Nathaniel Marshall
Game Designer, Writer
With a concept or even an inkling of a small idea, writing comes naturally to me. Over the eight-plus years I've pounded out worlds on my keyboard, I've honed and improved my craft into my own personal style and storytelling methods.
And while Digital game projects do lessen the time I am able to work on writing, I still set aside a small amount of time to work on the various stories of mine. Here are a selection of works with download links to PDF files of the excerpts.
Creative Writing Samples
Misc Writing Samples
In a world where all myths are true, a bunch of Archeology students get confused for Indiana Jones by a malicious Desert Tribe.
Tipping The Hand is a fantasy/adventure novel I've been working on for the last few years. Still in it's first draft, the story has a humored tone, poking fun at the aspects of the mythical beings through a genre savvy character while, at the same time, snapping deathly serious when the cards are down and all bets are off.
The story focuses on the themes of self-actualization and self-acceptance. This and others are mainly forged by two of the main characters who act as Foils to one another. In this world of Myths, shapeshifters are all but extinct due to systematic purges. With one character being a well-hidden shapeshifter, she provides the kick the other needs to accept his own non-human ancestry and complete his Hero's Journey by using the powers his ancestry contains.
Still early in its concept, End Points is a coagulation of three stories, all focusing on a single character who was thrown back in time six years and forced to live through them again in hiding.
In it's current iteration, the plot can be summerized by being about a crumbling world, and a character who's slowly doing the same. It's best described as bittersweet with the tone of the narrative as weary as it follows its time-traveler as he makes it back to present-day, and how his friends try to figure out what has happened to him throughout all the years.
It takes on themes of the sense of self, fate, and the utter loss of control of the former two aspects. As the story wears on, so does our hero's mask.
Going through many, many iterations of ideas, the world this story paints will most likely be the setting to a personal project inspired by FFVII.
Taking place in a world of monsters, the Duchy acts as a Deconstruction of advanced society in a monster-filled world. With Victorian-era technology, the Duchy's Capitol pushes High-Culture on it's populace and exports said culture to the rest of the world. Its Capitol it is the center of the major themes of the story take place -- Nature vs Ideology and Free Will vs Control, where the instinctive natures of the creatures are put in conflict with the human-like sets of values being imposed upon them.
To put it in another way, can a creature that has claws of flame really live peacefully in close quarters to, say, a Treent as the Duchy fully expects them to?