[Now Manaforged Robotics] The Hidden World - Announcement & Primer (Patreon)

Note : The Hidden World has been renamed to Manaforged Robotics, tags will be updated with the new name.

Hello everyone !

Apologies for the sort of radio silence these last few weeks here on patreon. I don't generally post news and status report here. I'd been taking a break since the end of book 9 of The Fallen World and with some IRL issues, plus planning for the holidays and writer's block, I wasn't able to write anything noteworthy.

Until now.

I'm happy to announce that my looooong discussed and planned project, The Hidden World, is finally being worked on. As in 'part 1 and 2 of the Prologue as well as the first chapter are done'. Which comes to about seven thousand words so far.

This time I'm...honestly not going to wait for ten chapters before I start putting it on patreon. If you wish to wait for that, be my guest, it will be at chapter 8, with the two part prologue taken into account. However I'm way too excited to do so.

Thus, the first part of prologue of The Hidden World will be up tomorrow at the usual upload time (18h CET), bar any issue and other mishap.

Some of you are certainly wishing to ask what happened to The Starlight Trader, and my answer to that is simple : numbers. After The Eternal Seeker Saga and The Fallen World I seek to avoid number juggling as much as possible (ever notice how I have never quoted the price of a single golem or other item Alexandra creates with her powers ?), and that just wasn't possible in a story about a free trader. I'm looking to move that story into more of a rogue trader scale, where at that level, where the fates of worlds are decided and exchanges are as much influence trading and political maneuvering as hard currency transfers, and abstract transactions work a lot better, but that is something I will have to work on for a while before anything comes of it, and I am not certain the setting as I created it will accomodate that. We shall see where that takes me.

For those worrying about The Fallen World : no, I'm not putting the story on hiatus, but it is becoming painfully obvious I need another project to work on between bursts on that story, or I just get stuck like a rusty cog. The Hidden World is indeed a story that takes a fair few lessons from The Fallen World, but it is not a dungeon core story and while I intend to be very axed towards industry and grand strategy originally, it won't reach even nearly the scale The Fallen World is at for many novels, which should avoid any overlap as they are being written.

Now, a short primer.

The story itself is going to follow Saphiria, an Artificial Intelligence of the Terran Federation, as she finds herself on a...Hidden World, so to speak. I will attempt to avoid spoilers, even for the prologue. The story will focus on many of the same themes as The Fallen World, melding technology and magic, plus industry, strategy, all that good stuff.

A few notes about how I handle my multiverse (which I like to call the General Multiverse) and some questions I expect to be asked during the Prologue :

-Is this set in the same universe as The Fallen World or The Dragon Imperium ?

No. They do, however, coexist in the same multiverse. Sapphiria's Earth is different from Alexandra's and Airah's, but they do share the same multiversal wide principles and rules, though those haven't (yet) been much expanded upon outside of G's short explanation in Imperium.

-Why are there characters like Arcadia ?

Earths in my multiverse tend to share some key characters and events. Arcadia is one of them. Something happening to Europa and Pluto is also a common (but not mandatory) occurrence.

-Will they cross over ?

[REDACTED]

-Is The Eternal Seeker Saga part of that multiverse ?

No. Even if I end up bringing it in later (which I doubt), it would be as a sealed off part of it. The Eternal Seeker Saga has only one Earth, period. Its different dimensions and realities have nothing in common with each other.

That's everything I came up with, but if you guys have more questions I might list them as well as their answers so you don't have to dig into the comments.