Sometime in the late 1970s, my wife and I attended a meeting of the Minnesota Science Fiction Society. This was in the early days of table top role playing games, and in Minneapolis, or at least among those of us in Minn-Stf, these were nearly always homebrew systems—indeed, I confess some of us got a bit snobby when we learned that other people bought their game out of a box. Humph.
At that meeting we were introduced to a woman named Adrienne Thornly (now Robert Charles Morgan) and her (his? I don’t know how to do the pronouns when speaking of the past. On the recommendation of friends, I’ll go with “his” and use his current name) just then being developed world of Piarra, based on elements of D&D (which at the time I think I hadn’t even heard of) with bits of Lovecraft, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and many other things that appealed to his amazing, fertile mind.
My wife and I sat down to play, along with Steven Bond, Richard Tatge, a friend of Robert’s named John Robey, and John Stanley. My wife, Reen, and I were hooked inside of fifteen minutes. The world was raw, empty, undeveloped; but some basic concepts were there, like the Cycle of 17 Houses, and at least hints of what a few of those Houses were about.
The amazing thing was Robert’s ability to create, off the top of her head, fully fleshed out NPCs, with a life history and an agenda. We loved it, and continued obsessively playing for, I don’t even know. Months? A couple of years? Richard dropped away, and we became close friends with John Robey (now deceased, alas). The rest of the group remained fairly constant.
Yes, we were obsessed—but I had no idea then that this game would lead me onto a path that would guide, essentially, the rest of my life. I wrote the first book, Jhereg, in 1980, largely because Robert was gone, and I couldn’t stop obsessing. Because of complications in Robert’s personal life (that are none of my business or yours), I had to change some of the names when I started writing about it, and I added elements of my own TTRPG, Dragaera, that was an offshoot of Piarra, and develop those pieces that remained only vague concepts. And, while characters can translate from an RPG, I find that events generally do not, and so there is little that happened in the game that appears in the stories. But the heart and soul of my world remains the game that we played that one day at a Minn-Stf meeting in the late 70s.
As of today, I have 25 more chapters of Vlad to write–eight more of The Last Contract, and then Chreotha. It has been an amazing, wonderful, fulfilling journey. And I remain humbly grateful to the readers who have stayed with me, to Steve, John, John, Richard, and Reen, and, above all, to Robert Charles Morgan, who set me on the path that would guide my life.
Oh, that rings a loud bell. I was in a D&D group for over 20 years. We had our own house rules, and spent a lot of time world-building, but the people were the core of it. Stopped doing it about 20 years ago, and didn’t write in that world until 10 years ago, but it all resonates deeply.
Wouldn’t have missed it for the world and will be so sad when it ends. A world like yours deserve every bit of love your faithful readers heap upon it. My greatest joy is when someone else follows my recommendation and falls in love with your novels.
Robey: Less than three.
wait, The Last Contract and THEN Chreotha? I thought TLC would be the end, or are you doing an Abbey Road/Let it Be thingy?
The plan…I repeat THE PLAN….is to write The Last Contract, set it aside, write Chreotha, then go back and modify TLC as needed. My plans, like Vlad’s, don’t always work out, but, like him, I always want to have one.
Thanks for the walk down, very similar memory lanes. I too miss my Thursday night crew (we all worked on the weekends, or so it seemed). I also appreciate the update on the remaining books. Three fourths done, huh. Great, looking forward to them.
Well, I’ve been this on trip with you for over 35 years now, since I was a freshman in college and a friend saw me with a copy of Cowboy Feng’s and said I needed to read the Vlad books.
Thank you for the trip. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Wow. I never realized that it wasn’t 100% out of your head.
The group I played with, off and on due to moving around and life in general, started off with that “box of rules” you looked down on. Bill was just down the hall from me my first year in college, and was my roommate for what passed (or not) for my sophomore year.
By the end of that school year, Bill was fed up with D&D’s gaps (even with some additions of his own), and he decided to switch to Chivalry and Sorcery. We played that for one year, but, by trying to include everything, C&S turned out to be less than the sum of its parts, and Bill decided to bail on the published systems and created his own. And we played “Monsters and Mayhem”, off and on, as people moved around and getting together was harder at times. But we didn’t let that stop us, even when two of us were in
Dallas and Bill in grad school in Nashville with a new group of players in the same campaign (they ‘grew up’ hearing stories from things we’d done years before).
We even managed cross-overs, from my roommate at the time and I “dropping in” to play one weekend in Nashville after we’d attended another player’s wedding in Western Kentucky. (He was seriously tempted to join us, but their honeymoon won out.) to a gathering in “what’s a reasonably sized city halfway between Nashville and Dallas”, Little Rock, and a final cross over session when they all made the trip to Dallas and crashed in our apartment there.
And yes, we wrote stories based on our experiences. Well, at least I know that my roommate and co-player Jim wrote some, though I never got to read them, and the story I submitted to the Jesse Stuart Writer’s Workshop that Glen Cook taught in 1985. (Glen and the group thought it needed more work, but they also wanted more stories! And a lot of that was the work that Bill put into
creating the world, I think.)
Sadly, Jim died last week, so his Siegric and my Madrak (yes, I went there) won’t get to have an epic exit unless I write one. And, while I’m used to typing “Fuck Cancer” when a friend dies, also Fuck ALS. Jim should have outlived me by 20 years. You lost a fan last week.