About the Author
Heather M. Dunn, also known on the internet as Keolah, is from Oregon. She likes tea, cats, and speaking of herself in the third person. She is a prolific author of fantasy and science fiction and a staunch advocate of fanfiction.
Heather M. Dunn, also known on the internet as Keolah, is from Oregon. She likes tea, cats, and speaking of herself in the third person. She is a prolific author of fantasy and science fiction and a staunch advocate of fanfiction.
I've basically been writing fiction for as long as I could read and write. I've found scraps from when I was six years old of stories about unicorns. Throughout my life, I've produced vast amounts of fanfiction, participated in several lengthy, long-running roleplaying games, and ran a few MUDs. (That's Multi-User Dungeons, for those who don't know. Online text-based games. What people who might have played something like World of Warcraft played before graphical online games became feasible.)
The Serriyan Multiverse was born in 1993, when I began work on a novel titled Quest for the Rings, which after several rewrites and twenty-five years would eventually go on top become Nexus of the Ancients.
During the intervening years, many other stories were written, and the setting spread to encompass my friends as well, who assisted in developing the multiverse, although I still did most of the writing. We ran a campaign of A(lmost) Dungeons & Dragons. (We couldn't afford the actual books because we spent all our money on Magic: The Gathering cards, so we just mostly made up our own system.)
In 1999, the MUD Rogue Winds was born. It was based on the Serriyan Multiverse and set in Torn Elkandu and many of the planes, further developing the world greatly through the areas built and roleplay that took place. During the years which Rogue Winds was active, many storylines played out, many worlds were explored, and many vibrant characters walked across the stage.
Following the shutdown of the MUD, the players who were still active moved the roleplay to IRC. (That's Internet Relay Chat, for those who don't know. The sort of text-based chat that people used before platforms like Skype and Discord were a thing.) For the next several years, millions of words worth of roleplay were produced, most of which is now lost forever but in the memories of those involved.
The Nexus of Torn Elkandu was always intended to facilitate exploration of other worlds, and so through roleplay and fanfiction, our characters visited many settings throughout the years in addition to the worlds we'd created ourselves. In 2012, I set about a self-challenge to write one million words in a year on a single project, and thus, the Stormseeker Saga was born.
For years I intended to reboot the setting, rewrite the earlier stories written while I was a teenager (which were pretty much as terrible as one might expect of stories written by a teenager), and consolidate the storylines into a coherent narrative. Thus, in 2017, the current version of the Serriyan Multiverse was born.