Sometime in the hours before false dawn (when I usually pass out) while I was weaving my way through the first Conan story, The Phoenix on the Sword, I realized I needed to get some blog posts done that actually had some sort of relevance to this whole writing thing. While reading Conan did give me a few structural ideas regarding how to attack my obsessively large timeline of interweaving stories – all of which have something to do with the novel’s world, but not necessarily with the novel itself – it was a previous attempt at something similar that I found myself thinking about as I laid there waiting for sleep to take me.
Once upon a time, before I’d become the creature I am now, I’d been a rather promising youth with a mind too strange and brilliant for my high school teachers to keep up with or care to do anything with. I say this only partly out of my oft-professed narcissism as there was actually evidence of these statements back then. I did poorly when it came to getting homework done on time, or caring about the usual high school bullshit, or even giving a shit about the half-assed nonsense my teachers often came up with to try and get students to engage in the classroom, but I aced every test I ever took. I carried the highest scores on the standardized tests, and had demonstrated this ability to the tune of a 160 I.Q. on the two occasions I was tested.
Some call that genius. Who am I to argue?
The point, however, isn’t that I’m just naturally smarter than everyone else – though certainly I am because they’re all idiots – but as a set-up for what came next. I was going to fail 10th grade so badly they were going to hold me back. They’d have done so in 9th grade, too, because for all the evidence that I not only absorbed all of the information I was supposed to absorb and easily carried my own against all the preppy GPA-whores who did their homework every day like good little sycophants and shit-heels, the educational system cares more about doing what you’re told to do than learning anything.
I’d skated by after 9th grade by way of one particularly good teacher suggesting that I pass if I agreed to attend SuperCamp that summer. I did, and loved it so much that when the good folks at SuperCamp’s head office called me about working for them a few years later I jumped on the opportunity and spent a month at Atlanta’s Emory University working as a Team Leader for the academic-skill-oriented summer camp. The school, or perhaps more rightly the biggest bitch of a principal ever to walk the Earth, wasn’t going to extend me the same sort of offer twice, though.
So I said, “Fuck you guys, I’m out,” and left after 10th grade. But I wasn’t your average high school dropout. I got my GED a week later with no prep classes, and signed up for college classes at the local community college the next week. I majored in Computer Programming until two years of that bored me and I switched to the brand new Graphic Communications program. I still didn’t do homework, but it was a great time and I learned all sorts of stuff.
What I DID do when I was supposed to be doing homework, however, became the impetus for this post and the real topic at hand. I had all sorts of free time since I wasn’t wasting it doing homework, and my programming teachers were truly brilliant people who knew how to inspire creativity in an otherwise very repetitive and often frustrating field. So, between classes or any time I had a break or got bored in one of the mundane Gen Ed classes thrust upon me, I turned my expansive mind and creativity toward what I felt was going to be a truly fantastic future in game design.
I wrote for hours, and filled three notebooks with handwritten plots, character designs and details, world history, quest information, and every other detail I could think of to put into what I envisioned as a classic RPG series very much in the vein of a Final Fantasy, or Suikoden, or Dragon Quest, or whatever other Japanese console RPG series you want to plug in.
I named my series The Winds of Fate, and gave each of the five games I managed to get down before the next diversion took my attention away from the effort its own subtitle instead of numbering them like the Japanese games I loved (and still do) so much did. My vision was a simple one, but grand in scope. I’d create a common thread between each game, even though they occupied different worlds, kind of like the famed crystals or Cid of Final Fantasy; omnipresent, but not always the same.
For The Winds of Fate that common thread was to be a sort of bleeding effect between worlds, before I really had the language to properly express how such a bleed would work or what it meant in the grander scheme of things. It was, according to the game world, just a wind that blew through the worlds themselves and shook things up seemingly without purpose. Winds of Fate characters, foes, and chunks of world would drift from one game into the next, or come out of nowhere from two games ago, and so on. It was an idea I knew even then I was pretty much copping from Stephen King, since by then The Dark Tower had already become my favorite book series of all time, but I thought at the time I was creating something really interesting and compelling.
Even if it was really just a thinly-veiled J-RPG riff with stories inspired by King, a juvenile understanding of mythology, and an intense desire to make my mark on gaming history.
I didn’t know it then, but The Winds of Fate would come to haunt me even to this day. What I thought was just going to be a fun project to keep me entertained while I avoided homework and plotted world domination actually became a testing ground for the world I’m still building today around the novel and the stories that take place outside of it. Everything goes back to the Winds and that attempt to create a world of such breadth and depth that no one story can contain it.
I still have those notebooks tucked away in a dresser drawer in Iowa, and every few years in the fifteen since my misspent years at SCC I’ve pulled them out for a chuckle and a nod to what I’d been before. The writing is horrendous, the plots are shamefully thin and centered around a lot of level grinding and dungeon crawling to pad each game out from what might be about six hours of actual story each, but the exercise was important and acknowledging it as such has often given me that little bit of drive I need to get a project done or at least stir up a few old ideas I can use again.
And the Winds of Fate blow still. A few years after I’d put the notebooks down and moved on to my next obsession, I picked up Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World and I’ll be damned if the Winds weren’t right there, on page one, rising in the Mountains of Mist, blowing east across the Sand Hills (once the shores of a great ocean before the Breaking of the World), and into the Two Rivers to ruffle the cloak of a young man who’d change everything. Robert Jordan’s wind was not the beginning, but it was a beginning.
For The Winds of Fate: Beginnings, though, was the title of the first game in that series-that-never-was.
Clint Knapp: Writin' Shit 