I am, so far as I’m aware, the only person who ever turned a <i>Changeling: The Dreaming</i> campaign into a non-tie-in novel.   (Do I win points for obscurity?)

The only thing I know that comes even close, Marie,  is the fact that some of the characters in John C Wright’s Chaos trilogy derives from player characters from an Amber DRPG campaign of his.  

And I let my characters roll the dice themselves for Perception plus Awareness, because they have learned that high rolls sometimes inspire me to have them see something they’d rather not have noticed. Ignorance can be bliss…

Anyway, I’ll be over here shouting “preach it, brother!”  I love playing RPGs, both tabletop and LARP; I studied them in graduate school (no, I’m not making that up); I’ve even run a few in my time — though not many, since I’m unfortunately inclined toward campaign ideas that involve way the hell too much research and prep time.  The interaction between that and my writing goes both ways, to the benefit of both.

(Me, I roll Perception + Awareness *for* my players, without telling them.  That way if they fail the roll, they don’t know there was something they overlooked . . . .)

RPGs have always “tipped the hat” to world building as that process often appears in SF and Fantasy.  As players and GMs have become more sophisticated readers and audience for games, so the RPG worlds have become more complex and challenging.

Now we are at a point where gamers write fiction based on long tested ‘virtual worlds’ and that makes for some sophisticated reading.

Looking forward to this column.

And I wonder if it wasnt for the upsurge of “fantasy” gaming in the 70s-80s if fantasy literature would have had such an explosion of popularity…or maybe it is a chicken and egg scenario?