About the Author · Threads of the Weave

Aayush Iyer is a fantasy addict at heart, and The Lord of the Rings is mostly to blame.

By day he is a data scientist, with twelve years spent turning mountains of numbers into stories that businesses can act on, across New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Ireland. The rest of the time he has been a game developer, an escape-room specialist, a programmer in more languages than is strictly sensible, and a national-league futsal goalkeeper, which turns out to be excellent training for running a tabletop role-playing campaign: you spend most of the game watching everyone else, then dive in just before it all goes wrong.

In 2017 he talked the friends he grew up with into trying a tabletop role-playing game. The campaign he ran for them lasted four years and became The Weavebreaker Saga. Threads of the Weave is his first novel.

In June of 2017, a group of friends who had grown up together — through primary school, high school, and university — sat down to try something different.

We were all working graduates by then. Twenty-three years old, supposedly adults, though you wouldn’t have known it from the way we still argued over which Pokémon was best, or who really deserved the last gear drop in whatever game we were playing that month. I’d always been a fan of fantasy and video games, and so had they, but I also had something none of them did: a bit of tabletop role-playing experience.

When I suggested we play, the reaction was mixed.

Plenty of them were keen. Some thought it might be too geeky, even for us. And for everyone there was the effort of it: hours around a table running on nothing but imagination sounded draining, and committing to a regular day and driving over was a lot more work than just jumping into a game online together from our own couches. But they agreed to give it a shot, and so one Saturday afternoon I turned my living room into a tavern. I baked a mountain of snacks. The boys brought their own supplies: more snacks, drinks, and, from a few of them, a healthy dose of scepticism.

They thought it would be a quick afternoon thing.

The campaign lasted four years.

What started as a favour to a friend became something none of us expected. Those characters they built on scraps of paper — half-joking, half-serious — became people they cared about. The world I sketched on napkins and loose-leaf became a place they wanted to protect. Saturday sessions turned into late nights, which turned into months, which turned into years of laughter, arguments, impossible plans, heroic last stands, and the kind of stories you only get when a group of people sit around a table and decide to believe in something together.

This book is based on their adventures.

The characters you are about to meet were born at that table. Their friendships, their rivalries, their worst ideas and their finest moments — all of it grew from dice rolls, bad jokes, and the kind of trust that only exists between people who have known each other most of their lives.

To my players: thank you for saying yes that first afternoon. Thank you for coming back every week after. And thank you for giving me a story worth telling.

This one is yours.