Hello World!

Welcome friends! I'm so glad you're here! Please, take your coat off and stay a while! For a first patreon post, I thought I'd tell a little story...

All jokes aside, this is a very exciting moment! This is the culmination of years of work towards building my own world, the world of Eterna.  It started with a D&D game. I had never played D&D before and I honestly had no idea how the game worked. Some friends of mine wanted to start a campaign and when they asked if I wanted to join, I said "Sure, why not?"  I loved it. I definitely wasn't a great player at the beginning, I didn't know the rules very well and D&D 3.5 edition was a bit more complicated than modern renditions of the game. But still, there was something so empowering and exciting about stepping out of my own skin for 4 hours every weekend and living someone else's life in a world unlike the one I dealt with on a daily basis.  I think I played a warforged dragon-fire adept named D.R.A.G.O.N. who was a weapon built for a war long ago in history and had awoken with no memory of their purpose or their past life. It was SO FUN and I remember spending hours and hours adding little details to my backstory and I basically talked the DM's ear off every chance I got about ideas I had for their story moving forward and how I could be more involved in the campaign. The campaign lasted for maybe five weeks then fell apart because the DM got busy, but to this day, I remember most of the sessions in vivid detail.

So that was it, I was hooked for life. I started making potential characters for "the next D&D game" that was perpetually in the planning stages and when I realized that things weren't progressing the way I thought they might, I turned to fleshing out the world these characters lived in.  I started writing short stories and songs and poems about this world and it's people. Stories about how they lived and events in history, stories about day to day life, stories about epic quests and world ending apocalypses prevented from coming to fruition by brave heroes. I discovered RPG Maker VX Ace and spent a few years trying to design a game based on this world which I had now named Eterna. This was the point where my approach to world building and world design changed. Previously I had paid very little attention to verisimilitude and realism and my world was a horrific amalgamation of tropes and blatantly stolen ideas and characters from every movie and book i'd ever seen or read. Capturing monsters in orb shaped capsules and battling people with them? Check. Over the top anime villains? Check. Edge-lord characters with tragic backstories, katanas, and trench coats? Check, check, and check.  Which is not to say that there's anything wrong with these sorts of worlds, at the end of the day if it makes YOU happy, then that's all that matters. But I realized that I wanted uniqueness. I wanted to tell a character's story without people saying, "oh yeah that's just [insert name of anime protagonist here] but with a hammer." I wanted to have a world all my own that was full of everything I thought was awesome, but designed in a coherent and logical way. I wanted to create my own Middle Earth, a place so iconic that it's inspired an entire generation's worth of pop culture and affects the way the average person now approaches the fantasy genre as a whole.

So I started over.

I put away all my old maps and stories and started learning about storytelling. Then I researched how to write strong characters. Then I spent a whole week neck deep in Youtube videos about city planning. It turns out that if you want to create even a moderately realistic fantasy world, you have to know a lot about a lot of different topics. Over the next few years I researched everything from geology to sociology to conlangs and creative writing.  I learned about plate tectonics, world history, conlangs, evolutionary biology, art, music, psychology, the list goes on and on. Did I understand everything I learned? Absolutely not. But I kept poking and prodding at the areas where I was lacking and seeking out people who could explain it to me in layman's terms. Eventually I got to a degree of understanding that I felt satisfied. I'm no expert on anything. A lot of the creative choices I make with world design are just plain wrong when it comes to following the conventions of logic, but I think that what I know is enough for me to be happy with the worlds i'm building and that's enough. At least now when asked about why my mountains are placed where they are I can mumble something about the interaction of continental plates and the influence of a mountain god spurred on by prayers from a community of dwarves. It works 100% of the time, 80% of the time.  After establishing the basics of the world, I started running games of my own in the new D&D 5th edition system with friends and coworkers. This practice helped me refine the rough edges of the world and start to build detail in the cultures and societies of Eterna's inhabitants. At some point someone came into a game and said "I'm a wizard from the Conclave Arcana, the governing entity of magic and magic users in the world." I thought about it for a moment and realized, "you know what, that's absolutely something that would exist! I can't believe I never thought of that."  I got more and more comfortable letting people into what had previously been a private project that I had spoken to almost no one about. And telling people about it felt awesome.

Fast forward to the end of February 2020.  A friend of mine from work was playing in a campaign I was running and idly commented, "Have you ever thought about trying to build one of your cities in Minecraft?" I replied, "no... not really? I've never played it before, is it hard?" Within a week I had purchased the switch version of Minecraft and had spent no less than 16 hours in game building a little town.  Then the pandemic hit full force. A wave of shutdowns now meant that I was furloughed for the time being and had 24 hours a day of free time and no where to be. Needless to say, I played a lot of Minecraft in those first few months. Specifically I spent about a week in a brand new default generated world on the PC Java edition of Minecraft searching for a good place to build, and a few months dropping sand blocks one by one in creative mode to create a mountain. I had a goal in mind. I was going to build the elven capital of my world in as close to a 1:1 scale as I could manage. Illias, the Alabaster Sanctum. It was a city I'd already run some campaigns in and therefore had some general ideas for the layout and points of interest, but also a location that was still new enough to me that there was room to add new things based on what I encountered as I built it. I spent 5 months building the bare bones outlines of the map.  A flat top mountain, a shining white wall, a castle of indeterminate shape and size. I was learning how to play the game as I went and every day was a new adventure. In September of 2020, I posted a picture of the progress I had made on reddit. It got 222 upvotes. It was the first proof I had that anyone besides myself and a small group of friends were interested in what I was working on. People in the comments were helpful, kind, and just overall awesome. Someone even asked if they could help me build. To this day, that feeling of waking up to all those notifications with such kind words is one of my best memories. It inspired me to keep working on the project, to invite others to join me, to build a community of excellent people such as yourselves.

This project has evolved more than I could ever have imagined in the short time it has existed. What started as a solo venture built for me by me has expanded into a project with ten amazing builders who share my vision of this beautiful and brave new world. I've grown a lot too. Despite what many people think, I haven't been a very outgoing or extroverted person historically. But I've learned to embrace and be proud of the work I do, encouraged at every turn by the amazing people in the community.  Thank you. This community is what pushes me to keep going, to continue expanding the scope of this project, and to make bold plans for the future. Who knows where we're going, but no matter what, I'm excited to tackle that adventure with you!