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Royal Road West gets regular shipments of translated historical documents from the Editor, who we think sends us what his Translator has sent him.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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