Excerpt: The Fall of Castle Cliche

So, let us pretend –for the sake of pretending- that there was once a place called Castle Cliché. It wasn’t a very happy place at the best of times, but it got by, its nobles were inbred and snobby and its peasants were inbred and famished, it had a few priests and a few mages, a few monsters in the cells and an executioner who – in his hayday – was regionally respected as being pretty handy with his axe. Over the years the Castles influence waxed and waned, though it was never important enough to be attacked by invading armies or ransacked by dragons. Life there was “good” and the people who lived under the Lord Cliché were “happy” insofar as they didn’t know what they were missing (their teeth, birth control, and vitamin C).