Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "steampunk"

If I said that I listened to some type of music my every waking hour, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration. Sure, sometimes I'm outside, or seeing my parents... or does it count as "waking hour" if I'm lying in bed and actively trying to sleep? I don't know. Even in those times I usually have music running in my head.

About a decade ago I got into D&D, and I sort of semi-accidentally ended up picking up a "soundtrack" for the first full campaign I was in. I listened to a bunch of music I had discovered at around the same time (mainly Sonata Arctica), always during games and only during games, or at least while thinking and talking about stuff related to it.

To this day I can't listen to any of Days of Grays without getting a really heavy hit of nostalgia. I've never been in a D&D game as fun as that first.



I began to realize just how much power music held, and how much it could influence the going of my (and probably everyone else's) mind. From there on I started to build myself soundtracks like that first: for every game of D&D (and later other systems), for every story I'd write, for some comics and books I like, even a few video games that don't have soundtracks of their own - I would find something to listen. I have a lot of songs and albums and entire bands, some of which I really liked, that I permanently welded together into one specific work or game, and that I only now listen if I want to feel nostalgic.

Sometimes I carefully pick up my music based on the sort of a thing I want to write, resulting in fairly consistent and well-managed stories that keep well in hand and don't go anywhere weird. Other times I just appropriate whatever I really like to listen at the time, which can easily shoot the whole thing into someplace bizarre and unexpected but not necessarily bad. I've done both successfully.

Often, how well this works out - how completely my brain associates the work and the music together, and how much I manage to listen to that same stuff while I work on it - directly correlates to how much I like the end result, be it something I'm writing or something I'm playing in or something I'm reading. If it goes poorly, it can lead to me throwing a story out altogether.

When I worked on The Straggler's Mask, for instance, I listened a lot of Blind Guardian, Twilight Force, a bit of Blackmore's Night and Blue Öyster Cult, and the soundtrack of a game I liked to play at the time, Risk of Rain. A lot of the sort I'd associate with adventure and exploration, but some of it was spontaneous and probably had a hand in the wilder bits of the story.

For The Vagrant's Wings, I picked up a bit heavier stuff like Bal-Sagoth, Celtic Frost, something more soft but foreboding such as Nox Arcana, and then just to spice things up, a bit more Blackmore's Night. It's one of the ones where I succeeded in picking a pretty fitting soundtrack - something for horror and romance alike - rather than just going with whatever, and I think the fairly grounded nature ended up for its benefit in the end.

One of the less successful drafts of mine - codenamed Shadowland - involved a lot of Manowar, Iron Maiden, Blind Guardian again, and the Balance & Ruin remix album for Final Fantasy VI. I don't know exactly why the interest to this one just sort of petered out: how much of it was because I had listened to all these soundtracks before, and elsewhere, and couldn't pair together with this story effectively? How much was because I just got distracted by other things and ended up not feeling like it anymore? I wouldn't know. I'd guess a bit of both.

(Although listening to some of the soundtrack kind of puts me back on the mood of returning to that story... which is inconvenient because I'm kind of already juggling between a lot of things I might want to write.)

Chaos Star is sort of half-and-half: I had no idea what kind of music could fit for this, so in the end I defaulted to Iron Savior, Hyper Light Drifter soundtrack, and a little something nice I found on Youtube called Edge of the World. I'm sure the music can take some credit of it probably being the most out-there story draft I've managed to complete so far. It's been pretty hard to edit, though.

I haven't begun to really work on Ivar Stormling of Skar yet, but I already know it's going to involve a lot of Magic Sword and Gloryhammer. How well this works, remains to be seen.

The cyberpunk story, as I think I've said, is pretty tough to grasp and maintain interest on regardless of music - but it has one of the more duty-picked soundtracks, taking stuff from Blade Runner and Deus Ex, and interestingly, Command & Conquer series, especially Tiberian Sun. Lately, though, I also started to click stuff on Youtube at random, listening to a lot of synthwave and such while I wrote it... and I'm still doing this, even though my interest in the story itself has largely died away again.

So we come to the pirate story, currently tentatively named Pirates of The Demure Sea. I probably should look into Alestorm and such stuff, but because of the cyberpunk fallout I'm currently listening to things like this. Lemme tell you, it's helping me spawn out some pretty weird story notes and ideas.



But on the other hand, I had already decided that the Demure Sea is a weird place. So maybe it'll all work out in the end.

A friend of mine was reading the draft of Pirates of the Demure Sea, and went on to ask me about photographs. I was going to answer him, but as I thought about the matter it ended up growing and mutating into a far more expansive subject, on technology in my books in general. So I put it in the blog instead.

The setting in which most of my books take place, a moon known as Shala, has some pretty varied levels of technology, sciences, and knowledge. I suppose this is the logical end result (if logic ever enters this kind of issues to begin with) in a world often thrown into the midpoint in a great cosmic conflict, like groups of children starting a fistfight on a field with an anthill in the middle. Scientists are often mistaken for wizards, and wizards are a jealous and misunderstood lot. Wars, occasionally interplanetary ones, can completely shuffle the deck in a heartbeat. Sixteen entirely different and perilous seasons wrack the sections of the world in varying ways, often cutting them off from each other for large periods of time. Parallel dimensions and other realms cross over in places known only to a few. Time travel is not an entirely unknown or impossible phenomenon. Things get weird.



Basically, if you're looking for a highly realistic and accurate examination to the technologies and livelihoods of people of some specific time period and place, this is unlikely to be the series for you.

The first (and currently the only published) book, The Straggler's Mask, sees the heroes crossing great many kingdoms and settlements across many biomes in two different continents, but despite all this variety the level of technological advancement tends to remain at roughly the level of our own 16th century. The Vagrant's Wings takes place several centuries later, in a fantasy equivalent to the Victorian Era, and on account of also taking place at the heart of Nexus - the least weird continent around - anachronisms are at a minimum. They have cars and, yes, photography. But in Pirates of the Demure Sea, which I'm currently working on, the story takes the reader on a faraway journey to an entirely different direction, where things get considerably more freaky.

In particular, two venerable superpowers vie for dominance in these seas, by means of diplomacy, subterfuge, and occasionally outright war: these kingdoms are Armaiti from above, and Aldarion from below.



Armaiti is a dogmatic, downright fascist Lawful empire, with an immortal Emperor and equally-indomitable law enforcement that are mentally linked to Him and more of a direct extension of His will than anything independent or sentient. They've had millennia to advance their technology in peace, but they do things extremely slowly and methodically and carefully, to never upset the order of things in any way. So they've stuck in the early-20th century steampunk/dieselpunk thing for several centuries now.

They have with them trains, zeppelins, helicopters, advanced weaponry (up to and including nukes), near-modern medicine, nigh-unkillable clockwork robot soldiers, and, yes, photography. They also bargained the secret of submarines and underwater construction from Aldarion, later mixing it up with their own tech. They complement all this with sorcery, which is where all the weird fantastic stuff (divine beings, carving Chaos out of humans like it were cancer, etc.) come to play. Magic, technology, and divinity - the last one stemming from their Emperor - all mix together in ways that an outsider can find impossible to understand let alone replicate, and they're jealous and protective of their secrets and slow to let the world outside to know them - it might all very well lead to chaos and disorder, after all.

The empire's borders are in fact completely shut. Only the city of Haurvatāt permits foreign entry, even then after intense customs and vetting, and no non-native is allowed to leave to the empire beyond. Likewise, no imperial native can ever leave abroad without permission, and some specific mission - and for that matter, very few would even want to leave, thank you very much, it's all so weird and scary out there.



Millennia ago when the majority of the old continent sank into the sea, the many warring kingdoms and republics of that time found themselves forced to band together just to survive the entirely new enviroment. Their dome cities, bunkers, magical fortifications, or just really fortuitiously well-constructed architecture, were enough to let them not be instantly killed as the water swept in, but only the kingdom of Zenmua - set around a great inner sea - had submarines and so they were the ones that got to travel around to rescue the less fortunate and unite them all into a new underwater federation that came to be known as Aldarion.

Their technology is a mixed bag, combining whatever high tech they managed to salvage from the old kingdoms, with sorcery and demonology. They have submarines, of course, and also salvage sunken ships and by arcane means turn them into underseaworthy vessels. Some cities have the original domes still standing, while others are cramped little bunker places (the town of Otachame, where the book takes place, follows this style) or bizarre wizard towers. They're technically a monarchy, but their king has fairly little political power: most things are run by a conglomerate of sorcerers and mad scientists from the many provinces and municipalities, most of which are the same as the old nations from back when they still lived above ground.

Aldarion is a far more open and accepting place than Armaiti is, and has a thriving tourism industry, but they're still fairly jealous about their magic and technology, fearing that letting these secrets spill would endanger their livelihood. Armaiti still managed to learn about submarines, though, as mentioned above - their sale on open market is allowed nowadays, but just because you own one, and know how to pilot it, doesn't mean you'd know how it actually works. It's even rumoured that such ships have hidden defenses that trigger if they're ever to be used against Aldarion itself, something even Armaiti would be unaware of.



Little of any of this has reached too far beyond Demure Sea, so far, and especially not to the naive and primitive continent of Nexus. Something of such might have come to place eventually, but then the Skar War happened, and in its aftermath no one contested high king Ivar Stormling's decree to ban all technology that they haven't yet managed to come up with on their own. After that, barring a couple hiccups, it could develop into a spacefaring empire on its own time.

Moments before writing this, I finished writing the first, roughest draft of Pirates of the Demure Sea. It packs a good 126488 words and took me only 43 days to finish, which is easily a new record for me!

The previous holder was probably The Vagrant's Wings: its first draft stood at 140743 words and took 62 days. Rather slower, all in all. Here's hoping I can still keep on breaking the record.

So what happens now?

Well, now I'm going to take a break out of this thing. I've hung it to dry for a month, clearing my head and getting involved in other projects and activities. 15th of November next month, I can return to it with an open mind and rewrite the whole damn thing. By new year I'm hoping to have something to throw at my editor, and then barring sudden cataclysms it should be ready for publish sometime 2019.

I rather like how this one turned out, and it's gotten rather good reception in my test group as well. I hope it will find a bit larger audience. It remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic.