Fear The Swarth

So we’re through that first stage of Incident Eliph, and with it the first stage of this new run at writing. To mark the occasion I wanted to take a moment, look at the project as a whole, and talk about why Eliph is shaping up as it did. What influenced it, some of the worldbuilding and the decisions that went into designing it.

Incident Eliph is a Quest, a type of interactive fiction that evolved from text-based adventure games, 4chan, and Andrew Hussie in no particular order. A better summation of its history than I could hope to provide is here, but for our purposes you need to know the following: Quests are stories where the writer (Or Quest Master) gets input from the players on the actions of characters or things going on inside of the narrative. I’ve been writing them for something close to seven years.

The story itself is a Fantasy/Horror quest set in an alternate Ottoman Empire. It takes inspiration from the Leviathan series Scott Westerfeld, The Thing, the art of Keith Thompson, Triumff by Dan Abnett, and City of Brass by SA Chakraborty; aiming for an aesthetic that marries bizarre mechanical advances and the prominence of Djinn with grotesque biological horror. At the character level we follow Yousuf Oziri, an officer in the Ottoman Empire, recovering with his platoon on the island of Kianida after a disastrous offensive in Russia.

This is not the largest or the most popular project I’ve undertaken in the field, but it is the first one I’m really actively marketing to people and the first one I’m trying to treat as a professional product. It’s the public facing part of the writing push I outlined in November and the only content currently linked to my Ko-Fi account. As such it is disproportionately personally important, a test of if I can really commit to a schedule and if people might be willing to buy into a patreon or other self-published offerings. Of my skill as a pseudo-professional instead of a hobbyist.

Below the cut are spoilers for the first eight updates (About twelve thousand words) of Incident Eliph. So if this has you interested and you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend reading the story here before continuing.

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