Royal Road West and Ancient Kesteva
An Introduction
The following is excerpted from the book Discover Kesteva, published by Royal Road West. It appears in Chapter 2: History & Fiction: How to Use the Source Material With Dungeon World.
Once every couple of months at Royal Road West’s offices, never on a predictable day, a housecat-sized parcel wrapped in dark brown kraft paper and secured with light brown twine arrives.
This is the good time.
Word spreads through the office. One by one staff amble into the shipping room. They hold porcelain mugs or paper cups of coffee or tea—Earl Grey is popular, and our copy intern swears a whiff of bergamot goes out on every letter we send—and gather around the table in the center of the room. Our Publisher lays out the bundle, slices the twice, unwraps the paper, reaches in with both hands, and brings out the contents. Sometimes it’s faded side-stitched copies of what might be logs. Sometimes it’s what appear to be journals. Sometimes it’s a collection of folded sheets of paper tied together with colorful ribbon: theses usually are copies of Ulric’s Little Descriptives. In most cases, we have no idea of the contents at first, for all of it is written in the language of ancient Kesteva or something even less familiar.
A thumb drive accompanies the haul. The drive contains the Translator’s conversion of the documents into English. The translations are not always complete, but they are extensive enough for Royal Road West to prepare reproductions of ancient Kestevan documents and make them available to the public. The Publisher takes the thumb drive and adds its numbered translations to the office network while other staff photograph the original documents, note dimensions, binding and other details, and file them away into the company archive. Writers, editors and artists go away to continue work on the year’s planned publications. The latest haul’s translations may or may not make it onto the editorial calendar; that’s a decision for the publication committee. Sometimes archives originals are brought out for display in Royal Road West’s Museum of Kestevan History. Most of it remains hidden, awaiting the kind of academic study the Editor wants but has so far not received.
The Editor’s interest in serious academic study of Kesteva and numerous rejections led him to Royal Road West. But to begin at the beginning:
One day, the Editor—an anonymous former newspaper Editor in a fog-shrouded town of the American Midwest—discovered a multidimensional door. He opened the door. He stepped through.
On the other side was an ancient library in the ancient world of Kesteva. Inside the library, the Editor found books, maps, letters, field manuals, logs, drawings …
The Editor had no ease with foreign languages, and so he found and somehow persuaded a Translator to convert the texts into Modern English. It was slow going at first. But after a time, the Translator reported breakthroughs, and soon the first translations began arriving at the Editor’s doorstep. Within these previously mysterious texts, the Editor encountered an ancient world of soaring mountains, great cities, castles, monsters and magic. As he read the decoded material that began arriving in regular parcels, he gained appreciation for Kesteva and determined the world must know of it and its people.
He conceived a plan to bring the world of Kesteva to our world’s attention by inviting university scholars to examine the material. Academic papers would be written, grants would be awarded, courses would be offered, department chairs would be endowed. The world would learn of Kesteva.
None of it happened.
The Editor continued to cross the multidimensional door and retrieve texts from the ancient library to which it led. The Translator continued his work. But the academic study was not forthcoming. In his discouragement, the Editor envisioned a new project: to convert the ancient histories into role-playing games, which he had heard about through his years of journalism. His idea was to gamify the history and thereby support more “serious” work of translating and research outside of mainstream academia. With the sting of rejection from such institutions in mind, he turned to our publishing house as a last resort.
We try not to take it personally.
The Editor began by writing to our Publisher.
The modern world, he confessed, sometimes got him down.
“It’s all black boxes now,” he wrote to our Publisher. “Time was when you could understand how a thing worked. Now it’s a matter of ignorance impossible to overcome. You have to rely on faith in technology to exist in this world. That makes modern existence and reliance on technology a religion, doesn’t it?”
There were many letters.
“And everything is being optimized to death,” he wrote in one. “Even going to the movies these days, now they know exactly what buttons to push. Television, the Internet, books: everything is optimized to sell you something. … And don’t get me started on the black boxes we live in through daily life. On the one hand, nothing is understandable, and on the other it’s all too understandable. …”
The Editor told our Publisher of the multidimensional door. Of the library he’d discovered. Of his great project.
Kesteva, he wrote, presents a contrast to the modern world.
“Imagine a place where they’re still learning. All those optimizations? They haven’t figured them out yet. Oh, they have social constructs, and let me tell you they’ve optimized their knowledge of goblin anatomy to know just where to hit the hideous beasts in close combat. …”
Kesteva is not perfect; the Editor admitted that. It is a sprawling world of adventure, danger, intrigue … and dragons, castles, caverns, snowy mountains, dark woods and green fields. It also is home to human, elves, goblins, trolls and gnomes, all struggling to survive everyday existence. An imperfect world. A dangerous world.
“But they haven’t invented time clocks or Social Security numbers,” the Editor wrote. “They don’t know anything about overtime or point-of-purchase donations or parking meters. I don’t think electricity even works in Kesteva. Magic looks like real magic. …”
“Their world isn’t a machine like our world. Not yet.”
Our Publisher invited the Editor to visit our offices. The Editor declined. Our Publisher invited the Editor to meet in a coffee shop, a library … the Editor declined. The letters continued, explaining Kesteva, the multidimensional door, and the Editor’s grand vision.
The multidimensional door is the reason our Publisher knew the Editor was telling the truth about his documents’ origin. No one can fake a multidimensional door, he said, and who would make up such a thing? When the Editor proposed his Great Project, the Publisher heard him out and helped set the plan in motion.
The Publisher even changed the name of our publishing house to Royal Road West.
The Editor has never given his name, nor that of his Translator. He has never identified the location of the multidimensional door. He has never identified the specific fog-shrouded Midwestern town he lived in. The return addresses on his parcels are from all over the Midwest, and no one has been able to trace them back to the Editor.
He did elaborate on the multidimensional door once, in response to a query from a staff researcher. He said the ancient library into which he stepped appeared to have been closed up for a long weekend, for the Editor did not encounter librarians or patrons and found all the doors locked from the outside. This absence of other people enabled him to secure a trove of books, scrolls, pamphlets and other documents and take them through the multidimensional door back into our world.
Not much else about it is known. It may never be known. Nevertheless, our Publisher tells us at Royal Road West that in bringing the world of Kesteva to the public—more importantly, to YOU, dear reader—we are in some small way rebuilding our own world.
Will you join us?
Do you continue?
