>Such things happen. I have to admit that I did much the same thing
>when I created Tales of the Wanderer... And then got a shock when I
>realised Bob Shroeck was doing much the same idea!!! (fortunatly, our
>two concepts are JUST different enough!)

To be absolutely honest, I was influenced by Twisted Path by Twiser and Ed Becerra's Legion's Quest. (Very heavily so, as anyone who's seen my comments about and/or drafts of the earliest versions of DW2 know!) And it's not even original to them... it is, after all, simply a variant of the standard quest motif.

> The biggest difference is
>that instead of dumping 'every anime I ever liked' into the cosmic
>blender and hitting Frappe is that both he and I are hitting them in a
>more serial fashion.

Well, EPU-style universes are very different beasts. There's a whole lot more work involved in a fusion -- instead of a simple, pre-existing picture that you use as a backdrop, you've essentially turned everything into jigsaw pieces, and you have to make that all make sense before you can begin telling your own story. It's a lot easier if you've spent a decade refining the world first, as EPU has done. (Which is part of the eternal attraction of EPU, why people always want to join -- everyone wants a world that cool to play in, but no one wants to spend years building it first...)

>Right now, fortunatly Bob's writing in the BG universe while I'm over
>somehwere in the Rumiko Takahashi spectrum...

Where, because it's so overdone (IMHO), I won't be going. (Then again, I said the same thing about Sailor Moon, but the folks on my forums inveigled me enough that my imagination went to work and said, "Hey, here's something that no one's ever done! Let's do it!")

>But I do follow Bob's
>work (and readily admit that I think his work is better than mine!)

You are much too kind.

>and rather intend not to use any of the same universes he has. (with
>the possible exception of A!MG. The way I see TotW's plot, he can't
>NOT stop there, or he don't larn something impotant.)

I suspect we're going to tell two entirely different stories anyway, so I don't think that's going to be a problem.

-- Bob
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Selsun Blue is people!