For those of you who aren’t familiar with Draxenath, she is a regular contributor to Spam Spam Spam Humbug episodes; she’s also been involved with the game development industry for a long time, and has stories aplenty about interactions with other notable game developers.

For the last couple of years, Draxenath has been working on writing the story of a setting of her own creation, Record of the Dragon Goddess. Initially, this was done to establish the setting for a game, or possibly a small series of games, but it morphed over time into a storytelling venture in its own right:

I have played the Ultima series since childhood. What made Ultima great was not its virtue system or its story by itself, but the fact that every NPC felt alive, every item had a use and/or meaning and reason to exist, all of them were connected, and your actions had an impact on them and made the game feel like a real, living world. It could be summarized with the Origin slogan: “We create worlds”.

In 2006, I started a homebrew D&D campaign inspired by the Ultima video game series. I have kept the Origin slogan and the Ultima essence always in mind as I worked. As the revisions of my campaign setting progressed, it slowly took a path of its own, with a completely new pantheon, creatures and its own history. It currently keeps very little from its D&D and Ultima roots. But even if there are no longer gargoyles, blackrock, a Lord British or anything imported directly from the Ultima universe, the essence of the saga is there.

My original plan was to make 3 or 4 simple RPGs, but a friend named Kevin Fishburne aka Boolean Dragon told me many times I had talent for writing epic stories and my fantasy world had the quality and depth to become a movie or TV series. I was not sure at first, but after his constant encouragement as well as the positive feedback I received from other people, I decided to start putting part of its history into narrative form. I hope it becomes popular and attains enough critical mass to take off into something bigger than the games I am working on, like a movie, anime or TV series.

With the publication of the fifteenth chapter of Record at the end of June, that story has now been brought to a conclusion; you can find the complete index of chapters here, if you would like to check it out. A Spanish translation of the story is also available.

And if you like Record, you might consider visiting the project’s Facebook page and engaging with Draxenath directly thereat.