A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft

It’s now about three and a half months until the release of An Inheritance of Magic, and you know what that means:  it’s time to start on a new series of worldbuilding articles!

The setting for my new series is actually quite thoroughly developed by now.  I spent much of 2021 and 2022 working out the details of the new magic system, the world, and the major players that operate in it, and as a result, by the time An Inheritance of Magic was sent off to the publishers, the setting was already complete enough that I could include a short glossary at the back of the book explaining technical terms and the rules of the setting.  By necessity, though, glossaries have to be compact, so the glossary entries are each quite short.

The new series of worldbuilding articles that I’ll be putting up here on this website will be a bit more casual:  since I’m not limited by page space, I can go into a bit more detail and go off on tangents which I personally find interesting but which weren’t crucial enough to put into the book itself.  Page space is a very limited resource when you’re writing a novel:  the more description and explanation you put in, the more it slows down the story, so for each paragraph of world information, you have to ask yourself “is this really important enough to be worth it?”, and there’s often no right answer to that question.  Putting stuff up online is a nice compromise that lets readers who are interested in this stuff find out more without annoying the ones who’d much rather I just get on with the story.

Like the old Encyclopaedia Arcana, the new series of worldbuilding articles are going to be presented in an in-universe format.  At the moment, my working list of articles is something like this:

1. Essentia
2. Sigls
3. Wells
4. Sensing
5. Channelling
6. Shaping
7. Drucraft Houses
8. Drucraft Ranks

. . . though that might end up changing as the articles get written.

The first four articles will be coming out between July 14th and August 4th, following on from the release of Chapter 1 two weeks from today.