I must confess to be completely culpable in this crime.
I'm just not content to write up what happened in the game. It was an awesome game, everyone wanted to see it as a story in novel form, and they hoped I might someday do it. I hoped I might someday do it, too, but eventually forgot. That is, until I was listening to a song that ached so much of a tragic love, ripped apart, desperate acts to reclaim and rebuild, but ultimately loss, and I knew then that I needed to write a story which contained it, but who would be my stars? I then recalled our campaign.
Unlike many of the campaigns I've heard of or seen, despite this being one of only few in which I've participated, I could tell it was a different sort of game. It had a lot of depth AND a lot of freedom while still following an overall arch. The GM was fantastic about thinking on his feet and adapting to the choices the players make, finding away to allow them to reach the end without compromising their abilities to make choices along the way for themselves. Within this one, the main NPC, whom the other players rescued from a rather nasty orc attack, developed opinions and relationships with the other characters based on a d20 roll by the GM. Conveniently enough, the moment the NPC saw my little dove, a natural 20 fell from the GM's hand, and thus we had the start of a romance based on pure chance alone.
All very well and good from an outside kind of sense, but did it play out well? I'm happy to say that it did. I felt very immersed within the world and situations he'd created. Now my only question was "how to portray it?" and "where?" The lovely unfinished ends of Eleasia wrapped themselves around the concept, and by changing aesthetic elements (orcs, drunken half-orcs, dragon attacks, someone having a pet polar bear, dwarves, dark elves, etc., your basic D&D standard fair) into things more standard to Eleasia instead, the story itself was able to take shape within the world, and in fact worked itself in so well that the character I once played, Seleana, has become absolutely integral to the main story arch, and I wouldn't be able to defeat the main baddy without her at this stage.
Beyond that, with all the work I've put
into Eleasia, I've also thought about turning it into a table-top gaming world, and occasionally work on the rules of that, focusing mostly (at this moment) on the translation of what magic is like for humans into gaming terms that can't be
overly taken advantage of by meta gamers and the like. (Time, as it turns out, super powerful. Not fit for humans.) I'd love to see people enjoying the world, not just the stories, and so many of my friends are total gamers, and there really is just so much information that it seemed only natural that I think about working on the two in tandem, or at least back and forth as whim takes me.
So, I don't think that every story based on a campaign will feel like it's based on a campaign, and should I succeed (which I very much plan on doing), this will be one of the tid bits I confess later as well, but I, too, have come across novels here and there that really feel like a recounting of a session that must have been terribly fun at the time, but which hasn't been written out well enough to feel "inspired by" rather than "happened just like".
I got wordy again . . .