The Many Worlds of Matt A. Paul
Writer - Narrative Designer
Greetings, friend!
I am a writer, dungeon master and narrative designer who makes people up for a living.
Thank you for taking the time to visit my portfolio. Here, you will find examples of the work I’ve done across multiple formats, including world-building and campaign design for games, long-form novels, comic book scripts, and short stories.
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I would love to help you build your world, inspire your designers, and delight your audiences. Get in touch!
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Projects
FIREBORN TRILOGY​
Novels
Fireborn cover art by Ana Santos
Lazarus is a young, aimless man from Seattle, who’s running out of time to get his life together. Abducted as payback for his father’s sins, he finds himself on top of a skyscraper, forced to choose between bullets and a lethal fall.
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Helian is a mysterious girl forced to live underground. She has planned to sneak out to watch the sunrise from the tallest tower in the city. Her formidable intervention will save Lazarus from his fate, but at what cost? She’s been caught on security cameras, and within hours, those who hunt her kind are on the prowl.
Soon, Laz is swept up in Helian’s unfathomable world. They have become moving parts of a plot decades in the making, with stakes higher than anything they can imagine.
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Selected as runner-up by the Irish Writers Centre for the 2020 Novel Fair. Physical copies available upon request.
THE FORGOTTEN KING
Animated Series & Video Game, for Story Games
Elderon is a high-fantasy world that sits at the crossroads of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, designed by Michael and Stephen Stagliano.
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As part of the narrative team, I led the development of the northern region of Elderon, crafted a social layer of savage clans at war with each other, and wrote a full campaign serving as the basis for the upcoming video game (under NDA).
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As part of this work, I delivered world-design documents, a campaign outline, a bestiary, and character dev for several key NPCs... I designed quest lines with both story & gameplay in mind, dialogs for NPC VO and cut scenes, tooltips, and even crafted a murder mystery -- although I can’t tell you anything about it, just yet.
All "The Forgotten King" content owned by and Copyright @Story Games 2024.
LANDFALL
RPG & Graphic Novel script
A heartless mercenary is thrown into the most guarded jail of the realm, yet escapes that very evening, thanks to a mysterious key.
A child of the wilderness loses her bear-father, and must travel south, to the land of men, to find her destiny.
An eccentric astronomer in the ever-night desert discovers the puzzling properties of a chunk of stone he's purchased.
Their trajectories will collide. It is written in the stars, in the eternal battle between the Aeon and the Void…
Landfall is a fully-fledged, playable pen & paper RPG, complete with 9 reimagined classes, and its own dice-based game systems.
It is also a 60-page script for a graphic novel. I’m currently looking for the right artist to partner with and create a publisher pitch together.
Sanctuary by Juan Pablo Roldán
ECHO
RPG world-building - overall setting & history
What if our collective imagination, all of our thoughts, and visions, and dreams, formed an invisible field around the planet? And what if it had found a way to manifest in the real world?
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That is the premise of Echo: each of us think on a unique frequency, and on rare occasions, that frequency can go into resonance with the ever-changing one of our collective thoughts, called The Echo. When this self-amplifying phenomenon occurs — causing the person to hear voices that get louder and louder until they pass out — a portion of the Echo manifests within the physical world, granting one “imaginary” quality, or ability, to an otherwise regular person.
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Think of it as a more Jungian premise to a classic X-men or Marvel tale. Echo was the first world I designed, over twenty years ago. It aimed to provide a very open game for pen-and-paper DMs. The narrative setting allows for a nearly infinite design space, since “if you can think of it as a DM, then it exists within in the Echo. And if it’s in the Echo, it can manifest in the game world.”
BUTTERFLY MARMALADE
Short Story
Every morning I go to the same cafe. My heart may be broken, but it still craves caffeine.
This morning I’m hungover, quiet like a barrel of gunpowder. There’s a young woman I’ve never seen before. She tells me she wants to help.
I’m about to become a monster.
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Trigger warning: foul language, sex, violence.
Please do not read this if you are a minor, or easily triggered by uncomfortable situations and/or characters with ambiguous morals.
