From the Publisher of Royal Road West
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 … and that’s how Royal Road West came to publish RPG material based on Kesteva.
But what if we had never heard of Kesteva?
I visited Gettysburg National Military Park several years ago and took a tour with one of the park’s well-regarded battlefield guides.
When we got to Little Round Top, our guide—he was in his 60s, probably, and we’d learned through the tour that he had taught high school history once upon a time—paused as a faint grin appeared on his face. He told us the story of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment’s heroic defense of the position under the command of Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. What’s funny? I asked.
“You’re a publisher,” he said. “So you know who gets published survives, and those who don’t get forgotten.”
How often do we hear of Culp’s Hill?
He went on to say that several other historical figures were just as important as Chamberlain and his 20th Maine. Col. Patrick Henry O’Rorke, for example, on July 3, 1863, brought his 140th New York regiment to bear against advancing Confederates, drove the invaders down the slope and helped win the day for the Union. He was shot dead while urging on his soldiers. A monument to O’Rorke stands at Little Round Top today. But we hear a lot less about O’Rorke than about Chamberlain.
My guide’s point was that O’Rorke, Strong Vincent, and also Charles Hazlett on the Confederate side, weren’t around after the battle to tell their stories. Chamberlain did. Not only that, but he was a university professor and good at it. So movies were made about him, and the others slipped into faded history. Not only that, but over on the other side of the battlefield is Culp’s Hill, the site of a Union defense just as important as Little Round Top’s. But again, Little Round Top is part of the popular culture, while Culp’s Hill is not, except to history enthusiasts like my guide, who insisted we spend a good amount of time there.
If university scholars had taken our Editor seriously when he presented documents he pulled through a multidimensional door from one world into another, they would have found themselves on the fast track to academic greatness. It was fortunate indeed that the multidimensional door this former newspaper Editor from a fog-shrouded Midwestern town opened into an ancient Kestevan library and not into, say, a dovecote or dairy operation. It opened into a chamber of academic treasure. And so what that the writings were of previously unknown languages. Here was an entire library full of such samples. How wonderful a contrast to Linear B, Linear A, and the Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Enter Royal Road West
But no, the academic world turned its back on the Editor, and so he turned to Royal Road West.
As the Translator undertakes the work the academics wouldn’t, and we publish the translations, we find matters that surely would have interested the university establishment.
Ulric survives and is remembered because he put down his thoughts. He wrote. He cemented his thoughts.
He shared his thoughts.
Little Round Top vs. Culp’s Hill is only one example of publicity winning over equivalent merit. There are others – maybe Newton vs. Leibnitz inventing calculus (they did it independently, but in our English-speaking corner of the world it took a long time for people to figure out Leibnitz did that). Do you have any favorite examples? Please share in the comments section. I’d love to hear them.
