I Read Books: Thieves' World
Thieves’ World In the afterword of this, the first volume of the long-running shared world heroic fantasy anthology series, editor Robert Lynn Asprin explains the genesis of the project. He begins by complaining that the hard part is creating a world every time, so you have to do all the hard work before you can start writing about it, and so proposed creating one for other people to write in. From the many, many world-building projects one can find online or otherwise published, I feel he overestimated the problem. However his next step – that then characters, situations, events and other bits of setting created by one writer could be used by others – was a smart and clever one. Sanctuary used to be a stop for the caravans, on the edge of one old kingdom. But now that kingdom has been conquered by the Rakene Empire, and they’ve defeated the mountain men so the caravans don’t go here any more. It’s become a town of smugglers and exiles, one exile being the governor, the hal...
