The World of Tiranis, a reintroduction (Patreon)

Titanis is a world I created exclusively for my Patreon, when I started this, so I would have a place to write any kind of stories I’d want to write. (Although. I almost certainly thought of it as “stories you’d want to read.” I’d lost track of why I wrote at that point)

Because I wanted to be able to tell any kind of story, I made it a world of humans and furries. Knowing I’d want to have stories of superheroes, I set a rule that furries were the only ones who could have innate powers and humans, the only ones who could create super-science. Beyond that, I’d allow magic and the supernatural, but I wouldn’t allow aliens.

I immediately thought of stories to tell in that world and while I no longer remember the order in which they came, I wrote ideas for a family drama, a medical drama, a police drama, and something that would cover a span of time when the city of Tiranis had simply vanished from the world.

Thinking of a slogan for the city (a bad one, I think) it became “Tiranis, the City of Soaring Dreams”.

Before I continue, the reason I’m writing this is that Tiranis came up in conversation on my stream recently with a supporter and they didn’t know about it. It was the first time anyone since I started my Patreon asked to see some of it, so I hadn’t bothered creating a collection at that point. Thinking it would be easy to just do a search for Tiranis and put the in a collection I did just that, the search anyway and…well, I don’t know of most of the files are just gone, or if the search system is that bad, but it wanted me to look through 200 pages of results. i.e. each and everyone of my post, I think. And not in any order I could make sense of (there were results for Breaking Step when the search query was “The Lord of Tiranis, an Origin.”

So, I’m going to be uploading the files again. Unless I get requests for it to be faster, it will be at the rate of one chapter a week to avoid spaming everyone. They will be posted across all the support tiers at the same time, with at least one story available to the public.

So, what stories did I write for this world?

Right off the bat, nearly none of them are complete. Because I didn’t understand why I wrote, the lack of interest in them from my supporters put me in a position where I had to chose between this world and publishing books. Publishing books still brings in more money.

To be clear, this isn’t on you, it’s on me. As I said, I’d lost track of why I wrote.

The first thing I did was look to stuff I’d already written to see if they would fit in this world and I found two stories that would with only a minimum of alteration

Foxtran is a superheros adventure type of story with something of a pulp feel to it, in my opinion. It was centered in “The City” and the characters traveled to another country that was clearly fictional. The only element of “The City” established in this story is a neighborhood that was slightly below sea level and that flooded regularly. I don’t recall if it’s named in that story, but that game me the neighborhood of The Swamp for Tiranis.

Another story is Amped. Which I wrote for a guy I was talking with online at the time. It was a mix of porn and life story about a guy who gained powers after being experimented on, but because of that he’d kicked out of the body builder circuit and had to turn to porn to earn money. It didn’t give me anything major, and some of the character needed to be changed to fit the rules of the world, but Amp has made appearances already in other stories.

Then I wrote a police drama to explore the implications of the super science in which an antro detective and his human partner investigate the disappearance of multiple people. I don’t know why, but I gave it a dark-ish ending.

I wrote a some outright porn stories set around Robert Alexander a successful business own with extremely loose morales and a taste for using his employees for his own pleasure. Other than the sex there was no specific goals with these stories

Then there is Mixed Bag, of which I have two ‘snippets’ at about 1k words each, and a lot of ideas for where this could go in my head. It’s a family drama centering around a couple raising three adopted sons. The couple are retired super villains who decided they wanted a family instead of more capers. When the story would start, I know the eldest of the boys already has powers, I think the next oldest is coming into his, and the youngest would be getting his at some point in the series. The boys don’t know their parents used to be super villains, or that they even have powers. The oldest is determined to become a superhero.

The Reignhearts is a medical drama following three generations of doctors. Samuel, the son is in his first year of residency at the hospital where his father, Richard, is one of the star surgeon. Walter, his grandfather, is a family practitioner with his own clinic and hates that his son and grandson are in the ‘medical industrial complex’. I have 14k of this written. When I wrote it, I thought it was how the story would start, but looking at it now, I think this would be the second ‘episode’ with some of the elements being stretched over the full ‘season’.

Then we get to what would start the epic, and give me the idea to eventually create a ‘comic book style’ crossover between all the stories that would reveal the secrets of this world existance and, well, you know, a big spectacle of storytelling and that kind of stuff.

The Founding of Tiranis started ‘innocently’ enough. Exploring how the city came to be and who the person who would eventually be called “the Lord Tiranis” was. As with 90% of my stories. There wasn’t much of a plan beyond those two ideas, and the resulting story is about 12k in length, it’s complete with a bitter-sweet ending, and it’s one story I know I’m going to make available to anyone who comes to my Patreon.

The thing is that through this story I hint at a lot of stuff that I just couldn’t stop thinking about afterward, and that started…

The Lord of Tiranis, An Origin. When I stopped writing this, it was over 200k words, and I’d also written ‘the ending’

An epic was not what I had in mind when I started this. All I was looking to do was explain why there were furries in this world and how come some of them had powered. When I was thinking about what this story was going to be I’d say that it only covered the first 50k, and was going to end there.

Only it didn’t. Somewhere along the way of writing this, I decided I needed to write how the world went from what it was, to what it would be in “The Founding of Tiranis”. So, I kept writing, and writing. My co-scripter definitely helped with some elements, but on the whole the entirety of Tiranis has been put Pansting. And that might be another contributor to me stopping.

Somewhere at the tail end of this, or after, or earlier, I really am bad with time. I started “Going Home” which was the story of a soldier returning home after a war. This story started as a way to explore the Tiranis of the ‘present’ through the eyes of someone who had been away for a long time. And, indirectly to set up some of the elements of the crossover which at this point had something of a name.

Reborn was going to be it. It would start with establishing the players that hadn’t been in their own stories already. I have already written 5 of them, although they aren’t all complete. Then they would meet in Tiranis, and the big battle would start and spill over to every other story I’d told by then.

I still want to tell that story, because with the end of it, comes the explanations. The ‘payoffs’ if you will.

And to be clear, Tiranis isn’t dead. A better descriptive is that it’s hibernating. It’s always at the back of my mind. I have new stories for this world, I always have new stories.

The situation is the same as it was when I decided I needed to stop. Books I publish still bring in more money than my support sites, so those are what I have to focus on. I figure that if I ever hit $1000 from my Patreon, I’ll be in a position to shift focus and give Tiranis more of my time. This time, I’ll check with all of you to get a sense of which stories you’d like to read, instead of writing just the ones I love.

So, that’s about it. Starting next Sunday, I’ll start posting The Founding of Tiranis and then more every sunday after that.

I hope you enjoy those stories too, and, as always, don’t be afraid of letting me know what you think.