World of Orenda

Author notes

“Lex est tamen lacuna vacuus manuum quod mucro hominem”

oachambers

on May 31, 2007

Allan here. Jordan and Brian have done a nice job discussing their inspirations for the tone of World of Orenda. I’ll add my own thoughts over the next couple of weeks.

My primary inspiration comes from more than 2 decades playing Dungeons and Dragons. D&D gets a bad rap from both the cool kids and the Chick Tract crowd, but it had a very formative effect on me. I first encountered it in fourth grade, when a kid brought a copy of the old red Basic edition into school. We spent recess poring over it, looking over our shoulders to make sure the teacher didn’t find us staring at the picture of the busty female fighter in remarkably form-fitting chainmail.

My friends and I were hooked. At the very mature age of 10, we were tired of being treated like little kids. Here was a game that was both exciting and accessible to us, but also seemed terribly grown-up. It didn’t try to entice us with brightly colored chutes and ladders, or playing pieces shaped like little cars. It gave us grainy black-and-white drawings of warriors hacking apart monsters. It didn’t give us square dice sealed safely inside a Pop-a-Matic bubble. It gave us crudely fashioned dice with shapes we’d never seen before, that you had to color in yourself if you wanted to read them.

And best of all, it didn’t talk down to us with simple words or easy to understand sentence structure. Come up with multiple words to clarify the rules? No, we’ll just use “level” for everything, and tell you why you should figure it out. Don’t know what “fecundity” means? You’d damn well better go look it up, hadn’t you, junior?

Suck on that, Candyland.
- Allan