Edition Wars

“Larry would come up with a crazy idea,” Ron Wachowski recalled, “to hang ropes from a tree and make a swing or trapeze, and Andy would be the person to grab hold of the rope, climb, and crash down.” The boys spent sleepless weekends playing Dungeons & Dragons in the attic, coming downstairs only to raid the fridge. “In D. & D., you have nothing but your imagination,” Lana said. “It asks all of the players to try to imagine the same space, the same image. This is very much the process of making a film.” The Wachowski brothers and some friends even wrote a three-hundred-page game of their own, called High Adventure. “We were often frustrated by genre differentiation, whether it was in games or in fiction,” Lana said. “In our naïve and foolish innocence, we dared to imagine a utopian world where all genres could intermix.”

So what’s it like, living in the Realms?

The flippant answer is “More exciting than you would like.” Given the prevalence of wars, casual daily violence, and widespread natural or magical disasters, it’s hard to see things otherwise—yet Faerûnians do.

Looking forward to this book, should be interesting.