New Year, unclear

(Cross-posted at The Scoop)

It's 2012. Great. This time last year I set myself a goal; viz to have a playtestable version (not necessarily complete, but workable) draft of my Eyliarenn RPG worldbook completed and ready to present to a playtest group.  I also pllanned to have a good playtest group (not my own) lined up to try it out, put it through its paces, and report back to me what they liked and what they thought sucked.

Update: The worldbook is a long way from being ready to playtest, and I haven't lined up a group yet (which kind of makes sense, as I didn't want to contact any playtesters until I had a complete draft in sight of being finished - four to six weeks away probably).

A year can challenge priorities and remove opportunities (or offer new ones). I made my committment on the back of my wife's coming home from an extended stay in hospital and all the positive feelings for the future that generated. Since then I've survived two restructures at my day job, and had to commit a lot more time to that than I thought I would ever have to again, and my writing has suffered.  The first things to go werre the blogs and Twitter feed, then the actual worldbook prep, then the copious notes I generate in the quiet moments between what I was just doing and what I'm doing next. With the lost time my imagination and, to a degree, my will to push on, dissipated as well.

I've also been hatching plans for creating an online imprint. This has been in the back of my miund all along: I wanted to produce my projected Eyliarenn product line (the main book and about seven or eight supplements) electronically under my own company name before even contemplating a hard-copy release. In the absence of actually working toward that goal, I've been considering what else I could do at the business end. I have nebulous plans of expending the imprint to cover fiction and poetry releases as well as game-related materials. I'm also beginning work toward producing everything we release in multiple formats (ePub, Kindle) instead of just pdf. 

So I guess the year hasn't been a complete loss, but I can't helf but feel like I should have achieved some more tangible goals by now. But this is the time to look to the future, I guess, not the past.  So, here are - in no particular order - the targets I'm going to set for myself going into 2012:

• Keep working toward a playtestable draft of my Eyliarenn worldbook
• Get my ebook venture, Aridamely Press, up and running with one or two titles published by year's end
• Stop devoting so much of my non-work time to work (sometimes a necessary evil, but not something to make a habit of).
• Try to maintain more of a web-presence (blogs, Google+, Twitter).

So, here's to 2012.  Let's hope it lives up to its promise (and that I do the same).

A little shameless self-promotion

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.

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.

Sometimes life gets in the way...

I know that sounds feeble. The fact is, I haven't written a single word toward the rules-part of my world-book, and am reconsidering whether the best strategy is to link to a specific rules set in the first place (which may put me back to square one).

I haven't been completely idle, though. I've been making some notes on the world, mostly with a pretty dark thread running through. I'm toying with teh idea of doing a separate supplement that I'm calling Gothic Eyliarenn. That sounds like I'm making grand plans for a publishing empire before I've even got the first draft of the foundation book down, but hear me out.

The way I imagined this place was as a gritty-realist fantasy setting (I mean, it doesn't even have real magic or gods). One of my keystone directives was that I wanted to create something like a pseudo-magic setting, more science-based, though the science is rudimentary and dealing with processes barely controlled, let alone understood.  The ideas that I have been developing of late have been more 'horrific' in nature than fits the flavour of the Eyliarenn setting, but they do work within the internal logic of the setting.  I don't want to 'pollute' the basic book with varying visions of Eyliarenn, but rather set out a solid foundation that can be built on by myself and others, and that can stand multiple interpretations (I also have in mind an Epic Eyliarenn supplement - I'm not such a fan of the 'bigger than Ben Hur' style of game, but I know I'm probably in the minority among fantasy gamers on that one).

So I am working, just not so much on what I should be.  More to come soon I hope.

(This post has been simultaneously published on my personal blog, The Scoop.)

Ynarn of Githalc (Part 1)

Ellinirl historian and Chronicler who flourished during the third century after the close of the Final War.  The "Account of the history and the whole island of Eyliarenn from earliest times until after the Final War, from the remembrances of several learned minds", more commonly known as the Chronicles of Ynarn, covers many significant events in the history of Eastern Eyliarenn, particularly, though not exclusively, those that affected the Ellinirl peoples. 

Ynarn is considered to be the most reliable of the early Chroniclers, especially in regard to the history of north-eastern Eyliarenn.  While the Chronicles are attributed to several authors working in unison (or more likely over several decades), scholars of the massive work believe it to have been written by a single author, who probably interviewed extensively among the oldest and wisest of the Ellinirl elders.

Ynarn may have been born in 67 AO, in or near Githalc, a significant Errinirl city in the west of what is now Chelene.  He was certainly educated here and this is more likely why he is traditionally associated with the city.  His contemporary, the philosopher and politician Lianu, remembers him as a brilliant student, who was always too respectful to challenge or correct his teachers before class, but who along with Lianu and a handful of others, were invited to participate in private debates with a group of their elders and teachers, a practice that is still maintained in many of the Errinirl's teaching institutions, as well as some Holds of Knowledge.

As his talents came to be recognised, Ynarn eventually became the Chronicler of his school, a position of some prestige among the Errinirl. Early in his tenure in this position, Ynarn realised how little had been recorded for posterity of the events and people of the time between the arrival of the Great Ones and their tumultuous Final War.  After making some initial notes and developing a schema for a five volume historical account of Errinirl history, taking nearly three years, he approached the governing apparatus of the collegium with the request that he be excused one day in each week to pursue the endeavour.  The story goes that he hoped that the governing panel would see the merit in the project and grant his request. He did not expect them to offer him two assistants from among the recent completion students, two days a week to work on the project, and a stipend to travel for three months in the summer for the first two years.

   

An Account of the History of Eyliarenn (Chronicle of Ynarn)

This exhaustive work's full title is An Account of the History and the Whole Island of Eyliarenn from Earliest Times until After the Final War, from the Remembrances of Several Learned Minds, though commonly referred to the Chronicle of Ynarn. The Account is a general and particular history of Eyliarenn in six volumes, covering the period from the earliest interactions of the Ellinirl and Riaroen peoples with the Old Ones through to the first decades after the close of the Final War, the durinal point from which the Floramy Calendar is derived.


The Account is divided into six volumes. The first covers the prehistory of the Errinirl referencing the early creation myths from their nomadic period, through their establishment of agriculture, cities and writing, and the influence and friendship of the Old Ones, the earliest sentient race established on Eyliarenn.


The second volume covers the Errinirl's relationship with the other races who later established themselves on the Continent; the native-born Riaroen and the émigré Kin-folk and Cincoel. The third volume considers the coming of the Great Ones, their initial negotiations with the Errinirl and the latter's land concessions, the establishment of their colony and their contact with the Kin-folk and the Riaroen, and their eventual adopting of some kinfolk communities for special benefits and advances.


The Fourth volume covers the period from when the Old Ones began to leave Eyliarenn (considering in particular the evidnce of the influence by the Great Ones on their decision to leave) through to the event that is believed to mark the beginning of the Final War, the murder of Sasys Paitop, the first Great One to perish on Eyliarenn soil.


The Fifth volume (originally the final volume), of the Account covers the period from the initial investigation of the death of Sasys Paitop and the dissention among the Great Ones, through the breaking of the factions and the beginning of the fighting, and the civil war that culminated in the near annihilation of the Great Ones at their own hands, and the Truce of the Three that brought the Final War to close.


The Sixth volume was an afterthought, prepared by Ynarn's associates and students, under his guidance and carefully articulated in his written voice, covers the near century-long period that followed the Final War known alternatively as the Long Winter, the Hundred-Year Winter and the Darkness. The volume finishes with an essay, dictated by Ynarn himself but referencing more than twenty of his teachers and contemporaries, on what should be learnt from the experience of the fourteen hundred or so years of historical events considered though the six volumes of the "Account". 

Eyliarenn (a teaser)

Eyliaren is a continent in the northern hemisphere of the world known to the locals as Wau. The climate of the continent runs from sub-arctic in the north ( with artic conditions at its northern-most extremities) to sub tropical in the south. From its extremities, the continent measures approximately 2490 miles (north to south) by 2670 miles (west to east). The contintent is split in to two distinct regions by a near-continuous series of mountain ranges known collectively as the Spine, running from the northern coast to the Chettarn Foothills in the south, about 140 miles short of the southerrn coast.

Eyliarenn is home to several sentient races and rich in wildlife. If also has many strange and unique geographical features, some natural, and some built by extraordinary forces. An intangible substance infuses the whole continent; this is called nevena, and it allows both the naturally talented and the the practiced to "maniplate" it to perform otherwise acts or adjust the physical world to a greater or lesser degree to their own ends. One discipline of manipulation allows the adept to enter into a meta-world reflective of the tangible world, referred to as the Barren Landscape.