LinkTales volume 1: Unfinished Novels and Unplayable Games

By Lee Edward McIlmoyle

LinkTales is a collection of stories and anecdotal reference material for the LinkWorlds series of (mostly unpublished) roleplaying games, which first saw print in LINK: West in 2003.

The main story is one of mystical power and corruption, as men serving the Queen of Britannia race against time to stop an ancient menace from blighting their shores and destroying innocent lives. At the end of the series of vignettes, the score remains uncertain, as the Baron sails across the ocean to the new world in the world's first airship.

This volume also contains detailed premises for the entire LinkWorlds series as envisioned by myself and Rodney Brazeau, as well as the completed glossary that wasn't available in the original manual, and the corrected version of the index that was in the aforementioned manual.

This book will serve as the introduction to a series of books about the Link Continuum, a series that has been in the works for over two decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee Edward McIlmoyle
• Release date: Nov 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466147300

Lee Edward McIlmoyle

Writer/Artist/Musician/Cartoonist/activist.Canadian.Married to NYC book reviewer who won't review my books.Two cats, both insane.Help.

Book preview

LinkTales

Volume One:

Unfinished Novels

and Unplayable Games

An anthology of shorter works

about the LINK Continuum

by Lee Edward McIlmoyle

© 2011 Lee Edward McIlmoyle

Published by Lee Edward McIlmoyle at Smashwords Editions

Smashwords License Statement

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TABLE of CONTENTS

Title Page

Smashwords Statement

Foreword

1001 Tales of the Omniverse

The Dark Guild

Mara’s Lament

The Voice

The Bath

Mara’s Fear

Taral’s Vigil

The Departure

Ærodiasnight’s Palor, a mystery

On Her Majesty’s Dark Charge 1

Court of the Britannian Queen

The Good Doctor

The Flight

On Her Majesty’s Dark Charge 2

Jason’s Lament

The Maidenhead’s End

The Flight 2

LinkWorlds

LINK: West

LINK: Frontier

LINK: Cutthroat

LINK: Longsword

LINK: Constellation

LINK: Zahara

LINK: small

LINK: Morphocosm

LINK: Nova

LINK: Clockwork

LINK: Pulp

LINK: Newtopia

LINK: Absurdia

LINK: Dusk

LINK: Pantheon

LinkWorlds Glossary

The Continuum

The Omniverse

The Other Side

the creator

The Guardian

The Lifestream

The Other

Entropy

Reality

SpaceTime

The Library

The Centrifuge

Foldspace

The Decay

The System

Agents

Assembly House

Evil

Good

Order

Chaos

Balance

Potentiality

Consequence

Corporeal Existence

Darkness

INDEX

Euroboros

City-States

Sourcery: An Understanding

Codex Continuus

Exchange Magick

The Dark Serenade Effect

Uryan Fire Cannon

The Gold Standard

Leonardo’s Dream

The Hope Springs Eternal

Of The Dream and The Leaving

Foreword

Hello, my name is Lee. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of me before. I’ve been an unpublished author for an embarrassingly long time. I won’t bore you with details or excuses. However, the series of stories you’re about to read have been germinating and festering in one form or another since my high school days. I’m forty this year. That should give you a notion of the time frame involved.

The story behind the Link Continuum goes back to high school, but it’s long and boring and I’m tired, so you get the Coles Notes version instead.

After the band folded in 1998, I took stock once again and figured I’d go back to fiction writing. It wasn’t as sexy, but at least I could play all the parts myself without putting anyone’s nose out of joint. So I dug out my old notes from before the band started in ‘93, and sorted through them to see what still read like a story folks wouldn’t piss themselves reading. Most of it seemed a bit dodgy, but I quite liked the LINK stuff. I started brushing up my notes for The Sunday Afternoon Matinee, and found myself also liking the off-brand LINK stuff featuring the stories Hero, Full Moon Memoires and The Gas Mask Chronicles graphic novels. But I also spent some time on the LINBeing Trilogy, and before I knew it, I was a writer again.

Or so I thought. I missed the bit in the script where I was going to take a detour into professional graphic design, which kept me largely diverted from the main plan for the better part of the last decade. I did put in some work on the Sunday Afternoon Matinee scripts, but very little art and absolutely no prose writing got done except what I wrote for LINKWorlds.

Rod Brazeau approached me with his plan to start making a Roleplaying Game (RPG) series from some of the old ideas we’d been discussing when we were back in school together, and wondered if I had any ideas to contribute. He had a few ideas of his own, and wanted me to help him flesh them out, and maybe work them into the old LINK canon, which he kind of saw as being ours, and in a real way, he’s right. I dreamed up LINK and most of what’s been called LINK over the years, but it was with him that I worked out a lot of my early ideas of roleplaying games and of comics and graphic novels as well. He was my writing partner in high school, and though we’d been separated for over a decade, it seemed a good time to get reacquainted.

We started with a pet project of his, as he had his heart set on doing a western adventure RPG, only in the LINK vein. Not sure how I got him to agree with that notion, because it lead to more headaches along the way than anything else, really. Not that LINK: West was a bad idea; just that it needed a lot more time to sort out and perfect than we had, given that Rod had already gotten us a printing deal. We had three or four months of mostly uninterrupted (but unpaid) time to crank out half a gaming manual, the other half of which would consist of a slightly altered pre-written, licensed gaming mechanic (for which Rod paid a Princely sum for the right to use) based on what our printers, Guardians of Order (GoO), had decided to market as their licensed indie gaming line. We went through three mechanics changes during production, and managed to get the deadline pushed back a couple of times, but in the end, we made it. Sort of.

It was a pretty exciting time, but in so many ways, it was a doomed venture from the start. We tried to do everything ourselves in the space of a few short months, and in the end, we both sort of burned out and handed in a far inferior product than the one we’d set out to create. Rod had been a pretty capable project manager, but as an art director, he left a little to be desired, and the reviews, sadly, confirmed it. Far too many of both of our pieces were cobbled together from heavily processed photographic sources to give them a sort of authentic 1800s photographic feel, but in truth, they just looked like hell.

To top it off, the rules system we were lumbered with was an extremely poor fit for what we were doing. Rod tried his best to make it work, but we had almost cartoonish superhero power sets listed to explain some of the supernatural effects that certain classes of players would develop during the course of their adventures, if they should accidentally become tainted by Darkness. When well-intentioned players actually figured this out, they all ran off willy-nilly into the desert to get infected and come back super-powered cowboys. It was a disaster.

The book sold out in pre-order and had to go back for a second run to meet the demand, but when it finally hit the shelves, the other shoe dropped: inferior, highly compromised product + lackluster, non-commital promotion = critical flop.

After another year or two, GoO was out of business (not our fault), and our book disappeared into the abyss of Amazon’s back catalogue system. It’s still available here if you want it badly enough. I don’t recommend it, however.

And that was pretty much the last anybody heard of LINK, save for Rod and I, who every few years would get together with a six pack and some tacos and hash out whatever plans we may have for a glorious rebirth of the LINKWorlds line. Actually, I believe Rod is overdue. See, he’s got other projects keeping him busy, including www.themoviesnitch.com blog website to manage and his plan for a gaming universe minus my influence. *wink*

But in the meantime, I’ve got stories to tell. A lot of them. And really, I’m not as interested in tabletop RPGs as I used to be. Most folks are more interested in interactive digital media these days, and the old schoolers prefer playing board games or classic RPGs like D&D, or Big Name IPs like Star Wars or The Dresden Files.

I HAVE been giving a great deal of consideration to interactive digital media, such as laptops, tablets and eReaders, in the past year or so, and have coem to think that I’d like to adapt some of these ideas to them. There’s a fair bit of technical difficulty involved there, but I suspect it’s the only way forward for LINKWorlds. Food for thought, anyway.

Meanwhile, here are several bits of prose fiction, some previously printed, others not, as well as copious notes that I have taken down over the last two decades whilst trying to piece this veritable saga together. Conventional wisdom states you should never give away the secrets behind your repertoire of tricks, but some of these ideas are long past due for a refresher, so they’ll most likely be in a completely different form if and when they finally see proper publication.

There is so much left to do, and so much more to come. I barely scratched the surface of my rough plans with these projects. I just hope I get it all sorted out and written before the Darkness takes me too.

Lee Edward McIlmoyle,

Somewhere in Limbo (a quiet suburb on the outskirts of the Centrifuge),

Sipping cold tea, IMing sporadically, and checking my Twitterfeed,

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

The Sand Castle of Time

...a deep corona of cerulean hovers almost mystically above the distant hub of the night-clad sands of the desert beyond. The still-blazing fire throughs the faces of even the most smooth-skinned beauties into stark relief, shadows dancing as if trying to find purchase in any rough-hewn crevice, to keep from being blown away in the cruel breezes of the evening. The pack animals just beyond the first glow of the fire can be heard making ghastly regurgitating noises in their chambered bellies and elastic throats. It seems to be a passive enough protest, and so you dispell the mood with a couple of extravagant gestures in the fire-lit air before you.

Eager, searching eyes just out of sight blink to life, and motion breaks the barrier of shadow beyond the circle of warmth and flickering light. Soon, the animals are fed and contented, and the regurgitating noises, though persistent, sound less like a mob and more like a choir, and so the night shall be less eventful.

Another balletic series of waves in the eddying heat seems almost mystically to summon drink, though the food that comes with it is mere trail fodder, spiced, but not at all like a grand feast, and so, the magic is revealed to have it's limits. The silent servants, moving like masked shadows of desert spirits, round the fire and see to the other guests at the fire this evening. Soon, all are basking in an inner-, as well as an outer-glow of warmth and light, liquid and solid chemically combining in empty gullets to create peace of mind and harmony of corpus, and all is well... well enough for this caravan.

And with this realization, you raise yourself up to your full sitting height, essay a few throat-cleaing noises, and, in opulent fashion, address the circle of travel-weary souls before you.

Gentlebeings, fellow-travellers in this vast, alien, lifeless place so very unlike those deserts of our youth, I entreat you to envision the flowing veil of Sheherezade, as she lavished her Sultan in the billowing layers of her successive veils, not of silk or saffron, but of tales. In so doing, you too shall fall under the spell of her gaze, and her warm, lilting voice, and become drunk on her patchouli-dipped tales of high adventure and romance. For in the invocation of this revered soul, I hope to sweep you away on winds of the imagination, and to take you to a place where even fair Sheherezade's tales of the thousand and one nights failed to penetrate.

I shall now tell you of the most fearfully bright, altogether strange place I ever had the strange fortune to reach port in. And a vast and teeming port it was, I can tell you, sprawling with life unimaginable in your wildest rememberings of sea-ports in your various youths. Ask not for which sea this amazing vision came to me, for indeed, no mere body of sea water ever met this timeless shore. I will tell you of a Serendib the even that old rascal Sinbad never set his greedy eyes upon. Though, truth be told, I am certain that Sinbad would have easily been set to begging at the gates of this shining, star-touched place, for wont of a scheme grand enough to pocket the whole thing, if he could but wrap his imagination around it, grasping, thieving hands seeking purchase like the knives of firelight upon your gentle brows.

Fellow travelling souls, allow me, I beseech you, to regale you of the tale of a traveller I once knew, a sailor and a prince both quite similar and yet quite unlike that wily old schemer, Sinbad. I wish now to share my memories of one Solomon Burke, the mad high prophet of chaos, the divner of fortunes got and lost, and the man who first showed me the golden, mystical shores of his own Serendib, the Centrifuge of All Reality.

And in so doing, permit me the license to start the tale with the first words Burke uttered unto me, in his own most high story-teller's voice, upon reaching those sainted shores. For indeed, even as we were coming astern of the those glittering shores, all palisades and gilt-edged archways and causeways, a veritable wall of light, he turned to us all, very much as I do to you now, and, opening his welcoming arms broadly, smiled and spake: ‘Welcome to the Omniverse’.

Link: The Dark Guild

In 2003, my partner and good buddy Rod Brazeau and I were creating LINK: West, and he had carved out the entirety of North America, called Amerius—essentially his name for the Old