Foreword

"The General Core" is the first story I have ever written, and unfortunately that will soon be obvious in that I had yet to find my own writing style in the first several chapters. Before this story I mostly wrote rule systems for Pen-and-Paper (or tabletop) RPGs as well as Adventures and Campaigns for players, but not stories for readers.

As a result the first chapters contain too many infodumps (the readers are not game masters and don't need many of the background info a gamemaster would need to handle a story) and a too complex system (it was one that I would have liked to test but too complex to impose on my players, much less on readers) and a few other mistakes. But now you also know why some of the reviews praised how lifelike the descriptions were, how they made the readers believe they were going in themselves - I had a lot of experience writing descriptions for players to experience them in a PnP-RPG...

Unfortunately I can't rewrite the early chapters to be more like the current chapters of the story. I simply don't have the capacity to do that and keep up with new chapters - in fact due to my health problems I couldn't even keep the original schedule before the writer's block that made several months of complete hiatus. I have been early medically retired for almost two years now, and my exhaustion didn't stop when changing from working to retirement...

Stolen story; please report.

However I did work on a few things while waiting for the missing idea on the "desert"-chapter for the General Core. A lot of that was designing a much better and simpler System for use in my stories. That design is not yet complete, but I will switch to it sometime in the next chapters of "The General Core", and use it in my other stories from the beginning ("Broken Earth", "The Guild Beyond" and a rewrite of "Shaleen the Wanderer", all of which are in various stages of first draft already).

As for the early chapters of "The General Core": At one time or another I will remove several of the info-dumps from them and streamline the quests a tiny bit (again mostly removing parts), but there will be no real rewrite to change the errors already there (for example I completely forgot that water and snow are black in the sphere when getting the snow foxes and designing the silver foxes for the General, and that is too ingrained into the story for a change without a big rewrite).

So please ignore those reviews that call the early chapters tedious or needing a rewrite, and focuse on the much better reviews for the chapters after I found my writing style. I agree with most of what the reviews said, but I simply can't change my old writing with the current restrictions on my time.

And now have fun with "The General Core" (if you are new readers).

Best Regards

Andar