About

"What we are, we are; and no more than potential, in which the germ presents all between nothing to impossible things. To stir the stones and bones of a million worlds once knowable, and venture once more into de-knowing" — Quel-Ya-Xhit, The Sapient Questioner, Ape-lich of The Tower Sideways

The Illuminated World is a Shadowdark TTRPG table semi-canonical to a creative world-building and literature project I’ve been working on with the same name. I believe I will have something worthy of posting here, but I am a young writer.

Influences

This is me being my most presumptuous, sorry. Generally the world is strange and backward and alien and in a perpetual struggle with itself, but I do like to believe kindness and hope lies somewhere in it; somewhere a new humanism can develop. That said, shout out to these works:

Fiction

Anything by the following is an influence to me: Gene Wolfe, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, C. L. Moore, Ursula le Guin, The Strugatsky brothers, Samuel R. Delany, Fritz Lieber, Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levy, Thomas Bernhard, László Krasznahorkai

Films

The Seventh Seal, John Boorman’s weird and very horny Excalibur, the old Arnie Conan flicks, Michael Mann’s Thief, Robert Eggers, Krull, and that one D&D film in it with Hugh Grant in it that’s fucking ace and we’re never gonna get a sequel to.

Video Games

Morrowind, Shadow Tower, King’s Field and pretty much everything FromSoft puts out, Skyrim, Wizardry, Caves of Qud, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Pillars of Eternity and a dollop of what we lovingly call “Slavjank”