That last story was finished in time for the holidays and I immediately started working on another. This project is a little different. I wrote a story grounded in D&D rules and based in a world created by an excellent Twitch streamer, Evan Blair. (EvanBlairArt - Twitch)
His world is called Tellaria and it's one of the Realms of Eldara. All his own creations. The story I wrote is essentially a fanfic and isn't saleable anywhere but I had great fun with it. There were two things that created the most difficulty fun. First was trying to fit the tone of Evan's shared world idea. I had to take his lore and the various Known Things in Eldara and adapt those into a story that both honored his creations and also was a separate creation of my own. I've loved writing in shared worlds before and I'm happy to have a chance to do it again. (Ed.- 'shared world' is a very ephemeral title, as nothing is really released publicly that would be considered 'shared' and this is all pre-debut.) Second, I found it challenging to write a story that had to follow specific game rules. It's not as easy as you might think. Games and fiction are two different mediums and they have different goals for the type of user experience they deliver. Hacking away at monsters is perfectly good fun when playing D&D. It's not that great to read about. Similarly, a story arc in fiction has elements of tension and resolution that are just not present in a game system. There also has to be a balance in the action beats that don't always happen in D&D.
But, like I said, it was great fun. More stuff like this to follow.
