You have to be careful in the Steamworks. It is a belly filled with brass and steam. Towering pipes twist and turn like yarn through brick walls and floors. Concrete walls and iron doors, bars like a prison. The heat, sweltering and pure, scouring your skin free. It is enough to drive you insane. I thought I was insane, once. That first day, when I had taken the King’s Shilling and become a City Engineer, I crawled through the hole in the ground down the slim ladder with rungs as thick as bottles.

For six hours the train traveled through the countryside, stopping at various towns to pick up and drop off passengers.

Edmund left Moulde Hall on the thirty-first of August. In proper British fashion, it was raining.

Edmund was an orphan from birth, as was fashionable at the time…

A whole new website design!

Yellow. Burning yellow. With a sharp sliver of black dividing the topaz jewel, the cat’s eyes slowly blinked in the flickering firelight. “Patience,” Rufus muttered, half to himself, half to the cat. “Almost there. Almost.” It had become a mantra, a holy psalm that spurred Rufus’s actions ever onward. It kept him going, moving in the dim candlelight when his strength had all but left him. Almost there. Just a few more tests…

With my RPG treatise finally complete (or at least as complete as anything ever is, in my head…) it is time once more to return to the dark and twisted world of Edmund Moulde, and the second book of the Macabre Quadrilogy. In many ways, this book was supposed to be the first book in Edmund’s story. I had imagined a very Rowlingesque (sans bigotry) opening of the odd little Moulde boy being tested after he used the chemicals from his sister’s makeup kit to revivify his dead pet rat.

Wait, wait! Not finished yet, I guess… Call it an errata, if you wish, but the truth is there are simply too many games and too many complex aspects of RPGs to ever really be “finished.” Even in the process of writing this, games have come out that are far better examples of, say, experiments with Game Balance or explorations of real-time than the examples I used. And that’s nothing compared to the subjects I haven’t even broached.

When I first started this…I guess you could call it a project, I did it for weird reasons. I had been struggling with my other writing projects, hitting brick wall after brick wall, forcing my fingers to type out trite and uninteresting sentences that advanced boring stories with empty souls, to the point where sitting down to write was becoming an act of self-harm. My brain began its spiraling semi-regularly, and it began to adversely affect my relationships with my friends, family, and myself.

Duke Markus von Himmelman, son of Lady Margret De’Mechaump and Lord Phredrick von Himmelman, Baron of Lower East Spannerton, Duke of Topside, and a Welcome Lord in the court of Prince Reinheart himself, was furious. He stormed about his office like a madman, pulling his watch out of his vest pocket and clicking it open every few steps. When the clockwork timepiece provided nothing less than further frustration, he would stuff it back into his vest, turn sharply on his heel, and begin stomping in a different direction across the large carpet.