Introduction

Welcome to the land of Mareten, set in a custom world created by yours truly, using guidelines set up in the Adventurer, Conqueror, King System (aka ACKS). But before I introduce you to this wondrous land I've created, I would like to introduce myself!

I am Andrew Metzger, a Christian, husband, father, GM, programmer, and table-top game player, in roughly that order. I must admit, I came to the pen-and-paper RPG world rather late; while most geek kids in the '80s and '90s were already rolling dice and slaughtering orcs, I was playing shareware PC text adventures. It wasn't until the late '00s that I first picked up a character sheet, but from then on, I've been hooked. I love creating; when I started with Deadlands, I made up two new characters after the first two sessions. Not long afterward, I GM'd my first game, using a somewhat strange system someone had made in their garage. It was clumsy, and the battle dynamics was terrible, but I got the hang of it, and the players loved it. It ended up falling apart, but I stuck with it; right now, I'm running a retread of that game using the Savage Worlds rules, and it's going swimmingly. However, it wasn't until I started playing ACKS last summer that I realized how amazing making a world could be. My first bout of worldbuilding was with text adventures: write the name of every object, every description, every motion anyone could make. I wrote Shifting Horizon as a story; beginning, middle, end, with all the details fleshed out and all the ideas written down. I try to keep it open, but there are some points that are pretty obviously designed to railroad the players - they have to do this thing, to make that thing happen. But this new system, ACKS, had simple instructions for rapidly creating entire universes - open, sandbox universes. Make what you think you'll need, and leave the rest to chance. I can write a story, and let the players figure it out along the way, on their own time.

So, I started writing down my ideas for my world over lunch one Monday; every lunch and evening that week, I made maps, rules, and indeed, a whole world. In the last three weeks, I've written a lot more than basic maps and stories. It's getting to the point where the intricate little stories I'm writing are starting to grow larger than a stack of text files can hold. And thus, though this world holds many secrets, I've created this blog to reveal the world as a whole... and perhaps a bit of misinformation. You never can be sure.