So to get back to talking about process: once my blank maps are ready, it’s time to start filling them in. That means rolling dice. I begin by rolling on a set of charts to create a piece to add to the physical shape of the dungeon — a hallway, a room, a flight of […]

‘Aleatory’ comes from the Latin for ‘die’ or ‘dice.’ It means, as Wikipedia sums it up, “the incorporation of chance into the process of creation, especially the creation of art or media.” That’s pretty much what I’m after with Fell Gard. I have my charts, and I roll dice, and generate the dungeon and its contents […]

I was working on the dungeon earlier today, rolling dice and mapping things out, and it occurred to me that it might be worth writing a bit about how it is that I do what I do. I don’t randomly roll events and put together a chapter directly based on the results; I roll up […]

This chapter is in some ways the most personal bit of work that I’ve done on Fell Gard. In some ways perhaps the most personal thing I’ve ever written, come to that.

Originally this chapter and the next were going to be one chapter, all told from Gral’s point of view. But as I wrote it I found I had too much material for just one post, so I split it up. I’m quite glad I did, as it allowed me to focus more on what I […]

Most writers — most people — have what you might call weak points in their understanding; not necessarily things they don’t know about, but things for which they have no feeling. Subjects which leave them cold. Among my own no doubt numerous flaws is a near-complete disinterest in food and fashion. This is largely a […]

The big issue for me with this chapter was, obviously, alchemy. The idea of alchemy has percolated through a number of cultures — Egyptian, Greek, and Islamic, for example, to say nothing of independent traditions in China and India — but is perhaps most familiar in its Renaissance form. Certainly that’s what influenced me as […]

I was fairly pleased on the whole by how this one came out. Some of these chapters definitely flow more easily than others, and this was one of the ones that, let’s say, came with no resistance. I don’t just mean that generating text was a quick process, I mean that the overall structure sorted […]

  I’ve mentioned that the process of creating the dungeon by random roll feels like an extended collaboration, but the truth it is goes deeper than that. Actually writing the chapters — sending the characters through the areas and encounters I roll up — makes things take different turns than I’d expected, and produces a […]

Geoffrey’s an interesting character to me in a number of different ways. I want to talk here a bit about his background.