“Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.”
– (H.P. Lovecraft, Notes On Writing Weird Fiction)
Hey all! I'm K.S. Morii, the haunted dreamer whose haunted scrivenings pen the Planar Danse. :))
Find all past Planar Danse entries here!
TPD is a universe that bends the rules of reality, and then takes them as seriously as planar law ought to be. From its origin in TTRPG, the sixteen-and-one worlds of the Danse expand within works written & digital, with more stories on Steam & ebooks in the works. It started more than 8 years ago coming up with mixing tabletop games such as D&D, Pathfinder 2E, Call of Cthulu, World of Darkness, & Blades in the Dark when creating a new setting & campaign for my loyal group.
Since then... it has grown to be many times larger than we had ever imagined. Four games, a novel, 1.7 million written words, & the pace has only picked up in recent years! Behind all of this is my driving vision for fiction, and what it means to write it. Read on to hear the story.
The KSM/TPD approach to fantasy...
At some point, somewhere, every emotion was felt, lest we fail in its description. For a book to be written and read, the human experience was encoded within; which is to say, the thoughts were real, the feelings were real—as much as any others.
Moreso; for they are shared.
Fantasy does not tell children that the monsters are real; they already know the monsters are real. Instead, it tell them that they can be killed.
In effect, the great and wondrous magic of a series such as Lord of the Rings, is not that a cataclysmic evil from before the world began created an agent of evil which threatened all mortals, it was that the destruction of a single ring could save the world. Wouldn’t you like all your problems fixed by the drop of one trinket?
Stories, to this effect, act as a lens of comfort, a veneer over the stories of human experience that might sit a bit too close to home were they told in the context of the waking world. A nonfiction account of a person’s death forces the reader to grapple with mortality; a fictional death could be comical, or it could even allow the process of grief, invisibly, through the lens of fiction.
Through my writing under the name K.S. Morii, and the Planar Danse, I aim to concoct an elixir of the human experience, a simulacrum of reality in a world of grandeur & sorrow of kinds far more aesthetically pleasing. Shades of gray in cascades of opinion, magic as a constant, gods as an uncertainty, worlds beyond worlds, and darkness lurking behind the stars.
We create worlds to live in them for a time, and to take home what we have learned.
———
“Your mind stretches, and then smears like paint dashed across a canvas where it drips like blood
through innumerable worlds—no—times. Both. All of them at once. Through the whispering will
of repetition, this Resonance thrums with frequencies of energies you know and countless more
you do not know. It permeates you. It cuts through you. It reshapes you, the world, and the stars
themselves in the sky.”
– The Resonance, Apollyon
