Fairyland: The New Game
I have mentioned Fairyland a few times in passing. In case you have not been paying close attention Fairyland is my new game due out August 2019. Fairyland is a game that I wanted to design but never had the time, or courage, to do. Courage? Yes, courage. I am over critical of myself. I genuinely feel everything I create is terrible, and, because of this, it is difficult for me to acknowledge my work. All writers have self-doubts with the work they create. For me, I feel as if I am incapable of producing at least something adequate. It is these self-doubts that often lead me to sabotage my work. If I think what I am working on is crap, then everyone else thinks it is crap. Deep, but there is a point to this, trust me.
Fairyland has existed in my mind for a while, and it was not until recently that I had a creative epiphany. It began with working on The Princess Bride RPG. That game forced me to break my usual graphic design/book layout skills and really rethink my entire approach. I went with a much softer feel, and the color palette is something I would never have initially used. The typeface is a departure due to deciding on sticking with the classics in order for the book to feel as if it is a storybook.
Though this project has been long in the making, I have enjoyed every stressful minute of it. For the first time, I genuinely like something I have done. So, with this going on, Fairyland began to write itself in my mind. Where things really got serious was in September. I was without a Mac for close to two weeks. The house was a mess due to a pipe break in the master bathroom. I grabbed a yellow legal pad, a fountain pen, and began writing. Unlike most of my early stage writing, I was not writing short three-word sentences. There were no bullet points of paragraphs. This was straight up full text to the page. I just sat in a chair and wrote. I knew the order of chapters, I knew how the chapters would reveal information, and more importantly, the rules were entirely in my mind. Once one legal pad was filled, I moved on to another, and another, and another, and, well I was done at six legal pads. In two weeks I had a full-fledged game, be it in my own unreadable handwriting, but a full game nonetheless. I put the pads away once I was back up and running with a new Mac and began the process of digging myself out of a pile of work that built due to being offline. Still all this time, I could not get Fairyland out of my mind. Now, with my schedule free, I went back to the legal pads and begun typing. The more I transferred my written work to the Mac, I found more ideas seeping out. Now, I am at the stage where I am sharing this with others. I am running sessions publicly (here and here) and have more plans of doing so leading up to when the book goes off to press. Fairyland is fun. Fun for myself, but more importantly, fun for those who have played it. So far, even in the very beta stages of the game, it clicked and shows me, I am able to create something I like. I still have work to do, but so far, I think I finally made myself happy.
