Okay, It’s finally hit me. I get it now.

I was standing on what might be considered the prow of a commercial tourist fishing boat somewhere between Cape May, New Jersey and Lewes, Delaware. It might be considered the prow, but it might be considered the jib or the starboard or the left nostril for all I know–I’m not real good with boats. I was in front.

Josh had been on a fishing kick for some reason and organized the trip with a passion I had rarely seen him use for something other than music, certain women, and tearing through Newark traffic at speeds that can–and do–put
carjackers to shame. Of course, it fell through last minute and it was just me, him, and assistant art director Frank Fallon–AKA Frankie Bønz.

To be honest, I had always appreciated the lack of pretense on a fishing boat. You could UTTERLY let yourself go. You’ll be dressed in your scummiest outfit, there’s no one to impress, and you and a bunch of middle-aged
American men all know that you will soon be covered in entrails and smell worse than a runny cheese-eating contest being held in a septic tank at the incontinent Special Olympics. Sometime you already do. If you do manage to
fart loud enough to be heard over the engines, someone with thank you for it. So why worry?

Armed with this incredible lack of decorum the mind can wander, and often has to be reined in either with beer, seasickness or both, just on the off chance that the inevitable snarl of every line on the boat actually managed
to get a fish in it somewhere and someone has to be held responsible. For this particular trip, poor Josh chose seasickness. I sat on a bench with Frank, holding the graphite rod and reel that might mean my dinner as Josh
slept on a wooden box in back empathizing with Kermit the Frog that it was in fact not easy at all.

It was Frank’s first time fishing and he had taken the mixture of disgust and boredom well. The back of the boat was occupied by a number of drunken local good ‘ol boys who figured the best way to attract the piscine treats we
were seeking was to scream beer commercial slogans at swimsuit-clad housewives in nearby boats. I relaxed and soaked in the sheer Americanness of it.

The BEST thing about the ocean is the fantastic lack of distraction. Water is boring, and sky is boring. The view from a boat is so fantastically boring that having your eyes closed in actually MORE distracting than keeping them
open. I’ve often wondered what one would see after doing acid on a fishing boat, but never had the sand to test the theory on myself or anyone else. Of course, after one realizes that thinking about food will only make them more
hungry and no matter how much food is in the cooler your hands will not be clean enough to eat with them until you return to shore, and fantasizing about naked mermaids and mermen is all well and good but might lead to visible changes in one’s pelvic topography that they would prefer to not have to explain to a bunch of drunken middle-Americans with only twelve to twenty feet of headway, one is left with something of a dearth of subjects to ruminate on.

By the way, I must be dosed. When the hell did I get so verbose?

Jesus, for that matter, when did I start using words like VERBOSE?

Must be the fish. It’s brain food, ‘yknow.

In any case, this is one of those bizarre perks of being a game designer. It’s harder to bore you because there’s always something to think about. For example, I fell asleep the other night watching OZ on HBO and dreamed I had
spent a month in solitary confinement. I returned half mad, naked, and gibbering, of course, but with a really clever, workable magic system for a mutigenre system. Wish I could remember it. Anyway, this took me back to my pet project–in the words of a heckler, “Dood, Kid Rock is TOTALLY cool. Let’s make the most blasphemous game ever.”

I’m down, let’s. As my line lazily tangled with the others, My brain floated away to the Last Exodus. See, in the Last Exodus, Player Characters are Messiahs and Antichrists–this much I know. They have been charged by
God–remember, there’s two of him/her/it–with the task of saving what’s left of worthwhile humanity and ferrying them across the breach to Eden–the only world of any consequence. Earth is a spiritual quarantine. Eden is where it’s at, a never-ending world of untold possibility, of nations like Avalon and Eldorado and Mu. Heaven, our afterlife, and…Yeah.

Eden had been a pretty good idea, but since the inception, it had remained that. Nothing made it real to me, not a world I could see, and feel and touch. Great settings jumped to life for me the instant they were explained, like Gareth’s UnderWorld, Gibson’s Cyberpunk future or Pondsmith’s Castle Falkenstein. In fact, each of these games is based on the “You are here” concept, and without the world, it doesn’t hold a lot of water. Other games tend to focus more on the “you are one of these” concept in a more traditional world–not necessarily our own, but what you play is what makes things interesting. The World of Darkness, most superhero games, and even
Orkworld (I venture to guess) functions more in this fashion.

In my arrogance and stupidity, I’m tacking both tacks. In the Last Exodus, you play a direct Child of God, but that’s only half of why you’re interested. It’s where this takes you that makes it worthwhile–and this had to be Eden. This placed a pretty tall order on my crummy little heaven. The Mythical lands as nations thing was cute, but it still had needed more.

First off, there was a dazzling lack of interesting things to do when you get there. It’s HEAVEN, right? No death, no disease, no conflict. Boring. A while ago I had introduced the idea of “Violated Realms”–sections of Heaven that had somehow been poisoned and became hells, in order to create a better conflict. Of course, this begs the question that if it’s at war, why would you want to go there, and is taking people to a heaven at war really saving them at all?

Very cool theological questions to explore, but not what I was going for. They’ll come up though. I still had a problem. My heaven-world was still falling flat.

I looked out at the line where the chromatic shift that indicated water and sky was, then looked up.

Blue. Not a single cloud.

Well, one. Quite suddenly, a single cloud I hadn’t noticed before and believe me, I was looking damned hard. And a single plane.

The plane was one of the famed Cape May banner planes, in this case advertising the Three Mile Crab House. My mother, also a pilot, had been quite chummy with the banner guys, who were as far as I could tell entirely mad. They would take off from a tiny airport in Cape May, then fly out to a skinny, blisteringly hot airstrip carved out of the local marshland, touch down and hook the banner, and take off again from a stretch of tarmac surrounded by dense forest while towing fifty to a hundred feet or so of
cloth, all in about sixty seconds. Crazy. This instantly reminded my of my mother’s explanation of why she loved flying:

“When you’re up in a plane, you can just look down and say: ‘All of my problems are down there.’”

Problem solved.

Eden instantly blossomed in my head. It fell brilliantly into place. I had been stewing and ruminating over what the land itself looked like, felt like, and all along, the answer had been right under–well–over my head.

There IS no land! Not much, anyway. Eden is a series of floating islands composed of an element that for whatever reason hovers in the air in it’s natural state. This element in it’s raw, unrefined form gives off a white, odorless gas, like steam, giving the entire place the look of cities and gardens built on the clouds. Naturally, this stuff could be mined, and is a valuable resource
for making all sorts of weird, floating architecture and vehicles. So there goes the basis for our economy. And perhaps, it could be controlled by harmonics and sound, which is why angels all carry harps–they’re not just
musical instruments, they’re control panels. And lastly, if an island is mined too much, it falls. Forever.

How’s that for hell?

Hundreds of arcane connections fused in my head. Eden was complete. I smiled and turned to Frankie, who was struggling with his reel. Josh was standing there too.

“You guys, I just thought of the…–”

“Reel in, we’re tangled!” Frank ejected with a surprising lack of irritation considering what I had done to his line. I reeled in, as Frankie did the same. Lo and behold, attached to the snarl at the end of our hooks was a nice, fat flounder.

“Jeeze, hold on to that thing!”

I figured my revelation could wait until dinner.