alexanderwales posts
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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 27, Too Much Talking
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~“You’re not in a guild, are you?” asked Mizuki as they walked away from the warp point. “I guess I assumed you weren’t, but I don’t actually know.”“I am not,” said Isra.“Well, I am,” said Mizuki. “Sorcerers are notoriously territorial, given there’s a limited amount of magic floating around, and limited jobs for us to do, so we tend to guil...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 26, Liberfell
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~There was a language to entads, though Alfric spoke it only poorly. They were unique, always, but there were commonalities to them, some of that just because they drew from the hexes, which had commonalities of their own. There were effects you’d expect to find on boots rather than knives, or chairs rather than towels. Chairs were for sitting and knives were for s...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 25, A Post-Dungeon Pickle
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~“I want to get this out of the way now,” said Alfric, as they sat and recovered. “We shouldn’t have fought the bear. Things were going well, but we got overconfident, and I should have put my foot down. When you’re dungeoneering, you shouldn’t get that close to dying. So I apologize for not being a better leader and allowing that level of risk.”“We d...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 24, 10% Dungeons by Volume
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Isra drank from her waterskin and tried her best to rest her arm. There were limits to how many times she could draw her bow in a day before the arm simply gave out and refused to pull, and she feared that she was hitting that point far too early on. They had said five to ten rooms in the dungeon, and she didn’t know whether that counted the first one or not, but ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 23, This One is Actually About Dungeons Too
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~The entrance to the dungeon was the same as it had been before, a tube of packed earth, but when it opened out into the first room, there was nothing like a house or building. Instead, it was a little grotto, with stalactites hanging from the ceiling and a trickle of water coming down. The only path forward was through the stalactites, where the light from the lante...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 22, The Journey More Than the Destination
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Mizuki was finding that she didn’t actually like traveling that much. Six miles was a long way to walk, especially if you were going to do a dungeon at the end of it. The dungeon was also a mile and a half off the warp point, so that was seven and a half miles. Then after the dungeon, there would be another six miles of walking, either to Liberfell for the night, ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 21, Sitting in a Song
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~It was Mizuki who thought to invite Isra to the Fig and Gristle, for which she was grateful. There was a part of Isra that felt she should be living in the same house with them, especially because it was so much better of a house than the one in the woods she’d inherited from her father, but there was also a comfortability to that old house, and the memories it co...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 20, Temple Politics
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkThanks for reading!~~~~They got the party channel exactly seven days after the party had formed. Hannah was pleased, but she’d been in a number of parties before, and party chat always came with some problems.It was an open question why the Editors had done as they’d done. The actual thought that went into the Editing was enormously complex, beyond the ken of a youn...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 19, I Suppose You're Wondering Why I Gathered You Here
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~Alfric and Mizuki walked together. He was following behind her as she went down a trail behind her house, one that had clearly been put into place by human hands quite some time ago. It wasn’t in need of much care though, and Mizuki happily walked along.“I’m not squeamish,” she said, looking back at him.“No?” asked Alfric. “No one said you were?”“I ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 18, The Next Day's Weather
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Isra moved through the woods, following a path the deer normally took. The world was looking different to her, and she didn’t know how much of that was in her head. Did normal people follow deer paths? Could they even find them? She would have to ask, and there was a chance that they would give her odd looks, and ask her what a deer path was, as though that wasn...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 17, The Blacksmith's Apprentice
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~When they were leaving to go shop, Mizuki debated how much money to take. She had a small crock that she kept some spare rings in, but this was three thousand rings, high denominations that would only be used for larger purchases.“I don’t like having this much money,” said Mizuki. “I feel like there’s a target on my back.”“You’re a sorc,” said Hann...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 16, Notions from Elsewhere
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Verity sat in the backyard, surrounded by the wild plants and the struggling ones that had once upon a time been cultivated. There was work to be done, an enormous amount of work, but that would have to wait for later. She was hoping that there was plenty of equipment, like a sun hat, gloves, a trowel, a hand rake, and a water can that would hopefully connect up to ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 15, Good Next Steps, I Suppose
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~“How is she?” asked Alfric once Hannah came back downstairs.“Nevermind that,” said Mizuki. “Look at this cat.”Sitting on the kitchen counter like a proper gentleman was Tabbins, an enormous black cat with a white belly and white paws that looked a little like mittens. He was nominally Mizuki’s cat, though he spent most of his time outside, and Mizuki on...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 14, Cracked Tiles
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~Five was an annoying number, in Hannah’s opinion. There was very little symmetry to be had from it. Five could have rotational symmetry, but the same could be said of any number, since a circle could be defined by infinitely many points. Five also allowed a flanking approach, with one of the five in the center and two sides of two each, but this didn’t have manif...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 13, The Nature of Travel
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkThanks for reading, and thanks for the support.~~~When Isra woke up, it took her a moment to realize where she was. It was her second time staying at an inn, her first time in any house that wasn’t her own, really, and it was strange just how disorienting it was. Isra had camped out in the woods plenty of times, and she had never felt the sheer sense of dislocation th...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 12, Overgrowth
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkIf you've been enjoying this story, and have an account there, it would be helpful to me if you'd favorite/follow/rate this story on RoyalRoad. It does helpful things to the metrics, and I would appreciate it.~~~Verity got going, leaving Hannah and Mizuki alone. Mizuki did the dishes for a bit, finishing up fairly quickly, and dried her hands on a towel hanging ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 11, Agates Among the Stones
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkThe Rest of the Story on RoyalRoad~~~Alfric left and went down the street, finding ‘Sharpe & Eddel’ without too much trouble, and explained the situation to the woman behind the desk. Her shop was much more clean and organized than Mergan’s, with most of the wares inside glass cases. There were three mannequins, two of them with armor, and the last wearing miscell...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 10, Second Breakfast
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkThe rest of the story on RoyalRoad~~~After finishing the dungeon, Hannah was left feeling a bit rootless. She hadn’t quit the temple, because she’d said that she would still help out from time to time when the dungeons weren’t calling, and Lemmel, the older cleric of the Church of Symmetry, had graciously allowed her to keep her room until she found some other lod...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 9 [An Unwanted Civics Lesson]
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Isra ended up renting a room at the Angry Plum, the larger of Pucklechurch’s two taverns, taking a room across from Alfric. She insisted that the materials from the book be taken out and distributed between their two rooms, which took a fair amount of time given how slow the storage book was, and how many ordinary books were contained within it. Alfric got to glum...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 8, Late Meals in a Quiet Kitchen
Effective today, This Used to be About Dungeons will be moving to a three times a week schedule, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If the backlog, which is currently twenty chapters, slips below ten chapters, I'll probably scale back to twice weekly, but there's at least a month before that happens assuming that I do basically no writing. Because of this, chapters will instead have a 24 hour wind...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 7, Songbird
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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 6, Henlings
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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 5, [This One is Actually About a Dungeon]
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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 4 [Three Raccoons] + Worth the Candle Q&A
Normal posting has started! As a friendly reminder, please keep discussion on Discord to the #earlybirds channel.Also, the Q&A for Worth the Candle is ongoing on my subreddit, so if you have any lingering questions, stop by and I'll try to answer them.Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link
Worth the Candle, epilogue 7-8
And that's the end of the epilogues. I hope you enjoyed them for their indulgences.Normal LinksEpilogue 7 Epilogue 8Edit/Comment LinksEpilogue 7Epilogue 8
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 1-3
This Used to be About Dungeons is a comfy slice-of-life adventuring story that occasionally features dungeons.Mostly it's about walking in the woods with a friend, looking for mushrooms to put in your soup, or haggling with the guy selling squash, or taking care of a neglected garden. It's putting some jam on shortbread biscuits. And yes, sometimes you go down into the dungeons with your f...
Worth the Candle, Epilogues 4-6
Epilogues 7-8 will be up sometime on Friday. Thanks for reading! Additionally, I'm planning the first three chapters of This Used to be About Dungeons to be put up quite soon, in part so that there can be some cross-promotion.NormalEpilogue 4 Epilogue 5Epilogue 6Edit/CommentEpilogue 4Epilogue 5 Epilogue 6
Worth the Candle, epilogues 1-3
... of a planned eight.I think that the story as it stands prior to these epilogue chapters is "complete", and it would be perfectly fine to have stopped there, both for me as an author and you as a reader. That said, there were still things that I wanted to pick at, and elements I wanted to interrogate, and I do think it's nice to have everyone have a known trajectory when you finish,...
Worth the Candle, Post Mortem and Apocrypha
The post mortem for Worth the Candle is here, if you'd like to read it, and gives my general thoughts on how things went and what went wrong. tl;dr: pretty goodI'm not sure the Apocrypha is worth reading, and would caution you not to think of it like "more" Worth the Candle.You can instead think of this like being deleted scenes from a DVD (boy do I miss DVD extras). As with those,...
Worth the Candle, ch 246 [Reflections at the End]
Well, here it is. There will likely be some epilogue chapters after this, but I'm not entirely sure about that. Barring any abrupt changes in my plans for the future, the next serial will start roughly a week after the final epilogue chapter, or after I've finished some of the side story stuff I was planning to do, if I do it. As far as outstanding obligations, I still need to write most o...
