About

The name

Why two things

A publisher usually picks a lane. We didn't, and the name is the admission.

Goggles is the workshop — the part that takes systems apart to see how they run, that finds it genuinely funny to build a rigorous combat engine and then populate it with kitchen appliances. VERSUS lives here.

Windchimes is the other weather — slower, older, and mostly listening. It's where a world gets an ecology before it gets a plot, where languages get phonologies, where a map is redrawn for the ninth time because the currents were wrong. The Vale Universe lives here.

They are the same instinct pointed at different problems. Neither one is the day job.

The founder

In his own words

As far back as I can remember I've been a storyteller. I saw old monster movies on TV, giant ants and titans, evil robots and clockwork owls and rabbits of unusual size and lost islands and beings from space. I read books about the life of the sea and deserts, that looked into the mysteries of life both before and after. I existed in a world I didn't realize everyone else wasn't a part of.

The work began in earnest in high school, with a homemade RPG built so that a group of friends could play on short notice. It was set in their own suburb and the object was to escape it. Over the following decades that system acquired a sea, then a planet, then a mythology, and finally a name for the whole undertaking: Projekt AP, Project Anima Planet.

Now I am a father, I'm a manager, and all these things which I created dwell just outside a locked door I have never shown to those outside the friends I built the world for. These rules and stories will no longer have it. Maybe we create not for ourselves and others, but for the creations themselves. So that they can exist in a world that will have them in no other way.

Goggles & Windchimes is that door, opened.

Adapted from the creative preface to The Vale Universe Bible.