Bloodlines – The Game Experience

I have expanded the Bloodlines Universe to include a Role Play heavy Dungeons & Dragons Campaign. I have roped a few friends into allowing me this vanity and they have agreed to develop characters and play in my universe.

The experience has been a lot of fun so far. I will be the Game Master/Dungeon Master since it is my sandbox, and I will take them to some of the locations visited in the novel and some new ones as well. Right now, they are still working on characters, and one of the ways to work through what they know and how, is Role Play. One of my players, the amazing Riley of Riley Writing, and I have been doing that for a couple days now and have made a rather interesting story, I think. It is not only helping him develop his gaming character, but is making me think through and improve the overall universe.

I will post the RP in another post because it is 9 pages long right now, but I never thought about how doing that could help world build and character build. I was surprised at how man questions I never addressed, not even for myself. Some of these will not be explicitly stated in the novel. However, they will help me when I do my re-write and editing to get my details straight and consistent.

World Building

When building a magical world, inside our own modern world, there are issues of how the magical systems work. How do the people who know about it behave? How do the people who do not know about it react when confronted with it?

Authors such as Jim Butcher and his Dresden Files Series handle this quiet well. Most people are completely unaware, often willfully so of magic and magical worlds. Those who are aware, have to walk a fine line to not get labeled as crazy.

Laurel K. Hamilton handles this differently. The supernatural and magical worlds are part of the every day world. Everyone knows about vampires and werewolves, and zombies and deal with it on a regular basis. Vampires are even US citizens.

I have chosen to go with the more hidden magic world, and