Vie's Inn of Wonders' Awards

Artimidor Federkiel: The idea of bringing people from all over the world together to start working on a fantasy project of the larger scale, which has never been realized before in so much detail. You would never be able to accomplish all these feats you can now experience on the Santharian Dream if you'd work alone or only with the help of some friends you know personally and who share your interests. The internet medium fascinated me in this respect, and so I started off back in 1998/99 with some lousy HTML skills to see how far I could get, and if there'd be some guys who'd like to join me in such an unusual endeavor.

Artimidor: Well, why not? Fantasy has always been something which interested me personally. I especially like role playing games taking place in medieval settings, which try to simulate a whole world and not only put some evil guys in dungeons Series like "Ultima" for example proved that there is much more to it than just monster-bashing in a role playing game. At "Ultima" people created a world which was based on philosophical values of morality, there existed whole cultures with historical traditions, with libraries full of interesting books to read and so on. "Ultima" seemed alive. When I played "Ultima VI" for the first time (I skipped I to V), I was impressed with the interactive world, representing a whole book to play, where the story itself wasn't really the most important thing anymore - and you could play for months, not only for a few hours. I really enjoyed the dense atmosphere of these games, and when I read Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" for the first time at the age of 22 a while later, I was even more convinced that the building of a realistic fantasy world with the help of some computer tools would be an interesting challenge for me.

Artimidor: Thanks for the flowers. Well, the Santharian Dream is defined as a fantasy world creation project in the style of J.R.R. Tolkien, so it's obvious that you'll find a lot of direct or indirect influences of Tolkien in Santharia, paying tribute to the master. You can see this in the way we describe halflings, orcs, elves etc., who have a lot of things in common with Tolkien concepts. Tolkien is also known to have worked diligently on details of his world, and I think this acrobacy also reflects in the Santharian world design.

Of course many people contributing in Santharian world building are well versed in fantasy in general, by reading books of famous fantasy authors (Raymond E. Feist, Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, Tad Williams or Terry Pratchett to name just a few) and thus may be influenced by them as well to a certain degree. Other influences may come from existing role playing games or RPG systems like AD&D. However, originality is of major importance in Santharia, and though influences here and there are obvious and prove fruitful in some cases, Santharia develops only unique concepts even though they may be inspired by the works of others.





Much more important though than the awards themselves are - at least in my opinion as webmaster - to get comments and criticism of what people see as well done and what they think they would like to have improved at the site. Only if things which could be made better are pointed out we can try to find new ways to realize them - a good website never reaches a standstill, but always tries to iron out smaller and bigger problems and inconsistencies, and at the same time remain innovative.