I’ve been meaning to do more writing in regards to my fantasy world. Now that the apartment is in order and I have a dedicated writing time on Saturday mornings, I look forward to writing more thoughtful articles (for one) and developing my own fiction writing.

The first thing I want to do is put all my poetry and short stories on the site. It won’t take long thanks to a little utility I found that changes rtf and doc files to html. They’ll be in a separate sub-domain of pinakidion.org.

In the meantime, there’s the fantasy world. The way I think, especially in regards to this world, is to build the world’s own fundamental mechanic and then work up from there. Up to this point, the rules behind the D20 open gaming content have been pretty helpful to fleshing out some things. Having played D&D(r) in one form or another since I was 10, I understand the D20 rules and it helps me to guage things like relative size, strength, impact of magic, etc. I think secretly, I hoped to make a game out of my fantasy world. However, there are enough things different in my world that I felt like I’d have to rewrite some of the basic rules in order to continue using them. Rewriting seemed to be easy, but I felt like I was in an endless loop.

However, I then discovered the Action! System (r) core rules. They are pretty straightforward and they detail only the core mechanic of actions, combat, etc. This freed me up to write in my material instead. It may seem odd, but the Action! System(r) doesn’t have a magic system. That’s good because magic on my world is wonky anyway. I feel like I can contribute to a good system and have my own way.

So, I wanted to give back to them in some small way. If you go to fantasy.pinakidion.org, you’ll find where I have begun creating a hypertext version of the rules. The idea is similar to the Hypertext D20(tm). The main difference on my end is that I have to provide the rtf files to download as part of the Action! System(r) license. Other than that, I won’t have a monster or spell filter. If I get that far, I’ll have done something.

This may seem like too much trouble, but I want the laws of my fantasy universe to be internally consistent. They can be strange and bizarre, but they do have to be coherent. Using a gaming engine to work through it forces me to do my job as a writer/creator. Who wants to read about a world where things are so random, no one can make order or sense out of it?

Besides all of that, it gives me an appreciation of the work God did at creation. I’m obviously going to cheat at some point and I’m definitely going to avoid a lot of the math and chemistry involved in His work. However, it does allow me a chance to see that God chose order. He isn’t bound by it, of course, but He chose to create a world that makes sense – it isn’t beyond humans to understand the order he created. For example, Newton’s laws. The fascinating thing, though, is that despite the order He created, there is a lot to explore. Not only that, there are also things in the universe that are bizarre and complex. The same God that provided the orderly rotation of planets and universal effects of gravity also created the world of quantum physics. The rules are completely different in the sub-atomic realm.

Anywho, gotta run. Just wanted to let you know.