Fantasy Stories
With the publication of ‘Stone Eater‘ I now have four published fantasy stories.
The other three are:
And I have another 3 sold and awaiting publication:
- Onion Farmer
- Bone Dreaming
- The Daughter’s Oath
All of these fantasy stories share the same world though I suspect that will not be immediately apparent from reading them as they take place in different locations and times.
(BTW if you are curious about my other published work, you can check out the list, grouped by genre or the full bibliography).
Brent Knowles
Former lead designer at BioWare (Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights). Creator of Raiders of the Serpent Sea.
4 Comments
Mordi Peshkess
Speaking of fantasy. Why do you think most Western made fantasy video game almost always use the Tolkien formula while Japanese ones are more interested in creating a unique world. I am not trying to diminish Western game and Tolkien. Lord knows how much I love them both but I do wish a fantasy game would try to go for something else.
Brent Knowles
A lot of it is familiarity. Familiarity for the writer and for the reader. I should say though I don’t think everybody in the West is simply copying Tolkien but most are drawing from the same myths/stories from their Western cultural heritage that Tolkien drew from. Hence, the similarity.
Additionally the fear that sales will be lost if the setting deviates too far is strong in the gaming industry. And the truth is, for the Western world, the bread-and-butter games (orcs, trolls, dragons, and such) do (or did; it has been years since I’ve looked at sales data) seem to have greater sales potential. Really bizarre settings are hard for an audience to dig into; it takes real effort on the part of the design team to make the game accessible.Why this would be different in Japan I have no idea. I could speculate that they have a larger gaming audience to begin with and hence even if something is not *as* popular as it might be in the West it can still be profitable. Or perhaps the games *are* influenced by a wider cultural pool of myth-stories??
Mordi_Peshkess
I think you are right about Japanese fantasy being different because they have a much wider source to draw from. The Tolkien myths is really English folklore as England never really had a chance to develop folklore of their own. However, if you look at other European folklore you can see that they also have as much diversity as the Asian ones. If you’re interested in it then I recommend you check out an old TV show called The Storyteller. It’s amazing old TV show where John Hurt plays out a storyteller and every episode he tells a different story from various European folklore animated by Jim Hanson’s workshop. They also made Greek Myth version with Michael Gambon (better known as Dumbledore V2.0) as the Storyteller.
Brent Knowles
Cool info, thanks. I’ll try to check into some of this.