Where did the world of Ethshar come from? Was it originally a gaming design?
. Ethshar was created, or at least developed, with gaming in mind, as well as fiction — though when I drew the original map back in high school I didn’t have much of anything in mind except keeping myself busy during a boring geometry class. In 1977, though, when I took that old map and started turning it into a world, I had in mind both gaming and fiction. • So how come there’s no role-playing game based on it? The problem was that I got so involved in the complexities of what I was inventing that it became unplayable as a regular face-to-face game; an hour or so of game time could consume days of real time. So I switched to play-by-mail, and that worked, after a fashion, for a couple of years. In 1980, though, a housefire destroyed my original set of maps (you’ll notice the very first map, as posted here, is visibly damaged; the others, which were still in use instead of stuck in a drawer, were completely destroyed) and most of the records. Since I’d sold my first two novels by then
