Prepare yourselves for a long rambling story about what I am planning to do with this new little website with a weird name. For those of you who like me, but are impatient: tl;dr I'm going to be putting D&D homebrew, characters, world building rants, and stories up here to make myself write and explain my thinking. It's mostly a log for me, but the more people read/like it, the better I'll feel about myself.
*muffled coughing to get your attention*
I love fantasy as a genre and specifically the magical worlds fantasy authors create. Growing up, I devoured The Lost Years of Merlin, every Tamora Pierce novel, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and, of course, the piece of perfect fantasy that is Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher. (I wonder now if Jeremy is related to Margaret in any way). But it wasn't until I was introduced to World of Warcraft that my own thoughts and fantasy worlds began to develop.
WoW was the first western RPG I had ever played, before that my experience with video games was limited to Pokémon, Kirby, and angry games of Mario Tennis with my sister. But in World of Warcraft, I got to make my own character through a distinct selection of race, class, appearance, and gear. I spent hours creating characters and then deleting them. I did not have a World of Warcraft account and my friend’s dad got mad if I had more than one character on there at once, so each creation quickly got killed off. Eventually, he forbid me from making any new characters; I had to stick with the next one I made. This was unforgivable and so I persuaded my parents to buy me my own copy, despite the fact that our computer was a virus ridden, no RAM, dud.
Eventually, I settled on a main character and created stories about her and her life. Soon, she wasn’t in Azeroth anymore, because how boring is that. Instead, I started crafting bits and pieces of a world where she could shine. A world that combined pieces and memories of my favorite fantasy settings into a cohesive whole. I drew maps, I planned out societies, and I crafted magical traditions. Looking back now, it wasn’t terrible, but also I haven’t improved much since then. I still fail to come up with villains and conflicts; I want everyone to play nice for some reason. I still fail to flesh out the minutiae of the cultures I create and take into account how historical and geological factors affect their society; I just copy existing cultures, hey Japanese dwarves sounds fun!
When I was 16 I got my own computer, with internet, in my room. I made sure it could run WoW and I set up shop. At some point, browsing WoW, I came across my first taste of Dungeons and Dragons, and I knew I had to play. I found a group at a local store, torrented every book I could find, played around constantly with Pathguy’s character generators and absorbed as much of the 3.5 rules as I could. As 4th edition came out and I went off to college I gained experience at the table, and eventually forced all my friends into a group with me. Every spare moment in class was spent either developing my campaign in Eberron, which completely hooked me or creating my own worlds.
It's been three years since I've left college. A short time for some, but in that time I have drafted two terrible fantasy novels during NaNoWriMo and learned that I love RPGs. I want to marry RPG’s. Every day I consider what I would be in a fantasy world, what my boyfriend would be, how would I import the WoW shaman into D&D, what would my students be like if they could learn wizardry? I sit and I ponder about these things, and every now and then I make a spreadsheet or craft a bit of homebrew to explain to myself how something might work. I’ve shared a few things in forums, mainly my take on a 5e Artificer, to some positive feedback. Otherwise, I’ve kept it all to myself and to my boyfriend, who listens to all my ranting.
Now all of that will change; I’m putting all my thoughts, considerations, characters, and homebrew out there. Partly just to be visible, but mostly to get me writing and cataloging my thoughts and ideas. If I come up with anything big, which is the plan, like a setting guide then I’ll compile it all at the end of the project and make updates to it when/if I go back to it.
The current alliterative plan is:
Monday Madness: Homebrew and Character design. Do you want me to design you as a D&D character? Send me an e-mail about yourself to fantasybandcamp@gmail.com
Worldly Wednesday: My ramblings on world building, starting with the setting of my first manuscript: BiFrost. This is heavily inspired and will likely follow a similar course to the essays by Rich Burlew which can be found here. He is much better than me. If you want to be better at worldbuilding go read his stuff.
Fiction Friday: I’ma write some stories.
This is the plan.
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