Chapter 13 Progress [28/JAN]

Hey all! Hope the new year has been treating you well so far 💖

If you're pledged to the Patreon, this progress update won't have anything new for you! The first progress update for January that you got weeks ago already went over all this. For everyone else, here's a little update of how CH13 is shaping up so far! I'm hoping to do these on a monthly basis as we go forward.

Most of January has gone pretty well writing wise, aside from that one week where I got horribly sick lol. If you've read previous progress updates/seen previous previews for CH12, you might remember that in the original draft, CH12 included a court scene with the Crown taking public petitions and dealing with more politics. I decided it would be too much to include in CH12, however, since the chapter is already quite expansive at 76k words.

Putting it at the start of CH13 gives it much more room to breathe and will allow me to delve in deep with all the different variations and make it a bigger scene. And that's kind of necessary considering all the different decisions the player has made that will feature into it:

• How you decided to handle Steward Bazo's absence from your coronation back in CH7 (condemning him, forgiving him, or waiting before making a decision)
• Whether you fired the Office of Law/Minister Besna, and if you did, whether you chose Noble Nûdem to be her replacement
• Whether you have Lady Naza as your Minister of Defense
• Whether you have an alliance with the Office of Imperial Decrees/Minister Awir
• Additional variations for those romancing R and A, like how X and D's routes got extra court scenes back in CH11

Yeah, it's... a lot 💀

On top of that, as I mentioned before, the Crown will be able to make some decisions on petitions from the public. This will be the scene where you'll be able to gain the most increase to your relationship with the public (or the nobility, if you choose to go that route)! So if you fumbled it before with the Office of Law, this scene will allow you to recover from that (or not).

That aside, the route regarding the peri trader will also be resolved in this chapter. If you have played both the peri trader route and the Kham meeting route, you may have noticed that the route where the Crown goes to meet the peri trader doesn't have all the exposition that the Kham route does--this will be saved for CH13, with some revelations that you won't get in the Kham route. It's a trade-off in that way!

And, of course, more romantic developments with your chosen love interest, but to a lesser extent compared to CH12. In CH13 is where we're wrapping everything up in Marabad, and setting off to the expedition to the mountains 🙏🏼

So far I've started writing the public petitions, and some variations of the court scene for R and A's routes, so I'm hovering around ~10k words at the moment. It's not as much as I hoped to write for January, but a lot of the process also involved planning the chapter, so hopefully February will be much more productive now that I have the structure of the chapter figured out.

Until then 💖