#gondolend

I don't expect anyone to actually read any of it since it's not fan fiction about skinny white boys from boring BBC shows kissing each other or whatever it is everyone here is into nowadays, but HERE IT IS ANYWAY.

Gondolend stories:

The Lek

The Women with Tattooed Faces

The Messenger

The Silver Pipe

The Crocodile Tamers

The Guardian

The Wall

The Hunter

The Prey

Long Winter Night

Eleven Days in the Valley

The Fisherman

The Houses of Stone

The Isani District

The Mirung

The Beasts of Kulig County

The Capris Herder

Woe be upon you: a selection of terrible Gondolend short fiction appears

Other stuff:

A Once in a Lifetime Event

Aliens in the Field

Free Time on Mars

Ship-to-Ship Combat in the 32nd Century

Screw You Guys, I'm an AI Author Now

Trouble in Dinosaur Park

Unfinished stories:

Bad Decisions All Around

Dash Manhunk in the Universe of Madness

The Samara is a vast network of fern prairie, grassland, and savanna that makes up much of the Democratic Republic of Samaraland. When I began writing the first Gondolend story that would go through entirely more rewrites and permutations than necessary and eventually become The Beasts of Kulig County it was mostly based on the flat open prairie of northeastern South Dakota, where I grew up.

But as time went on, and I fleshed out the area and its culture more, it became more inspired by parts of sub-Saharan Africa like Botswana and the Masai Mara.

There's still a bit of South Dakota there in how a lot of the local economy is based around ranching and agriculture, but now it has a much more African vibe.

The indigenous peoples who call the Samara home are also largely inspired by various sub-Saharan cultures.

Since I think body art is cool, a lot of Samara tribes practice various forms of traditional tattooing, scarification, and body painting, which combined with their often elaborate and colorful styles of clothing makes a visit to Samaraland a very visually interesting experience. Sort of like Wakanda from the MCU, but with more of a mid-to-late '90s technological level.

In terms of wildlife, a lot of the Samara's native fauna is based on the Jurassic Morrison and Tendaguru formations, with some Cretaceous animals thrown in as well.

(Art by John Conway.)

(Art by Greg Paul.)

(Art by Emiliano Troco.)

Of course, centuries of human habitation have taken their toll on the Samara's native wildlife, with many species being seriously threatened; in particular the kifokubwa, Torvosaurus, is almost extinct within Samaraland, though OutBarrier populations are, as far as anyone knows, doing just fine. In many parts of the Samara large theropod populations have been so severely depleted that the ratanga, a species of landcroc growing up to seven meters in length, has begun to occupy the niche of top predator.

Hey, you know what every fictional world needs?

Mothafuckin' MAAAAAAAAAAPS.

This was the first Gondolend map I ever drew, back in I think 2000 before the world had really been fleshed out beyond what I needed to tell the first version of the story that would eventually become The Beasts of Kulig County. A lot of the familiar landmarks are there, the prairie that would become the Samara, marshy lands at the feet of a southern mountain range, and the Cassowary Valley to the north, and the Barrier encircling everything...but it was all on a much smaller scale than what would come later.

This was the second map I drew, and while some details would change the major things were pretty much established at this point. I still wasn't thinking things through at this point though, which is why the people of Gondolend apparently decided to put their Prime Meridian thousands of miles outside of civilization.

A more recent version of the previous map.

The human-inhabited area of Gondolend, bordered by the Great Barrier.

A political map of what was, at the time, the Allied Provinces of Gondolendia, done in the style of a school textbook map. I later decided I liked the idea of all the provinces being their own countries however, rather that provinces of one stupidly huge nation.

A more recent political map, with all the former provinces elevated to nation status. Some of these names are pretty outdated, however; the Consolidated Forests, Plains, and Abendos Lemone would eventually come to be called the Democratic Republic of Samaraland, for example.

This one's from 2014, and the geography has been more or less finalized by this point.

Image by John Conway.

I don't have any problem with Velociraptor, in fact I happen to think dromaeosaurs are (well, were) very interesting animals, but I hate the popular perception of them as these highly intelligent, lightning-fast death machines thanks to movies like Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park I love you, but god dammit.

So for Gondolend, I deliberately set out to portray its Velociraptor in the most non-threatening, non-badass way possible, which is why Gina punts one like a football in that excerpt up there. In general, throughout its range in Gondolendia Velociraptor is considered an annoying pest and a threat to livestock, and in some areas its local name also doubles as an insult.

Fun fact about this little story: it was going to serve as the prelude to a longer story, in which after outlawing slavery and putting down House Valac's little uprising in response Denika Agares I raises a prominent local family to noble House status and then returns to the capital with their daughter to secure a political marriage to give them a foot in the door. The main bulk of the story would have been split between the daughter, Fa Mim, learning to navigate the world of Garacani nobility, and a growing unrest among the Garacani upper class over suddenly having to treat their Hahn Gar laborers like people and seeing one of them hobnobbing with the upper crust like some kinda bigshot, until they have to put down another god damn dickhead uprising.

I'm posting these separately from the straight paleoart, screw you.

Concepts for the Kriil. The Kriil were a species of intelligent yet highly xenophobic allosaurid that appeared in the second ever Gondolend story, which I'd never gotten around to rewriting to be less of a poorly-plotted mess that I was basically making up as I went along. Future stories would have brought them into conflict with Gondolend's human population, which, considering they were about an iron age-level of technological advancement and humanity had guns and bombs and jets and tanks, would not have gone super well for them.

There were two possible outcomes to this storyline that I'd envisioned: in the first humanity is forced to basically commit genocide on them in order to get them to stop causing trouble, which they would then feel Very Bad about, and in the second, humanity would manage to ally with a more reasonable segment of Kriil society who are content to simply shun all contact with Gondolend's other intelligent races than outright exterminate them.

Then again, I kind of didn't think about that storyline at all for about a decade, and since looking back on it now feels just a bit iffy I may very well have changed their entire characterization to make the Kriil more sympathetic once it came time to revisit them. With Gondolend currently on indefinite hiatus with no current plans to write any more stories for it, all we can do at this point is speculate.

My first giant hopper concept, before I decided to give it big heterodontosaur-style tusks.

Read chapter three of my novella The Beasts of Kulig County if you want to see what happens if you hit one of these guys with a jeep.