I'm not just a (very) part-time gameworld creator. I'm also a regular gamer (mostly RPGs, some board/war games, and I like to push (other people's) tin when I get the chance. I'm also a poet, when the stars align and I find myself in possession of both the free-time and inspiration.
About a year ago my friend Brett was running a truly inspiring Hellfrost game. One of the other guys at the table - Declan - was playing a skald (a bard for those of the Old Faith). Dec mentioned that he'd try his hand at writing a ballad commemorating the brave deeds of his fellow Saxe warriors. I thought this was a good idea, and said I might have a go at it as well. So for five nights I worked feverishly on what became a 3,000-odd word saga of our first adventure, entitled The Second Death of Rangnar Bloodaxe.
Presenting it to the group, everyone loved it. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to try to tackle the following adventures of our brave little band (I'm still hoping Brett will ressurect the campaign).
Anyway, fast-forward six months, and I stumbled across the electronic file After a few moments contemplation, I thought "what the heck", and sent it to Hellfrost setting creator and one of the busiest fellows in RPG publishing, Paul "Wiggy" Wade-Williams.
Paul wrote back almost immediately and asked if he coupld put it up as a free download for the punters. I was honoured and said yes. And so there it is - my first (unofficial) published work for a serious and respected gaming publisher. If you haven't dozed off yet, and you really feel like putting yourself though that particular ordeal, you can find a copy of the PDF here. I'd welcome any feedback.
For the technically curious, I wrote the poem in a non-standard eleven-foot metre, which was designed to read a little clumsily, evoking the rhythm of trying to walk though waist-deep snow carrying a heavy axe and shield, and half-expecting something big and hairy to jump out from behind a tree and try to eat you. There was a lot of that throughout the campaign.
All the action in the saga is relayed as it occured at the table, although I shortened the combat sequences, leaving out the bad roles and the associated bad language and queries relating to the provenence of the dice in question.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Monday, June 6, 2011
Occasional is right...
Forgive me Blogger, for I have been a lazy ass. It's been more than three months since my last post and I am truly repentant. But I have not been completely reprobate. There's been a lot of deep thinking and a lot of note-writing around my Eyliarenn game-world, and I've managed to get over a few conceptual hurdles. I've also spent a little time setting up a rudimentary website (not nearly ready to go live, but a big time-suck for someone who wasn't worked with HTML for a while).
Anyway, I'm not going to get into the big epithany I had regarding Eyliarenn, except to say it's a historical thing that has a lot to do with the way things are now. More importantly, it represented the end of a mental log-jam I've been having for... well, about four months if I'm honest.
Eyliarenn is a two-pronged thing for me. I don't think of myself as a game designer so much as a storyteller. I love RPGs and I love writing (although both can be frustrating as all hell sometimes). I enjoy GMing, but I know I'm not great at it. Luckily we have a roster of pretty good GMs in my group. So, Eyliarenn was an idea I'd had sitting in the back of my brain for a while: essentially it was a low-fantasy world where bad things had happened, all the gods had died or left, and the regular joes who remained had just been trying to get by for hundreds of years, and now some parts were still struggling and others were just starting to gain some traction, lift themselves out of the mire a little.
At first I thought it would be an interesting game world, but I didn't think anyone else would find it as intersting as I did. So I started thinking, maybe Eyliarenn would make a good fiction setting. Of course, that would mean I was writing fantasy.
I tried to read fantasy from time to time after I left school, and I was invariably disappointed. There's a perception (which may well be true) that the average fantasy reader isn't all that discerning. This seems to be born out in the number of really badly written novels that get published and bought in numbers enough to encourage the author to write another book (science fiction - and most other fixed genres - have there fair share of clumsily written works too). Nearly everything I'd experienced of contemporary fantasy writing left me feeling embarassed for the author, and it wasn't a genre with which I wanted to be associated.
The thing that changed my opinion of fantasy - that actually demonstrated to me what fantasy writing could be - was Gene Wolfe's Wizard Knight books. Forget genre snobbery and marketing divisions. Those two books are some of the finest writing I have ever read. More than once I was moved to tears by the sheer beauty of the perfect union of thought and execution before me on the page. Wolfe showed me what fantasy writing could be.
In short, I got over it.
Even then, Eyliarenn was there, in the back of my head, tapping it's foot and looking at it's watch. So I started thinking about story ideas (my original idea was to write a collection of short stories set in Eyliarenn so I could do different things in different places around the continent without it coming across like Mandeville's travels or something. I've been working on a couple of stories for a while now (one is burgeoning into probably a novella at the very least). They're coming together slowly, like the world-book itself, which I began, really, as a way to organise my thoughts about my fiction setting, but has pulled itself to the surface of my ruminations and has taken prescedence over the stories as my primary project.
Writing for me, to paraphrase Max Weber, is the slow boring of hard boards (having done some carpentry in my time the analogy is particularly resonant). Fiction and gaming, which is a less personal kind of fiction. In my moments of honest self-reflection I admit my reasons for writing are less like Jeremiah, more like Johnson. There's also a selfish desire for a little recognition, but as much as that would be nice, there's always someone with a shinier, more popular, or just straight-out better idea than yours. So I guess, at the heart of it, there is a little fire burning somewhere inside, telling me to keep at it. Fourteen notebooks filled with observations and details testify to that.
Anyway, I'm not going to get into the big epithany I had regarding Eyliarenn, except to say it's a historical thing that has a lot to do with the way things are now. More importantly, it represented the end of a mental log-jam I've been having for... well, about four months if I'm honest.
Eyliarenn is a two-pronged thing for me. I don't think of myself as a game designer so much as a storyteller. I love RPGs and I love writing (although both can be frustrating as all hell sometimes). I enjoy GMing, but I know I'm not great at it. Luckily we have a roster of pretty good GMs in my group. So, Eyliarenn was an idea I'd had sitting in the back of my brain for a while: essentially it was a low-fantasy world where bad things had happened, all the gods had died or left, and the regular joes who remained had just been trying to get by for hundreds of years, and now some parts were still struggling and others were just starting to gain some traction, lift themselves out of the mire a little.
At first I thought it would be an interesting game world, but I didn't think anyone else would find it as intersting as I did. So I started thinking, maybe Eyliarenn would make a good fiction setting. Of course, that would mean I was writing fantasy.
I tried to read fantasy from time to time after I left school, and I was invariably disappointed. There's a perception (which may well be true) that the average fantasy reader isn't all that discerning. This seems to be born out in the number of really badly written novels that get published and bought in numbers enough to encourage the author to write another book (science fiction - and most other fixed genres - have there fair share of clumsily written works too). Nearly everything I'd experienced of contemporary fantasy writing left me feeling embarassed for the author, and it wasn't a genre with which I wanted to be associated.
The thing that changed my opinion of fantasy - that actually demonstrated to me what fantasy writing could be - was Gene Wolfe's Wizard Knight books. Forget genre snobbery and marketing divisions. Those two books are some of the finest writing I have ever read. More than once I was moved to tears by the sheer beauty of the perfect union of thought and execution before me on the page. Wolfe showed me what fantasy writing could be.
In short, I got over it.
Even then, Eyliarenn was there, in the back of my head, tapping it's foot and looking at it's watch. So I started thinking about story ideas (my original idea was to write a collection of short stories set in Eyliarenn so I could do different things in different places around the continent without it coming across like Mandeville's travels or something. I've been working on a couple of stories for a while now (one is burgeoning into probably a novella at the very least). They're coming together slowly, like the world-book itself, which I began, really, as a way to organise my thoughts about my fiction setting, but has pulled itself to the surface of my ruminations and has taken prescedence over the stories as my primary project.
Writing for me, to paraphrase Max Weber, is the slow boring of hard boards (having done some carpentry in my time the analogy is particularly resonant). Fiction and gaming, which is a less personal kind of fiction. In my moments of honest self-reflection I admit my reasons for writing are less like Jeremiah, more like Johnson. There's also a selfish desire for a little recognition, but as much as that would be nice, there's always someone with a shinier, more popular, or just straight-out better idea than yours. So I guess, at the heart of it, there is a little fire burning somewhere inside, telling me to keep at it. Fourteen notebooks filled with observations and details testify to that.
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