After having written all that I did about the aleatory process of Fell Gard, one last thought struck me. That is this: every writer builds (or grows, pick your metaphor) a story out of their life experience. That experience comes in many forms — things that happen to the writer personally, things they hear about, things they read. It’s all grist for the mill, as they say.

But it is, to a large extent, random.

The writer’s life choices will in part determine what happens to that writer, but at the same time the world is unpredictable and the many vicissitudes of life result in all sorts of chaotic events. You can’t know what your future holds. So: every writer has a set of experiences, largely random but deriving in part from the choices they make, and out of those experiences comes story, shaped by the creative faculty of the artist.

And that, in brief, is Fell Gard. Only I have charts, and so in part create for myself a set of experiences — dice rolls — from which I can establish the dungeon and the fiction. The aleatory process is none other than the standard writing process, viewed from a slightly different angle.