Post by Bannanachair on May 15, 2020 16:16:01 GMT -4
In the past decade, I have written over fifty roleplays and participated in probably over a hundred. I have built worlds and explored worlds built by you, my oldest friends. My first ever RP, which I titled "Soliraex Desert" and wrote one afternoon while I was twelve, on a weekend before going for a swim, has seen its name reappear in my worldbuilding countless times since then. Despite that, it was insignificant compared to what would come. I'd like to reflect on the three worlds of mine that I have felt were the most impactful to me, and most representative of who I was as a worldbuilder at various points in my time here. Coincidentally, all three worlds have had a version of the man known only as Arthur Fangoran: These worlds were The Land of Ferinox, Arloth and the unnamed world of Fantasy RP.
The Land of Ferinox was my first great RP. It was never meant to be as impactful as it was: I wrote the OP in the span of under an hour to prove a point. What that point is I have thoroughly forgotten, as it was over seven years ago on a forum that was deleted three (or more?) years ago. It was something about simplicity: perhaps I was trying to prove that you don't need to put much thought into worldbuilding to have a fun time, perhaps I was trying to prove that longer OPs are not necessarily better. Whatever it was that I was trying to prove, it was inconsequential. Duck joined, creating the character of Arthur Fangoran - I believe that that was the first time we roleplayed together. It was joined by others, who would create a character in one part of the world and then be forgotten within a few pages, but most importantly it was joined by a user named Wasabimasta, whose character of Caligo would join Arthur, Darikinth and Veroth in their adventures.
Whatever I was trying to prove, there was a simple pleasure to The Land of Ferinox. It followed a small group of people, fleeing some monsters called the Shadow Minions. Despite how long the thread went on for - eighty pages and two-ish years - the storyline never progressed very far. The party was meant to encounter Darikinth's wizard friend, whose name I forgot, and from there go on a quest to do something else to banish the Shadow Minions. Then other adventures would follow, where the Shadow Minions were revealed to be just that - minions of a much greater threat. The story was straightforward, feel-good fantasy following heroic heroes in their fight against villainous villains.
Arloth was another story altogether. In fact, it was likely my most ambitious project ever, and a project that (in retrospect) I wouldn't have been able to finish even had I been working at the rate I envisioned up to the present day. A story told across three threads, the Siege of Dorthol, the Arcane Order of the Green Tower and the short-lived The King's Army, everything that had happened in those decade-spanning stories was mere setup for setup. I envisioned a world larger than Earth, with an epic tale of Gods spanning incredibly-detailed millennia and multiple parallel dimensions. Because of this, it was paradoxically my most and least successful project: Arcane Order of the Green Tower, intended as just a tiny side-story, managed to be told to near completion, whereas the story itself never even managed to truly begin.
My plans for Arloth were mind-bogglingly large. I can't remember all of it, and at the time I knew it would be impossible to remember all of it, so I set up a wiki. At the end of the Siege of Dorthol, as the city was being razed to the ground by the Hobgoblin forces that managed to finally break through, it would be revealed that Hareth and not Harn was the one who killed George Gorganrich's teacher those decades ago. The forces of the Tarthelian army, led by General Grilt, would win a Pyrrhic victory, destroying the Moonshooter Tribe's armies in the fierce fighting in the streets of the now-ruined Dorthol, though the Tarthelian army would discover that the Hobgoblins were receiving aid from the kingdom of Lehtrat. Decades later, the magical artifact discovered by George Gorganrich as a youth, the Book of Hilorik, would make an appearance, ultimately triggering a war between the kingdoms of Tarthel and Lehtrat that would last decades. At the same time, Hareth, revealed to be a minor god and servant of N'Lok, would have appeared in another region of the world entirely, seeking an artifact called the Flute of Bievis and ultimately condensing power around himself. The Second Lehtrat War would be told in two ways: An ISRP, where each thread is a unique battle from the decades-long conflict, and a regular RP told at the end of the conflict, where the heroes from all the previous RPs (or their descendants) would combine forces and finally defeat the King of Lehtrat. But it would be discovered that he was secretly a servant of the dark god N'Lok, alongside the ancient dragon Irinix (also in the area) who would take over as a primary antagonist for the next few decades worth of RPs... Eventually, after literally thousands of years intricately detailed across an insanely huge world that we've so far only seen a tiny piece of, there would be an ultimate battle between good and evil. Eventually. At some point Tarthel was meant to expand as an empire and then fall, like Ghoril before it. I was ambitious as a 14-year-old.
Some of these names may seem familiar to you if you read Fantasy RP a couple years ago. Fantasy RP was less ambitious than Arloth, but ultimately still pretty damn ambitious. Additionally, I got significantly further in describing the whole world and its history, which would make it seem larger - though make no mistake, the entirety of Arloth would have been likely one of the most insanely detailed worlds ever written by any worldbuilder ever had it been completed. Featuring worldbuilding elements plagiarized from myself, fantasy RP became my last hurrah of the genre. Telling the tales of six characters, with the intent to eventually bring the various story threads together and also introduce dozens more, Fantasy RP's storyline had literally just begun. In many ways, it was the epitome of my teenagerhood: A highly detailed world, setup for a hundred different stories, none of which ended up being told despite years of storytelling. The thread went inactive a year ago.
So, where does that leave me? I still have ideas for stories. I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that my fantasy stories are simply too large for the medium of a text-based forum roleplay, especially with how busy we all are with our lives. I have an idea for a trilogy of fantasy novels that I want to write, an idea that I came up with over the winter break but never got around to writing due to being busy. I have an idea for two trilogies of stories set in the Star Wars universe which I might try to get a start on over the summer. I maintain an obsession with wanting to exist in a world of swordfighting and magic and heroes and adventures, with a clear delineation between good and evil existing alongside the million shades of grey between them. A year ago, I had decided that Fantasy RP would be my last RP here. It looks like things will stay that way for the time being, but I'm not as confident that it's the end in the long run as I was a year ago. I've gotten busy, with college classes and new offline friends and having joined my school's varsity debate team. I'm an adult, no longer a kid. Despite that, I still find myself drawn into my imagination, and the kinds of stories I want to tell honestly haven't changed all that much in the past eight years.
Many people are embarrassed by their teenage years and the things that they did. Maybe I'm too young to be embarrassed by my past, but honestly, I'm not. I have nothing but fond memories (no doubt improved by nostalgia) for roleplaying and storytelling. I'm proud of the stories that I tried to tell, and only disappointed that I wasn't able to tell them to their fullest extent. This may be on the backburner for the next three years, until I finish college, but I don't think I'm done yet. In fact, I'm thinking that I might try to do something over the summer. Why not? Given social distancing, my new in-person friends have turned into people I'm in touch with only via the internet, so I might as well try to do something with my old internet friends as well.
Lastly, and most importantly, I want to know why I could so easily write fifteen hundred words about this, but I can't write the fifteen hundred word essay I need to finish my last class.
