.jpg)
Blogging remains a strange activity to me, as I often feel as if I not an expert in any field about which I could write. Some might call it "Imposter's Syndrome" but as of writing, I have exactly zero industry experience and lack even a completed bachelor degree. Nonetheless, my professions and advisers tell me to "show my process". Thus, I am going to begin to go through some of old my projects chronologically and discuss the process I used to create them. At my university, we refer to these reflections on projects once they are done as "Post-Mortems".
You can find the relevant document HERE.
Behind the 6th World
When I was in middle school, I began to send emails to my friends about the things happening in my imaginary world. As the name would suggest, it is the sixth imaginary world I have developed. The events of this world began in my sophomore year of high school, and I continued to develop the world until halfway through my senior year. As a sophomore in high school, I certainly borrowed elements from other places--never intending for my world to be something that I would publish -- such as race-names from Final Fantasy XIV or taking the civilization from Journey (2013) and fleshing out my particular interpretation of it. Nonetheless, the world had many of its characters, stories, histories, cultures, and a changing sociopolitical climate--all of which help to teach me more about the art of storytelling in general, art, worldbuilding, and the conventions of my particular favorite genre--fantasy political drama.
In high school, I began to play Dungeons and Dragons 3.5e and these things two things combined in December of 2015.
December 2015
For Christmas, my boyfriend of the time gave me the beginning of a D&D campaign module which included the races from the 6th World with statistics, using descriptions and art I had already made, and suggestions for new classes. He suggested he would add more parts as future gifts in following years. This was the beginning of the idea.
December 2016
In Christmas of 2016, I asked if I could write more things for the campaign module he had given me the previous year as a gift. We were wrapping up our group's first, two-year-long D&D 3.5e campaign and I wanted to try my hand at DMing myself. So, with his permission, I just started writing. I knew I wanted my guide to work as a standalone module--something you could pick up with only the D&D Player's Handbook or maybe even in lieu of the PHB.
I began by outlining everything I wanted to include. However, I knew, instead of trying to imagine all the things I would need for a D&D campaign on my own, it would be better to reference the PHB to ensure I did not miss anything. I made big headers in our Google Document--one for each chapter of the book--and then filled them out top to bottom.
In returning to the top, I expanded the introduction of the module to include a list of rules changes which reflected the setting--as my world had less powerful magic, the ability for mages to kill themselves to cast bigger spells, and no resurrection. I supplemented this with 5e's rules on death as well as some other homebrew rules with which my group played--in order to clearly communicate what type of game the module was built to serve.
January 2017
I decided, whilst I was rewriting the PHB, I should do a rebalance of all the classes--especially since I was reflavoring all of them for the purposes of the setting. Inspired by the tier lists commonly found for core classes, I decided to rebalance the system around tier 3 and 4. While I initially just planned to take away certain Wizard, Cleric, and Sorceror spells which were impossible with the magic in my world, I decided instead to limit them behind feats granted by special beings in the world. For example, teleportation and time manipulation spells were rendered impossible to force travel and time manipulation to be the exceedingly rare abilities they were in my world. In addition to being flavorful with the world, it also feat starves these upper tier classes, forcing them to specialize a little more by level twenty. Meanwhile, all the numbers of the Monk were increased and the Paladin was unlocked from their Lawful Good alignment as well as given their Horse immediately, making them an even more viable splash class as well as giving them their most powerful implements sooner.
Then, after reading and rebalancing all the classes, I tried my hand at developing my own to fit spell-caster types that appeared in my world. My first class was the Seer, as my world had a whole motif with Seers and stars, but I think it ended up being fairly weak. Seers were built around predicting the future--buffing and debuffing by shouting warnings, knowing things DMs want to keep hidden, and so forth. Most notably, they could place "bookmarks" in battle on their turn and return to that turn to change the future. The biggest issue with the Seers is the question, "How do I track that?" as there was simply too much memory involved, both for the Seers and the other players. I essentially gave them a 9th-level spell as a once-a-day ability for free as well as made them 2/3rds casters.
My second class was the Siphoner--characters built to be Tier 3. Their central focus was stealing the attribute points of other characters and moving around their only stats to suit the needs of the party at the time. This is at the cost of their health, however, until higher levels. This is what balances the Siphoner from being much too powerful--as they are limited by the damage they take each turn.
My last class was the Companion class, which is by far, my worst. It is essentially a barbarian that guards their friends instead of raging. It was very weak and needed buffing later in the campaign, as I found out when one of my players decided to play a Companion.
February 2017
During February, I ran my first test session with the Siphoner--doing a one-on-one D&D
session to ensure the class was written clearly and the player understood how to play the character. Overall, it went well, though I was surprised at the viability of the Siphoner in social situations. Unfortunately, none of my players were particularly interested in being a Siphoner, so I did not get much further testing with it.
Throughout the rest of February, I wrote up the character descriptions, lore, and added new items and materials for the 6th World. I used two points of reference for ensuring I had all the information I needed to have a full explanation of each major city in the 6th World. I based some of my formatting on how Mizahar-The Writer's RPG, a forum-based role-playing website, handles their lore as based on their couple hundred members and cohesive storytelling, they evidently knew how to present lore. Secondly, I referenced the Ryuutama tabletop RPG's city builder, as it gives organization and direction to what I choose to write about. Cities are critical in the 6th World because demons attack form wherever there are sentient people. If these people live in small clusters, such as traditional fantasy farming villages, demons will overwhelm them but in cities, people thrive. Also, from a fiction standpoint at the time, it seemed more important to me to develop a few cities really well than a thousand identical farming hamlets. I described each city as deeply as I thought a player would need to know--from cultural attitudes within a city to outsiders' perspective of the city, from food to architecture, from local flora and fauna to specialty goods. Needless to say, my players appreciated being able to reference anything I mentioned--even if they preferred me explaining it as the Dungeon Master to learning it on their own.
March 2017 - May 2018
As of March, I was ready to begin. I let my players build their characters and our campaign began. We had an Oruntier bard, a Qu ranger, a Qu companion, and a Miqo'te druid. We mostly played online for ease of transportation but occasionally played in person for special events--such as the Soiree, in which I transformed my basement into a fancy palace and we wore fancy clothes and drank apple cider in plastic wine glasses.
Despite lowering the overall power level of the game, I let my players get away with a lot with pure charisma. Throughout our game, I learned more about balancing on the fly, managing combat length, and the downside of making every major important location a city when playing D&D--there aren't that many dungeons. I tweaked certain classes on the fly, such as buffing the Companion, and I allowed feats no sane person allows, such as Leadership to the Oruntier who got to 57 charisma. Simultaneously, I let certain rules slip by untouched--such as spell penetration and spell failure. Gaining a level a session, players leveled up somewhere between 23-27 (depending on bonus XP) and we concluded with one of the characters, on the verge of becoming a minor god, leaving the world to seal a giant magical rift from the other side, while the rest of the players planned to search for a way to save him. Thus concluded our second D&D campaign.
I learned that, for the purposes of my setting, D&D was probably not the ideal system--as D&D is best for fighting wide varieties of monsters, and is poor at navigating a complex socio-political climate. Since it was my first time writing an interactive narrative of any kind, I struggled greatly with writing a story about all the players, but created something more akin to writing a number of slightly intertwined single-player campaigns. Despite this, the players still speak fondly of their exploits when I am around them. The rise of powerful and non-seduce-able forces divided the party into two parties--both of which hated the other--before getting them back together under one flag to conquer the world. The ranger turned to drinking as a way of increasing their charisma and seduced a sentient tower. One player came out as gay, and explored this by making his character come out too. They remember these events much more than they remember the particular setting they were in or the cities they visited. Overall, I think this project was a success, but it needs more monsters and non-social locations to truly provide the D&D experience. In the future, I hope to make my own tabletop system which is more suited to dialogue, as well as write a campaign setting more suited to the system of D&D.