Story Idea 3: Zenith of Sorcery (Patreon)

WARNING! POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!

A while ago I said I had four ideas for the next story I intended to write, and that I would eventually ask my patrons what thoughts they had on each. Well, I’ve made an outline for each of the four ideas. Here is one of them. If you have time, please take a look and tell me what you think. Does this look interesting to you? Do you have any ideas or concerns you wish to raise? This isn’t a popularity vote, and I reserve the right to do whatever I want regardless of the reception each idea gets, but I do care what you think. That’s why I’m asking.

Oh yeah, just to reiterate the warning at the top of the post and clarify it – the following is a fairly detailed look at the story idea I may eventually write. If I do, some of the information may constitute mild spoilers for that story. There is nothing really crucial here, but obviously I cannot discuss the story without revealing some surface-level details about it. You have been warned.

Story Idea 3: Zenith of Sorcery

The basic premise of the story is that we are following a mighty archmage in a classical D&D-style fantasy world, watching him grow his own powerbase and take on various established powers. He tackles various crises, gathers a bunch of students and followers, and explores the limits of his abilities. 

Eventually, the story will progress into some kind of ‘multiversal’ plot where the protagonist’s planet comes into conflict with other planets and the higher realms of existence (D&D-style outer planes). I am still not sure how I want this to play out, so I won’t go into details on this.

The Setting: 

The setting is a classical Tolkien/D&D-like fantasy, with elves, dwarves, orcs, and relatively primitive technology levels. Unlike your average fantasy setting of that type, the story doesn’t pretend that society is relatively unchanged despite the presence of magic, demons, etc. Kingdoms don’t bother with huge armies of normal soldiers, for instance, because they’d be useless in actual wars. Things like that.

There is a noticeable influence of xianxia on the setting. Specifically, all the gods are simply ascended people from the material planes, mages and other powerful people tend to congregate in supra-national organizations, and the magic system has several fundamental transformations as one progresses in power. These aren’t really power levels in the sense you find in anime and xianxia – the differences in power between different tiers aren’t nearly as severe – but they do provide a clear distinction between different people and the natives of the setting put a lot of emphasis on them.

If you don’t mind spoilers, I have a document outlining some aspects of the magic system available here.

The Protagonist: 

The protagonist is Marcus King, also known as Zenith, an incredibly powerful archmage from the Great Sea Academy, one of the major powers on his planet. Six years prior, he lost a political fight for the leadership of the Academy to his main rival, despite being far more magically powerful than him. He then went into self-imposed exile, travelling all over the world, eventually deciding his loss was a blessing in disguise.

At the start of the story, he has just ended his self-imposed exile and come back home to his home region. It’s a fresh start, and he has only grown even more powerful during his wandering. The sky is the limit! Who cares about leadership of the Great Sea Academy when he can make a new faction, one personally loyal to him and organized along his own ideas!

However, not everyone is glad to see him back…

Personality wise, Marcus is meant to be very confident and direct. He’s very powerful and he knows it, and this bleeds into his every interaction with people. Furthermore, he was orphaned from a very young age, and immersed himself in his training soon afterwards, so his understanding of what the life of your average person is like is… tenuous. Still, he has a sense of duty and a code of honor that prevent him from simply bullying people with his awesome powers to get what he wants.

Power-wise, Marcus has a wide range of powers and magical artifacts, too many to concisely describe. Hopefully the power level doesn’t make him look like a Marty Stu or a pure power fantasy.

Other Notes:

The story has a pretty massive theme shift roughly half-way through the plot, once it becomes multiversal in scope. Hopefully it will work, but this kind of thing has a huge potential to kill the story outright.

Since the protagonist is already very powerful, the power growth he experiences in the story will be relatively small. You’re not following some beginner working his way towards power – Marcus already has lots and lots of power. It’s just a question of whether he can leverage it properly.

I’m thinking of including an occasional alternate viewpoint in the story. Some story elements would be hard to pull off by following Marcus alone. Plus, Marcus is powerful enough that sometimes what he does is less interesting than the ripple effects it has on his surroundings.