Starfall

With a large edit pass on my fantasy Western complete, and the book series I was reading also complete, it’s finally time to move to a new project (and figure out what to do with that Western draft later).

It’s gonna take a lot of work though.

“Starfall” was originally going to be my ultimate epic D&D campaign, spanning eight parts separated by generations over the course of about fifteen hundred years. The primary goals were (and still are):

1. Tell the messy, desperate true story behind the origin myths of a world.
2. Write cosmic weird horror as the beginning of a world and be done with it, rather than inevitably end up with the cosmic horror being the ultimate final boss of the universe.
3. The newer later goal, to make this the origin story of my grand combined setting where I decided that almost all of my D&D games and fiction ideas would live and coexist.

I’d been jotting down ideas and outlines for literally a decade. So my literally thirty thousand words of notes are, unfortunately, disorganized and fragmented from ten years of scribbling, updating, and probably contradictory new ideas. They’re also fundamentally structured toward D&D adventures, where very direct and obvious references to famous works of fiction are fun, rather than practically plagiarism the way they would be in a novel. It’s one thing to clearly, intentionally identifiably base a D&D adventure on The Color Out of Space or the X-Men, and quite another to do that as large chunks of a book.

There’s work to be done. 30,000 words of notes and not a single hint of a protagonist – when it was gonna be a D&D game, the players would provide the protagonists for me, so I’ve got none!

The plan is to properly organize all my notes, then work on a huge update. My goals for this story and the setting, and the setting itself, have shifted quite a bit since I touched most of these notes. So let’s see where it goes!