Every first Friday of the month, I will write about how the current month’s theme applies to how I created Raven: Priestess of Nocturne. For this month, it’s about how I got the general concept and world down.
Inspiration
The idea didn’t really dome from my advice to write what you like to read, at least not immediately. What it came from was a number of ideas coalescing in my head, thanks to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. If you’re not familiar with the game, it takes place on the island of Vvardenfall, in the eponymous Morrowind Province. In it, you, a released prisoner, are tasked with fulfilling the Nerevarine Prophecy. It’s a great game, if you can get past the fact that it’s slow and the mechanics are kinda outdated.
Anyway, enough about Morrowind itself. What I got from the game is important here. Within the game, I played as a female wood elf assassin, because I thought that the character would be cool and have great synergy. I was right, and grew quite attached to her, naming her Raven (If that sounds familiar, you’re paying attention). I also developed a sense of curiosity about the elves, and wanted to learn more about them, sparking my longtime love of elves, and annoyance with the haughty high elves. Also, slavery is a major theme in the game, since the great houses rely on it and you can find enslaved Argonians and Khajiit in various boltholes, and free them from their bonds. That got me thinking about slavery in general and how evil I find it.
Oh, and I really liked the Daedric Prince Nocturnal. However, due to her being so mysterious, I basically made my own take on her.
How it came about
It took something like a decade and a bunch of other, failed stories before the elements of elves and slavery sort of combined in my head into a story, via taking over a completely different story idea. Seriously, you wouldn’t have recognized the story in its original form. It was about two characters, a proto-Raven and proto-Tom arriving in a city, and not much else. Also, there were four gods, one for each cardinal direction. I have to point out that none of the gods were particularly fleshed out, however.
Over time, I managed to boil the story down to two gods, and proto-Raven got inserted into the Church of Nightfall, which at this point had three priestesses in each temple. The eldest performed the morning rituals, the middle the evening rituals, and the youngest the night rituals. This is where proto-Milla appeared, and where slavery and slave liberation as themes started appearing. The eldest would receive the coded message every day, the middle would decode it, and the youngest would act on it, freeing the unfortunate enslaved soul.
The concept still had holes in it, such as what would happen with the slaves once they were freed. I kept it on the backburner, picking at it and its flaws until I came up with the concept. In the end I started writing it, mostly out of a desire to use the prologue I wrote, but also to get Tom, now largely fleshed out, his own role. This marked the beginning of Raven: Priestess of Nocturne. Amyway next month’s theme is plot, and that’s where we’ll pick that thread up. Also, I’ll offer free downloads of a previous direction I thought of taking the story in. I still have the chapters here.