Hello and welcome to the most embarrassing post I’ve made so far this year. Today, I’m going to be reading some of my old writing. I’ve sampled a few bits from older pieces I was able to gather and will be reading and reacting to these samples throughout this post. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate and recover everything that I’ve written. I did pull up some old Overlord Saga drafts. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find more than the first chapter of Elegance and Slaughter, which I only found because it had been used for querying back in the day. Some of these works are over ten years old, so I suspect they’ll be sufficiently cringe-inducing enough to justify this post.

ron Gold by Pierce Brown is the introduction to a second trilogy in the Red Rising universe. The first trilogy ended with Morning Star, which you can read my review of here. I enjoyed Golden Son in the first trilogy, but books one and three were average at best. Still, I wanted to continue the story, so I picked up Iron Gold and started reading. But was it worth it? Did I enjoy it? Was Iron Gold even a necessary book, or should the story have been left alone? These are the questions I will be answering in this spoiler-free review of Iron Gold by Pierce Brown.

Today, we’re getting complicated. I’m going to talk about the history and politics of our world here in this video, and both of these world-building aspects can be exceedingly complicated. It can be a lot of work, but I often find it to be well worth it. When you spend a lot of time on the history and politics of your world, it saves you a considerable amount of work and effort later down the line as you plan out your campaign. You’ll have a lot of information to draw from that you prepared in advance, so drafting the campaign arcs becomes much more doable. Additionally, having a solid idea of your world’s history and politics can make improvising during a session more feasible than it otherwise would be.

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is an annual challenge presented to writers. The rules are simple: write x number of words in one month. The standard is 50,000 words, which is the minimum length for a work to be considered a novel (while typically, a novel is actually 80,000-100,000 words in length). This challenge has been going on for several years.

I've been reading through Iron Gold throughout much of November. I had hoped to have it finished earlier, but tacking NaNoWriMo onto my litany of other tasks detracted from my reading time, among many other projects and duties that befell me, this month. Additionally, I changed to an overnight (12a-9a) shift, which meant that for at least a couple of weeks, I was sleeping when I should have been reading. Nevertheless, I’ll be wrapping up my reading this week and will have a review for Iron Gold out next Wednesday. In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to put together a reading blog for Iron Gold. This is my first time doing something like this, so bear with me while I continue learning the ropes.

Your players may have given you the names and a few details of some people they may know who could be part of your story’s first arc. I know mine did! If that’s the case, take time to note down everything your players told you about those characters. It’ll be important for this lesson! Once you’ve got that, you’re ready to dive into creating the shops and notable inhabitants for the setting of our first arc. I’ll be creating some NPCs and stores for the town of Kessit, where the first arc of my homebrew campaign will be taking place.