The very short first chapter of a novel goes live on my Patreon tomorrow!
Ravenshore’s Nightmare follows Kat, a P.I. who works with ghosts, spirits, and dreams in a black city surrounded by fog and eternal storm. She’s haunted by a ghost trapped in her revolver and by a nightmare that’s already killed her once, and if she can’t find a way to deal with them, the nightmare will try again.
That’s the hype-building summary, but I also wanted to talk spoiler-free about the book’s history for a bit.
Ravenshore started out as my very first homebrew D&D setting back in high school – way back, about twenty years now! Ravenshore was a city on an island off the coast of a country that had recently banned magic, and the player characters would be refugees fleeing the king’s military crackdown. I don’t remember all that much of the original version now, save that as a new Dungeon Master I was excited about the idea of antimagic and the gameplay effects of enemies that could create temporary zones where magic couldn’t exist. To be honest, in my inexperience, I went a little overboard, playing a little too antagonistic, enjoying making my players struggle with the dangers of being unable to use the magic they relied on.
In university I learned by example and by experience how to be a good Dungeon Master, to facilitate a shared story experience rather than just run the game I personally thought would be fun. This is where Ravenshore 2.0 and many of the novel version’s features came to be. This Ravenshore was not just a city, but a somewhat Gotham-inspired moody place built of black stone and shrouded in fog. The new version of the story was the same basic idea – the king had declared war on magic, and refugees fled across the water to Ravenshore for sanctuary. This time I was a better DM, building enemies as antimagic specialists who didn’t simply negate or ignore players’ spells, but instead punished or retaliated or were empowered by magic in ways that forced the party to think tactically, knowing that they couldn’t throw fireballs around willy-nilly in boss battles. This time, there was a plot twist: the anti-magic king wasn’t the bad guy, but a man making the hard choice to stop the return of an insane god of balance, whose cultists needed to gather enough magic to power their dark ritual. If the king could destroy enough magic and kill enough mages, the god wouldn’t return. Of course, the players found this out just a little too late. There were still some issues, but this was a successful D&D game, still ‘famous’ within our group of nerds, if I may be so bold. And it was the foundation of Ravenshore’s feel and character.
Years later I planned a third version of the Ravenshore campaign, another update. This time the mad god would be removed, and the campaign would be a deeper dive into the difficult question of whether the king was right to want to destroy magic. The game would deal with disasters caused by magic, criminals and villains wielding magic for nefarious ends, unnatural monsters terrorizing the city and countryside, and would beg the question: could all this have been avoided if magic didn’t exist? Was the king a hero saving the world from supernatural forces… or a villain, a mass murderer focused on the symptoms but not the disease? I planned out the city much more extensively. I sketched out maps and geography and history, including a perpetual storm anchored outside the bay, created ages ago by the Baron who would have been considered an evil dark lord had his selfishness not happened to be a benefit to his people. I populated the city with ghosts and spirits, with monsters bound by dark deals, with complications rooted in magic – little of it outright bad or evil, but difficult and messy.
I never ran that D&D game. But, years later again, I was working out an idea I had for a story, for a character, someone in a dark place, haunted by a ghost she couldn’t get rid of and her own dream trying to kill her. Progress was slow, trying to work out a new setting that was appropriate for the story and character, and I was getting frustrated, until it occurred to me: why not put this story in Ravenshore? The dark and foggy city full of ghosts and spirits and dark magic and questionable history would be a perfect home for the story of a woman haunted by her past and her too-real nightmare.
There was just one little problem: Ravenshore was built as a mostly-traditional high fantasy D&D setting, and the story I was working on was heavily inspired by 1950s noir, and thus near-modern. Which one would have to change?
Neither. The material I had on fantasy Ravenshore became the ‘old city’ on the bay, and the clifftop held the ‘new city’ modern development with glassy skyscrapers and apartment towers. The ghosts and spirits and the perpetual storm stayed, and so did the fog, but now there was also electricity, cars, public transit, radio. Once I settled that, with the planned characters and arc merged into the well-developed city, the story practically wrote itself.
I’d written novels before, but ended up deleting them because I wasn’t happy with them. Ravenshore’s Nightmare is the first one I was happy with. The first draft was finished around six years ago, and I do a lot of self-editing as I write, so I was quite happy with it already when I put down the last period of the manuscript. It’s gone through many beta reads and edits and tweaks, but nothing major has changed – it’s still very close to the book it was six years ago. In a good way, because I feel like I was right the first time. This book is special to me both as the culmination of a long DM career, and as the starting point of a whole universe I’ve been writing in for years now.
A lot of the background I’d developed for D&D games didn’t quite make it into the novel, or is present mostly as background to make the place feel more alive. But, rest assured, with all that extra development that wasn’t needed in this book, there’s quite a lot of room for more (he hinted subtly, not mentioning the other two finished books in the same setting).
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