Make Progress on Homebrew Setting

POST MORTEM

I am incredibly happy I wrote those three rules for myself before starting. Especially 2: “Remember your goal posts may move. This is okay, and even likely.”.

I think I changed the goal for literally every single week from when I began. I was also very glad about the Writer Meetups we had during the DK30 to talk about a lot of things (even if the timing was often a little poor). It helped me understand a little bit about why I kept moving things. I don’t do well with planning, and I do exceptionally well with mania. I know it ain’t healthy, but when I get “in the zone” I can just work for hours and hours without noticing the passage of time and it feels really good (until its over).

I probably got more done this DK30 than I expected when I initially set out on this project, however, I did very little of what I actually set out to do. I think that’s my problem, which is really good to know: “I struggle with structure.”. When I lay out a plan of what to work on, I lose track of what I want to accomplish within those goals, get bored, and move on to something more interesting. When I begin writing something I am interested in, it’s often poorly structured as a result of my mania.

Problems going into it:

1. I was not feeling confident about what to do in the subject areas before starting.
2. I am really bad at writing history. Like … really bad. UNLESS: I have a calendar I can physically mark these things on.
3. The project scope for the project as a whole is ludicrously ambitious.
4. I wasn’t sure who I was writing for except myself.
5. I don’t have an editor.

Things I learned from this project:

1. This is a two-person project at this point. At minimum.
2. I … think I might want to try to pitch this as a genuine setting at some point.
3. I need an editor. No matter if I decide to pitch it, I need someone who is skilled at organization and editing.
4. OH MY GOD HAVING AN ACTUAL WORKING CALENDAR IS SO AMAZING AND AWESOME. I cannot describe how much that has been a joy to use after I spent Week 3 making it.
5. I need a clearer goal for this project, or it will keep growing nearly infinitely in scope.

The things I learned from this project were probably invaluable, since I’ve been working on this for such a long time, I really lost track of a lot of things, and spent a lot of time thinking about it as a whole, rather than just “Writing for the sake of writing”. I have gotten a newfound respect for people who design rulebooks and setting books for Tabletop roleplaying games. I always felt confident on being able to write something like it, but trying to compile it all in a comprehensive way has made it so obvious to me how far I have to go, but also how far I have come.

The past week has been tough, and I also changed my goal this past monday: Basically, I am writing the historic events now!

And … Today I managed to hit my goal of writing out the most significant events I’d had in my head for a while somewhere more permanent.

So, here they are!

Yeah, so… I basically finished the calendar and decided on a current date. THat last part is something I’ve been struggling with for months because I lacked a way to visualize history and got stuck on it. Now that I’ve decided on a current date, it lets me move backwards through the in-setting time to determine the important historic events that I vaguely had in my head and actually lock them in.

The Calendar!

Quick overview of what days are dedicated to which gods and when in the calendar they are as well as to what events they correlate to.

All the Holidays!

With all of that being done, I now have two tasks:

1. Copying all those descriptions onto the calendar for easy access.
2. Writing down key historical events.

I have been extremely busy these past two days. The world now has at least one calendar! Made a custom one with lunar phases, holidays, new names for the weekdays and months, seasons, etc. etc. The holidays were added later, and took a hell of a lot of planning. For convenience I will be listing everything I’ve done over the past two days below:

The Calendar!

Quick overview of what days are dedicated to which gods and when in the calendar they are as well as to what events they correlate to.

A quick description of all holidays during the first four months of the year!

Well, I did my research.

From my research there is one thing I learned: I need a calendar. A lot of the mythological relationships are based on events that happened “on earth” (or whatever the equivalent is, be it Faerûn, or otherwise), as well as rivalries between the gods.

I locked my gods away in the heavens outside of their holy days, so I think what I will be doing is making a calendar with 12 months, each with 31 days, and marking the holy days. That way I know which gods are adjacent with their holy days, and I can start building more on the culture for Week 3.

Based on this week’s work I will be changing Week 3’s goal from “Basic descriptions for Holy Symbols” (which honestly, I was not looking forward to anyway) to “Work on Calendar and map holy days”.

Well, I did make some progress towards my goal but … I realize now, a couple of days in that really I struggle with figuring out what I’m supposed to work out, which I think is why I initially put it as a goal. One of the things I am trying to really not put into my writing for this specific project is the umm… amount of “incest” that I find in some (a lot) of old mythology.

Basically I realized that the way I want to write this with the current body of knowledge I have is not possible. I need to do more research into how other mythologies (real or fictional, and yes, that does sound weird even writing it) handle relationships between the gods.

I successfully completed my goals for Week 1, and began working on Week 2’s goals when I remembered that during last week I had a very long conversation about wanting to write a deity for Necromancy, but not an evil one. As a result of that I began writing about the newest addition to the now 37 gods: Seiyot.

On top of working on that I began working on a family tree (I had one in my head, just never wrote it down). I was too lazy to find a tool that could do a graphical representation, so I opted for the text version instead.

I’m not 100% happy with the progress so far, but I also realized during week 1 that I have got to cut myself some slack. I found out that when I get really into writing it often burns me out the day after, but it is good overall for how much I get done. So this week when I feel that, and I did more than the norm the day before, I will be allowing myself to take a break.

Alright! So, considering I did very little on Wednesday and Tuesday, I decided that today I would work to make up for it.

And that I did! I did a lot of work on outlining the basics for how the afterlife works: What happens to the “soul” after death, the journey it takes, heaven and hell (not quite that simple) and some other lore stuff sprinkled in: Like deciding that a couple of centuries ago there was a great realm ruled by a dracolich. Yeah, I was wondering what to do with that area. But anyway, a good start to the Farishi document!

[Click here for the link to the document!]

Alright, so I blame What The Deck for a lack of productivity today, but I did get started on a glossary of terms for the Farishi article. This is in part for me to keep track of things (because oh my god am I bad at keeping track of things), but also as something I can refer players to later when I am going to be using the setting for a possible campaign.

If I have the energy to keep working in fifteen minutes I will begin work on the article by doing an outline of the structure of “Jag’Ago” (colloquially known as “The Maw”, or “The Many Teeth” for those who prefer the more literal translation).

PS: I did not have the energy remaining.