Getting Started (sort of a Fertile Crescent origin story)

The time was about 1,000 years ago. A young struggling writer, ok actually a fairly successful retail manager looking to BECOME a struggling writer, was emailing every RPG company head he could get an email address for offering to help out.

I got turned down by Mongoose, Bastion and a couple others before self-publishing a PDF and getting noticed by Mystic Eye for a couple of rewarding, though non-remunerating gigs. Of course I didn't know the last part at the time. The company went out of business and still owes me some cash, but since my books might very well have helped them go out of business, it's hard to hold (much) of a grudge.

About the same time I was talking with Chris, owner of RPGObjects who tossed some editing gigs my way for the first edition Darwin's World books (my first credit in a printed book was the original Terrors of the Twisted Earth for Additional Editing).

Along the way one of the things we talked about was me writing a supplement for DW centered around my original campaign area, set around the Great Lakes region, which I dubbed the Fertile Crescent out of a nod to the past.

The Twisted Earth was a desert, so around these once might lakes, which managed to survive (though smaller) new civilizations were springing up. It was an idea that intrigues me and it still does.

But other things were calling and after a pretty successful straight d20 book, Blood and Space, d20 Modern was coming out and Chris and I both saw so much potential there we rolled up our sleeves and dug into books like Blood and Fists and Blood and Guts (still my two most successful books ever I think).

So the Fertile Crescent continued to get pushed back, even past the second edition of the game. The name Fertile Crescent and a few of the cities however (such as Bastion) made it into the second edition map of the Twisted Earth.

So with the location officially part of the world, at some point it was inevitable that I'd write it up. The draft for that is done, and I'm about to start work on the adventure, called the Feeding Grounds, set in that setting, with both seeing the light of day at Gen Con.