What do you like most about Dreadgod?
Yikes. What do I like most about Dreadgod without spoiling it? I'm really trying to answer this question. I think the characters get to be cool a lot in this book. Certain characters in particular. Including Lindon, I think lindon gets some very cool moments. I think there are some characters that you wouldn't expect to get their hype moments in this book. That's all I'm gonna say about it.
What colors are your Magic decks?
In this particular case, I was making a mono green deck, so all green. Usually I guess I would prefer green. I like mid-ranged decks, with creatures on the board interacting with each other, for those of you who understand what that sentence means. So therefore green is my go-to. Although I will say, the one Magic deck I had the most fond memories of is there was a particular meta years and years ago at my Friday night Magic game store where there were a couple of decks. There was a blue-white control deck and then there was a creature deck and then there was just everything else, so it was kind of a rock paper scissors thing. I was getting sick of the meta and it was the last week and the new set was gonna come out, so I made my own deck that was 100 percent nothing but burn spells so it was just spells that did damage. It was red-black and that was all that was in the deck. It would beat the creature deck 100 percent of the time. Every single card in the deck was removal for creatures. It could not possibly beat the control deck ever. When I played against one deck I just surrendered, and when I played against the other one I made them hate themselves. That was the deck I made myself and I was very proud of it and it was really funny. Someone called it the Blackflame deck, that's very accurate.
When will we see Fisher Gesha?
When will we see Fisher Gesha?
Soon. There is some Fisher Gesha coming up soon. Do not expect a full Fisher Gesha storyline in Dreadgod, so don't get your hopes too high. But, you know, you can get your hopes a little high.
Soon. There is some Fisher Gesha coming up soon. Do not expect a full Fisher Gesha storyline in Dreadgod, so don't get your hopes too high. But, you know, you can get your hopes a little high.
Have you ever thought about writing a story or one-off where some of your characters meet?
Yes I have. There's this idea that I'm building towards an Avengers style team up, and that's 100% accurate-no I'm just kidding. I'm not building to some mega series at the end-I might end up doing that, but that's not the intention. The intention now is to do something where I could overlap if I wanted to, but I don't have to. I don't want to give the readers the burden of having to go "Oh, I want to get on with Will Wight books, do I start with the latest series?" "No, you've gotta start 10 years ago." I don't want to give anybody an impossible task, but on the other hand I definitely think it'd be cool if characters overlapped and I certainly think it'd be cool in the context of a short story or spinoff or novella or something like that.
Have you read read Legend of the Northern Blade?
That's a great question. I want to point out that the Webtoon version of that is really good. I don't know if I have read the novel, now that I think about it, I may have just read the comic, but the comic's really good. It doesn't matter, I still recommend you read the comic.
Would the top damage weapons from our world stack against Cradle?
They don't. At the level at which you are still affected by purely physical attacks, so Lords and below. Even Archlords would be affected by the artillery or military weapons to a degree. But they can react so quickly, and then they can throw missiles from their hands, a feasibly unlimited number of times, so they can break our stuff we can't break them. It would still be very difficult to beat an army led by lords, but you could. You could fight them. That's something where superior technology could even the odds to a degree. But once you get beyond Lord, to Sages, Heralds, and Monarchs, any one of them just wins. No interaction, Sages teleport you into space, what are you gonna do?
Which Monarch or important figure do you wish there was more time to explore in the books? I personally would love to see more about Emriss Silentborn.
I, too, would like to see more about Emriss Silentborn.
After gaining abilities from the Bleeding Phoenix, would Mu Enkai be able to separate enough plasma out of blood to make a plasma ball?
Yes, absolutely. You would be able to separate plasma from blood and superheat it so that he could make a plasma ball. That's 100%. As a matter of fact, you've actually seized on my next series, which is a Cradle spinoff in which Mu Enkai is firing plasma balls.
Is there a character from another world that you think would be more powerful than a Judge?
Yes! I've actually been looking into power-scaling a lot lately. Turns out there's this whole subculture around it. I have been involved in a lot of series where people compare the powers of people from different series. I didn't realized there was this whole subreddit and there is this culture dedicated to just doing nothing but categorizing and comparing power levels of various fictional characters. And I've been reading it because I find it fascinating and the ultimate thing I come away from is there is no way to do that. So, technically, Kirby is a massive interstellar, intergalactic, interdimensional threat but in reality what he's doing is not anything on that scale. But he's capable of it. But only if you take Kirby's lore seriously and you shouldn't do that because he's a pink floaty guy. So are there characters more powerful than Judges? Yeah, absolutely. There are characters in fiction like Zeno from DragonBall that creates and destroys universes on a whim. There is always a more powerful characters somewhere in fiction.
How did it feel to have Sanderson react to your Kickstarter?
Great! I was actually hanging out with some friends while I was doing that. We were playing Magic. Actually, I think that was in my video. My friend and I built a cube that he has kept so we had... a cube is a limited set of cards that you play for a card game and you choose the cards that are in there and they stay so you don't have to buy new cards every time you want to play. And we don't keep up with the meta or anything so we were just playing this cube. And so, we and our friends were putting together decks and all these people texted and messaged me that Sanderson put up a video that had called us out on the Kickstarter. So I left. I was making a mono-green deck. I left it on the table and I walked away. I was really excited. I made all the calls. I made a quick reaction video. And it was neat. It was really fun because when his social media reacted to it I knew someone on his team had seen it, right? But now I knew that he saw it and that was cool.
I wonder if Will's writing will follow an identical formula for book length and the pacing of the story. With Cradle there's many kinds of scenes he avoided lest they slow things down. Slice of life moments and whatnot. There may be a few but he lets a ton of stuff happen off screen. Wonder if he'll try to develop any of that or just continue to eschew it.
Identical formula? Probably not.
Continue to skip those scenes? Probably.
I’m going to take a long wall of text to talk about why I skip these, even though it’s not directly what you asked.
A story being slow-paced doesn’t mean it wastes time, even by my definition. There are plenty of slow-paced stories that rarely waste time.
But I hate scenes that waste time. I hate them more than anything. I want to tear them out of the manuscript with my teeth.
“It was a rainy summer’s day. The air was thick with the kind of raindrops that—“ Let me stop you right there, because I can already tell this scene isn’t going to matter to my understanding of the character or the story and is just going to kill two minutes.
Not every character-building scene is like that! You need to establish your character for the story to work. NO character-building scene NEEDS to be like that.
WASTE: the scene in Moon Knight where they’re on the ferry talking about their failed marriage.
Why are you repeating exposition to each other? What does this show us about who you are as people? Nothing, it just gives us facts to remember about you.
NOT A WASTE: Tywin Lannister’s introductory scene in Game of Thrones, where he’s cleaning a deer and chastising his son. Fantastic. Shows us who both the characters are, tense, fun to watch, even though it’s just character dialogue.
It’s not like that second scene, storyline, or show is particularly fast-paced, but in this case it certainly didn’t waste time.
TL;DR - Wasted time is what I hate.
I would always rather an author err on the side of “too little” rather than “too much,” because I find the second to be a far more common and egregious mistake.
…and having said all that, I do still prefer a fast pace.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I still have painful flashbacks from the Wheel of Time starting off all those books describing in detail where the wind is blowing.
Thanks for the response!
Wheel of Time is a big part of how I formed this opinion.
I started thinking about the later books in the series and what they would lose if you cut out entire sub-plots, characters, and tens of thousands of words, and the answer was “nothing.” (At least for me.)
If anything, the story would get better.
Though, admittedly, I now tend to take that to the other extreme.
The gap between these stages of advancement is HUGE! people are trying to scale Lindon and the gang and it seems people think sage/Herald are closer to monarchs than they actually are.
The 8 man empire are the equivalent of one monarch. That's not because any 8 sacred artists at the level of sage/Herald (S/H) are the equivalent of a monarch, they need the help of special magic space armor to combine their significance to reach that level. This fact alone means that without the magic space armor, that I would take over 8 S/H to rival one monarch. The way the story talks about the 8 man empire I would guess it would take many more that 8 S/H to rival a monarch.
Unfortunately I have no idea how to estimate exactly how few S/H it would take to match a monarch.
That being said, the fact that Lindon and Yerin could push back against Malice, with the help of Mercy, is huge. To say Lindon is just a Sage with the raw power of a Herald is a joke. Our boy could spank any Herald or sage level sacred artist low dif.
My view of Yerin in this fight is that she’s roughly the equivalent of a normal Herald. She has some unique advantages, but so do many Heralds.
Fury, for instance, could have beaten her.
But she’s at the level of being able to participate in this fight while Lindon puts the lion’s share (tiger’s share?) of the pressure on.
That’s my general thought process, anyway.
Let me take a few minutes to address the 8ME.
A group of 4 Sages and 4 Heralds all fighting a Monarch together could win. And probably would, all other factors being equal.
The disadvantage is that none of them could 1v1 the Monarch, so they’re prone to getting picked off and defeated separately. Are you going to stand there and fight eight guys? No, you run and pick your moment later.
The advantage of the 8ME is that they don’t need to be together to combine powers. And that they can fuse their power to perform Monarch-level feats, which Sages and Heralds can’t normally do.
How does a Monarch beat a Sage? Engage them physically or in a straight-up power fight. How do they beat a Herald? Keep throwing workings at them they can’t match and make them waste willpower and concentration shutting them down.
An 8ME member can draw on the power of the others to remove those weaknesses at will.
How would you defeat the 8ME? Force them to spread out. They have a finite pool of power to draw on, so if three of them (for instance) need to draw on Monarch-level power at once, what does that leave for the rest?
Problem is, no faction has two Monarchs. So let’s say Reigan Shen wanted to take them down. He engages Larian in combat, and he assigns or hires a Sage or Herald for each of the other seven.
How does that actually play out?
They don’t pump Larian up to Monarch-level. She flees and runs and hides and does anything she can to survive with only her own power, and they pump whoever has the weakest opponent.
Suddenly, the person facing down a single Sage has Monarch-level power. The enemy is crushed. Then they move on to the next-weakest enemy, and so on.
Larian might die. Maybe she couldn’t hang on either.
But it’s still WAY faster and easier for the 8ME to pass power between each other than it is for Shen to travel through the Way to face the other members. So, in all likelihood, they become the Six-Man Army but all their non-Monarch opponents are dead.
Then they replace the lost two members and now they’re gunning for Shen.
And that’s the story of why the 8ME still exists.
[Emriss] may actually be saddened by the state of the world, but I think a certain part of that "sadness" is the mask she's been wearing while she waited for an opportunity like this one. To put it to a whole class of self-absorbed murdering bastards.
”I don’t forget anything,” she said sadly.
I don’t see her sadness as a facade at all. She’s sad because she’s thinking back over everything she remembers from her long history and ruminating on how nothing fundamental has changed.
She doesn’t take Northstrider’s threat to heart at all, because she’s always been conscious of the threat the other Monarchs can pose. Him outright threatening her doesn’t change anything for her.
That is certainly not mutually exclusive with anger.
When I read about the Sand Vipers enslaving people to go into the Transcendent Ruins, I figured that was only happening because it was a lawless area that was only technically in the BFE.
But in Blackflame, Renfei is thinking about her experiences in the Skysworn:
She had fought with the Kotai clan against walking sharks on the beaches of the Trackless Sea, executed exiled criminals trying to sneak in across the eastern border, and returned runaways to the Stonedeep Mines.
There's no such thing as a runaway employee. That's called quitting. Only slaves run away, and the Skysworn's job is to return runaway slaves to the mines.
I've read that line multiple times but it never hit me until my most recent reread that the BFE had institutionalized slavery.
My intention was that these were criminals sentenced to hard labor, since that’s how a lot of these isekai-style stories start.
You have a main character who wakes up inside the body of some frail kid who died working in the mines, or they get sentenced to the mines early on and end up finding some rare gem that gives them magic powers or whatever.
If the BFE had chattel slavery as part of their economy, the gang would have run into some slaves. Also, the Skysworn wouldn’t have been involved with returning runaways, since they’re sacred-artist-police and not a regular police force.
Although it’s not like forcing prisoners to work the mines isn’t still slavery. I don’t see the BFE as particularly socially or culturally advanced.
They tolerate a lot of murder.
So we saw DreadLindon tank a Monarch's blow like it was nothing:
Shadow madra Forged into blades and swept at him, but he weakened them with the Hollow Domain. Then he allowed them to land. They cut his body and his spirit together, but he healed as fast as she damaged him.
Yeah, it was weakened with the Hollow Domain first, but it's still a Monarch's melee-range attack. We've seen that same level of attack obliterate mountains. So clearly Lindon's Iron body is now healing at hyperspeed.
Lindon was also helped here by Malice's own madra and bloodline ability strengthening his healing powers as he was consuming it.
^ This is what I was going to point out.
He can’t tank Monarch hits forever without a source of Monarch-level energy to Consume.
Even with how much he expended healing himself, he did come out ahead in that exchange right?
Like how large an elixer are we talking?
About this big:
\ ___________ /
The topic that I really wanted to talk about tonight, in the sense that I wanted to talk about any particular topic in mind, is that Dreadgod is my twentieth book. Which is crazy. That's just a lot of books. So it's eleven books in this series, 3 books in Traveler's Gate Trilogy ('cause it's a trilogy,) and then six books in Elder Empire. So this book number twenty. We are having out twentieth book come out. I was talking before hand about things that I could talk about on stream, and they were going, "Do you have stories from the books?" What I thought, was I could do a really quick, rapid fire version, where I gave you whatever, just the first memory I have, just really quickly, just the first memory I have of writing each book. In all twenty books. In all of my series. So I'm going to go through them all; I'm going to tell you twenty stories, real quick. About whatever the first memory, I've not rehearsed this, this is something a just thought to do a few minutes ago, so I'm going to give you whatever story pops off my head for each book. It's going to be about the writing of the book, or where I was, or what I was doing, or any of that. Ok.
So, obviously House of Blades is the first one. And when I think of writing House of Blades, the number one thing that comes to my mind is we were in Roan Mountain. Roan Mountain, which is a park here in the US, and we're camping, and we're at a stone table, that is covered in moss. And I have set my laptop up, and I'm wearing a camp chair, and I've set my laptop up on the table, and I'm writing notes. Which rooms have which swords, and which advisors go with the swords. So that's the strongest memory for me from House of Blades. That's what I was doing.
Then, Crimson Vault, which was only two months later, we went back camping, because obviously that worked for the first one, but this time we were getting cabins. So I remember sitting in a cabin, because we could afford it, with House of Blades money, so I remember sitting in a cabin, and thinking over them, and trying to figure out the scene where we went on this montage over the Overlords of Damasca, and how they were reacting to the hanging tree; reacting in Crimson Vault to Valin breaking free. So that's the strongest memory for me from that one.
For City of Light, the strongest memory I
If dreadgods are at least as powerful as Monarchs, why do they never use spatial transfer? In the Wandering Titan's case it is because he doesn't like to expend energy, but that makes less sense when we think about the others.
What a question you have asked Charles. *siiiippp*
What a question that is!
What a question Charles has asked. Charles has asked the question, "If dreadgods are at least as powerful as Monarchs, why do they never use spatial transfer?" What a question Charles has asked. I'm going to move on.
Was there any dragon Monarchs before Sesh?
Oh yeah. Absolutely. He is known as *THE* dragon monarch, because he is *the* dragon Monarch now. There have been many dragon monarchs in the past.
In Bloodline, Yerin said that her master never trained against constructs, but in Wintersteel Tim thought about fixing her training constructs.
Ummm. I don't remember the first part of that. Her master never trained against constructs... I don't remember the context of that. So, he was considering repairing her training constructs for sure. That I remember.
Why did you name the sequel to Dreadgod, Plasma Bolts?
You'll find out in Dreadgod. You'll get to the end, and you'll be like, "That's why it's called Plasma Bolts. It's so clear now."
