By Tar-Palantir, Eleonora, Pitys, BlackZebra, Caradìlis, Spritelady, Tusky von Tuskington III, and H. E. Strachan

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'Philip, I have a very special mission for you. As my personal physician, I know you will carry it out faithfully'
'Your Holiness is too kind. How may I be of service to you and the Church?'
'As you know, the pagan Saracens threaten the Holy Land. I intend to resolve this. You have heard of the great Christian Eastern king, Prester John?'
'I and all of Christendom. Did he not write recently to the Greek Emperor?'
'Indeed he did, proving that he exists and is most eager to assist the Church in our efforts to save Jerusalem for the true faith. I intend to reply to secure a great Christian alliance of East and West against the Saracens. And you must deliver it.'
'I am not worthy to be the instrument of Your Holiness in this great undertaking, but I will do my best.'
'I know you will, my son.'
'Before I depart, may I ask one question, Your Holiness?'
'Of course, Philip.'
'Whither should I go in the search for Prester John?'
'I know not rightly where he lives, but seek for the land of the Armenians; we know them to be Christians of a kind and they may have surer knowledge. Godspeed!'
And so I found myself leaving Rome for God knew where. All I had to do was somehow circumvent the Saracen kingdoms of Asia and possibly fight dog-headed men and Blemmyes to reach the Armenian lands. And beyond that, who knew what I would find?
Arranging the departure took me months. The sunset surprised me often as I sat in my library way after Vespers, with the sole company of the feeble light of a dying candle. The cool evening breeze was slowly invading the halls of the palace while I was still sitting at my desk, making my way through old charters. None of those obscure geographers indicated an accessible way to enter the land of the Armenians. The maps were seemingly unclear. Studying them, I came across traces of ancient cities, settlements whose names had been erased and became illegible. And was that an oasis there, possibly an old merchant base in the shade of the Anatolian mountains?
Although my aim was to secure an ally, I knew that I should have been extremely careful in venturing into Byzantium and moving forward to the East, up to the Great Wall that Alexander the Great built to stop the giants Gog and Magog.
One evening, shortly before my departure, my apprentice Mercutius came looking for me. He was not alone: Cardinal de Grimoard was sending an embassy. His layman lieutenant, Jaufrè Malebranche, was there to escort me, as His Highness requested to have a private conversation.
"And you, Doctor of Medicine, might use the help of someone well-versed in tracking down who's very good at hiding, don't you?" so sneered at me Malebranche, with a snarling laugh that proved me that he sensed how appalled I was by his presence. Indeed, he was right.
The sky was growing light but it was still before dawn when I first caught sight of our destination on the horizon. The finally calm sea and early morning quiet was soothing to my nerves. There had been little chance for sleep last night and even less inclination. I had long chased tales and rumours of a pious, Christian King of the Indians, was this finally my chance to find him?  My revelry was rudely interrupted, Malebranche had emerged from below deck and was coarsely addressing the captain much to his displeasure.
What had I got myself into by bringing him here? What was in it for him, or for the cardinal? The woman was probably little more than a wild goose chase. A royal princess, even a widowed princess past her breeding years, would surely not have been risked with such a desperate mission. And yet... I thought about the small, dark skinned woman who accompanied us. Her clothes did something to diminish the exoticism of her appearance; plain, and her hair covered not unlike any good sister who might be found in Rome. But she did not hold herself in the same subservient way. And how could I ignore the significance of the token she bore? The three magi, the gifts they bore had been replaced with three small emeralds. My hands had shook when the cardinal had triumphantly revealed it to me that night in his quarters. I could not simply dismiss it.
Finally, our ship arrived in the magnificent city of Constantinople. While sailing through Sea of Marmara my gaze fell upon the magnificent Theodosian Walls protecting the city for centuries. I wondered if these Greeks, despite their declining power, would be a better bet against the Saracens instead of this mythical king in the east. As we anchored at the pier and left the merchant vessel, which brought us over the Mediterranean, to our surprise a group of soldiers and a man in ceremonial clothing awaited us. Beside him a small figure emerged clothed in the simple robes of a monk. He addressed me in pristine Latin:
'My lord sends you greetings and wishes to inquire about your journey. What brings the personal physician of the Pope to these lands?'
Surprised about the man knowing my identity, thoughts about possible betrayal crossed my mind. Was there an intrigue by the cardinal? Who was this man in ceremonial robes? It seemed as if the monk had read my mind.
'You seem to be puzzled. May I introduce Katastaseos Arkadios. He is the ceremonial master of his majesty the Basileus. I am his humble servant and translator Konstantinos. Cardinal de Grimoard informed us about your impending arrival. Nevertheless, my lord wishes to hear himself what the purpose of you journey is.'
'His holiness the Pope sent me on this journey in a secret mission. I cannot tell your lord.'
After translating and receiving an order from Arkadios, Konstantinos replied:
'You must be tired from the long journey so please enjoy the hospitality of his majesty.'
I nodded and conveyed my thanks. Arkadios waved a hand and a young man appeared by my side almost instantly, beckoning me to follow. And so, I let myself be led away through several corridors and a small courtyard.
We walked quickly and in silence, only stopping, when my guide halted at a small wooden door. He opened it and gestured for me to enter. Behind the door was a small, but comfortable room. Light entered only sparely through small windows near the ceiling. There was a simple bed at the far side, a washbasin and a wooden chest next to it and near the door, a small table with a single chair and a candlestick holder with a nearly burnt down candle stuck within. My guide remained silent, as I looked around the room, but it was made quite obvious even through his silence, that these would be my quarters for the duration of my stay. It would do. Having done his job of leading me here, my guide turned and disappeared.
I sighed, sat down on the chair. This place, I was beginning to get a bad feeling about it. Hopefully, I would be able to complete my mission here soon and return home. I had an inkling that I was not wanted here.
The following day, I was summoned to the private chambers of Katastaseos. I had not informed Malebranch of this invitation; I was keen not to spend any more time with the man than absolutely necessary.
'My lord would like to ask you to reconsider the secrecy of your mission. He and His Majesty are keen to aid the Pope in whatever way they can, especially if your mission concerns securing the Holy Land.' As Konstantinos spoke, his hands twitched slightly, in anxiety perhaps?
'I can only say that my mission is in the best interests of His Holiness and his goal to secure Jerusalem. I am forbidden to speak further and must decline your offer. We are prepared to proceed with our journey. But we thank you for your hospitality.'
Konstantinos appeared to pale at my response, and I couldn't help but wonder why this was so important. Was he set to receive some punishment if I declined to reveal the information his lord sought? Or perhaps was it something more, an issue concerning Master Arkadios' own standing with his Majesty? Whatever the answer, Konstantinos delivered my response and the reply came swiftly.
'We would be grateful if you would stay another night and consider this request. Your ship has not yet been fully resupplied for the continuation of your journey. In fact, it may be some time before this can be completed'. Arkadios' message was clear to me. He would not permit us to leave until we had revealed the nature of our mission.
The next day I enquired as to the readiness of the vessel, but I was told there was an issue with the ship's rudder. My suspicions were confirmed. I was furious. My path was guided by God and I would not have it imperilled here.
With this in mind I decided to venture out into the city. Whilst I was free to move around as I pleased, some figure always followed me, probably hired by Arkadios. So, this time I headed out in the company of Malebranche. Whilst I did not like the man, I had thought of a use for him.
As we passed through a bustling market I had him start an argument with a vendor over something trivial. It was a ruse. The ensuing commotion distracted our tail, and I was able to slip away. Seizing the opportunity, I quickly made some enquiries about moving east. As luck would have it, I happened across a merchant from Ani, a city in the Bagratid Armenian kingdom. He told me his caravan would be heading there by land the next day, so in exchange for gold he agreed to escort us.
The merchant had given me a map, detailing the route we would be taking through the western Anatolian mountains, so I spent the afternoon familiarising myself with it.
I was reluctant to move on in this clandestine way. The Basileus himself might get wind of it and brand us fugitives, but what other choice did I have?
The next day I rose at Lauds for prayer, asking forgiveness for my coming deception and the certain missing of my more usual Prime prayers. In the pre-dawn, I, the despicable Malebranche, and our mysterious female companion, escaped our separate lodgings and hurried to the merchant's caravan. God was with us: the man had not left and, facing the rising sun, we escaped Constantinople.
Or so I thought. Barely a mile from the ancient city's wall, the camels and donkeys halted, my own included. Malebranche dismounted and approached the caravan's leader, a wrinkled fellow different to the man I had paid. He turned his head so it was in profile and I almost fell off my mule: it was the face of Byzantine's coins, the Basileus!
Malebranche, addressed the ruler boldly, "Cardinal de Grimoard sends his greetings."
The Basileus made no answer. My merchant, a servant or a spy I now realised, acted as a translator to the Basileus and the grey man nodded once in response.
I thought of the map I had been given to study: was it fake or genuine? could I ride without a guide? did I have enough supplies on my mule? My indecision denied any of these questions being answered. The other men in the caravan, openly armed, took my donkey's reins from me and hope left my breast.
We did not return by the same route. The dark woman who had courted my curiosity so long rode beside the Basileus, silent as ever. Malebranche on the other hand delighted in goading me with the details of his cleverness and double-dealing on behalf of his patron. He made jest of the tortures lined up for me in the eternal imprisonment which was my due.
"Why is it my due? I am innocent! You have betrayed the Holy Pope, the agent of the Almighty God. Hell awaits thee Malebranche!"
"Not if I'm serving the next Pope who will absolve me it won't," Malebranche countered. My jaw dropped at the audaciousness of Cardinal de Grimoard. Then my consciousness was taken from me and I knew no more.

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This is one of three stories written as part of our summer 2020 chain writing project. You can read the other two here and here, and find the project wrap-up announcement here.

Editor's Note: A rich story with a winding subversion. Philip is sent on a dedicated mission, accompanied by someone who he would have preferred was not there at all, but what could Philip rightfully do? Even so, Philip continued on and complied with the requests of the royals, with a whiff that something just was not right. To get so far in his escape plan from the palace, only to be brought right back to where he was, how really very unornate.

The Editor Is Now Concerned About: Why Philip did not try to flee the moment he suspected his company of plotting and preparing to outmanoeuvre him, it's a shame.

By Spritelady, Andrew Conway, Beebug_Nic, Bigosaur, Arthcymro, Dan Shaw, rbuxton, Irina Rempt, and Phoenixguard

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When Lucia had made her deal, this had not been the outcome she expected. 100 years of servitude on Davy Jones' ship in exchange for her life had sounded like it could be a lot of things–frightening, thrilling, shocking, enlightening–all these had crossed her mind. But, as she'd briefly debated whether or not to accept the offer, the possibility of boredom had been far from her mind. And yet, sitting atop the mast, bored was exactly how she felt.

As she watched the crew scurry about their usual, strenuous activity, she couldn't help but sigh. It wasn't as though she was anxious to toil for the sake of a ship and a crew that, for the most part, wanted nothing to do with her, but being left alone day after day was torturous.

When Davy Jones had taken her on, half of the crew had clearly been outraged. There had been more than a few outcries of 'cursed' and 'bad luck' in response to taking a woman in. These were the crew members that ignored her presence so completely she may as well have been invisible. The other half of the crew had been obviously elated to have a lady among them. So much so, that they insisted she did none of her share of the work and left her to wander the ship, lonely and bored.

She hadn't seen Davy Jones since she had come aboard the ship ten days ago.

She looked from her perch on the mizzen mast to the main t'gallant top, where the lookout, Blind Jenkins, glared blankly at the horizon. In the distance a kraken waved a friendly tentacle. There was nothing else to see, not even a mermaid frolicking in the wake. Though the mermaids' chatter was mostly of hair conditioner and scale polish they were at least more talkative than the crew.
Perhaps she could borrow the cook's Bible. She swung onto the futtock shrouds, and descended to the ratlines. It had been two years before she had ventured into the rigging, but now she was as agile as any jack-before-the-mast.
There were only three books on board: a King James Bible, complete except for Leviticus, which had been burned by the cook who disagreed with its edict on ferrets; The Young Sea Officer's Sheet Anchor, used as a pillow by Marlowe, the junior midshipman, in the hope that soporific proximity would educate where earnest study had failed; and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which she had cordially hated even before it was set to music.
In the galley, the cook was pounding an amorphous blob of meat with his ceremonial peg leg.
"It's a mistranslation," she said for the thousandth time. "Leviticus 11:30. Where it says you can't eat ferrets. It's supposed to be lizards."
"No, young Missy. God changed His mind. It used to be lizards, now it's ferrets. But He's wrong, He is. They're delicious. My dad had the biggest ferret ranch in north Lincolnshire, till he was struck by lightning."
The ship's rat, a well dressed and grizzled creature spat in disgust at this statement.
"It's disgusting that you eat flesh like that – just because the ferrets can't talk. I remember the Cat Wars when you lot first found out about the black liquid on our islands. Scared the bejesus out of you lot, finding creatures that could talk and fight. You two leggers with your mechanical cats invading us. But we fought you back well enough."
She sighed – conversations often went this way. Out of all the crew the ship's rat seemed the most intelligent even if a torrent of racism about a war a hundred years ago would spew forth out of his mouth after a glass of cognac.
It was only a matter of time (and another glass) before he would start rambling about how his father had led the counter attack on Cornwall, heroically avoiding gunfire and delivering his load of pestilence filled fleas to an orphanage.
She sighed and got up, leaving the rat to his disjointed and incoherent rant. The ship shook softly as she left the galley. She could feel the ennui building up inside her as she went to her sparsely decorated cabin. Her duties on board were pretty light, so she spent a lot of time here in the dark.  Contemplating what she now thought of as her "past life" and knowing that this was going to be the routine for a horribly long number of years.
She decided it was time to do something about this. Maybe she couldn't change the way the things are currently, but there were those who could. At least, she thought that Davy Jones could cancel the contract if he wanted. She wasn't sure of this, but it was her only hope. So she convinced herself that it has to be. But how to make him do that? And more importantly, how to have fun while doing it?
They won't let her do anything? Well then, idle hands do devil's work. Her first thought was to become so obnoxious, so irritating, so annoying that all the crew gets upset and complain to the captain. It would go on for weeks if needed, until he gets fed up with it and lets her go. He can't really kill her, can he? She wasn't sure of that either, but it didn't sound possible.
Without any duties, she was free to roam around the ship. In the following days, she watched the crew carefully. Who liked what, where would everyone go during the day. Things that would annoy someone, items that someone was attached to.
Soon she realized that every path leads to the food. Everyone has a favourite meal, everyone dislikes something. If she really wanted to mess with them, she had to get access to kitchen. She needed to be able to mess with the ingredients. And the ferrets. Oh, the ideas were overwhelming.
The time had come to cook the cook.
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The Captain continued to stare down at the maps. He'd been studying them for almost four hours and was getting nowhere. Usually, the Gods guided him to his next assignments, meaning his navigational skills were never really put to use. Now, with the Gods 'occupied', he was forced to put these waning skills to the test. Frustrated, he tossed the yellowing papers into the air and lent back in his chair, removing his hat to rub his temples. What he wouldn't give for some ale. And not the vile, slush they had on board. Proper, mortal ale.
Someone knocked. "Cap'n?" He ignored it. "Cap'n Jones, it's me." "For Gods' sake, McCladding, what is it!" The minotaur, entered the study, bowing slightly as he approached. "We've found our trickster sir." "Let me guess. Lucia" asked the captain, rubbing his eyes. "'Ow did yo—yes, sir. We found her put'n somethin' in the pie" replied McCladding, a little deflated.
"What was she going to use?" McCladding withdrew a weathered, corked bottle from his sash and placed it into the captain's open hand. Davy, examined the bottle lazily. "How unoriginal" he signed before throwing the bottle on to the table. "What have you done with her?" "She's in the lazarette. We 'ad to chain her up 'cause she was causin' such a fuss" Davy, groaning, got up from his seat and pulled on his coat. He then snapped his gloved fingers and the maps instantly tidied themselves away. "Take me to her."
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The shackles hurt her wrists, but that wasn't the worst part, nor was the stench of salt and half rotten food. It was the boredom! Lucia's recent hijinks had worked in stirring up the crew but she hadn't figured they would just chain her up in the bowels of the ship and forget about her.
Footsteps, McCladding's unmistakable hooves and a second softer set behind them, the door creaked and two figures stepped inside. Lucia pulled against the cahin strining her neck to see her visitors, it was McCladding followed by Davy himself. She'd done it! She had his attention. The pair came to stand in front of her with Davy taking no time in starting his tirade, his voice bellowed as he listed off her deeds and insulting her for being a child. 
Finally he said "McCladding, leave us!" The minotaur waited a moment then bowed, leaving them alone. Lucia waited until the door was closed, now was her chance "I suppose you won't be-"
"I'm sorry" he cut her off "It was for the good of the crew, you understand. I have to been seen to be disciplining you." What? "But playing up, won't get you kicked off my ship. Lucia, there has never been a woman on my ship. Do you think I changed this on a whim? Do you think I have risked the possibility of a mutiny for nothing?" It hadn't occurred to her until now that the pirate may have had ulterior motives. He was looking her up and down, nodding to himself.
"Lucia," he began, "The newest member of our crew. Nice to have a fresh pair of eyes on board. Tell me, have you any feedback on your experience so far?"
"Well, umm..."
"Your cabin is satisfactory?"
"Yes"
"Your duties, manageable?" She nodded. "So can you explain the mischief?"
Lucia felt herself slumping lower against the wall. "Bored."
"Pardon?"
"I'm bored."
"Yes," Davy nodded again, "You had to see it for yourself." Without warning he flung himself against the bars of her cell. "Bored? You? After a few weeks? Try eight hundred years! I don't understand, the crew, they were all so talented, fun, there's actors, gamers – take Rat!"
"Rat?"
"A celebrated comedian in his own country, renowned. Yet one deal, one soul bartered, and it's all gone. Honestly, what passes for fun on this ship! If I hear one more rendition of Heave, Ho I'm taking us straight to Hell where we belong! No Lucia, we need you, it had to be you. You're our new Social Secretary."
The silence which followed was broken only by Davy's heavy breathing. He was asking a lot of her, but she could think only of her comfortable perch up on the mizzen mast.
"Lucia," he said, in response to her blank gaze, "I need your help. What should we do?"
Lucia smiled. Time for some fun after all. "Captain," she said, "Set course for the Isles!"
"The Rat Islands?" The captain's face radiated incomprehension.
"No, the Hidden Isles of Adventure! Bring me a map! Oh, and while you're at it, please get me out of this dungeon."
"It's not a dungeon, there are no dungeons on a ship. Not even on this ship. It's called the brig."
"Brig, dungeon, lockup, jail, clink, it's all the same to me. I can't think properly in here, let alone do magic on maps."
The captain's face became even more puzzled. "Magic?"
"Of course. How else can I show you the Hidden Isles?"
Davy wielded the heavy key to unlock the barred door, and a smaller key to free her from the chains. He didn't so much bring her a map as bring her to the map: the one hanging on the wall in his own quarters, which showed all the known seas in the world. Clusters of pins adorned it, some shiny new, some old and with a ring of rust around the business end.
"Show me your isles," he said.
Lucia could have done it with much less fuss, but people wouldn't believe magic if it didn't look spectacular. She recited the spells aloud, ponderously, in Latin, and let light stream from her hands to the map and reveal faint outlines that became more definite by the second. Brown and green patches appeared.
Davy Jones stood gaping at the sight. "We sailed there countless times. I never saw any islands!"
"Well, they're hidden," Lucia said smugly.
"Hidden in what way?" Captain Jones asked, his brow furrowed in concentration.

"Have you ever been out at sea, weeks away from the nearest spit of land and seen what looks like a coastline or island where you know there can be nothing? And as you approach it, the land disappears behind some waves or swell, and you do not see it again?"

Davy Jones nodded, his thoughts drifting back to past instances of the phenomenon Lucia had described.

"Look at the map more closely, Cap'n, and tell me what you see."

The captain leaned in closer to the vast map upon the cabin wall and was amazed to see the small brown and green patches he had taken for islands were actually slowly moving, drifting upon the surface of the map. Lucia's slender finger reached across in front of his gaze and traced a loose circle around a small group of 'islands', drifting slowly across the oceans.

"This is a family of island turtles, the fabled Hidden Islands of Adventure. All up, five turtles, a breeding pair and their three offspring, wandering the southern seas. Who can say what we might find upon their shells?"

And thus did the Flying Dutchman, the dreaded ship of the mighty pirate captain, Davy Jones, set sail for the south, and then for the west a little, following in the wake of the Hidden Isles of Adventure. Within a month of setting course for the islands' general location, five great rocky outcrops in the distance were espied from the crow's nest. The festivities which occurred once the ships finally caught up to the island turtles proper is worthy of record, but sadly, the telling of that tale must wait for another time.

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This is one of three stories written as part of our summer 2020 chain writing project. You can read the other two here and here, and find the project wrap-up announcement here.


Editor's Note: A tale of mischief and uncertainty! What a great ending though, the ship may have been mundane and the daily schedule monotonous, but Lucia took a big risk. Boredom was her sole driver, with an idea to stir up mischief and get kicked off the ship, all to free her from her life with Davy Jones. Her plan did backfire, but in doing so Lucia had no idea that it would become an adventure. Now they are preparing to visit places previously visited, to make new discoveries that Davy Jones had not seen or known about before. 
Of course, this could have ended in a completely different way. Fortunately, Davy Jones saw past the obvious mischief and wanted to help make Lucia%u2019s time better

The Editor Is Now Concerned About: What sorts of things can get everyone around the world escaping their fleeting brigs of boredom? Any ideas?

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Here's the overdue part four of my series "An Unexpected Bestiary", in which I look at the natural history and narrative potential of seven more animals you might well never have heard of before. From the less humble than expected Dunnock to the tiny Honey possum and the bizarrely beautiful Sea swallow, there's hopefully plenty of interest here! You can also read other parts in this series: parchments one, two, and three,  five, and the Pangolin special.

Seriema

You may have seen a video circulating around the internet a while back of a bird apparently bouncing discarded balls on the hard surfaces around a golf course. The captions often suggested it was playing, or having fun – but there's a bit more to the story. The bird was a Red-legged Seriema, a bipedal hunting bird from South America. Their strategy for hunting isn't based on having especially strong legs or talons, or being able to fly especially well – rather, they have very powerful beaks and necks, and throw their prey down on the ground hard or shake it about to break it, eating a mix of smaller mammals, eggs, lizards and snakes. In other words, that bird was probably trying to break the golf balls in the hope that they were eggs it could eat, and was getting baffled by the weird devil eggs that just bounced instead of breaking!

Fast runners at up to fifteen miles an hour – quicker than a human – the Seriemas only fly when there's a particular need to escape predators. They will nest a metre or two up, and can be both in conflict with and trained by farmers, who will keep them at times as guard animals to warn predators off chicken flocks and other small farm animals.

Seriemas are fantastic possibilities for a certain aesthetic of fantasy fiction. They're bright enough to learn, so the idea of a fantasy South American ruler or noble heading out to hunt with a pack of Seriemas to keep the snakes away and run out to finish off smaller prey is definitely a workable image. The red-legged Seriema's distinctive crest positioned at the top of its beak particularly helps the aesthetic. Simply reflecting their actual usage works well too, however, with them being one of the less well known species to have a trained relationship with humans.

Noble Pen Shells

Pinna nobilis, the Noble Pen Shell, is a large and increasingly rare bivalve mollusc living in the Mediterranean Sea. They have attractive, large shells with beautifully iridescent mother-of-pearl inside, and require clean, warm waters to live in, and – a fatal combination, as overfishing for the tourist shell market combined with pollution and habitat destruction has led to the population crashing to a critically endangered fraction of its former glory. This isn't just a tale of a pretty but otherwise unprepossessing big shellfish and the loss of its habitat though – Noble Pen Shells have a fascinating property that's made them the heart of an ancient craft industry dating back millennia.

Bivalves have little threads, the Byssus, that anchor them to rocks on the sea floor to stop them floating away. On most of them, the threads are far too small to be of any interest to humans – but the mighty size of Pinna Nobilis, up to a metre in size, can have Byssus filaments up to six centimetres in length – just enough, in fact, that if collected in sufficient numbers they can be woven into cloth.

Sea silk, as the resulting fabric is today known, is a miraculous material, highly sought after since the ancient world. The Byssus threads are exceptionally fine and can be woven more finely than silk can, creating an exceptionally light and warm fabric. The tendency for it to be a favoured target of clothes moths, rarely being passed down for generations, has probably only added to its rarity and value over time. Procopius records a set of sea silk cloaks being an exceptionally fine gift from the Emperor to the highest nobility of Armenia, while a ninth century Persian writer recorded over a thousand gold pieces as the price of a robe (only affordable by society's greatest elites: a slave could probably be purchased for under forty gold pieces at the time). Middle Eastern writers recorded stories of strange sheep-like animals that emerged from the sea, no doubt influenced by the practice of calling Byssus cloth "sea wool". More recently, the uniforms of Jules Verne's Nautilus crew had to come from somewhere, and what better place than the sea floor?

Sea industries that aren't fishing are perhaps particularly interesting narratively because there are relatively few of them. If you want to get some sea-shore interest into your campaign, threats that keep weavers away from harvesting their immensely valuable, time consuming crop might well be worth a protagonist's time to go and investigate, with the shallow sea diving involved allowing for narrative interest without the need to shoehorn scuba gear or underwater breathing herbs into your tale. And there's something about the end product, sea silk, which is immediately captivating: we dream of kingdoms under the sea, lost arts and treasures of the deeps, and this gives sea silk a mystique that even regular silk, which might once have attracted the same feelings, now lacks due to our general familiarity with it.

The art of sea silk weaving is now in the process of being lost forever: Pinna nobilis is now so endangered that its last practitioners in Sicily and Sardinia, most of them very elderly, are unable in any case to obtain the raw materials for their craft. I write this, almost undoubtedly, in the age of the last generation of sea silk craftspeople. We sometimes find it odd when narrative worlds fixate on the crafts that ancient versions of a culture were once able to do, and the idea of lost secrets – but, without many people even remembering that the secret was there to be lost, some of our own are disappearing beneath now-empty seas.

Dunnocks

Small, common birds tend to be pretty overlooked in most literature, and it's not that hard to see why. They can't be trained for many useful purposes, they're too small to make a good meal, so it's not obvious that the characters have a good way to interact with them. The occasional princess might find herself surrounded by generic songbirds, some mage might send small birds with messages, but in neither case do the differences between types of small bird tend to matter a great deal. I think that's a pity, however. Past people's understandings of the world almost certainly included a lot more detail on small birds than ours do, simply because in the wild they're a completely everyday occurrence – although people's past understandings of those animals of course often also had gaps.

Dunnocks, a small brown bird that visually looks a bit similar to a Sparrow, are a good example of both.

"Be thou like the dunnock – the male and female impeccably faithful to each other", proclaimed the naturalist Reverend Frederick Morris to his parishioners in the 1850s. These small, drab birds seemed like the perfect emulation of an idealised humble, protestant ethic. Morris couldn't have been more wrong: Dunnocks have an exceptionally loose and fluid sexual structure, with multiple males around a single female often sharing the work in raising a brood that mixes young from all of them (and some of those males may be visiting and helping with other females and nests too). Capable of copulating in a tenth of a second, and doing so over a hundred times a day, the assumptions people made about these birds traditionally were rather different from the reality.

Dunnocks were historically often simply known as hedge-sparrows, Chaucer's heyesugge (indeed one mid twentieth century folklorist bemoaned the popularisation of "dunnock", previously a more localised dialect word, by ornithologists). In Irish they are Bráthair an Dreoilín, the wren's brothers. The Celtic fringes of Britain seem to have a particular range of folklore on them: Ada Goodrich-Freer's 1902 compilation of Hebridean folklore records them as "blessed, but not lucky", and suggests that Dunnocks gathering around a door are the harbinger of a child's death. In Ireland, too, their sad little songs are said to be the voices of children who have passed away. These sorts of connections to specific facts or emotions can help bring the differences between otherwise less plot-central animals into view in narrative terms too, and can also point to specific uses for them: too much of the time, we assume that because an animal can't be eaten or trained it can't have plot relevance, but there are far more options than that: in Irish tradition the Dunnock's distinctive blueish-green eggs were used as charms against witches, especially placed on the hob to stop them coming down the chimney. Rather than the tendency in some games to gut and use different parts of larger creatures, there's no reason why magical ingredients shouldn't come from specific smaller ones. Add a couple of challenges to overcome to reach and find the Dunnock's nest, as part of a wider method of dealing with a local hag problem, and we find that a decent side adventure is starting to emerge from the humble – or not so humble – Dunnock already.

Maras

The Mara is a distinctive South American rodent from the southern grasslands of the continent. Looking more or less like what happens when a Guinea-pig decides to change careers and become a Hare, they're some of the largest rodents (fourth after Capybaras, Beavers, and the larger Porcupines). They don't tend to interact with humans much, and around areas with too much human activity will often switch to nocturnal behaviour patterns to avoid contact, though they live well in captivity as good pets and can be hunted both for meat and furs.

Maras are useful because they are a big clear klaxon horn of "we're not in pseudo-Europe any more", whilst also, I think equally importantly, giving a sense of cuteness and familiarity. Far too often, non-Euro settings especially in fantasy feel the need to emphasise power in the cultures and landscapes they focus on, to give an idea of the appropriate majesty and strength that those places can have and make them feel equal to the dragons and castles fantasy fans are used to. But I think it's equally important for settings to have homely elements to avoid othering them – a setting that just seems to contain giant god-serpents and terror birds is a place you can adventure in, but a setting that has those and also has cute little Maras bouncing around is the sort of place you can start empathising with and wanting to be protected from its more terrifying and powerful forces, and that's narratively a very important tool. They're also emphatically the sort of thing a certain sort of rather cavalier pixie would absolutely love to ride around on, too, so there's that going for them.

Sea Swallow

In a previous Unexpected Bestiary, we covered the Sea Sheep, a sea slug with the clever trick of stealing Choloroplasts from algae it eats. Well, the sea swallow is another Sea slug – more streamlined, and with its own far more deadly clever metabolic quirk.

You see, Sea swallows specialise in eating dangerous jellyfish and similar creatures, especially the Portugese Man O' War. Not much wants to eat a Man O' War – it's a powerful predator and its sting is utterly debilitating to most creatures, known at times to kill humans. But for the little Sea slug, just a tenth as long as the Man O' War's swim bladder, that just seems to mean less competition in the food queue. The Sea swallow is immune to the stinging whips that hang down from the floating creature which is a key part of the feeding strategy... but not only that, the Sea swallow actively chooses to eat the stinging, venomous parts of its prey. Taking the most deadly of the little explosive cells, called Nematocysts, that deliver the Man O' War's sting, they store them and keep them active in specialised sacs at the end of their Cerata, the feathery fingers that extend from the Swallow's body. Indeed their sacs can concentrate the venom better than the original nematocyst structure, meaning the Sea swallow's sting can be more dangerous than the creature it got it from.

Or to cut the long description short – this tiny, beautiful Sea slug steals Jellyfish stings powerful enough to kill humans, and can and will sting you with them.

This is one of those creatures that's somehow got a strong sci-fi feel despite being very much real. I think that they're tricky in some ways to use narratively: they're hard for humans/terrestrial humanoids to encounter for the most part, and if you do encounter one you're either having bad luck or are going to be in a very dominant position – it's an "if you get bad luck it will do you huge damage, otherwise you'll be fine" creature when put in an antagonistic position, and its aquatic nature means it's hard to see any sort of intent involved (being dumped into a tank of Sea swallows by an archvillain might be incredibly dangerous, but it'd have to be a very particular villain to pull that off in a satisfying way). However, creatures based on them and their behaviours could work better – the concept of a creature that has evolved to steal and re-use another creature's killing or defense mechanism is definitely good – and the look would work broadly very well in a sci-fi setting.


Honey possum

Pollination, the movement of pollen grains between flowers, is one of the keys to life on earth as we know it. Required for the survival of many flowering plants, many insects and small flying vertebrates are key to carrying pollen around, usually lured into the plant by the sweet nectar available there. But there are almost no non-flying species that specialise in nectar drinking – to do so requires an area with flowers available most of the year, to allow such an animal to survive the winter. There is an exception though – the ngoolboongoor to give its proper name in the native Noongar language, or the Honey Possum to English speakers.

This tiny creature (six to nine centimetres combined head and body length) clambers around flowers in southwestern Australia, drinking nectar and moving pollen around between the flower heads, especially the huge candlestick-like flowers of the Biara tree Banksia attenuata. They can go into torpid states for some days at a time if food is short, but their body mass is too small to do this for an extended period.

Honey possums importantly play with people's expectations about how an ecosystem works – terrestrial mammals doing a role we expect to be performed by flying insects. They do also have spiritual significance to the Noongar, who have traditions of personal and family totem animals among which the little marsupials may feature. They're more an animal that can create colour and depth in the background of a setting than one that is going to be placed foremost, though somewhere with a lot of flowers could have that emphasised quite effectively by the presence of Honey possums as pollinators – given our mental associations, it gives a much better calm and relaxing feel to say "and his garden of a thousand flowers has tiny furry possums jumping between the to carry the pollen" than "you reach the garden of a thousand flowers and it is FULL OF BEES".

Wryneck

If you've ever read a fantasy book with much magic in it, there's a good chance someone has cast a jinx as a type of spell. Indeed if you grew up in an English-speaking environment, there's a good chance calls like "jinx – touch wood!" or the idea of "being jinxed" as a curse or after saying a word simultaneously will trigger something in your memory. But the name doesn't just arise from a strange big of magic related terminology - the Jinx, Jynx in Latin, or iunx in Ancient Greek, is the name of the wryneck, a smallish, well camouflaged brown bird closely related to Woodpeckers. So what connects these two things? Why did the name of an apparently normal bird become a byword for curses?

The Wryneck, it turns out, has a particular trick which has fascinated humans for all of recorded history and beyond. When threatened, it sticks its head up, and mimics a Snake with it. Its English name is based on the incredibly eerie twisting and turning motions that its head can undergo, contorting and wiggling at strange angles that along with strange hissing noises make the predator convinced that what they're facing is a much more formidable and more reptilian opponent than they'd bargained for. This incredible behaviour has been observed throughout human history and led to the continuous association of wrynecks with magic and witchcraft. Indeed, the "wry neck" gives them their English name, and their scientific name Jynx torquillalikewise references the torque of their twisting motions.

Iunx was also a nymph in Greek myth – a daughter of Pan and Echo, cursed by Hera to turn into the Wryneck after she cast a spell that caused Zeus to fall in love with Io, making her quite literally the wingman responsible for a lineage containing about half the major Greek classical heroes. Another tale suggests that instead she was the daughter of Pireus and the curse came after she and her sisters challenged the muses to a musical contest. Either way, the magical associations came early and continued. The Wryneck seems to have been especially associated with love magic at times, with particularly unfortunate birds apparently being captured and whirled around on a string as a charm to bring back an errant lover; the Greek poet Pindar has Jason (of Argonauts fame) using a Wryneck in magic to win the heart of Medea, too. The idea of "jinxing" someone seems to appear in English in the early modern period, maintaining some of its connections: a 1903 "Encyclopaedia of Superstitions" suggested that a young woman who sees a Wryneck on the morning of February 14th will remain eternally unmarried. I don't think I really need to go heavily into "how do I use the weird snake mimic magic bird that might be a transformed Nymph and can be used in witchcraft" from a narrative perspective beyond all that... there's just so much there!

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Thank you for reading, as ever – I'm intrigued to know what you think, or if you have any good stories or folklore I've missed about any of these wonderful creatures. Do leave a comment below, and I'll see you for part five of the series at some point in the future!

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Eric Matyas is a long-standing Exilian member best known as founder of SoundImage, a website that provides a free to use archive of thousands of music files, images, and sound effect clips for use in games and other projects. We sent Jubal deep into the heart of SoundImage's archives to find Eric and ask him about how this huge library got started, some of the things that have happened on his journey since, and his thoughts on the future... read on!


Jubal: Firstly, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into producing sounds and images for people to use.

Eric: I'm really an indie filmmaker at heart...one of my goals is to make my own sci-fi and fantasy films (and for them to actually be good...lol)...but I've been playing piano and creating music compositions since I was a kid. I got my first synthesizer, a Korg Triton, quite a few years ago and was interested in maybe making ambient albums although I had no idea how to go about it. So I concentrated on learning the synth, mostly by trial and error since there wasn't much online help available, and I started recording some few pieces which sat on my hard drive for a long time. Then the DSLR revolution hit...indie filmmakers could finally obtain really good images in a way that was cost effective...so I borrowed a friend's camera and started making nature documentaries. I had never tried scoring any of my own films so I looked around online for royalty-free music and discovered Kevin MacLeod's site where he allows people to use his tracks for free with attribution. I thought, "What a great idea...I wonder if I could do this?" I contacted Kevin with some questions and he was very encouraging, so I decided to give it a try.

I didn't know anything about making a website, especially not one for sharing music files, but I found an article in which another musician recommended creating a WordPress site. He mentioned that google likes WordPress sites so I thought maybe that would make it easier for people to find my music.

The site didn't get much traffic at first, so I joined some forums for indie filmmakers and began posting weekly announcements as I released new tracks. Then, somehow, indie game developers began to find my site and use my work. They started sending me links to their finished games and writing to thank me for making my music available. That's when I realized that there was a larger audience for this than indie filmmakers. Today, most of the people who use my tracks are indie game developers and they are a great community to be involved with.

As for the images, I've been slowly teaching myself 3D modeling and animation for several years and texture images are a big part of that so I started creating them on my own. Once the game developers found me, I thought that these images might be helpful as well so I began expanding the site to include them. They're really meant to be building blocks rather than finished textures. 

Jubal: On your about page, you say that you're a great believer in the "democratization of media". Can you tell us a bit more about that, and the vision behind SoundImage as a site?

Eric: The vision of Soundimage has always been to make good-sounding music and other assets available to anyone regardless of their budget. Call me an idealist, but I think anyone should be able to produce quality creative work, connect with an audience and be paid for their efforts without having to raise enormous amounts of money to do so. Here in the U.S., popular media is controlled by a handful of mega corporations which, in my opinion, severely limits the range of content that's available for consumers. On a more philosophical level, we face many daunting problems as a species and I think the world needs more creative problem-solvers so I support anyone who is doing creative work.

Jubal: Did you have any idea when you started how big an archive the site was going to end up with?

Eric: I started the site with 100 tracks and tried to add one new track every day. I had looked at Kevin's site which had over 1000 tracks at the time and it really blew my mind so I decided to try to work toward that. Then I started adding other things, like texture images, and the site grew pretty rapidly. I think it's getting a bit out of control now... lol!

Jubal: Have you had any problems with capacity or hosting costs as the site has grown?

Eric: Not really. My hosting service doesn't limit the number of files I can upload, but they do restrict the file sizes. That's why my music tracks are in MP3 format...the original WAV files are usually too large. 

Jubal: What's your favourite track you've composed, and why?

Eric: I don't really have a favorite, per se, but I like "Stratosphere" from my Aerial/Drone page a lot. I thought it came out really well.

Jubal: ...and what's the most surprising use you've seen someone put SoundImage's files to?

Eric: I don't know about surprising, but one of the projects I've seen that I feel the very proud about is a documentary about a struggling wildlife rehabilitation center in South Africa. Here's a link if anyone is interested:[/size]


Jubal: What other projects have you become involved in via SoundImage - have there been any particular highlights or failures of those?

Eric: Well, more and more indie game developers are hiring me to create custom music and sound effects for them because I can do it so affordably. The synthesizers I use (there are 3 of them now) are built for rapid music creation so tracks that might take days to create can be done in a matter of hours. In that sense, I guess the website is like a giant demo reel.

I'm very passionate about science, so I've been combining that with my love of filmmaking and creating short films that teach kids environmental stewardship in a fun way through stories and characters rather than as informational documentaries. In essence, I'm taking learning concepts and building stories around them that kids can relate to. I've done seven films so far and am working on two more this fall. The organization I made them for uses them all the time with visitors, but schools have started using the films in their classrooms as well which is really cool too. One school district even put together a team of educators and created their own curriculum based on the films. So now I'm working on creating my own activities and things to share with the rest of the world. Eventually I'd like to create software and make the whole thing an interactive learning world. It's all experimental at this point so it will be interesting to see where it leads, if anywhere, but I love the idea that the films can be used for years and years rather than being watched once and forgotten.

Jubal: Smaller creators continually worry about things from a financial perspective, and your work is very much part of that scene. Do you worry, though, that free repositories like yours mean fewer opportunities for smaller scale paid texture artists or composers?

Eric: As I said, I do paid tracks as well, at pretty low cost, so I'm one of those smaller-scale paid composers. Do my free tracks take business away from my paid work? I honestly don't know, but a lot of folks who use my free assets seem to be indie game developers and filmmakers who are learning or just starting out...often one or two-person teams...and original custom assets can be prohibitively expensive for them...especially music. The current going-rate for custom music (I am told) is $100 per finished minute of music which, in my opinion, just isn't doable for a lot of people. I certainly couldn't afford it for my films. I'm not saying that composers shouldn't be properly compensated...they absolutely should...but content creators who are just starting out probably can't afford them anyway, so I don't see free music as taking away business. Looking to the future, I imagine there will always be people who will opt for free assets as well as those who will raise the necessary funds to pay for them. 

Jubal: SoundImage has its own license which is a variant on a creative commons license - was it difficult for you to produce that, and what would you advise to anyone who might want to produce similar open-with-restrictions type licenses for their work.

Eric: My license was very easy to create because it was identical to the creative commons license...I simply added a restriction that prohibits my music and such from being used in works that are obscene or pornographic in nature. I think that anyone considering doing something like this should think about situations in which they don't want their work being used and be very clear about it.

Jubal: Do you think there's space for SoundImage's model to be used more widely and for more photographers and composers to start open media archives like yours? Do you think there'd be any scale issues if many more people tried to do so?

Eric: I think sharing assets is a great way to network with creative people. As for scale issues, I really don't know, but the internet is a pretty big place so I would hope that there's room for everyone.

[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/eric-matyas/still-of-night[/soundcloud]
One of Eric's tracks, Still of Night, from his Urban collection.


Jubal: Finally, any upcoming plans for SoundImage - what can we look forward to seeing more of?

Eric: Besides using my music in their games, developers have written to me and said they enjoy listening to my tracks while they work on their projects. Some have even said that my music inspired them or gave them ideas for games which is great. With that in mind, I may put together some albums and make them available for a small fee. I've also had requests for the original super high quality WAV recordings of my tracks, so I'm looking at doing something similar with those as well. If you think the MP3 tracks sound good, wait until you hear the original WAV versions!

As I said, I'm really a filmmaker at heart and shooting footage is something I love to do... whether it's for my own films or just to explore the world through my lens...so I'd like to see if there might be a need for that. I've visited some stock footage sites while working on my own projects and the prices seem pretty prohibitive so perhaps that's something I can help with in a way that's actually affordable.

On the graphics side of things, I've started experimenting with other kinds of game art besides textures...backgrounds and sprite objects mostly...but I'm always trying to find out what kinds of things might be useful to the community. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!

Jubal: It's been great talking to you! Thanks for doing this and best of luck with everything in SoundImage's future.

Eric: Thanks for having me on your website...I sincerely hope that some of my work is helpful to everyone. Keep being creative! 

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Eric Matyas' work is free to use with attribution in both commercial and non-commercial projects: non-attribution licenses can also be purchased. You can get updates on new work from Eric via his forum threads for music/sound effects, textures, and game art, or via his twitter @EricMatyas. We hope you enjoyed this interview, and do stay tuned for more interviews and other articles in the near future!

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It struck me recently that it'd be interesting to share some thoughts on place in writing and game design. Places are, to say the least, pretty vitally important to designing any setting. A good backdrop can really set the action of a plot into appropriately epic (or appropriately non-epic) context, and hugely affect the mood of an event: being charged by a troll when you're defending the gates of an ancient temple is a much more heroic feeling action than being charged by a troll in a large sewer tunnel, even if it's basically the same difficulty of encounter. More prosaically, places are often largely designed by means of function – there has to be a bunch of stuff in a place that does certain things.

Imagine a fantasy village called Isicando that we need a couple of rag-tag adventurers to visit. We'll probably give them a tavern, the Blue Rose, to refuel and meet people, some sort of economic functional stuff (for the sake of argument, llama farms), a leader who we'll call Ms. Marianda who can do local authority things, a temple, which can be to the air-spirits, and maybe a small fortified tower in case of attacks from the lizardmen. Boom, set of functions plus a not all that subtle Latin American evocation of place, and we have ourselves a settlement.

Function, however, is only a small part of what's important to us about places, and few places are solely important to people for their intended function. Re-using and repurposing places for different things, and attaching unintended meanings to them, is a pretty natural thing for people to do. Places, for us, aren't just about what you can do there, they're about the stories we attach to them and the unintended aspects of their existence that make them unique. I'm going to suggest that it can add a lot of depth to a fictional setting if you incorporate that into your place design.

We're already used to doing this a bit with taverns in particular – they're expected to double up as "the place where a mysterious stranger offers you a quest", rather than just being places to meet, eat, and drink. But even a tavern can have a lot of repurposing and additional meaning given to it as a place. Precisely which social circles meet at a particular tavern in any given town is important; does one guild favour one tavern and another their rivals, or perhaps a particular temple's followers have a certain tavern they go and sing songs at after services. Maybe it's the traditional gathering point for a certain ceremony or communal game, or hosts the village dances (with the result that about half the settlement's people got together with their spouses there). Perhaps it's not even humans who are repurposing the tavern – a particular tavern might be known for hosting a lot of birds' nests in its roof, say.

Ritual and linkages are two key things to think about here, and I'll talk about ritual first. In the previous paragraph I mentioned dances and ceremonies; settlements often have processions, carnivals, street parties, and other such events, and they're important in binding the people of that settlement together. They also often mark particular emotional moments for people in the settlement, because they're important in dealing with the major milestones of life, be that meeting partners, childbirth, marriage, coming of age, dying, and so on. Many of those rituals will not have discrete spaces in a typical settlement – trying to confine them all to "this is social stuff so it goes in a temple" is weird and just not how societies work. Instead, repurposed buildings and space inside buildings will double up as ritual spaces that tie everything together

That tying together leads us on to considering linkages between different societal functions. Take my example of a temple group going to the tavern to sing songs afterwards (perhaps keeping alive ones that have been removed from the official hymn book, a phenomenon that actually happened in real-world Sheffield). Or consider the relationship between governing figures and the military or economic aspects of a town – a small town leader is likely to have to take a hands on role in its economic life, and in lots of societies religious, secular, and military leadership roles could be doubled up in various combinations. Perhaps in this society the priest is required to be an active part of the garrison as the person most trusted with morality and virtue, while the town's secular leader is mainly in charge of running the market and collecting taxes. And of course, everyone needs to meet up and have a pint now and again. So we don't just want to think in terms of a functional model where place X hosts person Z who does thing Y – these functions and how places host them are an interlocking model, and how they interlock can be important.

Adding stories and purposes to buildings lets you promote or flesh out landmarks that are otherwise unremarkable. A village, to its inhabitants, is not simply comprised of some "function buildings" plus a few undifferentiated houses which may have different shapes or owners. Think about when you last spent time in an ordinary house in a game or story setting – it's actually a surprisingly rare occurrence given that houses are a huge percentage of buildings in total. I think one reason for that is that in the functionality paradigm, houses are inherently boring; they get reduced to places to store stuff, sleep, eat, and poop. In practice, though, our homes are a massive part of our lives, and have a huge number of auxiliary functions and stories attached to them.

Homes can certainly be meeting places: after all, any old adventurer could just walk in on you in the tavern, so actually a decent guild gathering might well be happening at a senior guild member's house, and even in humbler dwellings there'll be some people who particularly enjoy hosting friends for a bite and a cup of wine. Homes are landmarks and story vessels, too – there'll be the empty house where such-and-such who eventually ran away into the woods used to live, the house where someone got the door fixed wrong which is where you have to turn for the track down to the temple, the little white-polished house whose owner gets the job of keeping the town's well working in winter, and so on. Homes can also be important in certain ritual or even defensive contexts, as well – perhaps one older house is built of stone and can be barricaded whilst its surrounding ones are less defensible and more vulnerable to fire, or maybe one has a cellar that the villagers know can be used to hide from the invading lizardmen.

Many of the functions we've mentioned can be applied to non-building features too. A particular tree or large boulder or stream crossing can be a meeting place for casual bartering, a place to join hands and do circle dances, the site of wedding dances, a mustering point at times of crisis, the political space where villagers come to elect their spokespeople or plead with their overlords, and so on. Especially in smaller and more medieval style settlements, the natural landscape can be a proportionally more prominent part of what's going on, and features from it can provide some of the most memorable locations in a certain settlement. The village that has a burned oak on the heath where its villagers go as neutral ground, in order to stop the hotly contested elections to their reeveship spilling out into violence, feels a very different one to the village with a blossom-filled orchard in which people set up stalls at the weekend for an old barter-style market (much to the chagrin of some nearby knights who have been trying to get their own market licensed in order to be able to reap the spoils of local trade, but who are unable to stop the traditional bartering from continuing). That said, those two ideas may feel very different, but there's no reason they shouldn't both exist in the same village – life can, after all, be very multifaceted.

So to recap, let's look back at the Isicando we might have now. The air spirit temple is innately tied into the life of the tower garrison, which it operates. Its followers, after their weekly procession carrying offerings from the great boulder at the south end of the village up to the temple, are often to be found at the Blue Rose, singing the old songs that are no longer part of the official worship. Ms. Marianda mediates at times between a frustrated priest and his traditionalist flock, as well as leading some of the village's less religious aspects: she is well respected by the llama herders, for whom she throws feasts once or twice a year at her house to ensure their continued support, and she can often be found heading out to help rescue an errant livestock animal stuck in the mud of the nearby swamp. As she does so, she'll no doubt pass the well-house, a home on stilts built over the well to double up as its roof, and she'll pass Meadow Cottage, a now-ruined old dwelling in the fields just outside the village whose owner died some years ago – the tumbledown building is now the most popular playground among the village children. We still have the same basic structures of economy, politics, military, and social gatherings, but now the places and structures are all tied together with a web of connections that both physically and socially wraps the village together and perhaps also helps us start to think better about how this society would react to the sort of pressures and changes that come along with adventurers and heroes turning up!

I hope this piece has given you a few ideas for how to get beyond that basic "here's the menu of five places that do the things you want" system – I don't want to be too down on that idea as it is a starting point that helps you cover the basics, but if you want to create somewhere that's memorable and capable of sustaining the suspension of disbelief then starting to attach ritual, story, and tradition, even just occasional hints of them in the background, can go a long way towards building settlements that really feel alive.

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Stormwell (besides being second in Exilian's "most topics started" stats at 189) is a designer and writer of tabletop gaming supplements - in particular Frozen Skies. This dieselpunk setting for the Savage Worlds RPG takes players into the frozen northern land of Aleyska, flown over by planes and huge airships, with great wealth to find but great risk, weird tech, and terrifying monster along the way. We sent Jubal up over the barren cold waste in the Exilicopter, to hunt Stormwell down on his sky pirate vessel and ask him a few questions...

Jubal: First, tell us about yourself a bit - how did you first get into tabletop RPGs? And what made you decide to take the jump into founding Utherwald Press and designing primers and settings?

Stormwell: Well, I'm a born and raised Sci-Fi geek. During my childhood I regularly watched Doctor Who, Star Trek, Red Dwarf, Babylon 5, UFO, Space 1999 and more obscure series such as Space Precinct. Star Wars also got a look in, as did later series like Stargate SG-1, Firefly and countless films. Fantasy for me during this time was lucky to get a look in once a blue moon, being limited to a handful of extracts from The Hobbit and some films. It wasn't until high school that I developed an interest in reading, particularly when I first came across the late, great Terry Pratchett's most wonderful Discworld series. It was at roughly this time that I became aware of tabletop games, chiefly Warhammer 40K when one day I saw a friend looking at some 40K models on the computer. It was a work colleague a couple of years after leaving school who actually got me started with 40K.

(OK, I'm beginning to ramble here, but it is bit of a complex web when it comes to my gaming background, and I hope to be done within another ten paragraphs...)

Right, where was I... ah, yes. What has probably had the biggest impact for my gaming habits is computer games. I'd first cut my gaming teeth on my dad's 1980s Amstrad computer and later went onto the Sega Megadrive and then the first Playstation. Possibly recognising where my interests laid, or just thought I might be interested by it, my parents brought me a magazine mainly focused on card games such as Magic the Gathering. The thing that caught my attention was an ad for a computer game due out the following year called Arcanum; Of Magick and Steamworks Obscura. This game has probably had the biggest impact upon me of any I've played; I still play it from time to time some 18 years after its release. The world of Arcanum is your typical Tolkienesque fantasy thrown headlong into the Industrial Revolution, sitting under the banner of what I would later know as Steampunk. The game saw my first forays into internet based play-by-post roleplaying and developed my initial interest in Steampunk, which probably also owed a bit amount to my earlier passion for trains (which I admit was a factor in me picking up the game as it had a train on the cover). Arcanum also prompted me to start buying PC Gamer magazine on a regular basis after it did a review of the game, which would prove fortunate as the magazine also saw me buy the Crimson Skies and the first two Fallout games after it did articles on those. With my growing interest in Steampunk I also read the works of H.G. Wells and the novel The Difference Engine, developing a desire to write my own book.

I'd been playing 40K for a while when I finally got introduced to tabletop RPGs, there was a group that regularly met where we played wargames and included a couple of people I knew. Curious, I asked about it and then got invited to join a game of the grandfather of RPGs; Dungeons & Dragons. After a handful of games of D&D I wanted to run my own games and had, by that point, been introduced to the Iron Kingdoms/Warmachine setting which I bought the books for and ran. My desire to write a book evolved into a desire to create my own setting, influenced by my interest in Steampunk at the time, which would be the genesis for what became Frozen Skies and the world of Darmonica.

Over time I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the D&D system, prompting me to try out different games and other systems. It was when I was playing a Rogue Trader RPG campaign that Savage Worlds came to my attention, the GM had brought a copy with him and I fell in love with what I saw when I flipped through the book. Frozen Skies had begun to mature as a setting by that point and I had considered publishing it as a system agnostic setting, but saw that Savage Worlds had a licencee programme for other publishers and so decided to adapt Frozen Skies to that system!


Jubal: A few questions on your Darmonica setting and especially your book Frozen Skies. Firstly, what inspired you to go for a snow and ice themed setting specifically for your book, out of all the different options that Darmonica might include?

Stormwell: Ironically, Star Wars.

The Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back and a couple of maps from the original Battlefront games appealed to me. So did a world from the TV series Firefly. There's just something about an ice-bound frontier that really stands out to me. I suppose the hazards and challenges imposed by an arctic environment helped reinforce my vision of a frontier setting with a true "edge of civilisation and the world" feeling to it.

Jubal: Alongside humans in your world you have at least a couple of other species, the mysterious wyndryders and genchi. What do you think the importance of these other peoples is in an otherwise quite human dominated setting, and what inspired you to include them?

Stormwell: In all honesty I was in two minds about including them, torn between making the setting full dieselpunk or include some fantasy. I think including them helps make Frozen Skies stand out as a setting and enriches its background lore.

People have done some interesting things with the traditional Tolkien races, ranging from the Steampunk Arcanum through to the futuristic Shadowrun. Though I feel theres only so much you can do with dwarves, elves and orcs before you start running out of ways to reinvent the wheel. At least with the genchi and their Windryder cousins I have more wiggle room to explore different concepts regarding them.

Jubal: Your setting is a fantasy, but it's one with a lot of quite modern elements due to the dieselpunk style. Do you think this creates any particular challenges to think about for you that medieval fantasy authors don't have to worry about? Can more modern fantasy settings end up feeling "too close to home" with problems the real world has had?

Stormwell: I think the biggest challenge has been being aware how nations work and how they interact with one another. In a medieval setting people, as a general rule, don't normally travel much further than the next village over and would be vaguely aware of who ruled over them. Frozen Skies is much closer to the 1930s/40s of our world, meaning more integration on the national level, greater mobility of people and better access to things that a medieval peasant could only dream of. Have I managed this? Well, more than one person have commented how 'real' the nations in the setting are.

It all depends on how it's approached. The best example I can think of is Pratchett with the dwarves and trolls in his Discworld setting. He used these two races to tackle both racism and extremism in a way that appealed to people and made them think about it.

Jubal: A lighter one now - what's your favourite character that you've created in the setting, and why?

Stormwell: Hmm, favourite character, eh?

Hands down it has to be an Andrei, a character that has featured in the Frozen Skies campaign I've been running. He's what called a 'keeper of secrets' or information broker, effectively the guy everybody goes to for information - if they've got the money! Certainly has been a character that my players have taken seriously, and he still has plenty of secrets of his own left...

Jubal: Are there any particular books, or authors, or other fictional worlds, that particularly inspired you when creating your Darmonica setting that users of your book could go to for inspiration?

Stormwell: The computer games Arcanum and Crimson Skies spring to mind right away, both have certainly left their mark on Frozen Skies. Others that deserve a mention include Indiana Jones, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Firefly, the webcomic Alpha Shade and the Brendan Fraser Mummy films.

Jubal: A few questions on technical and rules-driven stuff now. You write for Savage Worlds as a system – what attracts you to that ruleset in particular and why do you feel it works well for the adventures you want to create?

Stormwell: What attracted me to the system was its free-form character creation and advancement, it felt like a refreshing change to the rigid class system of D&D. Having run the system as a GM I really like how it feels so much easier to do things on the fly, come up with new NPCs in an instant compared to the hours that could be spent doing the same thing in D&D. It feels so much more flexible and a better laid-out toolkit for the GM.

Jubal: Recently, Savage Worlds has been releasing its Adventurers' Edition, SWADE – how have you found the rules changes from that? Do you have a favourite improvement or change they've made?

Stormwell: I'll echo what others have said; it's still Savage Worlds under the hood.

SWADE feels like a refinement and upgrade with plenty of new options, some of which I've incorporated into my game current with great success. The changes to character creation and advancement give more options, though at the same you have to think more particularly with assigning skill points.

The new Chase rules are my most favourite thing about SWADE, when I first read 'em I like them over the previous version. Plus I've really grown on me since I've used them a couple of times, just need to find more opportunities to use 'em.

Jubal: What events or scenes do you find the biggest challenge for you to simulate for your players with the base Savage Worlds rules, and how do you cope with this as a GM and/or a setting designer?

Stormwell: Generally most things that I ask Savage Worlds to do it does it well, heck I used the Social Conflict rules for a trial and it worked extremely well. The only thing that I can think of that's challenging is making combat interesting and engaging for the players, though that's more on me as a GM remembering to use the various tools that Savage Worlds gives you for this. If I use stuff for NPCs in combat, usually the players will start using them as well. SWADE gives a few more options, too, especially with the new status states.

Jubal: Writing fiction is obviously a strong part of designing a setting like the world of Darmonica. How closely integrated is that with your processes of designing the rules – do stories you produce give you ideas for the primer and rules tweaks, or are they more something that comes at the end of the process for you?

Stormwell: Considering how a fair bit of Frozen Skies was already written before I even considered using Savage Worlds, certainly have to say that story normally comes first. Of course there are exceptions where rules, character abilities or even artwork will prompt story.

Jubal: And, as someone who's now done the whole process, what advice would you give to anyone interested in publishing their own RPG books?

Stormwell: The biggest one which a lot of other people also say: know the system you're writing for.

Tying into that would be to start off small by writing adventures or creating characters, particularly as these will help you understand the system. 'Course there are also programmes like the Savage Worlds Adventurer's Guild (SWAG) and the Dungeon Master's Guild (DMG) where you can create and sell content without going down the licensed publisher route. Those will help with your portfolio and will allow you to see what bits of your work people like.

Jubal: Finally, what's coming up next for you and your work? Any conventions people should catch you at or releases to keep an eye out for?

Stormwell: Unfortunately it's looking to be bit of a quiet year, though there is a few things of note.

Granted, it'll be finished by the time this interview gets published, but a Frozen Skies game was run at SavageCon which is the UK's Savage Worlds convention. I provided some prize support and hope to be able to attend next year. UK Games Expo is another convention that I hope to do, again it'll probably be next year when I go again. On a more positive note, I'm back at Diceni in Norwich, at the Forum on Monday 6th May. This is awesome as, save for the past couple of years, I've usually had a stand since this event started. NorCon is another event in Norwich that I hope to do, but cannot say whether I will. Frozen Skies has also been submitted to this year's ENnie awards, so keep an eye out there.

Releases-wise, it'll probably be the SWADE version of Frozen Skies before I work on a follow-on book called Skies of Crimson that focuses more on the sky pirates of the setting. I also have some other settings in the works, plus I've released an adventure through SWAG called Operation Thule. The adventure is Weird Wars inspired and is set during the 1982 Falklands Conflict, guest-starring a creature out of South American folklore. I'm hoping this will garner interest for a much larger project called Cold War Skirmishes...

Jubal: From cold skies to cold war! Looking forward to seeing the results, and thankyou for talking to us.

Stormwell: Thanks for having me.


You can get Stormwell's Frozen Skies supplement for Savage Worlds here, and do also take a look at regular blogposts on the Utherwald Press website here, as well as Exilian's Utherwald Press Forum.

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Got more things to ask Stormwell? Please tell us in the comments below! And let us know what you thought of Jubal's choice of questions.

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