Worldbuilding | Balancing Excitement and Pacing Oneself

I’ve learned to never say never. I’d said many times over the last number of years that I would never, and I was pretty certain, try my hand at game mastering a role playing game session/campaign. That’s where you plan a bunch of story and world details (or, if desired, pick up a prewritten adventure) then have a few of your friends get together with you and cooperatively tell the story with you helping them and the characters they’ve built interact with the story and world you’ve built. Often exciting and fun chaos ensues, I know from experience as a player character. Feeling daunted yet? I sure was.

Fast forward to about two weeks ago when I changed my mind...never say never, y’all. It just might happen.

Honestly I’d been thinking that my never had turned to a maybe...someday when I’d watched Ashely Johnson game master a killer space adventure one-shot. She was on record as never wanting to game master but as a special unlock of the Critical Role kickstarter she was on the hook for one game. And she knocked it out of the park. I was quite inspired.

And thus, here I am in the middle of ideation and writing for what I’m calling my almost real hypothetical game. I cannot believe that this is me, right here, right now. I’m so excited to be doing this. It’s such a beautiful creative thing to be making a whole world and story for a game. Sure, some of it is going to be epically, unapologetically, hand-wavingly strange. As some who know me might have guessed, there be Dragons and steampunk technology, as they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Think about it…

All this excitement also leads to this feeling of the time scarcity vortex. Like I want to show this cool thing I’m working on, get it moving and on the ground as soon as possible. But I need to pace myself if I’m going to do this right. And I want to do this right. I’ve almost never wanted to do something more right than this thing. I’ve got plans. Lots of plans. Both story/world wise and artwork wise. You heard me, not only am I creating a story and a world, I’m planning on creating some artwork visuals for my hypothetical players.

I must be crazy, right. But it’s the best kind. Also my creativity has skyrocketed with this project being added on to my preexisting ones. I’m likely not going to be done with any of my projects super soon, but I’m enjoying the ride.

What of your own creative outlets are you guys excited about?

PS. I’m sharing a piece of my worldbuilding art below, welcome to the continent of Ikoth, Vraith. In the few days since I wrote the bulk of this post I’m finding that the sharing of this particular project may be closer than I was expecting and the players much less hypothetical and looking a lot like a certain number of friends...just saying...I’m terricited!