After giving up designing computer games, Pinto said that he "carried that discipline's world-building paradigm" into his writing. Though interested in historical fiction, he chose to write in an invented universe so as not to be creatively constrained by the setting. He notes that the Masters of the "Stone Dance" series have aspects of the Roman emperors seen though a "fairy tale lens." An initial conceptual idea was that the story was set in late Cretaceous period Antarctica, and some elements remain from this scenario.