![]() ![]() The Greek gods don’t exist now and they didn’t then. Clearly that was a world governed by the same physical laws as ours. So should a historical Spartan RPG include divine favour? I'm not talking about a fantasy setting here, but one where you’re trying to recreate Classical Greece as it really was. If you want to read the whole thing, I'll wait. That's from Claire Hall's article "The Day A God Rode In" in The London Review of Books. Shackled to our own ways of understanding, we can only ever write what amounts to a shadowy prehistory of ourselves.” On these grounds, histories of pre-modern cultures that make use of modern Western ontologies fail to capture something essential about the world as it was. That we tend to see as a ‘natural’ feature of the world and not as our own construct is inherently bound up with the development of colonial modernity in the West. “To understand the Athenians properly, we must recognise that it isn’t just that they perceived the world differently, but that the world itself was different. I’m not coming with any answers this time, just a question. And what about maps? The AI is still a few years off (I'm just guessing) being able to handle those. But even if that gave us cover art we could use, there's no way any Fabled Lands book could come out without interior illustrations by Russ he's an integral part of our creative team. It could be a lot better if I spent a few months practising. You can see from the examples here what Wombo Dream came up with off the top of its artificial head. I'd been thinking about that, though I'm not sure if it saves a lot of money. (It's less bother than reading prose.) Also they'd like a lot more illustrations than the Vulcan Forged company were willing to commission for the gamebooks. Myself, I prefer fillers, like the little vignettes Russ Nicholson does for the Fabled Lands books, but most readers demand drawings that illustrate specific scenes in the book. That bedevilled the Vulcanverse books, which I thought looked amazing with Mattia Simone's atmospheric filler artwork. He's also made a start on The Lone & Level Sands, and all that industry has stung me into talk of turning The Eye of the Dragon into another FL Quest to tie in with book 8. Paul Gresty, who wrote The Serpent King's Domain, has completed work on a new Fabled Lands Quest based on my Golden Dragon gamebook Castle of Lost Souls. ![]() Whatever I work on, people ask me about more Fabled Lands books. His then-wife Debbie typed up the text of the book (no OCR in them days) and I then rewrote it, adding some scenes and details of my own to make it tally with events in our campaign and to introduce the fantasy element that's not present, of course, in Dr van Gulik's books. ![]() I had an excuse for wasting my time: Jamie's birthday was coming up, so I decided to print one copy and give it to him as a present. (A lesson in archetypes there, I suspect.)Īs if I didn't already have enough to do (I was finishing up Blood Sword and probably working on some TV tie-ins such as Knightmare) I took it upon myself to rewrite the novel, setting it in Taikava fief in western Tsolyanu instead of Tang Dynasty China. ![]() All the other characters in the novel, such as Sergeant Hoong Liang, had direct one-to-one matches among the player-characters. Jamie Thomson played the fiefholder Lord Jadhak hiVriddi, who neatly filled the Judge Dee role. Towards the end of the 1990s I read Robert van Gulik's novel The Haunted Monastery and realized it was an amazingly good fit to our Tekumel roleplaying campaign at the time. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |