Stuff From this weekend...

[bluegargantua]

1.) Aria -- you don't play it. You survive it!

2.) Sin City -- Rock on! Way to beat the typecasting Frodo!

3.) Evesdropping can be fun!

whee!
Tom

Comments

Re: Aria.

[anselm23.livejournal.com]

I don't have any additional material that never saw print, though a couple of things I did for Aria later are floating around on the net, including the Duchy of Deira and the Diocese of Ketton. I think I have a copy somewhere of the article I did for the ARIA in-house magazine, but I'll have to look for it.

The story of how I got the gig is kinda self-flattering, so I'm reluctant to tell it. It's related to how I got the writing work with White Wolf.

In essence, I'd been writing to an AOL forum on RPG setting design a series of short articles on top-down/bottom-up world design. Christian Moore e-mailed me one day and said, could he meet me for dinner in DC while he was there on business? I said sure. We had dinner at a nice place on Connecticut Avenue, NW near his hotel. I don't remember for the life of me what we ate. We talked religion, science, the history of the world, RPGs, a bunch of stuff like that. Christian Moore paid.

He e-mailed me later, and asked me to write the intro to ARIA, which I did. I got a free copy of the first printing, which I loved but no longer own. I'm not sure what happened to it. It was reported to me later that Christian had been asked his opinion of me and he described me as "fucking brilliant." I'm pleased by the comment, but I don't know if he actually said it. I did some further consulting with them, and did some outline work on ARIA: Cosmology, which was going to be a book about designing pantheons, heavens, and hells. It was a vast project, potentially running to hundreds of pages, and I was writing my master's thesis at the time. Impossible to do both. I gave up on ARIA: Cosmology, and Last Unicorn Games moved on to other projects.

Sometime after that, my good repute got around, and I was asked to do 5,000 words for Vampire:Jerusalem by Night. I didn't do a very good job -- the Cappadocians in that book are my doing --by my own lights, but it was my start.

By all the gods, I want to start gaming again. I miss all that stuff I used to work on....