From Fantasyland to Artis Prime
Okay, okay… so my title is a bit misleading. But today, I thought I’d talk about one of the weird ways that Shattered Stars became what it is today. In real life, people talk about “invisible threads” — small events, coincidences, or choices that lead us somewhere unexpected.
When I first conceived Shattered Stars — it was a humble space adventure story. I had the trio, an idea for an ending, and not much else. A few years after that, I started playing D&D with some friends. It was a great way to spend a Saturday, and my sketchbooks were filled to the brim with doodles of our adventures. Eventually, I wanted to run a game of my own. I didn’t care for the generic fantasy setting, so I started thinking “what if I could take my book world and make it a campaign setting?”.
This is when I really started to write. While designing that campaign, I started refining the magic system to work for D&D type combat, I created quests and settings, such as Artis Prime and Zviera, and formalized the Coven system as my stand-in for an adventuring party. Everything was coming together more perfectly than I had imagined. I even cast Xela, Jack, and Nigel as my primary quest givers — giving them a small role in the story.
Actually — while I’m here, and this is my own blog anyway, let me share the little campaign blurb/tease.
Our story takes place in a small galaxy at the center of everything. Most promiment in this galaxy are the Order's planet, Zviera, and the Artis Prime, the center of all Galactic Trade. This makes for an unusual mixture of cultures, but that's what makes this galaxy unique, there's something for everyone. Tourists are plentiful, as Zviera is a popular magical pilgrimage for many and the shopping on Artis Prime can't be beat.
Most unique about this universe is the humans. Every human is born with the ability to use magic. When an infant is born, it has a gem in its mouth. This gem will become a conduit for the child to use the magic he has absorbed. Gems hold a fixed amount of magic. How much magic is held is typically dictated by the gem. Generally speaking, the darker a gem is, the larger capacity it has for magic. Humans usually form special relationships with their gem, either having them crafted into beautiful jewelry or implanting them into their bodies.
The human-gem relationship is a symbiotic one: the human absorbs magic from the world around them, and the gem holds this magic and enables the human to perform magical feats. If the gem is broken, the human will no longer be able to absorb and perform magic. Gems will break without magic, so if a human uses up all the magic a gem can hold, it will shatter. It is said that humans with shattered gems experience immeasurable pain and lasting psychological damage. Since the breaking of a gem can be detrimental to humans, technology has developed primarily so that humans can live in comfort without expending too much magic at any given time. Cities have evolved to operate with very little magical intervention from humans, and so most humans barely develop their magical skills, lest they accidentally break their gem, and end up as Shattered; magic-less vagrants who can no longer contribute to society at large (though nowadays there are some not too bad ways for Shattered to make a living).
Whatever your lot in life, you have ended up here: in a small Coven hub orbiting Artis Prime. Covens are, if nothing else, a really great way to meet people and make money. Once you’ve joined a Coven (or started your own), you can take requests that come in from all over the galaxies. This place resembles a rest stop, with various Covens taking odd jobs here and there. Being a Coven member can be dangerous, and it’s definitely not glamorous, but it pays the bills and buys ship fuel.
You walk with your Coven to a large Panel on the wall. Scattered all over are posters for work. They range from “Help me Move out of my Apartment” to “Please Slay the Dangerous Monster living in the Sewers”. Monster slaying quests, while definitely prestige work for a Coven, are not something you think you would want to do. You scan the wall, and a few posters catch your eye:
The first one says “LOST DOG: REWARD” and has a picture of probably the cutest puppy you’ve ever seen on it. The job is on the local moon Orlessian, and the reward is surprisingly high for the request. You grab it immediately before anyone else can see it.
The second one is a job posting. It reads “Temporary Workers Needed: Good Pay, Magic Skills a Plus”. Upon closer inspection, it’s a factory job deep inside Artis Prime’s Industrial District, but it doesn’t look too dangerous. The job starts in a week, so you pocket it for later.
You spend probably too long staring at the third poster. There’s nothing remarkable about the listing, it’s just a black piece of paper with the words “TAKE THIS JOB” written on it in gold ink. You continue to stare, as if new words will suddenly appear, but they do not. You stare longer and nothing happens. Without realizing it, you grab the page off the wall. You stare a bit longer and then put it in your bag.
Whew — that’s longer than I remember. Obviously, it needed to explain the gist of the magic system, but a lot of this became the foundation for everything after it. Of course, once I put real people in the mix, everything changed. Backstories had to be worked in, planets and universities were created, and the world became stuffed with new threads to pull on.
In the second session, the players stepped into Artis Prime and, like true D&D veterans, headed straight for the nearest bar. I hadn’t planned anything for this session other than to let them wander around, so when they asked who else was in the bar — I thought of the first witch-adjacent name I could: Sabrina.
I rolled some dice to see how dangerous she would be, and to my surprise, the answer was very dangerous. Hence, the drug ring Candy Shop found its origin.
As the players fell into this world with me, I just kept creating. I made something like 30 NPCs for a six week game (overkill by many standards) — and many of them found their way into my heart (and the books).
When that campaign ended, I was disappointed, but resolved to actually create something real and worthy for my children. Around the same time, I had also been invited into a D&D homebrew game based off the Disney and Final Fantasy crossover Kingdom Hearts. I wasn’t familiar with the games, but I knew Disney, and I knew D&D so I thought it would be fun.
Years later, I found myself planning my own Kingdom Hearts D&D game. I wanted to stay away from the classic Disney trappings (which had been done by other DMs more clever than myself). Therefore, I thought — what if I just killed them off? I’ll send them to ‘The Final World’ (KH name, not mine), and then they’ll be resurrected in the “real world” aka Disneyland, USA. As a California resident and Magic Key Holder, I had an intimate knowledge of both Disneyland and Disney California Adventure (DCA) so I knew I could pull it off. But once again — I needed NPCs and Cast Members to populate this setting that I couldn’t steal from the games, so I turned to my old campaign notes for inspiration.
It ended up being a near-perfect confluence of events. The premise became this: Xela, chaotic as she is, stumbles into possession of a nascent Kingdom Hearts — an incomplete crystal of darkness. She starts encountering Heartless, but is unable to kill them due to her lack of keyblade. So she hatches a plan — recruit dead keyblade wielders to solve her problem, and give the now-purified Kingdom Hearts to Jack so he can have magic of his own. There’s just one problem. Kingdom Hearts turns out to be sentient and insists on playing a ‘Reaper’s Game’ to test the player’s ability to save her.
With nothing but a document of notes and a discord server, we ran an RP-chat between proper sessions for about six months. This meant that the players could interact with NPCs, each other, the park, whatever — in real time, limited only by what I and the dice would let them get away with.
This real-time RP spawned many of the habits, quirks, and voice that eventually became the books. Here’s a fun example (and the inspiration for this post title):
I had a rule. Whenever a player would wander the park (and state where they were going), I would have them roll a Perceive check for a fun random encounter. Mostly, they would come across the trio doing something odd and would need to talk to them to investigate. Early on in the campaign, on a Monday, a player wandered toward Fantasyland. I didn’t have anything specific, but Xela was free for me to use, so I had her heading to get one of those huge Bavarian pretzels (that don’t exist in the park anymore, sad!). The next Monday, the same thing happened with a different player, and I had her getting a pretzel again. After the third time, I decided that I would make this her Monday routine (and this stuck to the end).
Over time, her love of pretzels became a defining character trait — and is even a key motif for her in the books as well.
It turns out that having to be in a character’s brain for six months lets you find small moments of whimsy in their daily routines. I learned things like who their favorite Disney characters were, how they interact with fake magicians (Xela vs. Doctor Strange was one of my favorite bits), and what role they might play in a band.
It’s the kind of lightning I’ll never capture again, but I’m so thankful for that time, as it made all my characters (not just the trio) these deep and lived-in people. Of course, I also have to shout out my friends who actually RP’d as Cast Members. Sabrina was one such character and so many of her little voice mannerisms come from those interactions.
As time passes and I write more, obviously things start to become more distinct, but I think it’s important to reflect on your roots from time to time. For Disney or Kingdom Hearts fans — there’s a ton of little references sprinkled in because I just can’t help myself. Chapter 33 in particular is both a reference to Club 33 (where Xela and Jack shared an apartment during the campaign) and its title The Best Sunset in the Universe is my sly KH reference to Twilight Town.
Really, I could gush about this forever, but I will stop here.
I promise my next post won’t be able D&D, and I’ll write about real things. Probably. Maybe.
until next time,
lexe
