maxim maps

I grew up pretty online. I spent a lot of time on Neopets, Yahoo Messenger, Runescape, and Club Penguin, with some dabbling in AOL messenger, as a child and tween, if that tells you anything about my demographic. Later on, throughout my early teens, I spent a considerable amount of time on MOCpages.com, a now-defunct social network where kids and adults shared LEGO creations. A little later I started spending time on DeviantArt, and at some point during middle or high school I got on Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram and Tumblr.

Then, in college, I fell off of all social medias—because for once I felt socially satisfied and nurtured where I was. Within a couple years of graduating, I had deleted pretty much all of my social media accounts. Not coincidentally, this was during a time in which I started learning about surveillance capitalism and how companies use and sell our data. I started researching privacy-friendly alternatives to major websites and programs.

In the last year, while I have continued to adopt more secure internet habits, I also decided to return to social media.

Sometimes, like tonight, when I want to worldbuild, I sit down not knowing what the hell to write about. At times it's overwhelming, trying to build an entire world out of nothing.

So instead of worldbuilding fun lore like I want to, I turn to my impending tabletop sessions for inspiration and see what I need to prepare for them. In today's case, I needed to write a letter that my players would find addressed to an NPC they fought. When I was writing the letter, I instinctively went to put a date at the top—and then I wondered what date I would put.

A fantasy calendar

While I knew that months like “September” sure as hell didn't exist in my fantasy world, I've been loath to implement a calendar in my tabletop sessions that my players would have to learn. But I needed to put something down, so I turned to the calendar I had worked on in the past, based on the International Fixed Calendar: 365 days = 13 months of 28 days, + 1 special day at the end of the year. Pretty cool, right?

Right, I guess—but today, I thought: not cool, fuck the IFC!

Lore for Paiat usually comes out of a need to create content for my players. I have always struggled with decision paralysis, writer's and artist's block, fear of the blank page, etc, but worldbuilding has been very exciting and rewarding because I have had less of an issue with that. It's still a challenge, but I often have more ease creating because I have a deadline and an audience in the form of my tabletop RPG players.

I’ve NaNoWriMo’d it! In the span of three or four months, I've reached about 50,000 of my own words in the Obsidian vault for my worldbuilding project, Paiat. It has been my most rewarding and exciting creative project of the last year, and I’ve had a blast. The world is getting pretty big now, though, and I am hitting the point in this project where I'm asking myself the why??s.

Why make a world at all? Well, that one is easy; I wanted to create a setting for my TTRPG sessions separate from existing worlds where I had total flexibility and creative power. Plus, it's fun. I still reach points of depression where I ask myself why I'm doing this at all, but it's fairly easy to find my way out of that one—the project of worldbuilding is a transfixing game, and it makes me happy.

But then there are more complicated questions, like