The Book of Dungeons - A weak to strong litRPG epic

A Note From the Author

I love making maps. Nothing charges up my imagination like geography. The basic form of Miros hasn't really changed, although I endlessly iterated on location names. My first step in writing this series began in December 2019 with this map. When making a tabletop RPG adventure path or a 3D level for a computer game, I always start with a map.

For me, maps come before stories. By sketching out maps, story ideas spring into my brain. Aside from a vague idea of what kind of character I want to write about, it all comes to the setting. I stole the idea from George Lucas. Not many fans know how he wrote Star Wars. He spent months jotting down ideas on a yellow notepad—a grid-locked galactic senate, a droid factory, a snow planet, and floating racecars.

After filling his notepad with settings and circumstances, he kept his favorite situations and strung them together into a story. His process was that haphazard. Originally, Luke Skywalker wasn't rescuing a princess, he was saving his friends from Tatooine. George Lucas forgot to make a female character until the last edit of the script. Months before shooting, he scrapped scenes of Luke saving his friends and giving him a princess to rescue. It wasn't any high-minded hero's journey that Joseph Campbell writes about when he describes the film as some great mythology describing the timeless tale of humanity.

They hacked the film together, and I don't say disparagingly. Hacking is good. Hacking shows iteration, the process of improving something. That's how many stories get made. Lucas put Leia in a cloud city (sound familiar?), but when 20th Century Fox said there was no way they'd pay for cloud city interiors, they told him to reuse interiors from the Death Star. Lucas went along with their idea.

Part of Lucas's process involved writing down names. R2-D2 came from a moment when we edited his first feature film, American Graffiti. He wrote R2-D2 on reel number two from the second day of shooting. He liked the cadence of the name and saved it for later.

When I worked on World of Warcraft, Chris Metzen's office lay on the other side of the hall, and I learned about his creative process as well. He kept changing names or swapping them about. Cities on the map change from place to place. One of the images from The WoW Diary, my first book, shows the world's continents looking different from how they appear in the game. I took a picture from what Metzen painted on the wall.

Stories are the cheapest part of computer game development, and most studios string a story together with whatever elements are finished at the end of the dev cycle. If a game's dev team doesn't finish the dragon animations, they yank it out of the story, swapping it for another monster. Fans who have bought into a series might be disappointed to learn how malleable its stories really are.

When writing The Book of Dungeons, I created a map of the continent and jotted down dungeon ideas, cool fight ideas, and situations. The list of ideas looked like enough to fill seven books. I imagined a narrative that might string everything together, connecting the settings and fights into a sensible story. It felt like seven books of content.

It's no coincidence that my continent's shape fits snugly on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper. After a few pencil sketches, I broke out Adobe Illustrator and tweaked it over the next few years. The shape hasn't changed, but the names have been in a constant state of flux. Geography freaks will point out the scale of miles measures to a landmass roughly the size of Madagascar, which is hardly the size of a continent, but other geography freaks will point out there's no working definition for a continent, so "Nyah!"

I debated leaving the populations off the map, but they're not really spoilers. As you can see, Basilborough and Belden are roughly in the middle of the map on the west continent. Hawkhurst lies roughly in the dead center.