Tristan, Maia and Middle Grade Adventure

Dungeons & Dragons helped me learn storytelling.

I started playing D&D in middle school and loved it. As a creative kid, I found the worlds of D&D and Advanced D&D to be awesome sparks for my imagination. Many of the worlds felt grown from Tolkien fantasy of elves, hobbits (aka Halflings), dwarves, etc… Great stuff!

As more worlds were released for D&D like Al’Qadim and Kara-Tur, I found myself drawn into Arabian Nights and East Asian mythology to tell better stories for these worlds. The stories were so different than anything I had encountered before and were amazing.

This winter I’ve been reading a book of African mythology & folk tales which has been fascinating and got me thinking, this is a world that should be represented more in games. The stories provide a different flavor to familiar stories from floods to origin of life. The characters populating these worlds are deep and engaging and full of potential adventure. The gaming industry has massively missed out on a population of wondrous places, people, monsters and magic.

New Worlds for New Games

I found these two books recently and began to think: “damn these would be great worlds for role-playing games.”.

Tristan Strong

Punches a Hole in the Sky

by Kwame Mbalia

I haven’t finished it yet because I just bought it last week, but so far I’m loving it. This book builds a world of mythology and provides the kindling for other stories, your own stories, or maybe your role-playing group’s stories. The story combines African mythology with African American folklore to build a world that isn’t your standard elves and dwarfs Tolkien fantasy.

Early in the book, the car ride to the farm, is a good use of showing character through dialog. My key take away so far is: what else can I say about characters when THEY are saying stuff. Examine the dialog in the book. Check out how telling it is about the characters. I look forward to bringing some of this dialog work into my own writing.

Spin the Dawn

by Elizabeth Lim

Magic, social roles and fashion all come together in a mythical world. This story gave me a lot of ideas for challenges and conflicts to provide my D&D group that didn’t involve your standard traps, monsters and politics. I felt like this book could also give readers the ability to build spin off stories to flesh out the world.

My daughter is a fan of Mulan and there are some parallels in this story. What I think is much more interesting is the main character’s internal and external conflict. This reminded me of lessons I’ve had on conflict and drama. Using internal and external conflict as drama points to build tension in different ways at different times in the story. How internal tension can take the character on an emotional roller coaster with more perilous outcomes than any external danger. You can then amplify the drama by layering on external tension. Good stuff!

Imagination and The Other Stories in the Story

These books reminded me of how stories can spark your imagination to explore other worlds. Not just to read the book but imagine adventures in these worlds. I encourage you to pick these books up and give them a read. Imagine your own adventures in these worlds. Both these books have sequels on the way and I look forward to reading them too.

One game for storytelling i like to play is to take another story and create an alternate story from it. For instance, Tristan starts the book after a boxing match…well what happens when the other kid goes home? Does he go home? Did his parents come and see the match? After the match did he get a victor’s dinner or lonely walk home? Was the winner of that match a he?

Write it or at least sketch the story out. Play! Enjoy playing with other people’s stories. On that note…here’s a story for this week. Last week I was playing with African Mythology. This week, I’m going to play with another popular tale. Enjoy!

Thank you Tim Gouw for this awesome photo! (https://unsplash.com/@punttim)

Peter vs. SHL-192

Starting line.
Systems check.
Ready to run.

Bipedal legs.
Inefficient.
Fair for a race
against Peter.

Race is one mile loop
returning to start.
Last run
completed in 3 minutes
at moderate speed.

Human opponent
steps up to starting line
stretching his leg muscles.

“Good morning, Peter.”
A standard morning
American English greeting.

“Ready to race SHL-129?”
He slaps my back.
Shaking away the pain
in his hand.

“Yes Peter.”
Curious.
I ask.
”Why are you racing Peter?
You cannot win at my speed.”

He smiles,
happy.
Crouching preparing his sprint.
”We’ll see SHL.”

Gun fires
race begins.
I run.
Peter hidden in
a puff of dust.

Round first curve.
Round second curve.
Round third curve.
Peter rounds first curve.
His pace
very
human.

SURGE!
POWER SURGE!

Legs systems fail.
I fall
rounding corner four.

Only a few feet away
from finish.
I crawl with my arms
slow
much slower.

My arms are
short and sturdy
made for lifting
not speed.

Peter catches up
passing me
”Something wrong SHL?”
Chuckling as he runs by.

He finishes.

I finish minutes later.

Peter pats my back
”It’s okay SHL. Machines aren’t
as quick as humans.”

He snaps something off my back
a disc
an electrical surge disc.

“You put that on my back?”
I ask.
He smiles,
happy, I think.
”You cheated. You lied.”

“Nah, I”m just human.”
He waves the surge disc
in my face.
”I’m just quicker than you.
And that’s why we’ll always win.”

<EOM>

Thank you to Karen Edmisten for hosting Poetry Friday this week! Check out her blog’s shockingly clever name. Also, thanks to Michael D Beckwith for the awesome library photo for my blog cover. Check out his website here. I look forward to having a library like this in my house one day…wishing :)