A is for Arrival

Welcome to Meterra! A world of magic, mystery, and pulp-action excitement! A world where medieval knights fight creatures from the very pits of Hell itself in the name of God, a world where history becomes current, a world where the impossible becomes inevitable.

Over the course of this month as part of the A to Z Blogging Challenge, I'll be introducing some of the places, characters, creatures, and concepts that breathed life into Meterra. I've written two novels in this world, and there are more on the way. I begin with the Arrival, which is the title of the first book of the Chronicles of Meterra.

The Arrival is the seminal moment in Meterra's recent history. A small army of European Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land found themselves trapped between two Saracen armies led by the great Saladin. Before the battle was engaged, however, the Europeans found themselves surrounded by a bright light, brighter than the sun. When the light faded, they were no longer in the scrabbly hills of Palestine, but in lush green fields that reminded them of home.

It wasn't long before they realized that they were in a new land, one inhabited with monsters out of myth, legend, and the worst fears of medieval imaginations. But there were other people there as well, men and women who looked to these great warriors for protection from the fierce tribes and terrible monsters that plagued the land. Guided by the leadership of their new king, and the wisdom of Bishop Marten, the European Crusaders were forced to make for themselves a new home in the land they called Meterra.

I don't want to give everything away, since that would basically spoil the plot of the first book. But there are some things I can say about it, in particular where the ideas came from.

First of all, I am a long-time gamer. I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons in the early 1980s, and fell in love with not only the game, but role-playing and fantasy in general. I was heavily influenced, as were many people of my generation, by the gazillion pastiches and outright rip-offs of Tolkien. To me, that's what fantasy was; epic quests, long trilogies, and stock characters that were either direct copies or inversions of Tolkien's characters. I didn't know any better.

But as I got older, I learned that D&D wasn't about that kind of fantasy. Or at least, not just that kind. Because there was a whole bunch of other fantasy fiction that bore no resemblance to Tolkien whatsoever; Burroughs, Howard, Lovecraft, CA Smith, Pratt, de Camp, Merritt, Lieber, etc. Yes, the famous 'Appendix N' of Gary Gygax. And I began to read some of those authors and saw how they not only shaped the game I loved, but the entire realm of pop culture.

And as I dove into the history of the game itself and how it originated, I found myself wondering what the rules of the game would look like if they were a reasonably accurate representation of a fantasy world. And no, for those who are fans, I wasn't doing an Order of the Stick self-awareness thing. I took the idea seriously, and went through the original rules from 1974 and even the precursor to the game, 1971's wargame rules called Chainmail, to see what was actually there. And then I built a world based on what I found.

After I had that world built, I wanted to not only run games there, but tell stories. And so, I wrote up the story of Meterra in a book, Arrival. It was the first fantasy book I published (through Amazon). A sequel followed (I'll talk about that in a few days), and there is more on the way. While Arrival wasn't the book that launched me into writing, it was the book that spurred me to write more fantasy, not necessarily in the same world. I've always come up with stories, not all of which would fit in Meterra. But there are plenty of stories to tell in this world, and I'm hoping you'll come along for the ride.