Creating a fictional shared universe

Is continuity a curse?

Nov 18, 2025

It’s time for a rare Tuesday edition of Amazing Journey, my column on making comics! If you’ve missed a prior installment, you can browse our back issues at the end of the post.

Today we are taking a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a fictional shared universe.

There was an idea…

I wrote what ended up becoming the prologue of Guild of Tokens almost 11 years ago, entering the flow state to create what I thought was a perfect piece of flash fiction: a person finds a section on Craigslist called “Quests” and completes their first five real-world quests in New York City. It was sadly rejected by a handful of flash fiction online publications.

I then spent the next few years building out a story that continued that original piece, serializing it over a few months in my nascent monthly newsletter. It was … not very good. Major characters appeared immediately, and things built to an insane crescendo without any room for the plot or characterization to breathe.

So I went back and wrote more. And when I did, the story veered completely off course, as I discovered and uncovered who Jen Jacobs1 was. I finished 12 chapters and packaged it together with that original prologue into Guild of Tokens: Initiate, and then let it marinate for a few months. In the meantime, I took the side character from Initiate, Beatrice, and wrote a story about her (Trainee). One story became two stories became three stories, and suddenly I had a second main character, but a personal story only big enough for one of them.

… to bring together a group of remarkable people…

With that conundrum in mind, I plotted Beatrice’s exit as a secondary character from the NYC Questing Guild series, setting her up with a new status quo at the end of Guild of Magic. But I had no clue what was next for her. I eventually figured it out and that the story wouldn’t be another book series, but instead would be a comic.

I wrote the first draft of the script for issue 1, full of cross-references, a cameo from Jen Jacobs, and several editor’s caption boxes encouraging readers to check out my other books (including two in the first few pages!).

Fortunately, I had my friend read over the script first before I sent it to Fran Delgado to start the art.

Too much “inside baseball” was exactly the right note here, and I realized that by focusing too much on crossing over the stories, I was alienating potential readers who had never read any of my books before. So I drastically scaled that back and took a few additional pages to let the introduction breathe. That didn’t mean eliminating all cross-references. I just needed to be more strategic with them.

In addition to Beatrice’s spin-off, the end of Guild of Magic generated a second new plot thread: there was an empty Seat in the Guild to fill, but again, this wasn’t Jen’s story to tell. She could be tangentially involved, but I didn’t want to start adding POV characters to book 3, especially when the books had been written using a first-person perspectives.

So it was time for a second spin-off: Guild of Magic: The Gauntlet.

… to see if they could become something more…

I wanted this new project to be fundamentally different from the existing Guild books. That meant multiple POVs, third-person instead of first-person narration, and a new framing device: a Questing podcast with interviews and hosts who will follow the action as the competition for the Guild Seat progresses. I began writing this new story over two years ago in fits and spurts, but finally committed to it at the beginning of 2024. Along the way, I started dropping hints about this story in my other work. With issue 1 of Blood of Atlantis coming out in summer 2024, I made a passing reference to what I was now calling the Gauntlet, to pique readers’ interest:

This also imposed a time constraint: all subsequent issues of Blood of Atlantis needed to occur after the Gauntlet had reached its top 10 and that the villains in issue 1 are among those 10.2

… see if they could work together when we needed them to …

Readers of Marvel and DC understand that the titles in the mainline continuity don’t always mesh well together. Mr. Fantastic could be off in New Avengers fighting incursions in another universe, but at the same time a week later, he’s going back in time to ancient Rome with his family. For a comics line with dozens of titles, there is a certain flexibility that the readers will permit (even if it always doesn’t totally make sense).

But for my little universe, with only three interconnected titles, I wanted things to line up in a cogent manner. In The Gauntlet, there is an after-party at Beatrice’s coffee shop/speakeasy that takes place after one of the Challenges, which is rather eventful. So we need to have our BoA crew acknowledge it:

And you might notice that a few of the characters in issue 2 are wearing metal bracers around their wrists. A small visual detail that is not referenced on page, but a nice little easter egg hopefully for people who are reading the comics and the books. Later in issue 2, I take my biggest swing, leaving a plot thread dangling that will run through The Gauntlet first before coming back to Blood of Atlantis several issues later. It’s a small subplot that doesn’t impact the main storyline, but helps give the story universe a lived-in feeling.

… to fight the battles we never could.

Although continuity can be complicated at times (witness the multiple universe resetting crises in DC Comics or the sliding scale timeline in Marvel Comics), it offers a unique storytelling mechanism and challenge: how to build a new story on top of decades of existing ones that honors and respects both? Even though my own fictional universe isn’t quite that old, I try to keep that balance of existing vs. new in mind as I add to its story tapestry.

Writing The Gauntlet has been such a fun experience, from developing new character voices, to introducing new villains and magic. The Kickstarter campaign is currently live through November 20, and it’s a great on-ramp into the wider fictional world I’ve created. I I hope you’ll check it out!

Do you love playing D&D but sometimes wish the quests and adventures took place in the real world?

Do you like determined heroes, gritty cityscapes, and strange magic?

Does it seem to you that there is a secret magical organization running everything that’s just out of your reach?

Then you’ll love Guild of Magic: The Gauntlet!

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Jen was originally named Jen Janwoski, but right before I released Guild of Tokens: Initiate, I wisely changed her name to Jen Jacobs.

As a writer, you can rely on your characters not always telling the truth to give you some wiggle room with continuity. Are the hooded villains in issue 1 of Blood of Atlantis realllly contestants in the Gauntlet? Or was that just a convenient lie that Beatrice told? You’ll have to read the book to find out!

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