ESSAYS ON GAME AND WORLD DESIGN
I had originally intended to write and post all of these essays in the order listed below. But life, hurricanes, a heath problem with my child, work, seminars, my novels, start-up ventures, college (my children going to and entering college), and attempting to get my work published interfered with that intention.
Nevertheless, on the weekends, I have been working on these essays, poco-a-poco, and most are already finished though not yet posted or published. I’m working on that though.
Most of these essays deal with fantasy gaming, role playing in general, and even specifically with Dungeons and Dragons and those types of games.
My overall ambition in writing these essays is to give the game designer, the game master (or DM/GM), and even the player a basic (and hopefully very beneficial) philosophical and design basis for the construction of their own backgrounds, characters, milieus, worlds, and works (from a gaming and design point of view, of course).
However I believe that many of these principles can also be easily and readily applied to the creation of fictional worlds and systems for genre writers of fantasy, science-fiction, horror, and pulp type works. Therefore these essays can also be looked upon as providing the philosophical and structural basis for fictional world design as well.
At present my total number of Essays on Game Design stands at seventeen (17), with most of these having already been written and the rest already sketched out. However this number may very well increase over time. Actually I expect it to, and eventually I expect to collect and publish all of these essays in a book on Game and World Design.
ESSAYS ON GAME DESIGN
INDEX:
Essay One: Crawling into Oblivion
Essay Two: To Hell With Balance
Essay Three: Where Has All the Magic Gone?
Essay Four: The Heroic Impulse – Where Have All the Heroes Gone?
Essay Five: The Tomb of Myth
Essay Six: Why the World Exists
Essay Seven: Why the Game Exists
Essay Eight: What is Modern Fantasy Anyway?
Essay Nine: Where Has All the History Gone? On Heirlooms, Legacies, and Inheritances
Essay Ten: U Plus (U+)
Essay Eleven: Luck Be Not Lazy
Essay Twelve: The Blood of Uncanny Monsters: Parts One and Two
Essay Thirteen: Scientifica Magica
Essay Fourteen: The Ability Hoard
Essay Fifteen: The Interactive Essay
Essay Sixteen: Where Have All the High Homes Gone: The Heröon, the Hometown, and the Mansion or Fortified Keep?
Essay Seventeen: Where Have All the Liturgists Gone?
Wyrdwend 