Glory Days: The Time of Swords and Eagles
For me, urban fantasy is defined by the late 1990s and early 2000s – not through novels, but through tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs). It was after second edition D&D had gotten dull and stale (and TSR’s long, entropic demise didn’t help) but before third edition D&D (which made our group want to pick up swords and leap into dungeons again).
So in this window, we started to play other things that weren’t D&D. Vampire: the Masquerade, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, the Everlasting…
It was different feeling to run around a modern city than a fantasy realm, especially a local one that you were familiar with. Still, we brought over from D&D an expectation of violence, and a lot of our earlier games ended up like mafia games with fangs, leather jackets and Desert Eagles (which was the best weapon in the game!) Gradually we drifted into more character-based, thematic gaming based on those books, especially when World of Darkness started to focus on different monster types for you to explore and play – vampires, mages changelings and so on. Then we went on to explore our own ideas such as a short-lived Highlander game1 and our own visions of urban fantasy.
So when I started the urban fantasy novel project, I started to figure out what I wanted from it, how you could build a modern-day setting with lots of supernatural critters, how they interacted with each other, and how would I make this an interesting place to explore. After buckets of text later, I realised I was structuring my notes like an RPG book. Who would the characters be in the setting? What would they be? And as I work on both side by side, the novel and the RPG are complimenting each other. I hope to release them both, and will see if the RPG captures (and improves upon) the experience of those early games2 in the time of swords of Desert Eagles…
- The GM stopped the game after one session when we ran around trying to decapitate each other rather than teaming up against the Big Bad that had recently arrived in town…
- Although some of the worst GM advice every is in the first edition of Vampire: the Masquerade, where they suggest you roleplay by candlelight. This nearly burned down our gaming club, after we tried holding character sheets closer to the candles to try and read the damn things, and one of them caught on fire…
Kell
I’m Kell. I write urban fantasy in an interconnected universe. I’ve published one novel so far, and I’m working on the sequel. The premise of the universe is: Did you ever wonder what happened after the Dark Lord was defeated, and when the magic left the world? It’s been two thousand years since the forces of Darkness were defeated. Now, there’s a modern world of cars, skyscrapers and officers. Elves run fashion magazines. Orcs go to office jobs, and everyone thinks that the age of wizards and dragons is folklore. It’s a perfectly ordinary world…on the surface. But magic hasn’t gone away—it’s merely hiding in the cracks of the world. My current series, the Revenant Records, is an urban fantasy series focusing on ghost stories, mysteries and dark adventure. It’s the story of an undead teenager, trying to balance her responsibilities to help lost ghosts, while maintaining a semblance of a normal life. I love roleplaying games and I’m writing a system for my story world/universe. My mega-fandoms are Doctor Who, Final Fantasy VII, and Transformers.
