Hi, I am Erwan Le Breton, a French game master and designer. I am studying English literature in Paris but I am currently living in Sydney, thanks to an exchange program between my home university and the faculty of Arts of UNSW.Although I've been playing and designing RPG systems and backgrounds almost since I started playing (in 1982), the first time I had a serious contact with a publishing company was in 1995.
It was at the occasion of the annual French RPG fair/exhibition. I was trying to sell my generic-rules system and a companion universe (an antique-fantasy background not unlike Runequest).
Alas, nobody was interested in a fantasy RPG anymore. Nobody except a small company, named DŽlires, which was running the French version of QUEST, an English play-by-mail fantasy game. DŽlires asked me to write a sourcebook for Kharne, the world of QUEST, and, with the help of a bunch of veteran QUEST players, I started working on the project.
As a result of this collaboration, a 144-page book (all background, no rules) was released in May 1996. Immediately, plans were laid for a RPG based on it, but DŽlires experienced serious management problems, and eventually, the company was bankrupt.
Fortunately, this first work opened some doors for me and the following year, I was asked to write a couple of "play your own adventure" books for Hachette, an important publishing company. The collection, Quasar, was a new generation of game-books, with elementary rules and an emphasis on the visual. The settings were all based on existing myths, although the plots distorted them.
My two contributions, Djinn and Mazda, dealt with the Arabian Nights and the Mesopotamian mythos respectively. Both were rather successful, with about 10,000 copies sold for each of them up to now. In 1998, I left France for Australia, but I kept in touch with my editor. At the present moment, I am working on two different projects:
- "Shadowplay": a trilogy based on the Arthurian legend but with a modern setting (a kind of "Camelot 1999" with high-school students as the new knights of the round Table). These books will be published by Hachette as a series of novels for teenagers.
- "Jade": a "multimedia" background which mixes Masamune Shiro's Orion, Jodorowsky's Incal, Frank Herberts' Dune, and numerous elements from mythic Japan. This universe was originally designed by my younger brother and I to become the frame of a RPG, but comic-book and video-game companies have shown some interest for it.
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