Marco might be able to make it out in the greater world, since there’s at least one person who survived it and Marco just beat him.

THE OLD WOMAN

The old woman is sort of the leader of the island, but it’s not clear why at first glance. She has moxie, sure. She has salt, for certain. But beyond just being the kind of person who is good at telling people what to do, it’s not obvious why anyone would follow her.

Does she fight? Not that we see! Is she strong? Maybe! Is she the embodiment of the system itself, various gods, or some other unstoppable force of omnipotent face? No, actually. Getting that on the record. She’s a human person.

What she’s very good at, the main thing we see, is projecting confidence. She might be a world-stopping threat, although she seems to think of herself as somewhat weaker than Frisk. She might also be a seamstress or something, and we don’t really know.

One thing that we do see that can be defined as a superpower is a sort of well-aimed encouragement of young people. She meets Marco, figures out about what he’s capable of, then gives him a task that will stretch those abilities with just enough danger. He handles that, so she gives him the next thing. He handles that, but gets chased by a mega-pirate straight into her island, at which point she figures out how much he’s in over his head by, trims off that much, and helps him handle the rest.

The other thing we could see as a superpower is she’s old enough that she considers almost everyone else young. That means that no matter how strong they are, she feels she can stare them down, correct the error of their ways, and set them right. Worse for her enemies, she’s pretty good at seeing those weaknesses, since she’s seen them in other people before. When she stares down Frisk and gets him to do most of what she wants, it’s no surprise. She had his number the whole time, as she does with everyone young.

BARTENDER LADY

Angry retired warrior who works in food service is a great trope. DanMachi has at least one, and I feel like there are just a lot of ass-kicking cooks in the overall water of anime and manga. Hitori Hanzo himself makes sushi, if somewhat badly. It’s a thing!

I wanted there to be a little more reason for the crew to hate the pirates about halfway through the book. Sure, they are murderers and pillagers, but mostly of people Marco doesn’t really know or has only imagined. When they go after people he likes and a place he wanted to hang out at, it becomes more personal.

She has a son somewhere she loves, and basically projects that son onto any vaguely son-shaped person she sees.

She’s the main reason Marco doesn’t have to worry about pirates after he leaves. With Steed gone, there’s just nothing in the local waters she can’t kill, lash together, and turn into another bar.

TATRIC

Marco needed someone to have meals ready for him after long days of boyhood exercise, and thus we got Tatric. Marco being an orphan makes sense, mostly because it makes more sense for him to have been raised by someone who didn’t know what they were doing and mostly let him go his own way.

Luckily for Tatric and Marco, this worked out pretty well. Marco didn’t get in any serious trouble, and the whole thing went off mostly without a hitch. By the time we meet them, they’ve already long since established what they both expect from their relationship, and it works.

I envisioned Tatric as very specifically someone who works on or runs docks, perhaps as a sort of specialized Sturdy without all the strength buffs. We don’t see him fight and don’t get the impression he really can, and he’s not particularly smart or wise. He’s just a local man who was trusted enough by everyone to get tossed a child and who raises him in a modest but adequate sort of way.

Then Marco gets arrested. The real question at this point for me was, does Tatric care? How much, if he does?

The easiest way out was to have him go full father AND to reveal he had substantial power that we didn’t know about. I did half of this, having him be willing to break Marco out prison at great personal risk. The other half I didn’t do, and I sort of intentionally left it open-ended as to what happened to him because of this until the end of the novel.

I think what Tatric does is the best thing a parent can do for their kids. He helps right up until the point his help would become a hindrance, then pretty seamlessly lets go of his kid as he moves out into the world. Don’t worry about me, he says. I’ll be fine. You go be as good of a you as you can be, and I’ll still be here, waiting for when I can help again.

GARRICK

Garrick is a ship captain and essentially the closest thing to a role model Marco has. From the point of view of Marco’s childhood, he’s invincible, an ultimate force that can’t be stopped by anything. In reality, he’s probably just sort of a normal inner-sea guy, someone who has a lot of levels and a whole career behind him but who has also probably not reached any insanely high heights while doing it.

He’s Tatric’s friend, and I feel like it takes both that connection and whatever affection he has with Marco to get him to help. At the end of the book, we hear from Tatric but not the captain, and he never comes gliding in in his ship to save the day. He might show up later, but if he does it will just be a nice moment, a friend seeing another friend again because they bumped into each other.

AETHE

Aethe is an elf in a world where Elf is a national affiliation and a very strong national mindset that is intentionally foreign from what Marco is used to. The day I wrote her character, I had been idly thinking about collectivist societies that are more group-oriented compared to Western “I, me” mindsets.

Specifically I was trying to think about what life was like for someone who lived in a society where that was a much stronger effect and who was “broken” in the sense that she was normal by Marco, Elisa, and Riv’s standards. What would life have been like for her up to that point? How would she feel about things now?

What I eventually decided on was someone who was still very introverted and follow-the-crowd but who really, really enjoyed any aspects of autonomy she got to take advantage of. Aethe doesn’t talk a lot and she never really bucks the direction the group is going in, but she also never seeks orders during a fight and takes initiative early and often when she sees a threat.

Initially I had no thoughts of her and Marco being together, but after a while I was writing a scene where they were both genuinely interested in how efficiently the other person could shoot things, I realized it probably worked under some circumstances. As I mentioned above, they both were likely to feel like they had to spend the same amount of time on the relationship, which could have been very little if they were in dangerous situations.

Aethe is interesting because she was more or less abandoned by her people into Marco’s care. She seems to understand from the beginning that this doesn’t actually mean anything to Marco or his friends and that she’s not owned by them or even owed anything from them. At the same time, she has no other place to go, no experience outside of shooting things with a bow, tracking things, and having excellent eyesight, and she really likes the crew and the lifestyle they are leading.

More than anybody else, she is the person who is having her adventure right now at any point in the book. Even Marco feels a little like he can’t have fun during most of this book, but Aethe simply is the right combination of hardcore and repressed that her fun is happening no matter how many cannonballs she has to dodge.

Build-wise, she’s as close to a pure combat class as anyone on the ship. She kills very efficiently, she’s very good at target selection, and her skills are almost entirely built around taking down enemies. Since Marco has an entire combat class built into his legendary status, he’s able to keep pace. That’s only true because he practiced so hard growing up, though. Aethe did too. If she were a little more talented or he was a little less hard working on pure athletics, she’d be better, flat-out.

THE WORLD

ISLANDS AS ZONES

Building the world, I was interested in how One Piece geography seems to work in the first couple arcs. There might be a big continental landmass somewhere, but if there is, it doesn’t matter. Islands are more forgiving when it comes to story structure, since they can be small enough to contain just one interesting thing or big enough to contain lots of fun. So long as you don’t constrain yourself, they’ll do what you want.

Gulf Isle is big, contains a pretty good-sized town, and has a lot of different terrain features. It has a variety of people, which means Marco has lots of chances to get jobs and learn things. It’s also big enough to have a government to cause Marco problems.

The second island they go to is basically a really big backyard with a dungeon on it and nothing else.

I wanted to make sure that later in the series there were a lot of chances to go more episodic, spending a book on a single island with a big issue or bouncing between a lot of islands with small issues if the big problem of that book was more sea-based.

It also seemed to me that you could contain a much weirder thing on an individual island without it being an aspect of the greater world, so much. In the CS Lewis book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there’s an island they pass where dreams are real, which ends up being a horribly scary thing once they realize nightmares are a type of dream. They escape before anything crazy happens, but the important bit is that once they sail away, the island never has to matter again. After all, it’s an island, and it’s way back then as soon as you get out of eyeshot of it.

MONSTERS EVERYWHERE

Some worldbuilding has every monster coming from the dungeons that populate the world, or has the world be such an inherently dangerous place that dungeons don’t have to exist at all. I wanted all of the above.

The area Marco inhabits at the beginning of the book is pretty pacified, meaning that there are some scary things in the sea, but only to a point. We still learn something from that, and that there are monsters just roaming the ocean, waiting to be found. At the same time, if you want guaranteed monsters, you can go to a dungeon somewhere where the system will dish them up for you.

There’s no point where I want the characters to feel completely safe or distant from a possible fight outside of a trusted populated area, but at the same time I want it to seem like encounters are also spotty. Most days, they can take naps, goof off, and just sail without getting in a fight. In that sense, I wanted the danger density to be “We can always find something to hunt, and every now and again we get attacked, which can happen at any time but functionally only happens a few times a week.”

INNER VS OUTER SEAS

Marco grows up in a pretty safe, controlled environment. There’s a government, there are guards, and most of the dangers he faces are self-imposed. As he moves away from the island, he manages to find risk, but only as judged by a sub-level-10 fighter. Most of the world around him is pretty safe in a way most people would be able to handle.

So where’s the adventure? I think for most people, there just isn’t any. Like in the real world, most folks live in populated, safe areas. They don’t explore much and they hardly roam. Really adventurous members will go out to local outskirts, like the areas between the settled Elvish lands and Marco’s homeland. They are still just the bravest people in what amounts to a pretty small town.

That’s the inner seas. They are settled places, places that have had their legends and adventures and are now pacified.

The outer seas are wilder places. They are places where not everything is settled yet, populated by people who have grown up in more danger. They have outposts and towns, but fewer of them, and they are generally much more likely to be small, barebones-functional sorts of places.

Someone like Frisk is impossibly strong for an inner sea, probably capable of hacking it in the outer seas if he brought every resource he could find with him. In the outer seas, though, he’d eventually find someone who is as much stronger than him as he is to Marco, some outlier who had fought stronger monsters, took down stronger sailors, and eventually became the kind of monster who lives in deeper waters.

In a nuts-and-bolts look, I think this was necessary or at least enormously helpful. We don’t want Marco to absolutely steamroll everything from the beginning, because things being hard is usually how things are also interesting. So we understand that local areas are mostly gentle but can have individual monsters watching over them, and that the outer seas are where people go to find the real adventures, the actual unique experiences that make people strong.

THE SYSTEM

I have a habit of making the system a person in a lot of my books, even when I say they aren’t. They have personalities, they have friends and enemies sometimes, and they have actual conversations with the people under them.

This system is more hands-off and possibly just a force of nature. Still, even if it doesn’t talk, it still wants things. I think all systems do, and you can point to what they want based on what they promote. In this genre, they mostly want people to be badass fighters who hit things with swords or else people who support badass fighters who hit things with swords.

There’s a thing in DnD where you can either level via actual experience points you get from killing things or from “milestones” which is basically in practice just your DM telling everyone at the table they’ve leveled. If you do milestones, the game progresses under his control. There are flaws to that, but a good DM is mostly going to be able to control the pace of everyone getting stronger so he can tell a good story. See that? That’s his goal - you can tell it’s what he wants because he’s set up a leveling system that supports narrative growth.

The experience-based systems usually devolve into what’s called murder-hoboing, where the characters pick an unrealistically large amount of fights so as to get experience as fast as possible, eventually mowing down whole towns to feed their bloodlust. It’s good for a certain kind of story, but only one very specific certain kind of story.

Sometimes the DM will still choose this type of leveling, and it either means he doesn’t know what it will do, or else that he does know what it does and that’s what he’s looking for.

In this story, I started out with a sort of dual want for the system:

1. The system wants populated places that are pacified and reasonably peaceful

2. The system wants those places to be populated

When the story starts, I think that implies a couple more things:

1. The system needs weaker people to populate those areas, who are strong enough to survive there easily but not much stronger than that

2. The system needs people who are strong enough to slowly pacify new areas

The implication on top of all that is that the system sea is literally endless; that this is a process it intends to go on and on for ever and ever, amen. I think when you put that all together, you get something like this:

In an infinite sea, mankind battled and bled to get their first foothold in the wild, a place that was theirs. They did this by means of the assistance of the system, which elevated them and made them strong enough to face the beasts, dungeons, and everything else in between them and safety.

The work didn’t stop there. Every generation, the strongest of humanity make their way into new wilds, fighting new battles and carving out new bubbles of territory in which humankind can be nurtured and grown.

I like that system, overall. I think the thing I like most about it is it implies that there’s a place for all sorts of people. It’s a bit like Demon World Boba Shop, where there were both crafting classes and combat classes. But where Demon World Boba Shop’s overall deal was that crafting was super overemphasized, this one is both more balanced and separated by regions. If you are a baker, fine. You can live your life in a place that wants bakers, surrounded by peace and goodness. If you are a guy who carries around an entire cannon and shoots people with it, The Kraken is just however many hours of sailing away, waiting for you.

CLASSES AND SKILLS

I consider there to be several general types of combat skills:

1. Stat enhancers. They take whatever you can do (however you accomplish it) and make it better.

2. Regeneration skills. They heal you over time and come in both active and passive flavors (i.e., think “always on” and “can be turned on by some method and last a while but not forever”).

3. General combat skills. Think “Swordsman I” here. These make you better at using a sword, a bow, or whatever. If this skill exists and you level it, you will eventually be much better at using a sword. The author will say things like “The sword just fit better in his hand, somehow, like he had held one for most of his life” and the guy never really has to get lessons or anything as a consequence.

4. Active skills. The guy yells “Wooo go FIREBLADE!” and fire comes out of his sword.

5. Movement skills. Think everything about combat skills, from passive to general to active, but it only has to do with movement.

6. Stuff that lets you do magic. This is way too complex to get into here, but it basically covers everything that the other stuff doesn’t.

This can be parsed down endlessly to little tiny categories, and somebody probably should, but even with this kind of imprecision we can imagine some stuff.

First, imagine the absolute extreme of this. Dave No-Cardio arrives on the Adventure Planet, having never played a sport and having never done a sit-up. He gets Magic Hero Swordsman as a class and is immediately a master of swordplay whose body stats mean he has the athletic abilities of an Olympian (the sports kind or the Greek god kind, take your pick). His movement skill means he can do parkour stuff and never trip or fall.

In essence, it’s like that Jackie Chan movie where the guy gets the tux that makes him a secret agent. He’s still making some decisions, but all the ability he needs to do that stuff is built into him without him doing any real work to get it. If another dude arrived at the same time who had spent his whole life in fencing lessons, it wouldn’t matter at all. Everything just got overwritten, after all.

At the very opposite end of the spectrum is Batman. A bit up from that is a guy who has skills that enhance things, but they are just sort of buffs and combat skills that increase what he’s doing in a percentage way. When he makes contact, he cuts 20% deeper than his skills and stats would imply, but that “skills” bit is really important now, since he doesn’t have a general combat skill that’s faking competence for him.

For the classes in this world, I first wanted a bunch of skills that really would let someone be superhuman over time, that would provide them with competence beyond what they could normally get. Marco has a combat skill that makes him better with swords and guns, and it’s tacked on to whatever he normally is in an artificial way that he earned by being in danger, but without practice.

That’s a little cheap, though, so it’s A) Not all-powerful and B) is on top of his normal physical capabilities, additive to them instead of subtractive. All the work he did first fed into his class to make it better, so he got paid out at least once in that way. But he’s also a super-physical person who is dominating people in fights from the very beginning, fighting above his level.

Elisa is the opposite of this, having an attack that could be overpowered, but that she can barely land. Riv is somewhere in the middle. He’s a big strong simple guy who does big strong simple attacks pretty well, and he’s using a big dumb stupid club. The part where he’s sort of a rough, powerful guy matters there, and there’s only so much a club can be informed by combat skills outside of just pumping more and more strength into them.

That’s how the combat part of combat classes work. What I decided for class rarity was that it wouldn’t really make any one thing a person did that much better, but instead would emphasize different things and make them more versatile. So Elisa is a scholar AND an elemental palm mage. Riv is really good at working AND pretty good at swinging a club, in that order. Marco, the rarest class of all, is all of great combat class, good pilot class, weird ship enchanter, AND grows his own armor.

All the add-ons are great, but they don’t make him better at swordfighting directly. He could still be beaten easily by a more skilled duelist class who bought good-enough equipment at a store. The only thing keeping that from happening is Marco’s personal quality, and the only advantage his unique class gives him is the ability to eventually be able to adapt to all sorts of situations in a way that gives him the advantage in almost any terrain.

The one thing that breaks that balance is that his ship can be loaded up, growing stronger and stronger as he fights stronger and stronger foes. The balance for that is coming; nearly everyone who can hack it in the outer seas has something similar. It’s a bunch of overpowered captains out there, boosted by more specialized crew.

CONCLUSION

The difficulty with writing a book that sets up a universe is there still has to be a story there. Nobody is going to put up with 100,000 words or so of worldbuilding where nothing happens. So on top of everything here, you get a tale. Marco leaves home, chased to the edges of the civilized world by civilization itself, for nefarious reasons that only get revealed right at the very end. There’s evil afoot, but there’s nothing he can do about it right now.

At the conclusion of the book, he has a choice. He can either evade the authorities as long as he can near home, dropping off his friends to keep them out of trouble, or he can keep the gang together, sail out into the unknown, and get what he needs to make a difference.

The longer I write, the less able to judge my own writing I get. It all seems good enough, terrible, and like a work of great unstoppable genius all at once, and I have no idea which version is the most correct. I’m guessing it changes chapter to chapter, most days. Still, I think this one probably has legs, and I’m planning on running on them for a while.

Thanks as always for being here - it’s a gift to be able to write stories for you.

RC