Origin

Origin of Loria in the Game

When I reached twelve years, our parents thought me old enough to stay alone with my younger brother and two sisters. It fell to me to keep them amused. That was the first time we played the game.

We had few toys and used imagination in our play. Invented games explored their own paths, evolving because they were alive. That night, we took our parents’ books out of the double-wide case of shelves. With them, we built houses, then roads. Because of the roads, people had to travel on them. We chose the face cards of a handy playing deck, and each of us moved along our king, queen and jack. These trios and a joker or two put us into monarchy; we called the game Kingdom.

Our models came from stories Dad read to us, tales told at the kitchen table, and radio shows as varied as Let’s Pretend and Space Patrol. Swashbuckling and adventuresome movies fed our limited knowledge of history. Despite our age range, from seven to twelve years, the game kept us entertained for over an hour. We were still playing when Mom and Dad came home, and we had to put everything away.

Shirley, Susan and I wanted to play Kingdom longer, and continuously. We set up in the uninsulated attic and played there in cooler weather. Each of us took a country with prominent people and population. Shelves, crates, and tables became buildings; shoebox lids were boats. We bought cheap toy horses and farm animals, used some dollhouse furniture, but made much more from construction paper. Spent shotgun shells stood for people. To keep them distinguished from one another, we named each kingdom’s principals with lettered bands around the shells. With the clothes made out of ribbons and the jewelry that we fashioned, they could dress.

Each country had an economy based on a unique business with products. The rule was that you could have any non-competitive business as long as you had a physical base to show its existence. If you had the dairy, you had to have cows and some objects that stood for milk, butter and cheese. We bought and sold with one another using play money. Auctions and trade fairs followed. Cash and treasure went with dowries. The world we created had become a glorified three-dimensional version of Monopoly except that plot substituted for chance and technology remained at the late medieval level.

As we grew older, the game became more sophisticated. Susan started portrait painting with colored pictures cut out of magazines. Shirley began a newspaper, The Kingdom Journal. I ran the notary public since our people had to make wills to dispose of their property. Characters wrote letters to one another and kept diaries. Outside of the game, we projected plan books with future year-by-year events, mostly of a dynastic nature. Shirley’s Roman Rome became Romst; my Lesser Italy became Loria. Susan had started and stayed with Richland.

During four years when the game was at its height, we enacted our way through 600 years of inter-relations between our three city-states. I capped the game by a sketchy history of Loria, commissioned by Frivovla VIII, its queen in those days.

By age sixteen, the game occupied much of my thinking, and I had plans outlined 400 years ahead. When we sloughed off Kingdom, I could not give it up and began to review and reconstruct Loria in my mind and then on paper. Between the start of tenth grade and December of my sophomore year in college, I puzzled through and wrote out the life of Frivovla II, the Well-Attended, the fourth monarch and first pre-eminent one in Loria’s long history. That finished, I leapt 700 years ahead to the time of Augustus, who vaulted the kingdom into an empire and lead at the start of the modern age.

At age 23, with a family and career, what I had envisioned as the Empire Series slowed to irregular piecemeal work and the development of background genealogies. But I never quit thinking about it and plumbing for the origins and development of Loria. At age 40, I resurrected the life and background of Vodarodi the Founder in a three-part narrative, The Crowns of Vodarodi. That done, I started rewriting the earlier Frivovla draft. I reworked it about four times, amidst other explorations back and forth on Loria’s timeline, and could never satisfy myself. At age 60, I decided on a new tack and figured out the story of Frivovla’s maternal grandmother, the Lady Frivovla of Allonor. At first all I knew of her was that she was the child of the Chief of Allonor and that she had been wed when very young into the Kingdom of Rheapolis. How did she come to Loria? At Last, I Depart became the result.

Of all the writing in my life, some of it has been professional, some of a civic nature, and some personal. Still, my continual obsession has been to work out stories of individual lives. I believe that my personality, whether innate or nurtured, set me in this direction. Most of the influences in my life have been literary, as a listener, reader, viewer, talker, and scribbler.

But the consistent thread that I find I have pursued over a fifty-seven year period with Vodarodi, his ancestors and descendants, began in the game we four Sween kids started one night when we were left alone to our own devices.
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© 2009 by Roger Sween.


I first wrote this piece, here slightly revised, for an essay contest sponsored by Minnesota Literature in 2005. The theme was to tell a nonliterary event that influence one's writing. I was hardpressed because I could not think of a single thing that did not have its connections to some literature. The game, though it had scattered roots in stories and the media, seemed to serve the purpose. My submission was not accepted among the awarded top three.