Days of High Adventure: Gaming Fiction

[Matt Forbeck]

Days of High Adventure: Gaming Fiction

From H.G. Wells' wargames to Dragonlance, games - video and tabletop both - have inspired further narratives. This week, games author Matt Forbeck starts a series pulling back the curtain on the art of the gaming tie-in.

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[GL2814E]

Eh, I enjoy some of the derivative fiction. And some of it is much better than 'original works of fiction.' And I've enjoyed some of these stories much more than even some Pulitzer Prize winning works.

But it doesn't matter. People who get bent out of shape about tie-in fiction clearly don't have enough to fill their days with.

 

[Andy_Panthro]

Guilty pleasures perhaps...

However, I don't think it's any problem that these books relate to gaming. They're as varied as much as other fiction books, in both depth and quality.

My experience of such books is the trilogy that was essentially the prequel to the Baldur's Gate games, which I thought were as well written as other fantasy fiction that I've read.

They also seem to sell quite well, and quite frankly I'd rather people were reading these sorts of books than celebrity biographies or similar.

 

[hamster mk 4]

I am an avid Black Library (Warhammer 40k) reader, but I own no miniatures and don't realy like the Dawn of War games. I enjoy them mostly for the fleshed out Crapsack World and the psudo latin vocabulary. That and Dan Abnett realy puts forth a good tale.

 

[abaeran]

Fascinating article.

I'm still bitter over Assassin's Creed: Renaissance. The novel read like poor fanfiction, and considering the wealth of story that the author could have delved into and the poor execution, I could not finish it.

Games provide a unique background that is made uniform for both reader and author - for the depths of exploration the reader has accomplished and perhaps the same by the author. With the amount of experience the reader has gained, through the eyes and adventures of characters - I find reading good gaming tie-in novels an absolute treat. Yet, with great experience, comes great expectations. I don't need authors catering to the whims of selling a novel, but authors invested in crafting a story and realizing its characters. That will sell me the book.

Anyhow. I'm quite excited to hear about the Guild Wars novel - perhaps this foray into game-novels will be more enlightening than my last.

 

[Lazarus Long]

The Chronicles trilogy was fantastic, and I really enjoyed the All Flesh Must Be Eaten anthologies, but yeah. For some reason, when I think of licensed literature, all that comes to mind is the Doom comic stereotype. I should really work on that.

 

[ElectroJosh]

I enjoyed the Weiss/Hickman Dragonlance stories when I was a younger lad. Chronicles and Legends were fun and accessible series while some of the other Dragonlance stuff was quite uneven.

I never, however, played Dragonlance as a game nor did I have any interest in doing so. Now I have looked back on the old Dragonlance and thought how silly it all seems. But to a young teenager they were fast-paced, exciting and fantastic. If I had kids in the 11-15 year old bracket I would give them books like that to read.

I look at current offerings set in other gaming universes and assume that they fit into the same category. But I could be wrong. Maybe there are some real Sci-fi and fantasy gems that I have missed due to my assumption that they are stories for young adults more than people my age.

Can anyone offer further insight into that? For example I am a fan of warcraft games so would I like a warcarft novel? How would they compare on a scale of 1-5 (with "1" being bad and "5" being amazing).

 

[Falseprophet]

The original Weis & Hickman Dragonlance trilogies were probably the first "adult" fiction I ever read. I loved non-fiction as a kid, and was reading high-school level books on astronomy and spaceflight in first and second grade, but hated the fiction we were assigned at that level. The only fiction I read before Dragonlance were Choose Your Own Adventure books.

I read Dragonlance around the same time I learned to play D&D and discovered the SSI D&D games for Commodore 64 (sixth grade). When I look back on those and other Weis/Hickman series, I realize they're not great literature, but I'm still grateful for spurring a love of genre fiction and gaming in me.

No other game fiction has ever really appealed to me. I immensely disliked Salvatore's Forgotten Realms books, and the only Magic: the Gathering book I tried to read (it came free with a starter pack of cards) was so bad I threw it against the wall 4 pages in. I read the first two Vampire: the Requiem novels. They weren't great, but better than I thought they'd be. Now there's just so many novels for so many properties, and I have so many other books to read, I don't dare to start anywhere. I don't get enthralled with the settings or characters of most games. I rarely spend more than a week or two on a game; why would I want something that short fleshed out? At least with a pen & paper RPG or LARP, I spend months or years playing the setting. This is part of the reason that Dragon Age are the only video game-based novels that kind of interest me at the moment.

 

[SonicKoala]

I've honestly never picked up a book which was based off a video game - I don't read much anyway, but I've always figured that if I wanted to experience that setting, I'd just play the game which the novel was based of.

That being said, this article has got me intrigued. Perhaps I just never realised how popular this type of fiction had become - I'll definitely be trying my hand at one of these books in the near future.

 

[Xylis]

Huh. I never knew that the Dragonlance books were based of Dungeons and Dragons. Learn something everyday I suppose. I generally avoid books based on video games, apart from a few (the Halo books-which were recommended by a friend, are actually pretty damn good, and ANYTHING written by Dan Abnett because, well, they're just awesome).

Good article by the way.

 

[Matt Forbeck]

You seem to be limiting the term games to mean only and exclusively video games. If you broaden that a bit to include tabletop games, particularly tabletop RPGs, as I discuss in the article, my meaning should be clearer.

 

[ProducerPaul]

Good article, Matt. Looking forward to reading the rest. As someone who would like to write tie-in fiction, I find any article on the subject fascinating.

 

[ElectroJosh]

How about games like "Betrayal At Krondor"? Raymond Feist writes the Riftwar based on a table-top RPG campaign setting. After several of these Riftwar novels the rights are secured to base a game on it (Betrayal At Krondor). Years later Feist writes a novelization of the game.

So we get a novel based on a video game which is based on some novels which are based on a roll-playing game.

 

[BlueInkAlchemist]

Great article.

It seems singularly difficult to break into this field. The mainstays of the genre of this sort of fiction - Weis & Hickman, R.A. Salvatore, Dan Abnett, Drew Karpyshyn, etc - are well-established and the comparisons between them and any newcomers is inevitable. After some of the experiences I've had trying to break into the business of getting fiction published, it seems to me that tapping into this particular vein requires excelling in another field of spec fiction or knowing somebody in the business, if you're not a part of the business already.

I could be entirely wrong, of course.