I’m building a world.

This isn’t that unusual. In fact, it’s so common there’s a longstanding joke about “world builder’s disease”, where creators and authors of many different sorts become a little bit obsessed with all the pesky little details of a fantasy or sci-fi setting and distracted from actually writing characters and story. Or, in the case of someone working in and around RPGs, becomes so occupied with lore and backstory and possibilities they lose sight of players, and the game.

I’ve got a bad case of world builder’s disease. Not terminal, but I’ve suffered for decades. And the project I’m starting *isn’t* about fixing that—because I’m not sure that world building is the problem to be fixed.

If I do have a problem, it’s that I’m easily distracted—and sometimes that distraction isn’t the internet (I know, right?), I’ll get sidetracked by another idea: A new rabbit hole to run down, a character idea that needs to be chased down and properly sorted, a road ‘less travelled by’ encountered in a yellow wood, that sort of thing. To date, I haven’t found a way to avoid the distractions, and I haven’t been disciplined enough to ignore them.

What slowly dawned on me is going to sound like a stupid idea: I had a suspicion that what I really needed was something *bigger*, big enough to accommodate the ideas and the distractions both. A super-large idea container that I could just start binning things into.¹

So I’m building a world.

I have notes. Lots of notes. Lots of disconnected ideas and story beats and fragments of mythology.² The whole thing could use some structure. And of course I mean literal structure, in that there will be maps, and a wiki.

But by ‘structure’, I also mean deadlines. For inspiration I look at how Dickens and many others wrote their novels: a bit at a time and serialized in magazines before it was all wrapped up (and edited) into a book. Many of us are already familiar with how motivating an actual deadline can be. I don’t know if the self-imposed deadlines will loom quite so menacingly over a beleaguered author’s very soul, but I have a calendar set up for 2022 and we will discover that together.

I’ve been working at this big project in fits and starts all through 2021, and going back into 2020 a bit.³ So parts of this project are already set up, but the ribbon cutting and grand opening will be the first deadline, six weeks into 2022, 11 February. My big goal for the new year, the overall goal of the project, is to publish an installment every six weeks.

I’m still trying to decide both what publish means and what the actual product will be for these ‘installments’, but I’m leaning towards a package of materials for folks who enjoy fantasy role-playing games.⁴ A set of maps and some background and some characters, a setting or adventure suitable for a gaming session, along with some notable NPCs and a new faction and a new town or city, another small corner of a slowly unfolding world.

While I’m working on each Drop [working term, I’ll come up with a better name later] I’ll be adding all that along with the other details and proper names of things to the custom wiki. If I get distracted by something shiny, I’ll add that to the wiki too. And between now and February, as I figure out the actual scope and scale of the 2022 project, I’ll be blogging here, talking my way through my process, telling you the tools I’m using—and learning—and sharing whatever the hell this is, both the process and the project.

Sharing is the best part of what we do online, ideally anyway.

And in the interest of sharing, I’d like all of this to be free. (Mostly free) (and some large part of it always will be free.)

I will be giving away what I can⁵, and we’ll work out the financing later. At some point I anticipate that my project will need art, lots and lots of it, and for that I’m going to need an art budget. Though I do like money, and find it has many uses, this is not a project I plan to make money on. (I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an outside chance that I’ll build something worthwhile through this — and worth putting a price tag on — but wherever that place is, we’re not there yet.)

This is the point in the article where I try to wrap things up, and end with something trite like, “So Join Me on This Epic Expedition to a New World! I have a lot of ideas, and hope for the future, and though I don’t know quite where we’re headed I look forward to where this Grand Adventure (And Experiment!) will take us!”

At the moment I can’t think of anything better to end on, and far be it from me to make an unexpected break with tradition.

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¹ “Bin” is probably the wrong verb to use here but let’s go with binning for now.

² In addition to the notes I’ve specifically made since this started, I also have older stuff that I might, might, recycle into the new World as well, but I’m not sure how many of those past worlds could find a new home here and which should really stand alone and apart (and are best forgotten). There is a difference between a large encompassing world with many influences, and just putting every failed draft into a blender and hitting frappé.

³ Pandemic. Y’all know. And the long slow crawl up this on-ramp is also why I feel like deadlines might help. A new start, a new year, an actual schedule. Motivation.

⁴ The distance between RPG and Fiction is a short one. Not even a brisk walk down the garden path, more like standing on different parts of the lawn, batting things back and forth over a net. So I hope my decision to favor RPGs over Fiction doesn’t disappoint. Hopefully the flexibility of the format allows me to be even more creative.

⁵ And releasing as much as I can under a Creative Commons license. Share Alike or just straight-up free to use.

⁶ Worldbuilding might not be a problem that has to be fixed but the jury is still out on my reliance on emdashes, parentheticals, and endnotes.