SHOREFALL might be a zig instead of a zag, as far as these sorts of stories go. I realized pretty quickly that it couldn't be a story where The Fight Against The Bad Guys just progresses. The story was uninterested in having that conversation.

Plenty of folks have mentioned that FOUNDRYSIDE is a critique of capitalism, but I've never felt that quite lands. Tevanne isn't necessarily a libertarian capitalist fantasy. It's more of a mercantilist trade empire, with lots of cronyism up and down.

Libertarians would be aghast. There's no market. No personal liberties. No perfect knowledge. It's all riddled with inefficiencies.

Rather, I've always felt that Tevanne is more of a story of technologies.

Civilization, for example, is a technology. It is a complicated device that operates to proliferate, spread, and stabilize.

But technologies are neutral. They're neither bad nor good.

However, some technologies, in some situations, tend to allocate and aggregate power in the hands of a few, as opposed to delivering benefits to human beings at large.

Still other technologies are just downright destabilizing.

We think the printing press is pretty great, sure - but the sudden widespread availability of knowledge does align somewhat uncomfortably with several centuries of warfare.

The question is - what kind of rig is human civilization? And how can it be tinkered with? And by who?

SHOREFALL kind of skips the fun, swashbuckling revolution aspect that should go here, and instead injects a character who's done about half a million fun swashbuckling revolutions, and knows how these things go.

And he knows they do not end well.

It's a fun proposition, to stick the Foundryside gang in a space with this character. They want the same world, just different; he believes this will just lead to the same world all over again.

It's a debate. But - with a lot of explosions.