{"id":7108,"date":"2017-09-14T18:24:39","date_gmt":"2017-09-14T23:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/?p=7108"},"modified":"2017-09-14T18:55:05","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T23:55:05","slug":"everything-i-learned-about-writing-i-learned-in-lankhmar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/2017\/09\/14\/everything-i-learned-about-writing-i-learned-in-lankhmar\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything I Learned about Writing I Learned in Lankhmar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LankhmarMy life changed in 1985, with the publication of TSR Games’ LANKHMAR – CITY OF ADVENTURE<\/a> release.<\/p>\n

Six years of playing Dungeons and Dragons led to that moment, an open adventure where friends and I could lay out the city map and do anything we wanted.<\/p>\n

As the Dungeon Master, it was my job to guide those stories. I took my role seriously, finally realizing this game I loved — that saved my life<\/a> — was a shared story with close friends…not a thing I ran them through in an attempt to work out my many issues when I was younger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those years of playing the game since 1979 culminated in Fritz Lieber’s world<\/a>…in an apartment in Grapevine, Texas…<\/p>\n

Enter the Flow<\/h2>\n

In the years before the publication of Lankhmar, City of Adventure<\/em>, Dungeons and Dragons consisted of very determined modules that told a budding Dungeon Master exactly what to do.<\/p>\n

\"Lankhmar<\/p>\n

Nothing was left to wonder: if the party turned right or left, you knew exactly what they encountered. But with Lankhmar…everything was so wide open. You were given a map and a guide, but few adventures. It was up to you<\/em> to make legendary stories happen in that city near the Great Marsh.<\/p>\n

Oh, How We Flowed<\/h2>\n

We answered the call — everyone I played with seemed to understand that all our years of gaming came to this moment and place: a free-form map and book of rules that let us<\/em> decide our fates.<\/p>\n

Do you see those blank spaces in the map?<\/p>\n

\"\"
The Old ‘Hood…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Those were places left entirely up to us to build.<\/p>\n

How did we build them?<\/p>\n

TSR Games<\/a> gave us geomorphs…little squares where we<\/em> could say what the buildings were (and who resided within).<\/p>\n

\"TSR's<\/p>\n

Just like that, this established realm belonged as much to us as it did to Fritz Lieber<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(Because in those blank spaces, game designers did something wonderful: they let those playing the game decide what each of those blank squares contained, effectively making this massive place our own!)<\/p>\n

How Did All this Make Me a [Better] Writer?<\/h2>\n

Lankhmar mattered because I had no choice but keep my friends entertained for hours on the fly. And that’s helped me greatly as a novelist.<\/p>\n

I know some people say a novel should be a well plotted thing, but an international author who has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize (multiple times) would argue otherwise:<\/p>\n

\""When<\/p>\n

I’m not saying the adventures in Lankhmar I came up with in the moment were akin to the novels of Haruki Murakami, but…Lankhmar taught me how to tell stories when pressured to come up with something great.<\/p>\n

If I came up with something ridiculous, I couldn’t throw it away — I had to decide why<\/em> a ridiculous thing occurred in an instant to keep a story going…or disappoint a group of people right there before me in real time.<\/p>\n

Now that I write novels, it’s not much different: there, in a moment, I make decisions that affect story.<\/p>\n

Over and over — thousands of times…<\/p>\n

But It’s Just a Game…<\/h2>\n

Some may say Dungeons and Dragons is just a game, but I discovered it the same time I discovered the writing of John Cheever, Stephen King, Robert Pirsig, and John Irving.<\/p>\n

This is not to say my games for friends compares to literary works, but it’s to totally say that in junior high — in the worst years of my life — the seeds of how stories come together were planted.<\/p>\n

Today, I like to think I write with confidence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And if you agree…as much as the writers I just mentioned (and so many more) factor in to that ability, Dungeons and Dragons (specifically that Lankhmar sourcebook) played a role as well.<\/p>\n

(Nevermind that I pay the bills as a tech writer…whose first tech writing was done creating my own homebrew Dungeons and Dragons realms as a kid.)<\/p>\n

(I owe so much to this game…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My life changed in 1985, with the publication of TSR Games’ LANKHMAR – CITY OF ADVENTURE release. Six years of playing Dungeons and Dragons led to that moment, an open adventure where friends and I could lay out the city map and do anything we wanted. As the Dungeon Master, it was my job to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7108"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7108"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7121,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7108\/revisions\/7121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}