Congratulations on the progress! Chapter 7 sounds a real behemoth, it must be good to have it done. I hope the life stuff goes smoothly and you get some time to relax as well.
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While I’ve enjoyed all of your work up to this point, I think this is my favourite premise so far, though given that Viv was my favourite part of Stars I may be a bit biased.
My favourite parts so far:
Rubbing people’s noses in the reality of their hero vs the fiction they have created.
Absolutely destroying the Broken Stone League about how back in your day they were a bunch of idiots fighting in the mud and how it doesn’t look like much has changed (vicious).
Being able to play a tired/reluctant hero. It’s one of my favourite tropes that we are starting to see a little more of. My hero (Ren Brand) is deeply devoted to the ideals of his homeland, but he wasn’t exactly unhappy at getting a chance to rest.
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I think its time for me to wet my toes in this one.
I own Heroes of Myth, but still haven’t dove into it. But Stars Arisen? Ugh, that one caught me by surprise. I loved that one.
I’m excited to throw myself into this one. Congrats on the work so far!
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Hope that gets settled. Good luck with the subsequent updates!
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Okay, chapter 6 is up now, with a new HTML file to download in the first post! Parts of the chapter may still change in the future (as can anything at this stage, but it may be more likely than usual) - this chapter is pretty closely related to some things that happen in chapter 8 that may be adjusted as I get to actually writing them. But I’ve edited the thing that was bugging me the most to a version I like more. (Being deliberately a little vague about what that thing was, because explaining what I changed and why might be a little spoilery, or at least imply some spoilers. I can probably elaborate on it in the future if I remember or am asked.)
Chapter 6 has opportunities to explore several different subplots, as well as more romance opportunities. (Not so much with Cecilia, but you spent a lot of time with her in chapter 5 and you’ll spend a lot of time with her in chapter 7 as well. A lot of her stuff happens at different times because she doesn’t hang out with the rest of these people.)
Additional content warnings for this chapter:
- NPC panic attack
- Natural (well, unnatural) disaster
Excited to hear any thoughts! I’m also thinking over future ideas for this thread. I’m planning on posting chapter 7 here once chapter 8 is done as usual, but that might be the last one I include in the demo - chapter 8 starts going into some endgame stuff that I might rather save for the official beta and release. Not completely decided on that, though. Either way, there will likely be a pretty long gap between the last game update on this thread and when the beta goes up as I write the last few chapters of the game (which will almost certainly be the longest). If there’s anything you’d like to see me post in longer periods of downtime, let me know!
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Bug report:
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Thank you! Might not be able to get a new version up right away, but I’ll get those fixed.
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Strangely
Even though my MC expressed dissent at the idea of regaining his his body (he’s got nuanced reasons, despite his attitude about it) I did think it odd to have no reference to what’s been going on with it.
Specifically in the scene with the four choices of: help rebuild, help the people be more at ease, go sneakily to the sea, or go to the sea boldly. I kinda wanted a choice to visit Senna’s lab instead since none of the others felt “right”, and my MC was (at this point) reconsidering because he was starting to feel romantic interest in one of the ROs. A good enough reason as any to be self conscious about the lack of a physical form to cuddle. It also plays into his being uninterested in Leviathan, and his preference for avoiding the people because he is not their hero. In many ways, he’s not blind to how differently the world is seen by these people descended from his peers from hundreds of years ago. What with him being pro-monarchy, anti immature a-holes (read: Luceris)
As for those “nuanced reasons” it kinda boils down to him being dead, knowing he’s dead, and being scared out of his ghostly skin about becoming attached to something he knows can be taken away. Not even just potentially; it already happened when he died. To feel alive again? Oh, he’s scared enough to be sick (if he could lose his lunch, he probably would have from the stress of it at the back of his mind!)
But now there’s someone he likes, and he’s no longer sure what he should do. Would reclaiming his (new) old body make him less interesting? Less appealing? Would the enemies in the shadows surrounding his homeland start thinking he was less of a threat? (Despite him wanting very little to do with the issues of modern people’s concerns.)
His feelings are very complex, as you can see. 
That’s just what I was thinking around the time of that particular scene, though. Not going to worry about it if nothing changes. 
Especially since a lot of what I mentioned was very specific to the experience my MC was having.
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The idea at that moment in particular is that the ROs are all busy with other things - if you’ve already started a romance, you’ll see a note about that before the choice itself. (Senna’s not actually in their lab at that point, they’re still in the infirmary helping with the patients.) So that’s why the options of what you can do there are a little more limited. There are definitely additional opportunities for lab-and-body stuff coming in the future, though - you hear a little more about it in chapter 7, and there will be a lot more in chapter 8, that’s one of the main plot threads there.
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Fairly belatedly, I’ve uploaded a new version in the first post that fixes the bugs reported above! A couple of other minor adjustments but nothing big - mostly adding terrestrial and anatomical magic entries to the glossary and establishing that the councilor Beren Vinter is a wizard. This isn’t terribly important to anything at the moment (and nor is Beren themself really), but just so you know: wizard.
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Had a dream last night that I remember very little about except that the Sorceress from Stars Arisen was Frey’s mom. Does this mean Frey was the protagonist of Stars Arisen? Unclear. Baz was also there but I do not recall his relationship to the situation.
Anyway, just letting you know that my subconscious is writing crossover fanfics of my own games, carry on.
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Hello! Chapter 7 is up, with a new demo to download in the first post. There are dragons. There is drama. There is romance, mostly with Cecilia (as I noted above, her stuff tends to happen at different times than other people) but some with others as well. This is a long chapter, but chapter 8, which I recently finished and which is not up yet, is a fair amount longer. Chapter 8 came in at just over 160,000 words, which makes the current game draft longer than Heroes of Myth. (I still anticipate the length of this game being between Heroes of Myth and Stars Arisen, but maybe closer to the latter than I originally thought.)
I’m not immediately thinking of any content warnings for this chapter aside from the ones that apply generally to the game, but let me know if I missed something. There’s a lot of game to keep track of at this point.
I’ve also made various fairly small edits to the earlier chapters, mostly adjusting some things relating to Haberna and the League. Edits like this are probably ongoing - there are various political machinations relating to the League where I’m still adjusting some of the details to make everything fit together correctly. (Said machinations have very little to do with chapter 7 but a great deal to do with chapter 8.) The biggest of the changes is that the League anatomist who shows up in chapter 6, Gisela Saller, is now a man named Gerhard Saller. There are reasons for this, but they are complex and slightly spoilery for later stuff. (They also have essentially nothing to do with the in-world story itself, but I can’t really explain further without getting into the spoilers.) If you see any places where the wrong pronouns or other gendered words are used for Gerhard, let me know!
I think this will probably be the last chapter I put up for the demo before the beta, though it’s possible I’ll change my mind on that. (Chapter 8 starts getting into some endgame stuff that I’d like to save for the complete version, but it’s also complex enough that it would likely benefit from more testing time, so we’ll see.) I do think that chapter 8 will likely be the longest chapter in the game, so the remaining ones should hopefully go a little faster - as I’ve noted, I’m not great at that kind of prediction, but chapter 8 has always looked longer structurally than the remaining chapters will. There are two chapters and an essentially chapter-length epilogue left to write, and they will still be quite long even if hopefully shorter than chapter 8, so there’s still a while to go, but we’re getting there!
As always, let me know about any bugs or issues with the game, or anything you’d like to see in this thread in the future, particularly as this will likely be the last significant game content update. Thanks to everyone who’s tried out the game so far!
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Chapter 9 is complete! It’s actually been complete for close to a month and chapter 10 is well underway, but I kept forgetting to post an update. I’m still planning to leave the demo as it is and save the rest of the chapters for beta and release, so the demo hasn’t been updated. Chapter 9 is 118,000 words, and the full game through chapter 9 is now up to about 737,000 words. (I still expect it to be shorter than Stars Arisen, but probably not by much.) Chapter 10 is the last chapter of the main story, but there will be an epilogue afterward that will likely be chapter-length.
I’m still trying to think of snippets or fun facts or other interesting things to post here in the meantime, so let me know if there’s anything you’d like to know more about! Here’s something to start with: in chapter 4, a certain choice can lead to you hearing a ghost sing a thematically relevant sailors’ song. (I don’t know that I can call it a sea shanty, because those are technically work songs and I imagine this one as a bit too eerie to fit that kind of rhythm.) For anyone who hasn’t seen that scene, here’s the song:
What nightmare lies in the deep?
When my bones rot, where will I sleep?
Down below the tides,
Where the warden hides,
In its tomb, in the gloom, will I sleep?
(Any spoilers are very slight, it gives nothing specific away.)
In my notes, I’ve actually written a couple more verses to this song. I doubt these will end up making their way into the game itself - I haven’t found a good place for them, and I don’t think they’ve come together quite as well as the first verse yet. But for anyone curious, here they are:
What monster flees from the sun?
From the shoal, to the trench, does it run?
When we part the waves,
Will they be our graves?
When I die, will I fly, can I run?
What terror shrieks from below?
When we sing its song, does it know?
Can it hear our call?
Does it hear us all?
When it screams in my dreams, will I know?
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Some feedback on this song:
Song stuff
I think the first part would read better as:
What nightmare lies WITHin the deep?
When my bones rot, where will I sleep?
The way I read it, the first two lines as written have a pattern like this:
What night // mare lies // in the // deep
When my // bones rot, // where will // I sleep
This feels sorta awkward to me. I think going from “in” to “within” feels better, since it changes to:
What night // mare lies // with in // the deep
When my // bones rot, // where will // I sleep
This may be more of a poetic meter thing than a song thing, but I think keeping with the meter gives it more of a shanty-esque feel
All that aside, I love getting to play a ghost and I am really looking forward to this one. 
That song is great! I love the imagery and the rhyme scheme, and thinking about a ghost singing it is kind of giving me chills.
If you can’t end up working the whole song into the actual game, I hope you leave it in as a *comment. That would be a great Easter egg for code divers!
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“In” and “the” are both unstressed in the meter I hear in my head. (As are “will” and “I” in the next line.) Kind of a quickened run-up to the end of the line.
For anyone wondering about meter
It’s not strictly iambic, it’s a mix of iambs and anapests. Less regimented than a shanty would be, but that’s fine, it’s supposed to be more haunting. The two-syllable unstressed sections are still on the same beat, eighth notes rather than quarter notes. I don’t come up with tunes, but I hear meter very clearly.
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