I’ve decided to write blogs about how I’m writing HoN Lore, so the readers that are interested can understand my thought processes and how I approached things.
I love Savage and Savage 2. They are awesome games.
I love HoN. I’ve played DotA for 6 years before HoN. But enough about that.
I am a story lover. I love reading fantastic stories and even game lore. In fact every game I’ve played up to now, I will ALWAYS read the lore and background of everything.
And so, I was quite depressed that Heroes of Newerth didn’t expand on Savage’s Newerth lore. Well, Heroes of Newerth was never meant to be canonical to Savage, as far as I know.
And so, I researched. I read everything I could about Savage, everything I could find. Ultimately, I found this was not enough; the very first things did not carry on to be the last few things. For instance, in the comic strip I found Jereziah and Ophelia are not royalty (well, at least it’s never hinted) and Maliken Grimm doesn’t even exist apparently.
So I looked for the writer. Someone must have come up with the story. I looked at the staff page and found one Mark Yohalem.
Some of you may remember that I posted on the forums asking how to contact him. Eventually, someone mentioned that I might ask Laura Baker about it. I sent her an email, and she emailed me back with his email.
And so, I found myself in contact with one of the writers. Probably THE writer. The Savage lore was actually developed between many different people (which explains the inconsistencies), but Mark Yohalem was probably the foremost expert since only his name appeared in the credits.
And so I sent him a letter, and he agreed to answer all of my questions.
I was initially dying to have access to the setting bibles, and he emailed S2Games asking if I could read them. Unfortunately, this was a no-no, and so I was stuck with what was not gag-ruled.
Overtime, the inconsistencies were very obvious. Mark even admitted to me that it was inconsistent. So I had to salvage what I could from all of these into a conceivable storyline to follow, one that I would stick with.
After confirming many things over the space of a few weeks and having committed everything to memory, I received an unexpected praise from him: that I by now probably knew it as good, or even better than he did, with the exception of the setting bibles.
And with that in mind, I started brainstorming what I could do with this new knowledge.
While thinking up the storyline and adding/removing things from it, I searched for a way to allow easy reading. The earliest readers may remember my creation of threads. My first post was simply a long thread.
I realized later on this was not convenient for everyone and myself. I could not possibly update the same thread over and over again with new long paragraphs of chapters; it would result in probably the longest post known to our forums. Nor could I continuously create new threads and keep linking back; what if eventually all of GD was just my threads (okay this would be totally awesome)? I am sure some moderator would be like “enough”, and move it all to somewhere where I wouldn’t want it to be.
And so I migrated to blogger. I could have chosen many different sites actually, but I had an unused blogger account that I once created with an idea floating but never actually got around to it. So I used it. The Google Ad revenue would be a plus. I actually realized that now I was legally an adult, I should actually buy something for my parents anyways.
This worked for a few weeks. And then problems arose.
First of all, I was not entirely happy with the layout. I kept a widget to the side that would detail all the posts in chapter form, but it would only show so many posts before a reader would have to search for the chapters themselves. I found no way around this.
Second, was region blocking. I’m looking at you, China.
So I ultimately made the decision to migrate to Yahoo Contributor instead, after having made sure that they were viewable in all regions. Was slightly a sad panda that Yahoo Contributor pays less than Google Adservice…but meh. It was more important for me that everyone gets to read.
Anyways, about the chapters. On average, since I occasionally glance at Microsoft Word’s word count thing, I hit about 1500 words per chapter. Usually a good fourth or fifth is always cut off. It takes me 1-2 days to figure out how I want the next scene to progress, ~3 hours to write the initial draft, and then ~1 hour to edit. Then I usually let it lay about for ~1 day and then look at it again, finish editing, and upload to Yahoo.
My process in a nutshell is like this: I already know how I want Forests of Caldavar to end, it won’t change much. Occasionally I restructure my story so that different heroes/characters do different things, but the overall ending is unchanged. I do not think I will be vastly changing the ending in the future. Individual chapters can be thought of as a stepping stone to the next one, until the final ending. All of my chapters must fulfill a certain intent that I had when I set out to write them; either plot development, character development, or advancement of storyline. You guys take time to read my stuff, I make sure my stuff is worth the time you took to read it.
The project I have in mind is probably going to span a few years, as a series. I intend to stick with it till the end. The storylines will be detailed in “books”, each named after a map. Forest of Caldavar is the first one, which will transition into Grimm’s Crossing/Watchtower. I have a general idea already planned out for the next maps, but I haven’t really developed them very in-depth, since most of my attention is focused on FoC.
Well that’s the first blog on my writing, until then, stay tuned 