After procrastinating on NaNoWriMo 2022 to a sufficient degree that it has just become another story I hope to finish at some point, this week I’ve turned my attention back to The Last Question, which was my world of choice for NaNoWriMo 2021. I have some ideas for where I’d like to go next.
The Last Question has six character types, each with their own broad personal traits and a place within a rough social hierarchy. My goal was to write one story for each character type, putting them in the world, displaying typical interactions and interests they may have, while including non-obvious choices or elements that still mostly fall in line with their description.
I only made it through three characters before the holiday season stopped me in my tracks. A year later, I’ve begun story number four, and have a rough plan for where these fit into the game I’ve built.
Earlier this year I created the Gameplay Guide, a short document outlining the world and the rules of the game. I plan to write a much longer Stories and Scenarios document which contains these character stories; perhaps some other stories where character types are implicit and instead focus on specific elements of the world at large; and most importantly, a list of starting scenarios for gameplay.
Now, I’m under no impression this is anything more than a vanity project. Just like my blog or my podcasts, this is a form of personal entertainment that hopefully I’m able to share with my friends. Yet I am inspired by the large worlds of a few actual play shows of which I am aware, most notably Campaign: Skyjacks which is a beautiful game with a more novel concept than I have. They have awesome characters, compelling storylines that weave and breathe with plenty of space to grow, and most notably they include significant flavor text during off-weeks. The creator of the show, James D’Amato, contracts with writers who fully understand the world, and he is also an exceedingly capable writer. They produces short stories of the variety I hope to emulate.
While building a world could be intimidating, there are so many people who have done so successfully, and to some extent it’s easier to craft a self-contained world that mirrors our own than it is to write something firmly within reality as we understand it. I thoroughly enjoy the process, and this is a project I keep coming back to because the inspiration remains ripe, my motivation holds, and there are many concrete steps I can take to keep moving forward.
Stay tuned.