Building Veridys
Since I was a kid I’ve been a huge fan of tabletop role playing games. One of my favorite parts of the game was world building and telling stories, so I’ve been what’s called a “Perma GM” (permanent Game Master) for probably about fifteen years.
Back in 2017, I created a fantasy world that became the setting for over five years of RPG adventures. My players sailed the high seas, dug deep in mines and in late 2019 they released an apocalyptic plague. The intention was to then begin a secondary campaign where a new slate of characters would contend with the plague that the original party had released onto Andromara.
Aaaaand then March of 2020 happened.
Now not only could my friends and I not meet in person to play games, but in trying to shift to an online format it was abundantly clear that the last thing anyone wanted to do was spend 4-6 hours pretending to live through a fictional plague when we were all grappling with a statewide lock down from the pandemic and mass uncertainty over our health and our futures. One of the key elements of RPGs (and books) is escapism. So as the creator of the world and the game runner, I needed to pivot-- fast.
So I took the expansive world of Andromara and decided to focus on a small section of it. I drew a square on the world map and began to fill it in with cities and history and characters who called it home. I named it Verdant Grove, and put out a call for players who wanted to play an online version of an RPG with traditional fantasy elements with an emphasis on character development. A bunch of friends signed up, and for nearly two years we did a deep dive into the cities and areas around Verdant Grove. Running a game in a smaller geographic area helped make the world much more fleshed out and realistic, and I found myself coming up with lore and stories about the world that I didn’t think my players would ever encounter. Or if they did, it was years away.
Simultaneously, I was also writing my first novel. It was a contemporary horror novel set in the woods of upstate Vermont. I wrote it in six weeks (thanks NaNoWriMo) and after I finished it, I was talking to a friend about needing something else to write.
“Why don’t you write a series set in Verdant Grove?”
How in the world that hadn’t occurred to me, I had no idea. Not only did I have an entire world just sitting there, ready to go (I already had a map, outlines for political structures, religions, cities and towns, creatures- everything I could possibly need!) but I had pages of story ideas and plot leads sitting in a computer document already. You would think that after my friend suggested this, I would celebrate and get to writing, right?
Nope. I told him it was a great idea, and then I ignored him completely for four months. I continued to work on the horror novel edits. I outlined two other horror novels. It was only in April, when I decided that I wanted to give indie publishing a try, that his suggestion whispered back through my mind.
So, I started doing the work involved in converting a RPG to a novel. I pulled out all of the creatures that I had borrowed from books and guides and other RPG players and replaced them with creations of my own. I reworked the magic system and how its inhabitants would have used it. I developed an entirely new religious history. Even most of the place names changed. Verdant Grove itself became Veridys. It was a truly incredible experience, making the conversion from an open-source game to a proprietary novel. I was forced to think about elements of my world that had just been a given before. I needed to decide where the line was between magic and mechanics, and what the social order of my fantasy world was going to look like.
I think that in the end, Veridys still has the small nods to its RPG roots, but over the last four months it has become a world that is wholly its own. I’m excited for readers to get to experience it, and follow along on the adventures that take place in this little corner of the woods.
If you’d like to experience a little slice of Veridys for yourself, you can order my novella The Light Keeper on Amazon Kindle.
