First off- thank you so much! Your critiques are the exact type of thing I'm looking for. The story and the style I'm using makes perfect sense in my head, and probably makes sense to my friends & family that I've told it to a million times, so it's extremely helpful to hear how it sounds (especially at the point the story is at, since it's still getting established with each chapter) to someone who has no connection to it. So thank you for reading it!
That being said, I'll answer some of the questions you asked- but let me make it clear that I know that if these things aren't very clear upon reading, it should probably be revised in the actual writing, since I can't exactly sit down each and every person who reads it and explain what's going on.
I don't plan on getting my story published- at least not for a long, long time. It does include lots of WotC-owned material, which will be a problem if I ever choose to try and so something with it, but everyone that I've consulted about writing has told me the first step is to write. I can worry about the legality and publishing issues much further down the line, if and when it becomes an issue. If I need to change names & remove references, I will later, but I've spent so much time worrying about the legality of publishing my story that it's taken me years to actually, you know, write it!
I'm curious as to what you mean by "proper spaces between paragraphs"- I know that putting spaces between each paragraph, as I do here, is often done to remove the whole wall-of-text look, but at the same time, proper writing doesn't have spaces between paragraphs. I suppose it couldn't hurt to add them, as it's being read on a computer screen rather than on pages of a book, though, so I'll take that into consideration.
As for what the book is committing to, the narration may seem strange so far, but my hope was to have each chapter be writting from a third-person limited perspective, with one (or a few) of the characters being sort of the focus of the perspective. So in the second chapter, for example, the orcs are being described as vermin and mindless creatures because the king/sir Aelfrey perceive them as such. The fact that they have a king is mentioned as a way to sort of clue in the reader that the narrator may not be as reliable as is assumed, but the fact that you've had issue with that definitely tells me that it might simply come off as inconsistent. I'll have to play around with that and see if there's a way to stick with the same style but make it seem more consistent.
As for sending the kingdom's finest rather than the army, it's like this: A group of twenty people won't stop the nation from being invaded if another army attacks. If there's an unknown threat far off that may be large or it may be small, sending a crack team of elite scouts and strikers to investigate (and deal with the threat if possible) is better than sending your entire army. As for the merchants & minstrels bit, yeah, that was sort of a holdover from something that I could have left out. So I'll definitely be revising that.
The rest of your questions (like the Artemis & Orin thing) I think were just bad wording on my part. Sometimes I try to put a bit too much weight behind each and every word I write and I need to just take a step back and see if it makes sense in context.
So, again, thank you! I honestly don't need much good criticism, because I've told myself that this story is awesome enough times that I'm going to write it whether anyone thinks it's good or bad. It's specific negative criticism, like yours, that tells me what needs to be worked on. So thanks!
