Break a Leg

So, I read a lot of fantasy fiction.  And I'm not talking about porn, as the number of this blog may suggest.  The last couple of books I've picked up really got me thinking about one of the most popular conventions in story telling: young, naive, but latently talented guy meets old, experienced guy and they save the world.  There are other people along the way, but it's mostly Frodo and Gandalf, or Garion and Belgarath, or Eragon and Brom...over and over and over.  There's always somebody who's been watching them all their lives and suddenly turns out not to be Aunt Pol, but Polgara: Immortal Sourcerus, 2nd Deciple of What's-his-bucket - the ancient god of blah Blah BLAH!

This convention is shaped by our internal needs to be somebody special - that little farm boy who grew up to be king, or the beggar girl that suddenly finds herself possessed of one of the rarest powers in the world and only she can protect the good and the handsome and intelligent prince inexplicably loves her.  This is nothing new.   Stories like this were being told back before Greece was even an island.

Why do we read these books?

Well, because of the other stuff: the other characters, the other goings on.  We KNOW that the young kid and the old guy are going to save the world.  Oh yeah.  And so we can cast fireballs and fly dragons.  Cuz that would be so cool!  Ok, so more of the good stuff and less of the convention is what I'm going for.  Look at Terry Pratchett's work and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

Elves and a superior race?  Superior bastards is more like. Now dwarves: dwarves are good.  They make stuff, the live in mountains, they fight, and they drink.  Magic?  They empower their hammers with the magic of ass-kicking, skull bashing, and head-butting...not necessarily in that order, though.  And humans...in stories they're all a bunch of dullards, except for the one special kid and one old fart, and the thief with the heart of gold, the big dumb warrior and the sexy mysterious magic-using broad that's like 1000 years old but looks 16.

Now in MY story, it's a dwarf, a kobold, a scaven, and a couple of halflings that have nothing to do with each other.  The world they live in is called Beta.  Can you see where I'm going with this?  It's a test world.  And things in the test world don't always get finished.  And sometimes things don't work they way they should.  And people find ways to eploit those disfunctionalities which make up the basic space-time fabric that is Beta.  All the normal people go about their lives playing by the rules as they've been layed out.  But there is always somebody who doesn't want to play by the rules and wants to get all the leet gear and pwn all the nubs lol!!!11!  And of course, somebody has to stop them.

Enter our heros.  Now the dwarf...is a samurai.  How much more unconventional can you be than a dwarven samurai?  And his Emperor sends him on what should, by all accounts, be a wild goose chase.  The emperor send the samurai on The Quest for the One-Sided Coin.  Well, it's looney, but a samurai has to obey his emperor or he will bring great shame on everybody.  So the dwarf goes off and meets the other characters accidentally in a tavern.  Which is TOTALLY conventional, but it's a gaming world convention and one that I felt I could allow.  The kobold is a martial artist specializing in the Drunken Master style; the scaven is a thief who is part man, part rat, and all disgusting; one of the halflings sufferes from a complete lack of fear and/or good common sense; and the other halfling is at one time trying to master the arcane powers inherent in nature and alternately get into a wider real estate market.

Hilarity ensues.  I promise.

I've been working on this idea for quite some time and have a few bits actually written out, with tons of ideas for side characters dreamed up over a life time of living with a wild imagination.  I am going to start turning my will towards this project.  Because it is constructive.  It is something I should be doing.  Lately all I've been doing is drinking and playing World of Warcraft...this is not healthy.

With the First Season of Break a Leg coming to an end and the prospects of future projects uncertain, and IF content will still be needed on this site on a regular basis, then I may, from time to time, subject you to more of this story as it unfolds.  I know I promised something like that in the past with that little cartoon thing, but after the majority of my work got wiped when the server at work crashed...I sorta lost heart.

Oh, and to make this blog have to do with Break a Leg: We should go to conventions like WonderCon and Comic Con and be ourselves to attract attention.

Happy Jenday!