Chapter 52.5: Author’s note

If you count the three novels that make up Deadworld Isekai at the moment, this is my fourth completed novel in about five months. There are some who would call that too much writing. I’m trying to think of it, as much as I can, as practice. I have some thoughts on that, but before I can explain them, I’m going to talk about bass guitar for a bit. Stick with me. I swear there’s a point.

The first artistic thing I ever really tried to do and stuck to for any amount of time was playing bass. I have always, always liked the bass as an instrument, mostly because while it has potentially limitless depth and rewards as much time and effort as you’d want to put it into it, it’s also fundamentally a pretty easy instrument to get pretty good at.

There’s a joke where a kid asks his dad for bass playing lessons, and the dad agrees, buys him a bass, and pre-pays for several weeks of lessons. The first week, the kid goes to his lesson, comes home, and the dad asks him how he did. The kid says he did great, and learned the first five notes on the E string. The second week, he goes again, the dad asks him how he did again, and he reports he learned the first five notes on the A string.

The next week, he goes, and never comes home. The dad panics, looks around for him, and can’t find him. He calls the bass teacher, who says the kid never even showed. Then, in the middle of the night, the kid staggers into the house drunk and covered in lipstick. The dad asks him how his lesson went, and the kid says “I couldn’t go. I had a gig.”

Bass is really like that, to the point where there are some real, actual stories where people were taught enough bass on Friday to fill in with punk bands on Saturday. But if you want to get any better at it, to actually stand out from all the other bass players and become special, you need to put in consistently large amounts of time for long, regular periods. Basically, work your ass off.

Most people who play bass never make that jump, and I don’t blame them. It’s jarring. I’m trying to make that jump with writing now. I am, I feel, pretty good. I’m better than I was 450,000 words ago, for sure. But I can now sort of see the future of my writing spread out before me. And I can say pretty confidently that I’ll probably still be getting better when I hit 1,000,000 words, should I write that long.

The reason I tell you this is because I wanted to make clear that, as I talk about these things, you should remember that at best I’m just an amateur. I’m still learning. So I’ve been writing these little notes at the end of every novel as a way to summarize how I thought about the books, what I think makes them cool, what I liked, what I disliked, and what I was personally working on as I wrote them.

There are people who like reading those, and I’m told some other writers found it helpful. So in no particular order and hopefully taken by the reader with a grain of salt, here’s what I was thinking as I wrote this last book.

The Setting

Present Day Seanville

There are a lot of cities in the western United States in which real people live and raise families while holding down pretty good jobs in sometimes remarkably important fields. But most people have never heard of them because they don’t have the five-to-ten hours worth of entertainment you are looking for on a vacation.

In a lot of cases, these are cities that are more-or-less connected to other, larger cities that you have heard of, sometimes actually physically engulfed by them and sometimes connected by short runs of freeway. If you’ve been on the internet a lot, you’ve at some point talked to someone who lives in Forest Grove and is proud of that, but is constantly forced to say, “Basically I live in Portland, alright? Just think of it as West Portland.”

I wanted Sean to live and work in a town like that, one that you either live in because your parents lived there and eventually leave, or one you otherwise would move to for work reasons. Sean’s there because at some point he just got stuck there. He doesn’t love it, he doesn’t hate it, and it doesn’t hold anything particularly compelling for him.

He’s just… there. He didn’t choose it. And it needed to be that way because that’s how Sean’s life was supposed to feel. If he lived in New York, that would carry an excitement of its own. Ditto LA, Boston, or even Boise if you are real into hiking and excellent municipal parks. Sean lives in a place you’d need a good reason to live in, lacking any of that foundation that other cities have.

Because of who Sean was and what his problems at that stage were, that’s sort of how it had to be. It’s also how his job had to be. When he’s at the Chronological studies building, the only active thing we see him do is read a manual for the kind of work he wants to but can’t do. He’s in a place that’s meant for other people, taking a peek at what they do, knowing he’s not a part of it and will be moving on momentarily.

The Seanville of The Future

The town in the future had to be a couple of things. First, it had to have enough people to offer Sean support, while not really having enough people to get in his way to any substantial degree. If the surrounding countryside was hunted out, if the dungeons were all cleared, he wouldn’t be able to level. But if there was literally nobody around, he’d have trouble getting food. Finding the right balance was important.

What I tried to get is the general feel of there being about a hundred people in the surrounding area, many of whom were travelers or short-term residents, and all of whom had their own business to keep up on. So while there’s a lively market with a lot of vendors, there’s not so many people on the streets that Sean sees much foot traffic unless he’s very close to the market.

And out of those many people. Sean only talks to (I think) six of them outside of “Sean bought food from a vendor” interactions, and only four of them (Estesia, Brett, Janey, Bernard) are named. If I had to, I could have just had Estesia and Brett. Everyone else is strictly for feel, so hopefully the reader feels like there’s still plenty of humans left, if vastly less than before.

System Influence in the Outside World

If you have a system, and you have a world it’s influencing, you need to make choices about who the system is and what it wants, even if the system isn’t meant to be a person. A system could keep everything monstrous in dungeons, and keep the outside world clean. It could not have dungeons at all, and set all the threats free to roam. Or it could have both dungeons and external threats.

Because I wanted a world that was depopulated to an extent, I needed the system to have influence in the outside world because otherwise there would be no chance of that depopulation happening. So, dungeon breaks at a minimum, and a massive but survivable influx of threats at a maximum.

The Apocalypse System struck a middle ground, or tried to. It had plenty of time to work with, so it introduced danger over the course of decades. Mankind, at least close to where Sean was, did poorly when this danger started ramping up. They had played it too safe, focusing on minimizing risk at every step except for the few who focused on maximizing it, and with no happy medium in the middle, they ended up getting massacred at some point.

We don’t see most of that, but we know something like that probably happened for two reasons. One is that the Earth really is depopulated, and the other is that the culture that we see is absurdly cautious. Estesia, a naturally helpful person, has “don’t do anything extra out of goodwill” so pounded into her that she feels terrible every time she does it. We don’t see teams of humans working together to accomplish big things, because other people are risky. Instead, everyone just accepts that they need to work very, very cautiously at lower levels.

Presumably, some people really did survive and thrive in the outside world, but late in the book we see that those outlier-successes have the ability to escape the world (either by buying their way off, or by teleporting away, or by facing a Crack Challenge), and thus their influence doesn’t accumulate.

Apocalypse System Spaces

The system spaces are dungeons, in that broad sense of the world. Originally, I wasn’t going to have them at all, but I eventually decided I would for two reasons. The first is that Sean needed some kind of limiter on his scavenging. If he could go anywhere, he could get just about anything, and that would make telling his story a lot more complex. As much as some people want chapter after chapter of characters experimenting with different kinds of rocks, it makes for a different kind of plot, and one that I’m not as good at writing.

The mechanic that I used to try and fix this was by making it so that the system would semi-randomly seize control of unoccupied spaces and build dungeons in them. That meant that any building, basement, or tool shed might just suck Sean into a level 30 deathscape from which there was no escape.

If you are a level 1-10 beginner in that situation, as Sean is for most of the book, you would almost immediately default to trying to figure out where the low-level enemies hang out, and then going exclusively to those places until you got stronger. So Sean does, and his movement to other areas ends up restricted by very reasonable, very boring fears for a while.

In terms of what the spaces CAN hold, it’s virtually anything. By the end of the book, we get the sense that the big, important one is going to hold an entire world, and there’s one small enough that it’s only meant to keep Sean in an arena for a while.

But generally, they hold condensed themes - one is Little Red Riding Hood’s forest, if her story is told as a gritty horror kind of thing. Rats don’t have much of a theme, except that they are scarier in the dark and sometimes they tunnel through things, so they get a cave. And one needs to hold a forest dragon, so it becomes a compressed, perhaps too-biologically-diverse forest.

If Sean was going to spend more time on the “surface world” plane, he’d end up considering dungeons places you go to conquer, beat a boss, and get a defined reward. In fact, I say that’s how most authors use them, and what dungeons are mostly for as a literary trope.

When Sean doesn’t get quite that far, it’s not because I don’t like dungeons. It’s because that’s probably going to be more of a thing in book two, which is going to be much less compressed.

The System and the Apocalypse System

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, there’s a character named Will Riker, who is best known for being the character on that show who will have sex with the most things. But outside of being generally promiscuous, he’s also a responsible, successful military officer, at least as defined by the setting of the show.

And then there’s Thomas Riker, who resulted from a transporter accident. At some point, he was the same exact thing as Will, down to the atom, but since he was immediately trapped on a wasteland planet for a few years, he diverged pretty quickly.

From Will’s point of view, he now has this clone that he feels responsible for and who reflects poorly on him, but who has also gone a little crazy and gets into a lot of embarrassing trouble.

I wanted the relationship between the two systems to be a lot like that. Apocalypse Systems are spun up out of necessity in little pocket universes the system can’t send it’s full power and influence to yet, like it chucked a seed of itself in there and just let it grow. And left to their own devices, Apocalypse Systems are chaotic and wacky.

The main system - the one that’s out in the greater universe - is a lot less unpredictable. It has a stricter set of rules, and rewards people in much more predictable ways. While it varies a little world-to-world for practical situations, it’s really just a single person who is code-switching.

The Apocalypse System, in contrast, built itself strictly for Earth. It identified entertainment as probably our most important cultural value, so almost everything it does is dyed in the themes it found in our media. Sometimes it gets a bit lazy and goes with system defaults (like the wind panther, or the sloths), but mostly it’s doing something it thinks we will like.

The fact that it doesn’t understand our mythos very well or that, for the most part, humans don’t love the part where they have to kill beloved fairy-tale characters is lost on it.

Still, both systems are trying to do good. They are forces of nature, for the most part, but they are ordered forces that are supposed to maintain patterns and predictability in the universe while allowing the people in it to get stronger, advance, and accomplish bigger things. To the extent the Apocalypse System seems cruel, it’s because it’s trying to do one thing and one thing only. Without it, Earth would be a total loss. It just wants to salvage what it can.

System Mechanics

Stats

Some stat systems reward being well-rounded. Street Fighter springs to mind; both Ken and Ryu are great. Some systems reward specialization and punish generalization, though. I play a video game called Underrail (Note: not the Toby Fox jam) that’s like this. In that game, if you try to be dodgy AND tanky, you get mercilessly curb stomped. You need to choose a direction, choose early, and get so very good at one specific thing that you can absolutely dominate people with it.

For what it’s worth, this is also how the US job market works. Everyone says they want a generalist, and then you find the people who make the most money are dudes who know so much Python they have forgotten how to tie their shoes.

The stat system in this novel assumes that most classes reward you for paying a lot of attention to two stats, and only raising the others when they are so low you feel embarrassed by them. Estesia, for instance, probably has an even split between SAV and DEX, with only minor investments in VIT, slightly higher investments in MAG, and absolutely nothing in STR. She wins when you aren’t fast enough to get to her and she can take you down with arrows, which works in a surprising amount of situations. The rest, she runs from.

Tanks are tanks, and win when they have a damage dealer to protect. STR fighters win when they can take you out with one big strike, and so on.

But people who just want to lift a car in addition to being rogues die because they gave up that edge. It’s not a system that rewards well-roundedness. The fact that Sean has to invest in four stats is unusual, and would usually mean that Estesia was right in calling his class trash. The only thing that makes that untrue is that his MAG skill is insanely overpowered in bursts in a way that nothing (yet) resists, and his SAV stat feeds directly into a kind of type-of-damage versatility he shouldn’t have.

One thing I have to address: Savvy was originally called Cunning, which made Australian people really, really uncomfortable because of the word sounding a lot like a slang term for genitals. I switched it to Savvy on the fly because it’s entirely something that guides other stats in most builds. If I had it to do over again, though, I’d probably call it finesse. Not the biggest deal, but if there’s anything that changes in the event this book eventually goes to print, it will be that.

Apocalypse Beast Descriptions

The Apocalypse System doesn’t always let the reader know the level of what’s being fought. With really strong things, this is usually because it's built in a way that doesn’t track cleanly with human levelling, or because something is so very strong compared to who it’s fighting that the system doesn’t think it matters.

Sometimes, it’s because the enemies are very weak. For the most part, if the system thinks that something is weaker than an un-augmented adult human, it doesn’t assign it a level. The animals we see that don’t have levels assigned are things that occur in swarms, herds, and packs, where assigning them a level would be confusing. Again, the system is trying to be helpful.

The descriptions themselves are supposed to give up some information about what the individual doing the scan is about to fight without telling them every single thing. And, for what it’s worth, most people in the Apocalypse era get a lot less flavor in their descriptions than Sean does. The Apocalypse System is not a person, but it actually is trying to be amusing and fun. Sean is from our era, grew up on our media, and the system is trying to entertain him.

The bit where this doesn’t work that well is more a function of the fact that he’s being murdered every time he has an opportunity to enjoy them. It’s much more a “what the fuck” reaction than a “ha, how great” thing for him, but it’s understandable why.

Characters

Sean Lawrence

Sean is a guy who works a lot of shitty jobs, feels underutilized, and thinks about that a ton. And then, like you know, he gets thrown into a situation where he’s no longer caught in the weird dynamic of “you must have accomplished this much, by this time, or we are going to try our hardest to punish you for it your entire life.”

Then he finds out something weird - he’s part of his own problem. He’s so used to taking crappy jobs that he automatically assigns himself to be head-cautious-rat-killer and gets on a track to continue doing that for as long as it takes for the world to explode and take him with it.

One thing that I like about LitRPG/Progression fantasy, and part of why I think people read it, is that it’s usually fair. If you kill a bunch of goblins, you get stronger in a way you can see, that nobody can take from you, and then you can go on to do bigger, cooler things with that strength.

If Sean succeeds, it’s because he realizes that fairness cuts both ways. Now that he’s in a world that will reward him for effort, he actually has to put some effort on the table, or when he does poorly it’s kind of his fault.

Now, for the meta bit of the book. Every book I’ve written so far has had an annoying sort of symbolic backdrop. The first book of Deadworld, for instance, was written when I was incredibly depressed. So the character in that one ends up being betrayed by broken promises, ending up in a broken, empty world, hunkering down and trying to get his base survival needs met, and hoping if he does that long enough things might get better.

For this book, I wanted to sort of have every character be in a different place as far as trust goes. Sean is, at base, a person who trusts people based on his intuitions about them, and is himself basically trustworthy. So while we see him reading the guide and using it, we also notice he never fully follows its instructions. Why should he? He has no idea who wrote it, if they are trustworthy, or if they are bullshitting.

The flip side of that is that he trusts people like Estesia and Brett more than even than they think he should because he gets a good vibe from them. Because an inability to trust is a risk in and of itself (and even more so for Sean), this isn’t as bad of an idea as it sounds like at first. But he also got lucky - if his intuition ever failed him, it will mean trouble.

Estesia

Estesia was raised by a generation of people who had survived by being very, very cautious. She fights things she knows she can absolutely handle and runs from everything else. She stays close to other humans, doesn’t go on long adventures, and as a result is relatively low-leveled. The part where Sean killed a level 50 Junkyard Goliath isn’t something she’d ever get up to by herself, and the fact that experience scales really quickly in this world means she’s long since gotten to the point where all the monsters she’s willing to fight don’t really move the needle on her leveling anymore.

In the trust meta, Estesia is absolutely trustworthy in an ironclad, powerful way that actually exceeds what she’s promised that she will do. If she sees someone in trouble, she helps them, even though all her training says that’s a bad idea. If she says she will do something, she will do it, even though her training says that she should only give it an honest try and jet if things get too messy.

At the same time, she’s been burned enough that she doesn’t trust anyone else at all, except to the extent where it would hurt her if she didn’t. She trusts Brett for business things, and she probably trusts Sean a tiny bit by the end of the book after he risks his life saving hers. But for the most part, she’s a lonely person.

She’s planning on eventually leaving Earth to get to a planet where she knows absolutely nobody and will be entirely reliant on herself, and that actually makes her feel safer, like there’s less to go wrong.

Brett

Brett is trustworthy, and trusts everyone within a specifically defined rule-set. Essentially, he doesn’t think about whether or not you trust him or not, and he doesn’t care if you feel like you can trust him.

What he does care about is making good bets that lead to relationships based on history. When Sean shows up, Brett tries to convince him as best he can that telling him some of his secrets will help Brett help him better. When Sean does, he puts those secrets into slightly better armor, and gives him better deals than Sean really justifies getting.

For Brett, this means that Sean now has knowledge that Brett lives up to his end of the bargain, and he has knowledge that Sean is a certain kind of bet. Because Brett is a merchant, this kind of transactional trust works well for him.

If Sean didn’t pay a bill, or didn’t bring his business back every time after Brett did so much to earn it, the way Brett thought about their relationship would have changed drastically. But because Brett thinks that’s how trust works, he also wouldn’t do anything to harm Sean, or even to undermine Sean’s expectations of Brett. That’s not only because he expected that would make Sean less likely to bring him business, but because it would hurt his reputation overall. He takes it seriously.

Outside of the trust mechanics, the reason Brett was even able to convince Sean to trust him with secrets is because he’s a type of guy Sean recognizes. He works with his hands, loves his work, appears to be competent, and does pretty well in a limited way. Sean would have encountered dozens of these guys in his life, and Jeff looms large in the story as the one he loved best.

Brett is the standard-issue decent dude-guy Sean needed to meet, one who anchored the idea that while times had changed, people were still recognizable and understandable across the decades of the Apocalypse.

If Brett isn’t particularly interesting to you, I think that’s understandable. But to me, he’s great. He’s every good-guy competent craftsman I’ve ever known, people for whom skill has turned into confidence, and who bleed consistency and kindness because they are anchored to that idea of being great at something.

Cedarhelm

Cedarhelm was my son’s idea, not mine. He came into my room one day and said, “Hey, do you have woods in your story? Put a dragon in there. Name him Cedarhelm.”

Fine, you little bastard. There’s your dragon. You better remember this kindly when you are reminiscing about your childhood later.

Despite not being my idea, I like Cedarhelm a lot. He’s a big, powerful being who is far from home, but not in any particular danger. He hates all the same people Sean hates, but for slightly different reasons, and he is friendly despite being an extreme introvert.

Cedarhelm does fall into a special category for me. When people talk about introverts, there’s this assumption that sometimes sneaks in that they lack confidence, or don’t communicate because they are otherwise scared or weak in some way. But we used to have a term for the opposite, which was “a man of few words.” Cedarhelm knows a lot, is strong, and is not in the least afraid of Sean. He even likes him. It’s just that he doesn’t talk a lot.

It’s fine not to talk a lot! As a person who talks far, far too much, I can assure you it causes a lot of problems.

When Cedarhelm meets Sean, he likes him okay. This is because Cedarhelm is a centuries-old forest sage who lives at one with nature, and likes everyone okay so long as they don’t intentionally try to cause damage to the forest or him.

Somewhere along the line, we find that Cedarhelm comes to like Sean somewhat better than that. Is it because Sean is friendly with him, or comes to trust him despite him being terrifying? Is it because Sean refused to kill him, or did he already like him by then?

I don’t know, and I’m okay with it being vague. The reason why I’m fine with that is there have been a lot of people in my life over the years who have loved me despite me not being their exact kind of person, or despite not understanding me that well. And when that’s happened, I haven’t always understood why they loved me. I’m not sure they did. That was okay.

I’ve also had people come to hate me, and to let that hate run away to the point where they took pretty good shots at destroying me. And I didn’t understand why, really, and in at least one case I don’t think they did either, regardless of what they might have said the reasons were.

And I’m here to tell you that people liking you, or loving you, or caring for you when you need it, those are unalloyed, pure goods. They are perfect whether or not they come with explanations, just in the same way that being hated by someone is bad no matter what reason the hater has for their feelings.

With hate, you should probably find out why if you don’t know because it might be something you can fix. But with love? It’s okay just to bask in it, even if you don’t understand how you earned it. Good things are good, even if you don’t have the entire explanation why you get to enjoy them.

Janey

Janey sells grain and beans. I meant to do more with her in the story. Whoops!

Bernard

Bernard is a food vendor who barely enters into the story, who was supposed to have subtle Barry-from-Deadworld-Isekai vibes. His name is Bernard because I was wrong about how nicknames work.

The Dao of Shanks

What makes a shank a shank?

In the book, I say that the platonic ideal of a shank is a sharpened toothbrush. It’s a peaceful object that’s not meant to be a weapon lovingly honed on a concrete floor, given a handle, and used to stab someone. It might not work twice, but it will probably work once, and that’s all it needs.

But consider this. You walk into a post-apocalyptic blacksmith’s shop and see a bunch of sword blade blanks laid out. They aren’t sharpened, so you take one and sharpen it on a rock, and then make a handle for it out of a water bottle and some 2-part epoxy. Is that a shank?

Is a gravity generator from a spaceship that you cover in steel plates and attack to a sign pole so you can use it as an unrealistically heavy mass weapon a shank? Is a medical laser you juice up with magic and carry around for use as a blaster a shank?

I spent some time with my kids going over hundreds of these, trying to figure out what felt shanky and what didn’t. Anything in the “simple heavy object in a fabric sling” category of things did. Almost no projectile-launching weapons did, outside of a category known as “projectile knives” if they were built from salvaged, low-quality materials.

Almost nothing high-tech did, except futuristic materials found in junk heaps.

One thing that I didn’t end up having a great place in the story to explore was Sean trying to cheat the shank-definition system and failing, say by having someone cut him off a clean, beautiful chunk of tool steel in the general shape of a knife to save himself work and try to get as close to an “intentionally produced” sword as possible.

Or finding a salvaged head from a Morningstar flail and attaching it to a new rope, which also doesn’t work.

In the end, I came up with several rules, all of which were pretty flexible but guided what I think of as “real shanks”:

1. Almost any material salvaged from the body of a monster would work, so long as it’s not something they were holding and using as a weapon. A ghostly set of armor might have a spike on the top of the helmet, and that might work for a shank if it was broken off and given a handle. But the sword an armor carries would be out.
2. Almost any “dropped” material meant to be made into a weapon would work, so long as it was sufficiently unprocessed. Those lumps of garbage he found in the garbage men are a good example. They could be used for a shank just fine, and were. But if he had used a power hammer and forge to make them into a weapon, it would blur the line between shank and conventionally forged weapon, and it wouldn’t work.
3. Mass/heavy weapons were okay. If you are going to be a shankmaster and limited to weapons that are by definition shittier than they need to be, you need something to pay you back for that, and I went with versatility. But I gave myself a higher standard for how janky/salvaged/clearly not for that the materials had to be in that category because mass weapons are inherently simpler than blades, and I had to make sure the difference between something like the Trash Compactor and a finely made historic flail was really clear.

On top of those rules, which were used, I had some other thoughts that didn’t quite make it into the books. For instance, can Sean make his own armor? I decided he could, but that it wouldn’t be a shank if he did, unless it was a really extreme circumstance, like him hollowing out a porcupine and using its entire unprocessed hide like a suit. That meant he needed an armor guy, and that meant I didn’t have to write about him learning the entire trade of tanning.

But that’s not a permanent rule. In the coming books, there’s a possibility he might have a hand in the creation of his own armor, or make it himself. It’s not absolutely decided yet and depends a bit on where the story goes.

The last thing, and something that didn’t come up, is the idea that Sean’s shanks have named, system acknowledged secondary states that interact with his weapons skill to make them more than they would otherwise be. If Sean had inspected his weapon that time he set it on fire using Plug Mud, he probably would have found the name had changed a little bit, and that it had defined, system-enhanced qualities that went beyond being merely on fire.

At some point, I want to explore that. It would be hard for the system to tell him that, say, setting one of his weapons on fire in a way that would destroy it over the course of five minutes wasn’t a real shanky thing to do, and I think it would be interesting to see some weapons exit his load-out that way.

Conclusions and Goodbyes

When I started writing this novel, I wasn’t sure if it would work. It’s a backwards-regressor novel, where someone travels to the future and thus has less time and experience to deal with threats with than everyone else, and it’s built out of a lot of components I really liked, but I wasn’t sure other people would be into.

The part where it’s found an audience of people who like it is a big deal for me. It justifies the work, makes me feel good about doing it, and makes me want to do more. Just by reading it, you’ve given me a substantial gift that makes a real difference in how I feel and how easy it is for me to get through my day-to-day life.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn’t get to feel like a “real writer” if you weren’t here, reading what I make. That’s something you do for me, and I’m thankful.

Thanks again, and I’ll see you in book 2!