All-Patron Reward August: Stuff I'm Not Doing 4: The Troglodyte Club

The Troglodyte Club Adventures

Origin/Description

Once upon a time – in 1978, to be exact – I went through a phase of fascination with speleology and spelunking (respectively the science of, and exploration of, caves). I decided to write a short story about a group of amateur cavers – the Troglodyte Club – discovering and exploring a new, amazing cave.

It… didn't stay short.

Instead of an ordinary cave, the Troglodytes found themselves traveling through a cavern that became a gateway to another world – a world named Zarathan – a world of magic and monsters and intrigue, that they would play a part in for better or worse. Each of the members of the Club turned out to be extraordinary (in the over-the-top, not-well-foreshadowed way that one might expect from someone in the middle of high school); Frank Dalton, gentle giant of immense strength and nobility; their older advisor Tim, with his erratic absences and mysterious past turning out to mean he was the above-top-secret agent codenamed Startop; Aaron Felden, leader and would-be hero; another character (whose real name has faded from my mind) who was in reality the Jammer, thief and gadgeteer extraordinaire. 

Entering this magical world (with, my hazy memory insists even though it's ridiculous, a hovervan), the Troglodytes quickly found themselves almost rudderless, with Zarathan being something utterly beyond their experience. A sudden disaster separates the group, some of them proceeding on to Zarathanton, the capital of the area, and the others becoming lost in the Great Forest. 

Meanwhile, Startop's opposite number had finally tracked him down, and found his own way through the cave…

It became clear to me – about the point that a cave-in forced the group to continue – that this wasn't even going to be one novel. It was going to be a trilogy, whose volume titles remained in flux; the only one that remained reasonably constant was the second volume's title, The White Rat's Secret. The first trilogy was also just the beginning; I had started contemplating several other stories for the Troglodyte Club (and other heroes/groups I was inventing) including Lightslayer, The Citadel of Death, The Power of Infinity, and The Shadow City. Among other things, Frank Dalton would become Lord Frank Dalton and his name would become corrupted to Dalthun, thus making him the founder of Dalthunia, which country would be the Club's effective base of operations and central trouble spot.

Why I'm Not Doing It (And What I'll Steal From It)

Why in this case is pretty obvious; this was a clumsy patchwork pastiche of the fantasy I was reading with some caving, spy novels, and a few other things thrown in. The characters were pretty simplistic, the plot was discontinuous and nonsensical if you looked at it hard (I convinced myself otherwise while writing it, of course), and fitting all the pieces together just didn't work.

Of course, another reason "why" is that I've already stolen plenty from it. This was Zarathan's first appearance, and while a huge amount of the world has changed since that first clumsy outing, many elements – the connection of Earth and Zarathan, the great capital city Zarathanton itself, the general geography as sketched out in a clumsy map on cheap paper, the country of Dalthunia, etc., are all now part and parcel of Zarathan as it exists and was finally published in the Balanced Sword trilogy. 

The concept of the Black City was created as part of the mythos for the Troglodyte Club, and so was the first iteration of the concept that eventually produced Virigar ("Nightspawn the Lightslayer", which remains the rough translation of one of Virigar's Sauran names)

The idea of a powerful being with the form of a white rat derived from the long line of pet white rats that I had as a child, and while the precise being referred to in the title The White Rat's Secret became something rather different, the idea never completely disappeared… and will finally make its own appearance in Princess Holy Aura.

Startop was, of course, another appearance of The Immortal Man (thus "Tim"), who eventually became Torline, the Eternal King of Atlantaea. 

The Troglodyte Club stories may have been clumsy, unpublishable, riddled with every conceivable flaw (well, except rampant misspelling and such, I was pretty good with that even from a very young age)… but it served as the seed from which many of my essential ideas grew.