For 47 years the D’Sev noble family E’Warna has published a comedy series centered around an alternate history in which they won the D’Sev Wars. I’ve gotten my hands on every novel, guidebook, and pamphlet. For every notable event these past 5 decades, these stalwart writers explored a D’Sev equivalent explaining how the Imperium would have handled it a thousand times better. Hundreds of novellas written by many authors who clearly didn’t coordinate. For example, there are five wars against Foregone City and each ended with Foregone’s annexation. The city was annexed five times with no explanation.

It’s been one of my favorite settings, though admittedly it’s hard to keep up with the huge quantity of releases by their team.

However, E’Warna has recently come under controversy and scandal and began selling off their assets, one of which is the rights to the Festival of Souls setting. The prior novels, and right to publish new novels, now belong to W’Ayko.

W’Ayko has decided to ‘clean up’ the setting and take it in a new direction.

‘Cleaning up’ means decanonizing decades of stories to establish a linear series of events. Festival of Souls had thousands of named characters, at least a hundred important and reoccurring ones, and some of their stories were also contradictory, such as the hero Jerta’F E’Worro accidentally participating in two simultaneous wars on different planets. But some characters have been erased, like F’Erriard, who used his psychic powers to stop a meteor that killed over 30,000 people in real life. That was hilarious.

The ‘new direction’ is that they’ll be focusing on a true alternate history, rather than just making commentary on current events.

I feel like I, as FoS’s biggest fan, am being punished for actually knowing all the lore and characters.