About
From Toreas
Toreas is a fantasy novel and an experiment in storytelling, created and written by Christian Riesen. You can find new chapters in a "when it's done" fashion on this site and don't have to wait forever for a new book to appear. Using anything at all on these pages, for any reason at all, is free, anywhere in the world. So you can read it and give it to your friends for free, as all of it is released to the public domain. I personally would even encourage you to do so. I ask for nothing in return, but would love to hear about it when it's used somewhere,
The story is a huge construct that has been brooding since 1993 and has been written down ever since. It has been revised, deleted, written new, shortened, stretched, turned and twisted too many times to count. Although much has changed in details, the basic story has remained the same.
The world of Toreas is a very troubled world. Having survived an event called the Impact the survivors have built up, from the ashes of what once was, a medieval world where war is a constant companion. There are peaceful areas but in general, there is unrest everywhere. The world is dangerous in itself and many things from the worlds distant past, before the impact, are still present and influence the course of the world.
Generally it is a rather dark place, comparable to a Europe in the dark ages. It's not a clean or nice place. While there can be kindess in Toreas, a rather large proportion of the people living on the planet are fighting for their survival on a daily basis in one way or another.
This website is based on the MediaWiki software, the same one Wikipedia uses. Although registration and editing is blocked, you can still freely use all the other features. For example, there are many places where you see the text in the story is colored like this. That means, that text links to some another page inside the Toreas page, which could contain some lore for example. Also all pages are put into Categories. For example you can find all pages of the Story in one category, but there are also categories for lore such as Locations, Events, People or Main Characters.
As a story, Toreas, all characters locations and events are released into the public domain. Although a creative commons license was first thought over, the public domain model is a rather extreme move in seeing how far this goes. Anyone and everyone can download, print, copy and distribute this work for free and is even encouraged to do so. Releasing this into the public domain means that there is no license fee or royalties hanging on this of any kind, for anything done with this content. Of course this means that no revenue collecting can be enforced by the author, but at the same time it means more people are able to get access to the content. Everyone can donate as a way of saying thanks or "paying for the book", in their own terms, means and ability.
A big thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way. I made a special page just for that.
If you like numbers, there is a general statistics page about the story as of now.
