Do I Role Play? Ask Rather, Do Ever I Stop? — Part One (Roling and Writing)

A reader asks if I still play Role Playing games. Indeed I do.

Let me count the ways. This will take more than one post. Let me here mention the rpg’s I have played in the past which influenced my writing; then I can talk about games I am running or playing in now.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND was written because while I was still in school in the 1980s I had moderated a role playing game I invented based on Roger Zelazny’s JACK OF SHADOWS. Because I thought the Dung Pits of Glyve were not sufficiently horrific as a place to go when you die, I decided to place the Last Redoubt from William Hope Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND at the West Pole of the tide-locked and unrotating world inhabited by the Jack of Shadows magicians. I decided that Origob, the evil god from the planet Tekumel invented by MAR Barker and Cthulhu were one and the same, and that they were behind the Great Watching Things besieging the pyramid, and that the psychic vibrations of the Last Redoubt created the citadel of Kadath from H.P. Lovecraft’s DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH in the mass subconsciousness of the humans living nearer the Terminator, the lands of eternal twilight nearer to the sunlight. Consequently, I had an enormous amount of material invented about the people of the Last Redoubt, but after the game ended, I put the thick folder away sadly.

Years later, my wife brought to my attention a tiny notice in a trade magazine asking for stories in the Hodgson’s Night Land. An editor named Andy Robertson was soliciting work. I had met Mr. James Stoddard at a Science Fiction convention at about that time, whose book, THE HIGH HOUSE, by pure coincidence, I happened to have found and read that week before. It turned out that he knew Andy Robertson, and was able to introduce us, and inspiration struck, and I wrote my first short story for him. The rest is history, but it started with a role playing game.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.