It All Started With a Character Sheet

Inspiration for stories can come from anywhere. The idea for What Remains is Infinity popped in my head while staring up at the night sky, into the cosmos, wondering what lie beyond the time I had on this patch of rock hurtling through space. Thinking to myself that somewhere in the universe’s existence, another being may have had the same thought. They were long gone by the time I pondered what lies in wait when we die, but the notion sparked in me a desire to wonder what the reality of the great beyond could be.

Sometimes the idea behind a story starts from a level grounded more in what we know. In something tangible. Although I’m hard at work on Murder in the Magic City, I’ve already begun laying the groundwork for my third novel. It may not have an working title, but it isn’t hurting in the origin department. This time, rather than study the stars, I took a hard look at the tabletop. Specifically, to the realm of Dungeons and Dragons.

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Those who know me even passingly well know that I’ve been playing the popular tabletop roleplaying game with a group of friends for the past two years. Not a wealth of experience compared to most who have dabbled in this wonderful hobby, but enough to know I’ll be playing it for years to come. My experience would be the equivalent to a Level 2 adventurer just setting out to find their way in the Forgotten Realms. However, we’ve completed two campaigns (almost; Covid-19 be damned) and are very close to embarking on our third.

For the uninitiated, Dungeons and Dragons is a game which sees a group of players creating characters to travel through a world, vanquishing evil, and sometimes being party to it themselves, with the end goal of eradicating the realm of a titular boss hellbent on bringing chaos to the denizens of the universe. Prior to the start of each campaign, players roll dice to determine the statistics of the character they plan to play. From there they allocate the values to various abilities (wisdom, constitution, charisma, etc) depending on the class they choose. Some people are wizards. Others are barbarians. A few are even murder hobos. Okay, that’s a solid majority if the situation calls for it.

Part of the character creation process is determining the backstory for your character. Where do they hail from? What is their motivation for adventuring? There’s a seemingly never-ending rabbit hole to travel down, full of questions to ask yourself in crafting the character you’ll spend countless hours pretending to be. This portion can be as in depth or succinct as the player desires. It provides a jumping off point into the story and helps to give you an idea how your character may react to a situation. I have a tendency to go a bit overboard in crafting a reasonably compelling narrative. This can backfire, but I do it to better understand who my character is, and who they might become.

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With Annabelle, the character I’ve created for our third DnD campaign, I discovered someone who can transcend the tabletop and become something else entirely. I crafted a nearly two-and-a-half page backstory that set the tone for who she is and provided a powerful motivation for her adventuring ways. Truth be told, it could have been even longer, but I had to leave something to the imagination. I’m excited to get to the table and inhabit this character based on my late, great, feline buddy, Annie, who allowed me to be her human for nearly a decade. She will be a Tabaxi Monk. More on that in a future post.

Covid makes getting to the table with friends challenging, so Annebelle will have to wait a bit to be fully realized. We’ll be doing a homebrew campaign, a story I have no way of knowing anything much about, so all I can do is sit back and wonder. The more I thought about her character over the past couple of months, however, the more it made sense to see where her story could go. I thought about what she might do when she left the monastery she spent years training at. Would she leave willingly? Would they force her out? If so, why?

Eventually I realized I could craft a full-length story out of her life to that point, and what could follow in the universe within my mind. However, as science-fiction is more my forte than fantasy, though I thoroughly enjoy reading both, I had to come at the tale from a different mindset than I would if I were creating her for the tabletop. It couldn’t be straight Dungeons and Dragons fan-fiction if I hoped to publish it without issue, but that was ok. I saw it as a challenge worth delving into.

This will be a larger undertaking than my first two novels, as this will require the construction of a non-existent world. It will exist solely in a world unlike our own rather than in locales we are familiar with. If you’ve read What Remains is Infinity, you’ve seen a glimpse at some world-building I’ve done to this point. That pales compared to what will be necessary for even just the first half of my third novel. And I’m looking forward to all that comes with creating a believable world that readers want to lose themselves in.

Though I’m not sure what to call it just yet, the first novel in the Annabelle Atala Saga (series title subject to change) will be available next year. I’m eager to share more about this world in the coming weeks and months.

Thank you for reading and have a wonderful week!

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