A LitRPG series that was a long time coming...
This is the story behind one of my main writing projects: the Shadow Kingdoms LitRPG world.
As well as informing you about the series itself, I hope to get you thinking about creativity, and show that it can pay to be patient when it comes to developing your own gaming and writing ideas.
After all, it took 30 years for my game world to make it from being a hand-drawn map on a page to the setting of a published novel.
The Beginning
It all started when I was in my mid-teens, back in the 1990s. I was very into fantasy novels (my favourite authors at the time included David Gemmell, Raymond E. Feist and Hugh Cook) and hugely into roleplaying games, too, from D&D to GURPS to Shadowrun.
While I did buy game modules from time to time, I’d come to really enjoy doing my own thing — planning and creating adventures and locations. I had almost as much fun drawing the maps and populating dungeons as I did playing the actual games.
Actually — wait a minute. That side of me probably started much earlier still…
I loved drawing maps as a kid. One of the most memorable tasks I ever did at school was when we were asked to draw a map of a ‘secret island’, and then write a story about it. It’s the only schoolwork where I…
