A few months ago I wrote a blog post for Speak Out With Your Geek Out in which I described the fantasy world that my best friend and I have been creatively inhabiting on an on-again, off-again basis for more than twenty years. The world of Varo, which had begun as just a dot on a hastily drawn map, grew over time into a living, breathing metropolis of a million souls that became the setting for several Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and the inspiration for three novels and eleven short stories. My friend and I had attempted twice to turn Varo into a published gaming world, but on both occasions real life managed to conspire against us, either pulling us in separate directions as we left college or pushing us towards the increasing responsibilities of career, marriage, and family. Each time was a learning experience but ultimately a disappointment, and after we gave up on the second attempt I don't think either of us ever thought we'd try and give it another go.
Well, guess what? It seems that we're getting the band back together. Not only do my friend and I have our heads screwed on a lot better than during our previous attempts, but after starting a new D&D campaign in the same setting we have way more publishable material than we've ever had before, including lots and lots of homebrewed charts and rules variants to transform any generic fantasy RPG system into the gritty crossbow noir world of Varo. We also have all of the Varonian fiction I've written since the last try, which we intend to draw upon heavily for source material and flavor text (while linking out to purchasable ebook copies of said works), as well as ongoing dispatches and other occasional fiction which will help introduce newcomers to this universe from varying first-person perspectives. My best friend has already been successfully managing his wife's e-commerce site for her knitting efforts, so he's able to leverage his experience there into coding a fitting online portal for our creation.
Here's to hoping, in the spirit of Make It Happen, that the third time's a charm! If anything has changed between our previous efforts and this new attempt, it's that I think we're more realistic about our expectations. While it would be great to make some money, this is more about sharing what we've created with our fellow RPG travelers, as we've discovered that the more we open up this world to others the more we find ourselves inspired in turn. At any rate, I will be sure to post a link to the web portal as soon as we have some content online...
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