Here are two random ideas that have been bouncing around in my mind for a while.

First, a handful of years ago, dungeon master and game designer Matthew Colville made a video where he asked, in effect, “If your D&D world is not at war, why not?” (No, I haven’t been working on Shadow of the King for quite seven years; it only feels like it!) The video drove home for me the fact that war is basically the default state in world history. Whatever I might think about it as a human being (spoiler: I hate it!), as a storyteller, this is a gold mine of plot ideas.

Second, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series begins with a world where the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) won, and now the characters are living with the aftermath. The Lord Ruler has only gotten more powerful, but a plucky band of misfits have a plan…

These factors, marinating over several years, shape the backdrop to Rune’s story in Shadow of the King. The takeaways for me are (1) everything has a consequence and (2) maintaining the peace take hard work.

In Mistborn, the BBEG won, and now everyone has to deal with that. But what if the good guys had won? What if they had been able to take down the BBEG? A rebel victory would upset the status quo, but then what? Especially if some of the victorious good guys aren’t all that good.

In Shadow of the King, the protagonist, Rune, was born into a world where the BBEG had been defeated…but now the petty kings who carved up his kingdom had been jockeying for position in a decades-long cold war that just needed the right spark to turn hot.

So what’s a writer to do but light a match and see what happens?

The shadow falls on October 1.