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March 09 2010
What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium
Fantasy/SF author M. John Harrison: "The great modern fantasies were written out of religious, philosophical and psychological landscapes. They were sermons. They were metaphors. They were rhetoric. They were books, which means that the one thing they actually weren’t was countries with people in them. The commercial fantasy that has replaced them is often based on a mistaken attempt to literalise someone else’s metaphor, or realise someone else’s rhetorical imagery. For instance, the moment you begin to ask (or rather to answer) questions like, “Yes, but what did Sauron look like?”; or, “Just how might an Orc regiment organise itself?”; the moment you concern yourself with the economic geography of pseudo-feudal societies, with the real way to use swords, with the politics of courts, you have diluted the poetic power of Tolkien’s images."January 06 2010
Patricia C. Wrede's Worldbuilder Questions
A large set of questions to ask yourself when designing a world, country or culture for fiction or a game. Originally posted by the fantasy author Patricia Wrede to FIDOnet in the dark ages of the Net.December 04 2009
In a Wicked Age: four oracles
Random story idea generator from Vincent Baker's game "In A Wicked Age". An example: "KD: The exposure by erosion of a long-buried door. 1H: A girl with the soul of a leopard, born inappropriately into a human body. QS: A golden armlet, still on the skeletal arm of its owner. 3D: The captain of a foreign troop, sent to collect tribute."October 04 2009
Ghyll
A lexicon wiki created according to a variant of the Lexicon game (see my prev post). "Ghyll is a roughly circular land which is at least 200,000 paces (just over 110 Gerth miles) in diameter. It is inhabited by a range of species, the most dominant of which are the insectoid Ghyllians, some of whom have taken to writing the encyclopaedia about the land in which this is an entry."Lexicon: an RPG
"Here's a little roleplaying game that I've been toying with. I call it the Lexicon RPG, in honor of its inspiration, Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars. "The basic idea is that each player takes on the role of a scholar, from before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they ceased to be). You are cranky, opinionated, prejudiced and eccentric. You are also collaborating with a number of your peers -- the other players -- on the construction of an encyclopedia describing some historical period (possibly of a fantastic world). "The game is played in 26 turns, one for each letter of the alphabet..."September 16 2009
A Flapper's Dictionary (1922)
"Flatwheeler: A young man who takes a young lady to an egg harbor" and lots more slang.September 14 2009
Writing Exercise Generator [Chaotic Shiny]
Suggests random things to write about, such as: "Write for at least 400 words about a thwarted plan, a clue, and a fortune teller."Latin Gibberish Generator [Chaotic Shiny]
Makes up sentences of fake Latin, such as "exhorta id passistis egressas, sibi aeqerunt estis laborit ego victae quod proma apud fructissimus, stalagmo sic rapacum coner."Religion Generator [Chaotic Shiny]
Generates a random religion by picking dozens of attributes from lists. Handy if you want to run an RPG, write a fantasy novel or start a new cult.September 01 2009
Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work - WSJ.com
"The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance. They're forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century."August 07 2009
Adventure Ideas Generator
Randomly creates brief ideas for adventure plots (useful for RPGs). An example of Obstacles: "The murder by strangling of an officer of the city watch. A lunatic, imprisoned in a palace and worshipped as a god. A skeleton, dressed in fine robes and turned into a puppet, which priests operate on sacred occassions."March 10 2009
Abulafia Random Generators
“Abulafia is a collection of user-contributed random generators housed within a special kind of wiki. That means you can use the pages here to get interesting random names, treasure, plots, and anything else you need. If you think the results could use a little more imagination, click the 'edit' tab at the top of the page and add a few more choices to the mix.”February 28 2009
Kate Monk's Onomastikon (Dictionary of Names)
“This is a collection of names from around the world which was initially intended to help provide character names for live role-players. It includes short historical backgrounds, male and female first names or personal names, and surnames or family names, from many countries and periods. The author is not an expert in onomastics or history so would like to apologise if any mistakes have been made.”Story-Games Names Lists
Lists of typical first/last names, from different countries/cultures. Compiled for naming RPG characters, but would be good for fiction too. My favorite is the list of senders' names compiled from spam emails, like "Max Polarfleece" and "Romeo Beltran" -- "Good for alien cultures that don't understand humans, artifical intelligences in a cyberpunk setting..."February 14 2009
Interactive Fiction Writing Month
Interactive Fiction Writing Month “is a loosely-organized set of tasks assigned one per week for four weeks, from February 15 to March 15, 2009, hopefully coupled with a few informal live discussion sessions (location-dependent, of course). The goal is to get a group of participants familiar enough with the Inform language to produce some simple games, and to promote discourse on game design in general through the medium of IF. “I'm interested in writing IF because I'd like to explore the issue of game design, but I have neither the time nor skill to make a "full" video game, and because I enjoy playing IF more than most other kinds of game. I think you could be interested in IF for the same reasons, or some of the following reasons…”February 01 2009
Thing-a-day 2009
Who else is signing up for Thing-a-day 2009?! Deadline is today! “Each year, hundreds of artists and creators from around the world meet online for a month long creative sprint. Everyone is invited to sign up before February 1st and commit to make one new thing (project, sketch, exercice) per day and share it on this group blog. It’s a chance to share some work and get your mind and hands ready for the rest of the year.”September 28 2008
Living through Interesting Times [Charles Stross]
Superb, thought-provoking new essay on near-future politics/economics from an SF perspective, by one of the best current SF writers. And read the comments, too — they're all good, including Stross's responses. "We are living in interesting times; in fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF ... it can take three years for a writer's idea to find its way onto the bookshelves. Pity the authors responsible for the rash of cold war novels that came out in 1990-91". "Put yourself in the shoes of an SF author trying to construct an accurate (or at least believable) scenario for the USA in 2019. Imagine you are constructing your future-USA in 2006, then again in 2007, and finally now, with talk of $700Bn bailouts and nationalization of banks in the background. Each of those projections is going to come out looking different."
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