I’ve received a few questions about the origins of the Rise of the Dragonlands world. A few of you know, because you were there, and may have even contributed to its creation.
It started in the late 1990s on a message-board RPG for fans of the SNES/Playstation RPG series Breath of Fire. If you played those games, you might recognize several of the “clans,” as well as the name “Agni”—the ultimate “dragon transformation” from the first game. The name struck something deep within me. It radiated power. Later, I learned its Hindu origin—the god of fire who carries the prayers of mortals to the heavens. That felt fitting too—for a character caught between gods and men—and for a flame that might consume himself.
But Agni Kazirian didn’t come from myth. He came from my own pain. At the time, he was my reflection: an angry, betrayed man who had lost his identity who, as I wrote in the foreword, “wanted to release his pain into the world and die.” That realization sent me into a spiral. For three weeks, I barely ate or slept. I walked out of classes in a flood of tears. But others saw something noble and magnetic in him. That gave me hope. Agni became more than just pain. He became a man of purpose.
Of course, a video game universe wasn’t enough to hold a fantasy series. I wanted more—a world of universal truths. A world whose inhabitants feared what we fear, who hope as we hope. A world where warring gods gave each tribe the features of what they feared most: the dragons that struck mountain travelers down with breath, fang, and claw; the tiger that mauled the unaware in the jungle; the roc that could snatch up a man in its claws and slowly feed it to his brood; the orca that could batter a ship to pieces and consume the survivors.
For it is said that we worship what we fear.
However, like all power, it comes at a cost.
The gods gave not only form, but their warlike instincts. War is woven into the fabric of the world. The uninfused—the “Lubo”—live on the margins, pitied, mistrusted, and often persecuted. Outlaws hide among them.
The result is a world of shifting alliances, constant strife, and rampant uncertainty—much like our own.
This is not a world of pure good or cartoon evil. I didn’t want an objectively moral world, nor a nihilistic hellscape. I wanted a world that could hold all of us—the virtuous, the broken, the aspiring, and the damned. A world where the fallen might rise, and the mighty might fall. A world that shows us not what should be true, but what might be truer than true.