I love writing shared world fiction, especially when the creators of those worlds let me go exploring into the unmapped corners and tell the tales that I want to tell. So far, I’ve been very lucky in my forays into other people’s sandboxes.
I fell into shared world fiction much like Alice dropped down the rabbit hole. I was invited to write a story for Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of a vast series of books set in the Forgotten Realms (an invention of a marvelous Canadian named Ed Greenwood).
Ed’s medieval world of magic, dragons, shining cities, and dark dungeons serves as both a setting for the novels and also as background for millions of D&D campaigns.
I did study once I got the assignment. Studied very hard. I have an entire shelf of maps, encyclopedias, monster manuals, magic guides, and so on. And in the course of this study, I found a city so obscure it only rated one column of text in an encyclopedia of the Realms. But it was an intriguing few paragraphs; one in particular stated that poor Tsurlagol was the most besieged city in the Realms.
For a couple of years, an article about sappers had been rattling around in my head. Sappers, in medieval times, were the blokes who dug under city walls during a siege or blocked others from doing the same. There’s even a fun story out there about how, in the time of wicked King John, a group of sappers used rotting pigs to blow up a tower in Wales.
So I have a “real world” history of a military unit who could operate in the “shared world” of Realms. I have a city that would naturally attract such folks. And, voila, a novel is born. After that came a year of hard writing, lots of whining e-mails to friends who also write or campaign in this world asking them to cross-check my facts, a truly brilliant suggestion from one mastermind on how to crumble the walls without pigs, and queries to my editor like “My heroine just punched a camel, can she do that in the Realms?”
In short, the entire process was very similar to what historical writers go through Except instead of writing to learned professors, I kept writing to learned Realmslore experts to settle my questions.
The final result was Crypt of the Moaning Diamond, a novel that still makes me laugh and people tell me is both very much my voice and very much a story of the Realms.
I should mention that Wizards does not assign plots or characters: they send out themes. Crypt was written for a series of stand-alone novels where the some of the action would take place in an underground place. The “dungeons” of the Dungeons & Dragons game.
In next novel that I was asked to write, Wizards wanted the action to take place in a certain neighborhood of a well-known Realms city called Waterdeep. Here I needed to do even more research: numerous books have been written about Waterdeep. Even scarier, creator Ed Greenwood would be vetting each manuscript. Back to the study and ordering more books for my reference shelf, which led to some interesting discoveries. There is an enormous graveyard in Waterdeep called the City of the Dead. A good deal of it, particularly in the north end, is unmapped.
While there is much written about who is buried in the City of the Dead, especially in the better-mapped south end, there was very little said about who buried them. Except to mention that various working class families living near the graveyard had businesses connected with it.
Oddly enough, I am descended from a mildly famous tombstone maker. When not carving monuments for Chicago’s finer graveyards, this ancestor of mine carved the Cardiff Giant, a hoax now on display in Cooperstown, NY. I have a postcard of the giant that lived on my desk during the writing of my next novel. I think it looks a little like my cousin Tony and wonder if my ancestor used himself or one of his many sons as the model.
Now I’m descended from the boy who left the family business. Rather than becoming a mason, he studied hard and became a dentist. So here I am thinking about Waterdeep’s graveyard, who would take care of it, and how somebody might not want to be part of a funerary family. And, yes, another novel begins there. Lots changed, of course, on the way to publication, but Ed was very kind in his review of the manuscript and said he enjoyed knowing who takes care of the graveyard. I enjoyed hanging out with the Carvers, my very fictional family created for City of the Dead, and even revisited them in a short story coming out in the anthology Realms of the Dead.
Then came an invitation to play in a very different kind of shared world. I live in Seattle, the hometown of Nathan Crowder, and am a fan of Nathan’s Cobalt City, a city full of superheroes battling super villains. All sorts of proper “cape-and-cowl” adventure takes place in Cobalt City, but Nathan’s heroes have very human hearts and often funny or sad real world dilemmas.
One of my favorite Cobalt City characters is Snowflake, a man-panda. This combination of furry bear and big human is the perfect sidekick for the city’s caped crusaders, but he also has a tough mind of his own.
In one of those deceptively simple talks that occur when walking to a coffee shop, Nathan mentioned he’d like to do an anthology and invite other writers to play with his creations. “Oh,” said I. “Like a Cobalt City Christmas or some such theme.”
Nathan’s eyes lit up and he announced he had a theme for his anthology. And I suddenly found myself committed to delivering a Christmas story in thirty days (Nathan claims now he gave me forty-five, but it didn’t feel that long). I asked to borrow Snowflake for my story. Nathan graciously agreed.
The boundaries of Crowder’s Cobalt City are not set completely in stone yet. There’s many unmapped corners, even in the Keep, the hangout of his superheroes. He’s pretty cool about statements like “I needed a nuclear reactor in Keep. Do you want it on the top floor or in the basement?” When I added that I needed somebody tying swan napkins for a dinner party, he smiled and steepled his hands. “That would be Doctor Shadow,” he said, and proceeded to describe his undying Egyptian master of mysteries and dark magic.
So I wrote a story set in a world I love, spending a pleasant interlude with the furry Snowflake, a nuclear reactor, a well-frozen goose, and, yes, swan napkins manipulated by master magician. It all ended up as a tale of Christmas dinner that does not go quite as planned.
For those setting off to write in a shared world, I would suggest doing the research first and then exploring the unmapped places of that world. Be willing to build a nuclear reactor in the basement if needed for defrosting the Christmas dinner. There may be dragons lurking in the far reaches, but there are also wonderful stories waiting for your discovery.
Rosemary Jones is the author of two novels for Wizards of the Coast: Crypt of the Moaning Diamond and City of the Dead. Her latest short story appears in the anthology Cobalt City Christmas. Go to her webpage www.rosemaryjones.com to find out more about exploding pigs and swan napkins.
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