Behind the saga

Iterium

This saga has a name that readers do not know and that players never knew.

At the table, I called it Codex Iterium. I never told any of the people who played in it: it was the name of the container, not the story, and the story was the only thing they were meant to see. Iterium comes from iteration, from return. The theme of the cycle was already in the title before it was in the books.

I have been running role-playing games since 2003. The White Line Saga grew through three campaigns, separated in time, each linear and complete in itself. The first two were not connected. They shared a universe, and for years that was their only link.

The third was Eirik's campaign. It is the point where the other two touched. That was when I understood that what I had in my hands was not an archive of sessions. It was a work in its own right.

The method at the table

The system I use to run games is a hybrid, and it has no name worth mentioning. It takes little from D&D, a great deal from World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu, and removes quite a lot from both.

The rule is simple: common sense comes first, dice enter play only when an action is genuinely uncertain, and successes accumulate instead of being decided in a single roll. The system scales with the characters' power, so that no one can resolve a situation with a lucky roll. Deus ex machina is always a problem, at the table as in books.

This explains the saga's tone better than any synopsis. In the world of the White Line, things are not decided in a moment: they accumulate.

Some things were born directly at the table, almost in real time. An alphabet, for example, invented and adapted as the sessions unfolded. Anyone who encounters it in the volumes will be reading it exactly as it was the first time.

From the table to the page

In 2017 I began to transcribe. At first it was an archive: I did not want to lose anything. But I had always wanted to transcribe a campaign, and this was not a campaign. It was a universe. Mine.

Between 2017 and 2022, the archive changed its nature on its own. For years I had watched a flower grow from seed to bud; now I was beginning to see the result. In 2022 I stopped calling it an archive and started calling it a novel.

Writing meant three things.

The first: bringing together what had been separate at the table. Oslo and the Peruvian valley, 1990 and 1997, were born in different campaigns. In the novel they touch for the first time.

The second: recognising what was there. I had understood at the table that the hero and the monster were the same figure seen from two sides. I only saw, on rereading, that everything revolved around a debt. The players lived the mystery. I found the debt afterwards.

The third: removing. The campaigns were harsher than the books, and to move forward with the writing I had to leave some of that harshness out. The books are cleaner. Not gentler.

In the end, the reader knows something more than those who sat at the table. And if someone played Eirik Halvorsen at that table, they would not recognise him today.

The Codex and the five volumes

Today, the Codex Iterium is a text already written in narrative form. It contains more than 1,200,000 words. The White Line Saga, five volumes, is less than half of it.

The other half comes from two other campaigns, played in other eras of the Codex. Other characters, a shared destiny, an accounting that returns. It contains the origin of the debt, and how it came into Diana Baird's hands. But that time precedes this saga and, in its own way, follows it: connecting it to what will be published in the coming years requires work I have not yet done.

That is why it begins here. The White Line is the part of the Codex that is most truly mine, the part that owes nothing to anyone, and the natural entry point to everything else. For a long time to come, it will be the only thing I work on.

The rest will come. But first, the five volumes.

What you will not find

The genre this saga inhabits has its habits. I deliberately left some of them out.

• The cult in robes: no secret society with its rituals. Evil here has an organisational chart, deadlines and a public relations office.
• Madness as punishment: those who see too much do not go mad. They keep working. It is worse.
• The revelation that explains everything: each volume closes one question and opens a larger one. The debt is not settled with an explanation.
• The hero who saves the world: no one in this saga saves anything. At most, someone decides not to take part.
• The lucky roll: no one gets out of a situation because chance helped them. Things accumulate until they break.