As some of you may know, I have been hard at work for a while on a book called Game Magic: A Game Designer’s Guide to Constructing Magic Systems, which will be published by Taylor & Francis/CRC Press within the next year.  My deadline is September 1st, so I’m writing both joyfully and madly every day this summer. The book is a cookbook of sorts: a grimoire of game magic meant to help game designers create more rich, immersive, and meaningful magic systems.  The book triangulates game magic between fictive magic (as represented in the literature of the fantastic) and occult magic (as imagined in the long, cryptic history of human beliefs about sorcery).

The book also will contain 75 illustrations, many of them screenshots and charts.  I am currently seeking permission to reproduce several images, and I sometimes run into the snag of absent or outdated contact information for defunct companies or fan analysis.  In a good-faith effort to hunt down the sources of these images, I’ll be posting some of them from time to time.  If you are the creator of the image or know how the creator can be reached, please post a comment.  (The images will also hint indirectly at some of my own book’s content for those interested, so perhaps these posts could have a little bit of an ARG flavor to them.

The first image is this excellent chart of the runes in the 2002 GameCube title Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.  The author of the chart is Chris Jones, but the email listed on the chart (warbeast2000@hotmail.com) is no longer active.  If you are Chris Jones or know him, please be in touch. It would be very helpful, both to me and my readers.