Now we come to the end of the first Red Rising trilogy. This has been quite a ride and I’ve been reading a lot of Pierce Brown. My original plan was to immediately pick up Iron Gold and start with that after all of this, but I think I need a break for a couple of weeks so that I can rest and reflect on this trilogy. That’s a problem for tomorrow, though! Today is the day I review the final book in Pierce Brown’s first trilogy: Morning Star. If you haven’t heard my thoughts on the first two books, they can be summarized as Red Rising being mediocre, but Golden Son being a fun experience. My expectation was that Morning Star would be as good or better than its predecessor, but were my expectations met?

Because we now know what all we want to happen in our arc—or what might happen—we have a lot of work to do to get the setting for our arc fleshed out and expanded. This course is going to be where we take care of that. By the time you've finished with this part of my homebrew campaign creation series, you'll have a solid grasp on the setting of your arc. We've done a lot of world-building so far and we're about halfway done with that, now. Soon, we'll be focusing largely on the stories of our campaign. Bear with me, we're nearly there!

Today, I thought it would be good to talk about some of the people and stories that inspired me to tell stories of my own. These are going to be books, authors, even games that originally gave me the drive to sit down and put pen to paper… or fingers to keyboard, as the case was later on. I’ve been writing since I was extremely young, honestly. I don’t remember exactly when I started writing stories, primarily about my classmates. However, I do remember that even from a young age I was checking out books about writing, publishing, editing… all things related to becoming an author. A few key players were definitely responsible for inspiring this.

I’d already been led to expect that the first book is the weakest in the trilogy, so I kept moving and started reading the second book. I’m glad I did, because--as you’ll find in this spoiler-free review--I found it to be an improvement on the first book in the trilogy. However, just how much of an improvement was it?

In this session, we’re going to take what we developed in the previous session and really flesh it out. I’m going to break down how I write my arcs and talk about what I do to ensure successful, cohesive improvisation during a session. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find links to download the template that I use for writing an arc. If you have your own that you’d like to use, feel free to use that! My template is also fairly focused on Dungeons and Dragons, but it can easily be modified to any other system.

The canon (that means no CD-I, Hyrule Warriors, or even, sadly, Lampshade of No Real Significance Zelda Games. I originally used Tiermaker for this, which you can see in the video version of this post (linked down below). For this version of the content, I've reorganized it so that the games appear in their actual order. You'll see my least favorite first, then we'll work our way up to my favorite Zelda game out of all of them.