Casting Shadows

Today’s standard prompt for #RPGaDAY2024 is to share an RPG with writing that you feel is great. There are a few books that I could quickly and easily suggest and move on, but this year in particular that won’t be enough. This year is a very important year in terms of RPG writing and so I will turn the prompt to a slightly different focus and share the name of a specific writer that I feel deserves recognition as a great example for this kind of writing, before sharing the tremendous book he released this year.

No time to read? Check out this Short instead!

Who and what are you talking about?

I have given his name in answer before for #RPGaDAY, and I think that is important to me both to state and to realize that. The first name in RPG writing that comes to my mind, every single time, hasn’t changed for me since I first encountered the author’s work late in 2010. Since then, I have gotten the great pleasure of gaming in his worlds, getting to work with him as an editor, seeing his tremendous body of work grow first-hand, and more recently, learning with great sorrow of his intended retirement.

Who is it?

As you might be able to see in the image above, the name that I am returning to in praise of great writing is Paul “Wiggy” Wade-Williams. Known best for his incredible work for Savage Worlds and Ubiquity, he has also wowed readers in publications by Atlas Games, Eden Studios, Green Ronin, and more. If this insufficient post is your first introduction to him, I hope you will trust my recommendation to seek his work out wherever you buy games, or directly from Triple Ace Games without delay.

Great Writing?

When I consider what great writing means in the context of an RPGs I find it requires clarity and logic coupled with suggestion and inspiration in the right proportions to transmit the information and imagery the reader needs without stifling their creativity and imaginativeness. Great writing in an RPG makes me want to inhabit that world as a character and makes me want to bring that world to life around characters as the GM. It inspires me to create PCs and NPCs with aspirations and inspirations connecting them to the past and present, and pushing them onward into a future touched by their own efforts. Wiggy’s work has this in both Aces and Spades, with Clubs and Hearts to boot~

Recently, Wiggy released his magnum opus – a complex and compelling collaboration with the reader to present the small and blighted country called Mordavia. It is as firm and bright in the mind’s eye as any real place, while being flexible enough to follow the twists of your own designs, appear for its native Gothic Horror, hide in plain sight for Leagues of Adventure, or shudder and coil menacingly for Leagues of Cthulhu. It speaks to you, as all such tomes of darkness should, of possibility and of illusion masquerading as truth.

Based on the author’s love of horror, with nods to such greats as the Universal Monsters and Lovecraft, Mordavia is, chronologically, the last work we may ever see from the keyboard of Paul Wade-Williams – though I hope it is not. There is, though, another project which has been taking shape from material written before Mordavia. We might yet get a long and long-awaited love letter from beyond… if it would only stop growing and expanding long enough for the publishers to catch it.

Curious about Mordavia: The Land of Horror? You can find it in digital form from the publisher, and in PDF and PoD from DriveThru.