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 part of a dungeon, and then write a story based on how the characters navigate through the encounters I’ve generated. There’s a subtle but significant difference.
So, over the next few days I’ll be writing about the process of writing Fell Gard. How the charts and tables I’ve put together, and the dice rolls, and the physical maps, give me a starting point from which I put together various narratives. By this point, the whole procedure’s become fairly fixed to me — I know what the rules are, and how to do things, and how to add or develop new rules as I need to.
It’s actually weirdly like a collaboration; not just between me and the dice, but between different parts of my psyche. And the dice. There’s a level of instinct that comes into play, and a certain space given to the unconscious. It’s not quite like any other writing that I’ve ever done. Over the next few days, I’ll try to explain how it all comes together.
