In the essay "Rules to Mock Your Vain Ambitions", noted RPG designer Robin D. Laws describes what were his aims when adapting Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" setting to a Role-Playing Game.
I find fascinating the discussion of how the game mechanics were carefully tailored to achieve a proper "Dying Earth" feeling during play. Besides design artistry, it required a deep knowlege of Vance's stories: the identification of their recurring themes, motifs, an character archetypes, not to mention an ear for his use of language (the players are encouraged to speak in the rarefied dialogue peculiar to the series, and the rules themselves are written "in voice".) It's no wonder then that the essay doubles as an interesting commentary on Vance's work.
The bit about the different dice "personalities" is amusing:
Maybe I'm crazy, but I've always found that the different dice used in RPGs all carry different emotional temperatures. The d4 is primal, parsimonious, and, as anyone who has ever stepped on one knows, hostile. The d12 is your goofy uncle, the one who tells you stories aren't supposed to hear and asks you to pull his finger. The d20 is a serious-minded juggernaut of decimal regularity. The six-sider, on the other hand, is a Dying Earth die all the way. A cube, it is elegant, spare, and classical. As the die used by normal civilians, the d6 offers a kind of bridge out from the world of RPGs, just as the Dying Earth stories straddle the boundaries between genre fiction and literature.
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