Shireling
A Servant of King and Country
This will be a bit autobiographical, but bear with me. Back in the heyday of my time as an online roleplayer, in my estimation roughly from 2014-2016, I remember fondly the days of the OG Sci-Fi nation builder, the RP format that seemed to dominate most of the nation building columns for a very long time. Truth be told, it's how I got my start in online text roleplaying and how I got my first real start as a creative writer. For me, it started way back around 2012 while playing a now-defunct MMO space strategy game on my phone. I joined a faction that, in addition to playing the game, also enjoyed roleplaying as characters from their space-based empires and establishing a long and extremely labyrinthine canon. It was fun in some instances, in other instances quite frustrating. Our GM was extremely adversarial, and there was a strong streak of competition. Nevertheless, it was a form of roleplaying that stuck in my mind so firmly that, even after I had branched out into more character-centric formats, I kept coming back to it.
Nowadays, it's hard to maintain a presence on the site anymore in the first place, here or anywhere. With college being a constant drain on time and energy, more than high school ever was, I have, over the years, lost online roleplaying as one of my favorite hobbies. This strikes me as a shame, given how fully immersed I felt in the lore and the characters in my other long-running sci-fi nation builders. There were various attempts to recapture the zeal of that first endeavor, which spanned across several different seasons, timelines, and story arcs. For me, the main appeal was to bury yourself and invest yourself in the roll of curating a fictional people. Just as emotional involvement in certain lovable characters is high, emotional involvement in a good nation-building series can be high as well, as you have the fate of an entire people to defend and protect or advance their interests.
As 2019 is now fully in swing, I was visited by a notion to attempt one last hurrah for the halcyon days of the OG Sci-Fi Nation Builder, the ones massive in scale that involve the clash of civilizations, races, people, robots, impossibly unrealistic science fantasy technology tropes, and the like. While they still proliferate on the site, even now, and will probably continue to do so well into the future, I personally may never again revisit the storytelling framework that gave my life so much joy when I was a teenager. Perhaps nothing will capture my imagination quite like the grand scale of the space opera genre, like when I first saw the Hoth battle scene from Star Wars and, at the time, I thought it was just cool. But as time went on, I thought of the richness and depth of experience, both uplifting and traumatic, that comes from warfare and how those same themes can be explored in a far future and fantastical setting.
My current project, then, is a chance to revisit the genre and give it the best treatment that I possibly can. I have a small group of friends that, even as we all have had less time for our common hobby, still love collaborative fiction and don't want to give up on the things we enjoy just yet, while the currents of our lives allow. So now I open it up, and I assume I might have some familiar faces in the comments. Maybe you don't know what I mean by "OG Sci-Fi Nation Builder" or maybe that format was not what got you into NBs or roleplaying more generally. Maybe you really don't understand the fascination. Or maybe you are someone who has similar experiences. I open this up to a discussion of the format more generally, some problems with it, and criticism I suppose, because I know that I have been at least partially responsible due to work or other reasons for the failure of some promising projects.
Nowadays, it's hard to maintain a presence on the site anymore in the first place, here or anywhere. With college being a constant drain on time and energy, more than high school ever was, I have, over the years, lost online roleplaying as one of my favorite hobbies. This strikes me as a shame, given how fully immersed I felt in the lore and the characters in my other long-running sci-fi nation builders. There were various attempts to recapture the zeal of that first endeavor, which spanned across several different seasons, timelines, and story arcs. For me, the main appeal was to bury yourself and invest yourself in the roll of curating a fictional people. Just as emotional involvement in certain lovable characters is high, emotional involvement in a good nation-building series can be high as well, as you have the fate of an entire people to defend and protect or advance their interests.
As 2019 is now fully in swing, I was visited by a notion to attempt one last hurrah for the halcyon days of the OG Sci-Fi Nation Builder, the ones massive in scale that involve the clash of civilizations, races, people, robots, impossibly unrealistic science fantasy technology tropes, and the like. While they still proliferate on the site, even now, and will probably continue to do so well into the future, I personally may never again revisit the storytelling framework that gave my life so much joy when I was a teenager. Perhaps nothing will capture my imagination quite like the grand scale of the space opera genre, like when I first saw the Hoth battle scene from Star Wars and, at the time, I thought it was just cool. But as time went on, I thought of the richness and depth of experience, both uplifting and traumatic, that comes from warfare and how those same themes can be explored in a far future and fantastical setting.
My current project, then, is a chance to revisit the genre and give it the best treatment that I possibly can. I have a small group of friends that, even as we all have had less time for our common hobby, still love collaborative fiction and don't want to give up on the things we enjoy just yet, while the currents of our lives allow. So now I open it up, and I assume I might have some familiar faces in the comments. Maybe you don't know what I mean by "OG Sci-Fi Nation Builder" or maybe that format was not what got you into NBs or roleplaying more generally. Maybe you really don't understand the fascination. Or maybe you are someone who has similar experiences. I open this up to a discussion of the format more generally, some problems with it, and criticism I suppose, because I know that I have been at least partially responsible due to work or other reasons for the failure of some promising projects.
