Weekly Progress Update [12/JAN]

I'm free of being horribly ill!

It only took a week but god it's so nice not to feel like shit again. I'm still a bit fatigued from it all so I didn't do as much as I wanted- I got started on writing CH13 with a modest 3k words, and have started to chip away at the court scene for this chapter.

I hope you all remember how you chose to handle Bazo's absence from your Crown's coronation, because depending on your previous choice, there will be very explicit consequences.

For example, someone who chose to forgive Bazo in CH7 and now suddenly flips and decides to treat him with hostility (which will be possible) might find other characters scratching their heads at your Crown.

So, rather than there being the "right" choice in this situation, it's more about consistency. Any decision the Crown makes can be rationalized through reasoning, the only caveat is that it has to make sense. The last thing the Imperial Court and the public want to see is a ruler who makes erratic choices or who decides things based on their whims.

Those of you whose Crowns chose to wait before judging Bazo, for example, will find more freedom to decide either way since they didn't explicitly choose a side before. While those who chose either condemning/forgiving Bazo and now go for the opposite choice will have to do a bit more work to convince others why they changed their minds. But it will be possible to make that case!

That aside, I'm also dabbling with the public petitions right now, and I'm having fun with the fictional political debates that are happening in this chapter. To give you a little preview for one of the cases your Crown has to decide on: they will get a petition from the imperial army who want to summon spirits into battle to use offensively, and some of the priests in Marabad heavily disagree with that proposal.

My challenge as a writer is to make sure it all comes across in clear terms to the reader, which can be difficult when messing around with made-up scenarios. Especially what with all the minor, nameless NPCs that are involved in these scenes lol.

Most of all, I'm trying to make it so that the love interests keep their opinions to themselves (for now) and kinda watch and wait to see where the Crown's political inclinations are. Of course, this isn't completely possible for all of them: D, for example, is directly involved in the army's request to use spirits in battle.

So, yeah, this is part of the story where you might start to see disagreements happening between the Crown and the love interests- for right now, that won't be a deal-breaker to any of them. I think there's a lot of potential grey area to play with, since I want to avoid a situation where "Agree With The LI or Else" becomes the way how people play the game. It will be fully possible to diverge from the LIs politically quite a bit while still maintaining the romance. It all depends on how your Crown handles it.

Honestly, more than siding with the nobility, the love interests will be more annoyed if the Crown shows incompetence rather than anything else. At least when the Crown is siding with the elite, they do so consciously and get their agenda done, and the LIs can debate them about it.

A Crown that just fumbles around and lets the Imperial Court walk all over them, however? Majorrrr turn-off for them.

I'm going to continue chipping away at CH13, and get that dev sneak peek out hopefully around Thursday/Friday? There's also the tier 2+ character snippet that will be released for this month: I'm starting the new year with R, though I haven't decided on a scenario yet.

Maybe I'll do an R POV for their CH12 romance scene 👀 No promises though!

See you then 💖