The Creation of Aurivyn

Greetings to you Tremendously Astute Spirits!

So, I'm gonna tell you straight up:  I'm taking a little break from Mutant World.  Now, now, calm down.  Yes, there WILL be more Mutant World coming in the future.  But I'm taking a little break to write up a few episodes of another series called...

I won't lie about it, Aurivyn grew out of Dungeons and Dragons.  

I don't really remember when or how I first learned about Dungeons and Dragons, but I remember being completely enthralled with it once the concept was explained to me.  My sister had the Basic Set, and I got to look through it and formulate impressions that have pretty much lasted my lifetime.

Played a few one-shot adventures, and collected books, adventure modules and the BECMI boxed sets.  Of course, I moved up to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and 2nd Edition is the version that I played the most.  

  

Over the years, I created a fair few continents...not really complete worlds...but definitely big enough to house several campaigns.  Never really got to play them though.

Eventually I found the world of Mystara, and it quickly became one of my favorite published campaign worlds.   I collected as many products related to it as I could.

Someplace along the line we had moved to another state and I lost my gaming group.  Being socially awkward and the demented loner type in my younger years, I rarely tried to hook up with new players.  Eventually I grew out of the habit of playing, and looked at the material as inspiration for writing and drawing.

That's the preamble, now for the beginning of the actual story!

I was taking care of my Poor Old Mother (TM) and somehow it was decided that my oldest brother's two boys should get to visit Grandma on weekends.  We decided to take one at a time.

The younger of the two boys, my nephew Jason, came to visit for the weekend.  I'm afraid he probably spent most of that weekend fairly bored.  But he popped into my study to see what I was doing, and spotted my collection of D&D stuff, so he asked about it.  I told him it was a game and that there was no board, you use your imagination instead.  I told him some stuff about it and he decided he wanted to play.

So, I drew up a quick five-minute dungeon, we pulled out a sample character and a map from one the box sets and we played.  I don't really remember why, but I figured he would dislike it and never want to play again.

Boy was I wrong!

So when I took him home, it was all he talked about.  So of course his older brother--Richard--wanted to play, and I mus admit that I wondered how he would have handled the adventure.  So he picked out a sample character and I sent him on the same adventure.

What was the adventure?  Well, they lived in a rural town populated by a superstitious medieval people.  A small statuette was positioned on the edge of town as a ward against evil spirits, and one day it was missing.  Each of my nephews was sent off--separately and alone--to retrieve it.  The search led them to a secret dungeon in the nearby forest, where they faced monsters and traps, rescued the statuette and found the person that stole it.

They both loved the game and wanted to play some more.  So the next weekend, both came for a visit.  They decided to keep the same characters and I sent them on a brief published adventure.  Their third adventure was a watered-down version of yet another published adventure.  

But for their fourth adventure, they were returning to the village where the first adventure took place and suddenly I had a problem: which one of them retrieved the statuette?  They didn't go together.  Some villagers would swear that Jason returned the statuette, while others would insist it was Richard.  How could I fix this?

Suddenly it hit me:  I had two alternate realities overlapping!  The rest of the campaign was about them trying to fix this.

I've always wanted to write up these adventures, so I'm going to!  I'm adding in some other elements from some of the other homebrew worlds, partly for plot purposes, partly for legal reasons--to differentiate my story-world from the published game setting.

I have written a couple of stories that take place in what would eventually become Aurivyn.  The Saturday Serial story "The Crystal Cage" takes places there.  So does the story "Buy the Sword" currently available in "The Adventure Sampler", which is a free gift received by the folks who sign up for my newsletter.  But these were minor experiments while I was trying to hammer out the plot for the series.

I have the details worked out now, and I'm pleased to announce that I am working on the first installments of an Aurivyn story arc called "The Wrath of the Ancient Prisoner", and it all started on that weekend when my nephew wanted to play a fighter!  Little did we know what that began...

Well, I'd better get to work, so until next time I wish you...

Good Adventuring!

Timothy A. Sayell

Hello and Welcome!

Hey-ho and what-do-ya-know!

I see you've found your way here to my Home Base, my Head-Quarters, my Secret Lair, my Sanctum Santorum!  Which means that you must have found the clues, solved the riddles, and followed the trail less traveled; in short, you answered the Call To Adventure!

Yes, I know, right now you're saying "What is this idiot talking about?  All I did was click a link!"

And that link led you straight here, to The Adventure Site, the official online HQ of neo-pulp adventure fictioneer:  Timothy A. Sayell!  (cue kazoo fanfare)

What does all that mean?  The short version is that I'm an author.  What do I write?  Well, I write adventure stories in various genres.  I write Sword and Sorcery, Sword and Planet, High Fantasy, Space Opera, Pulp Hero, and a few weird cross-genre things that are a little harder to classify.

Yeah, but have you actually been published?  Sure I have!  I've had stories appear in webzines like Raygun Revival, Flashing Swords, and Abandoned Towers.  Some of my stories appeared in Big Pulp Magazine, and a few anthologies.  Sadly, these ezines are now defunct, but the physical magazines and anthologies are still available at Amazon and a few other places online.

So I bet you're wondering what sorts of things influence my writing.  And even if you're not, I'll tell ya anyway!  Well, to start with, there are the normal things from TV and Movies:  Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,  Conan the Barbarian, Land of the Lost, Thundarr the Barbarian and various works by George Pal, Roger Corman, and films derived from the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.   These somehow lead me backwards to the old Saturday afternoon chapter serials that used to accompany a movie and a cartoon at the local theater back in, like, the 1940's.  I'm talking things like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, The Phantom Empire, Undersea Kingdom, and King of the Rocketmen!

But those are movies, you're supposed to be a writer!  What are your literary influences?!  My list starts off sounding like most other genre writers, I suspect.  Because it starts off with J.R.R. Tolkien, Fritz Lieber, Robert E. Howard, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner.  I learned that most of these folks first published their stories in old Pulp Magazines, and I started learning about and collecting stories from other great authors from the Pulps.  Folks like Norvell Page, Lester Dent, Emile Tepperman, Wayne Rogers, and many, many others.

So, how did you get into writing?  I think I'll place a lot of blame and credit on role-playing games.  In my opinion, a role-playing game is sort of like a group storytelling session.  Each player controls the actions of one character in the story, the game master tells us what happens in the story as the result of the various players' actions.  I was fascinated with the prospect of Dungeons and Dragons, but for a long time I had no one willing to play it with me.  So, I studied it, made up my own situations, and eventually started to write them down.  I learned of other games, like Gamma World and Star Frontiers, but I had never even seen physical copies of these games.

Of course, I eventually did play Dungeons and Dragon...a LOT.  And it did inspire some of the stories I've written, and some I'm still working on.  Other games have sparked other ideas, and so have pulp magazines, old radio shows, and movies.

So I write the kind of stuff I like.  And what I like is fun escapist adventure!  Sometimes that means storming the castle, sometimes it means trekking across the ruined city of a post-apocalyptic earth.  Sometimes it means seeking a lost treasure in a hidden temple in the jungle, or following a masked vigilante as he tracks down the mad bomber that wants to level the city, or even zooming my starfighter past planets to engage in the epic space battle!

That's Amazing Stuff!

Ya think so?  Well so do I!  What are we waiting for?  Let's assemble the expedition, and get this safari started!  If you're after adventure, excitement, and pure pulp fun join me on the journey and together we'll answer the Call To Adventure!

Yours Truly,
Timothy A. Sayell