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DargonZine |
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| Editorial | Ornoth D.A. Liscomb | |
| Born Leader | Stuart Whitby | Ober 12, 1016 |
| Talisman Two 1 | Dafydd Cyhoeddwr | Late Spring, G331 |
| Return to DargonZine Home Page | ||
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| DargonZine is the publication vehicle of the
Dargon Project, a collaborative group of aspiring fantasy writers on the
Internet. We welcome new readers and writers interested in joining the
project. Please address all correspondance to
<dargon@shore.net>
or visit us on the World Wide Web at http://www.dargonzine.org/. Back
issues are available from
ftp.shore.net
in members/dargon/. Issues and public discussion are posted to newsgroup
rec.mag.dargon. DargonZine 12-11, ISSN 1080-9910, (C) Copyright November, 1999 by the Dargon Project. Editor: Ornoth D.A. Liscomb <ornoth@shore.net>, Assistant Editor: Jon Evans <godling@mnsinc.com>. All rights reserved. All rights are reassigned to the individual contributors. Stories and artwork appearing herein may not be reproduced or redistributed without the explicit permission of their creators, except in the case of freely reproducing entire issues for further distribution. Reproduction of issues or any portions thereof for profit is forbidden. |
requent visitors to our Web site may have seen our pointer to
Donna McDougle's recent review of DargonZine. The review was printed in
an October 8th issue of Dark Matter Chronicles, a publication dedicated
to reviewing science fiction, fantasy and horror Web sites
(http://www.eggplant-productions.com/darkmatter/). The review was
unexpectedly effervescent in its praise, and very flattering. While I'd
encourage you to check it out, I'm not bringing it up to promote either
DargonZine or Dark Matter Chronicles, but to talk about a topic that the
review mentioned.
In the review, one of the things DargonZine was praised for was the
orchestration of the project: our ability to keep "so many threads
straight and smooth ... keeping it from becoming a hopelessly knotted
jumbled mess". As you can imagine, in a shared world with fifteen years
of writing behind it, there's a veritable glacier of Dargon-specific
information -- characters, dates, places, events -- which must be
managed and integrated. Over the years, we've built up a huge body of
information that is highly detailed and must be successfully
coordinated, both to present a coherent world to our readers and to
serve as a necessary reference for our writers. I thought I'd spend this
Editorial telling you a little bit about one aspect of how that has
worked.
Some readers might imagine that when we started the shared milieu,
a bunch of us sat down and hammered out all the details of Dargon, much
as a gamemaster might engineer a world for a fantasy roleplaying game.
Surely we would define all the continents, the kingdoms and duchies and
their rulers, the topography, the cities, the roads, the rivers, the
major characters, and the various races, religions, and cultures. For
many people (including some writers), having a rigorously-defined
environment is the first step toward developing a story.
Well, DargonZine has never really worked that way at all. In fact,
when the project began, the first Dargon stories were printed based
solely on a very brief overview. That initial description was shorter
than the three-dozen lines you've read so far in this Editorial! That
document briefly introduced just five elements of the milieu: the city
and duchy of Dargon, Dargon Keep, Clifton Dargon, Baranur, and Magnus.
When we started, that was all there was to know about the world of
Dargon.
One of the drivers for that decision was simply the level of effort
and the time that would be required to do a lot of up-front work. As
writers, we wanted to get started writing and printing related stories,
not spend a lot of time and energy doing the research that would be
necessary to architect all the details of a viable medieval society. And
back then, we weren't real sure whether the magazine would continue for
very long, either.
Furthermore, we came from a very different philosophical
standpoint. The gamemaster's task -- defining things beforehand -- is
really to create a mental model of the world, exploring and
understanding and describing it in depth, so that he can react
appropriately when his players take his story in an unexpected
direction. In contrast, the writer controls what her characters do, and
thus doesn't need to create a setting with the same breadth of detail.
In addition, the writer's work is defined by and limited to her stories;
any detail which doesn't actually appear in her stories seems like
wasted effort, because having never been committed to eternal life in a
story, it disappears without having benefited her readers.
There are, of course, gamemasters who create their worlds off the
cuff, and writers who prefer to develop a rich background before ever
setting fingers to keys. However, in DargonZine, we expressly decided to
define as little as possible, and allow future writers to add new
elements to the milieu -- to create Dargon -- as their stories needed,
free of arbitrary constraints. This gave DargonZine an open structure
that we could explore and extend over time, and it enabled us to publish
stories that might never have seen print if we had begun with a more
restrictive idea of what Dargon was. Without that flexibility we might
never have seen Dafydd's Fretheod and current Talisman saga, or Max's
Eelial, or the Beinison war.
Each of our writers has contributed their own elements to the
milieu. We have benefited from the knowledge and originality of dozens
of people over a decade and a half, and that kind of organic growth has
both enriched the setting and helped make it more believable. Looking at
Dargon today, I think the result is infinitely better than if we'd let
just one or two writers define everything at one point in time so many
years ago.
As we discussed and wrote stories, we decided that details and
ideas that we discussed would not be immutable facts until the readers
saw it in a published story. When there was a conflict between an
unpublished idea and the real and immediate needs of a good story, we
thought the story should always win out. By defining our canon in this
way, there really wasn't much point in making lots of reference
materials that weren't authoritative and might be superceded by any
story's needs.
So for most of our history we allowed writers to create the details
of our world as needed, building up a body of knowledge derived from the
printed works, and only limiting ourselves by a few philosophical maxims
and the stories we'd printed to date.
Of course, there are also some disadvantages to this decentralized
approach. Many of these result from the lack of a single authoritative
source to define the milieu. The lack of a central document to describe
the world of Dargon makes it more difficult and time-consuming for us to
bring new readers and writers up to speed. In order to address this
concern and make Dargon more accessible, last year we agreed to break
our longstanding reluctance to define things and decided to make the
first street map of Dargon, which you can see in the map area of our Web
site.
Of course, in going back and gathering the information for that map
we discovered the second major disadvantage of not defining things up
front: the potential for contradictions between stories and
inconsistency in our creation. By that time there were dozens of stories
with references to streets and markets and districts, and many of those
descriptions contradicted one another, or didn't make sense when you
looked at the city as a whole. Through some creative cartography and a
little revisionist history we were able to put together a map which
works pretty well. But we repeated our first mistake: we decided not to
assert anything in our maps about the areas that hadn't already been
named or described.
Just last week we revisited this decision, and for the first time
in fifteen years we're going to abandon our longstanding policy of
leaving judicious ambiguousness in our description of the milieu. We're
going to sit down and make another, more complete, authoritative map of
Dargon, including lots of new detail that wouldn't otherwise be
considered canon. It's taken us a long time to get to this point, but
hopefully the new map will lend more richness to Dargon, and give new
readers and writers a better starting point for understanding the town
and the stories that take place in it.
So that's a little insight into how much of Dargon came about: from
intentionally sketchy beginnings, incorporating the original and
imaginative contributions of dozens of writers, until now, when we're
finally able to conceive of fully defining and depicting at least one
small corner of the world.
It's been a while between issues, but that's really not surprising.
Submissions tend to slow to a trickle during the summer months, which
makes autumn a bit thin on material to print. Of course, Dafydd is back
once again, with the first chapter of his two-part Talisman Two, which
continues the series of stories he began a year ago in DargonZine 12-1.
But leading off this issue is a new story by Stuart Whitby, who has been
with us almost two years now.
At this point, we're still planning on getting one more issue out
before the end of the year. It will be distributed in mid-December and
should contain four new stories, including the conclusion of Dafydd's
Talisman Two and the first story from another new writer.
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