Tag: Editor

About Royal Road West’s attempts to create a multidimensional door

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A darkened passage with light at the end. Two figures move toward the light.

This website came about because once upon a time an anonymous former newspaper Editor from a fog-shrouded Midwestern town discovered a multidimensional door into the ancient kingdom of Kesteva.

How hard can it be to build a multidimensional door that accesses other universes? As it turns out …

Royal Road West gets regular shipments of translated historical documents from the Editor, who we think sends us what his Translator has sent him. I should stress at the outset that our relationship is solid and productive, if, well, maybe a little weird given that we have neither seen nor spoken to the Editor and all of our communication with one another is by snail mail at the Editor’s insistence.

So it was not out of a competitive sense that not long ago we embarked on an in-house project to create our own multidimensional door.

The project charter mentioned business opportunities in the way of charged admission and tours of the ancient library the Editor draws his material from, and of the possibility of unlocking further universes to discover and turn into role-playing game material. I can’t take credit for the idea. That belongs to my IT helpdesk guy, who after proposing the project to our executive team during a free-pitch day open to all employees won appreciation for his outside-the-universe thinking and was immediately appointed project manager and given a sizable budget.

The PM and the war room

Helpdesk calls went unanswered for two weeks as the PM set up a war room we gave him on the ground floor of a warehouse we were renting to store print products. Finally we brought in a temp and then made the position permanent; too many computers needed to be shut down and turned back on again and could not wait. The executive team also had thought the project would take only a couple of weeks, but after a month of getting the go-ahead, the helpdesk guy was rarely seen or heard around the office. I paid a site visit about a month into the project as part of a regular check-in and was amazed by what I saw. The IT guy, Kenny, had transformed the space we’d given to him into a tiki bar, with potted palm trees, three dozen varieties of liquor and rows and rows of tiki torches illuminating the conference tables. The fire alarm system had been disabled.

“Now that’s a space for creativity, Kenny!” I said, and he raised a hurricane glass with four varieties of rum in it.

“The team’s at lunch,” he said. “I’m holding down the ranch.”

I should also say that in and among the potted palms and Christmas lights were dozens of wheeled whiteboards, smart boards and other creative tech.

Much to my relief, the whiteboards were covered with scribblings, numbers, graphs and matrices.

For his team, Kenny had recruited a street magician, a palm reader, a Ph.D. mathematician from the local university, a dog walker, a carpenter, an electrician and a physician’s assistant.

“Why the physician’s assistant?” I asked.

“He’s our scribe,” Kenny said. “He also might help diagnose any radness with the situation of pulling live bodies into and out of multidimensional space.”

Looking for results

To date, the team had tried these approaches and noted these results:

  • Built a door frame. The carpenter made it out of specially ordered wood. Then the street magician jumped through it. He emerged on the other side. “Maybe should have said ta-da?” read the field notebook.
  • Added wire wraps to the frame. No change.
  • Connected power to the wire wraps. No change.

Discussion item: Does anyone have tips on how to build a multidimensional door? Anyone? Anyone? How do we build it?

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How Royal Road West got its name

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Man reading a book

Names matter. Royal Road West’s history begins with the anonymous former newspaper Editor from a fog-shrouded Midwestern town who pulled a cache of historical records from ancient Kesteva through a multidimensional door.

The Editor tried to get universities and academic journals to treat his find seriously, but he was ignored or shown the door. In one case, he may have been carried through a university building’s exit bodily, but we have little information about the incident. For that matter, we have little information about the Editor. To this day, we have neither met him nor had a phone conversation with him. Our intermediary is the Translator—whom we also have not met.

Out of desperation, the Editor turned to those of us who would become the future Royal Road West.

We try not to take it personally. Instead, we put Royal Road West into motion.

The name comes primarily from the Royal Road, a marvel of ancient Kesteva. The Road is the ancient kingdom’s highway, main post road, telegraph trunk, watchtower network and lodging system rolled into one. It stretches from the eastern mountains to the western sea and connected Kesteva with such efficiency that, according to our preliminary research, economic activity rose at least 25 percent in its first 10 years of operation.

Given all that, we thought “Royal Road” would be a good name for the Editor’s great project.

“West” comes from a couple of things. First, the story of Kesteva’s founding is the story of Aelfric & Aelin’s flight from the Old World, with thousands of their closest followers, and their subsequent march from the mountains to the sea.

That is, their westward march.

The company also is located in the western United States. And so “Royal Road West” was born.

Discussion question: If you were to name your own adventuring company, what would you call it? What elements would you try to capture in a name?

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Welcome, welcome, welcome!

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Many of our loyal readers have asked how mysterious historical documents pulled through a multidimensional door by a former newspaper editor in a fog-shrouded Midwestern town get translated and turned into role-playing game materials. That’s why I’m starting this blog – to as best we can give some insight into the process, and to show how you can get involved.

Have you ever thought something seemed too suspicious to be true? That’s how I felt when the Translator approached me some years ago and said he had stacks of historical records from an ancient kingdom no one had heard of and needed to find a publisher. Then he added that these records—fading travel guides, property rolls, diaries, maps and ledgers—had been in a library in that ancient kingdom, and the Editor had pulled them through a multidimensional door. Amazing. Furthermore, the Editor did not speak ancient Kestevan. He had met the Translator at a county fair, recognized the Translator’s skill with languages and asked him to translate as much as possible into Modern English.

So when the Translator said this Editor, whom we have to this day not met, wanted Royal Road West to publish the translated material, we naturally said yes.

You would have done the same, wouldn’t you?

Here is the process of bringing the world of ancient Kesteva to you.

  • First, the Editor collects material through his multidimensional door. We are not entirely sure where this door is. Apparently it is in the fog-shrouded Midwestern town he lives in. We do know it leads to an ancient Kestevan library that seems to be closed for the weekend when he enters. We do not know if he is able to walk about the ancient Kestevan land, or if the doors are locked inside and out.
  • Then the Editor ships his new material to the Translator. The Translator tells us this happens about once a month and that the papers, books and scrolls arrive wrapped in brown packaging paper secured with twine.
  • The Translator snips the twine, unrolls the bundle and sets about converting the ancient words into modern English. We at Royal Road West have asked him how long this takes, given that he is the only person on modern Earth who has been able to translate ancient Kestevan. He said the first translations took him months, even years, to sort out but that Kestevan is similar to some of Earth’s old languages. He examined word frequency, correlated illustrations with captions and made a few other guesses that led to him slowly and then rapidly decoding the ancient texts. He is still learning and adding to the secret vocabulary lists he keeps, but the process is much more rapid now.
  • The Translator sends Royal Road West the translated text. Often, he also sends photocopies or photos of the original material so that we may reconstruct not only the words but the formatting of the original and attempt to reproduce the illustrations.
  • We then put the draft product through our own editorial process, which typically includes adding game master notes, finalizing formatting, proofreading and other such steps.
  • And then we offer it to you. Some products are put up for sale to help us sustain the business, but much goes directly onto our website or into free ebooks. The Editor conceived of the project with an educational and research mission, so we offer as much free of charge as we can.

So that’s what it is. In the main, we are dealing with primary sources from a hitherto-unknown land. This brings challenges of translation, on which we look to the Translator, and of further interpretation, which our dedicated staff at Royal Road West – and you – provide. Join us as we

Next time, I’ll dive into the Editor’s great project and why on earth he thought a publishing company like Royal Road West should publish his findings. In the meantime, what do you think of our process? Would you have accepted the proposal the mysterious Editor put to us?

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