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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simrion" data-source="post: 5819744" data-attributes="member: 27676">No Stats regrettably but a great article by the man himself...and AD&D appears to have been the initial "seed" from which the stories sprang!<a href="http://www.stevenerikson.com/index.php/the-world-of-the-malazan-empire-and-role-playing-games/" target="_blank">The World of the Malazan Empire and Role-Playing Games | Steven Erikson</a>I love this sectionIn our own gaming, we took from AD&D the most basic tenets of gaming: we created characters, assigned values to their basic attributes, physical and mental; we selected from a list of talents and skills and put ‘points’ into them to shape our character’s abilities. We invented stories and plotlines involving contests and goals, and to gauge success we rolled the damned die. This sounds basic, but it is fundamental. Where we deviated was in the details, in creating a viable world with cultures and histories that made sense to us. We then spiced it with other stuff, be it inspired by war literature, tragedies, films, and so on.     This all became the grounding of the fictional world we then created, and those who have gamed well see the basic gaming elements at work in our tales. To be specific: the Malazan Empire was founded in a tavern called Smiley’s in an island city: its core of players were a balanced party of sorcerers, fighters, assassins, thieves and priests. The events in the city of Darujhistan leading up to the night of fete were all gamed, and again we had balanced groups (Kruppe, Coll, Murillio and Rallick; Whiskeyjack, Mallet, Fiddler, Hedge, Quick Ben and Kalam; and so on). The squad finale of The Crippled God, the tenth and final novel of the series, was gamed.     So, I can rail at the clichés established by AD&D, but man, they’re in my <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ing blood, like it or not. I use them. All. The. Time. And lo, it’s not a problem. In fact, I depend on them: as my readers know, in the Malazan series there’s scant else for them to connect with at first glance. And even as readers get a handle on them, I mess them up.</blockquote>

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