Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019
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Date of Graduation
Spring 2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (BS)
Department
School of Art, Design and Art History
Advisor(s)
Richard Hilliard
Joseph Loyacano
Agnes Carbrey
Joshua Rashon Streeter
Abstract
The game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) has been shrouded in stigma – so many people afraid to even try it out due to those undesirable personas constructed around the game. It’s hardly ever looked at as the incredible creative exercise and amazing bonding experience that it presents, a surefire potential to bring a group of people closer together as they joke, problem-solve, and process both game and real life together, while learning about how very much those two realms overlap. With how much the game has meant to me and how highly I regard the potential of its power, I wanted to construct a story and a commentary to do it justice. I wanted to show how real it could be for my friends and myself.
This project is my exercise in an introduction to world design, my attempt to bring bits and pieces of a world created by my closest friends, myself, and the Eberron Dungeons and Dragons campaign book. Although the game started originally as a normal D&D campaign, with city names, settings, magic, and items as they were in the campaign book, the desire to make the world more unique and the systems, histories, and settings far more personalized emerged when we realized what a story we were creating. My friend who ran the game, Robert Rizzo, would add in these elements of the world that were fascinating, and we would explore them as much as possible, talk about them out of the game more than we did in it and expand on these ideas to see what we could push out the other side.
A story in mind, characters in place, and a vast setting to be explored. I wanted to come at this project like I was on a team who was building a Universe for a book, a movie, a video game, or like a historian uncovering those same worlds. I got through several pictures to represents multiple different facets of the world, as broadly as I could go with each thing that came up that I wanted to address. In this thesis are several drawings done with paper and pencil, ink, or digitally in photoshop, as well as blurbs of text for some context in the world, and a more detailed abstract at the beginning.
Recommended Citation
Linder, Austen, "A world of possibilities" (2018). Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019. 512.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/honors201019/512
