Where This All Came From

Back in the day, when I was in college, I was an avid Redditor. I’m still on the site, but I’m not as avid as I used to be, what with having a life beyond sitting on my laptop and killing time. Now I sit on my laptop pretending to work whilst killing time. Massive difference. 

     But in the mid twenty-tens, a few years after fifth edition came out, I stumbled across one of many homebrew pieces that one would expect to find at the time (between classic meme templates and rage comics). This one stood out to me not because of how powerful and broken it was, but rather, how story inducing it was. Surprising no one, the writer slash ex-English teacher is a fan of a story driven experience. This particular post was a background called The Displaced. 

     Now, here is where I would give credit where credit was due to the author. But this was almost ten years ago, I’ve changed phones and computers at least twice, and have no idea how far back in my old account I’d need to dig to find his information, so my man, wherever you are, if you’re reading this, thank you for the inspiration. It never would have happened without you. 

     The Displaced is basically a D&D version of an Isekai anime (which, I don’t know when it was first used, but the genre jumped in popularity with the release of Sword Art Online in 2010 and was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2024). To those not in the know, Isekai is a genre wherein a protagonist from the mundane world is thrust into another world where their worldview is seen as unique and new. I saw the Displaced and thought, “what would happen if our world was the other world?”

     With this in mind, I got to work building an entirely new world out of the old world. As a New York native, one would think I’d choose NYC as the backdrop for the story, but as much as I love my original home, I was sick to death of every story taking place there. My sister moved to Boston about the time when I moved up to high school. I haven’t visited as much as I would have liked, and now that I live in North Carolina it's even harder to get up there, but I always loved the city. The classic American architecture mixed with the modern advancements, the beautiful parks, and the typical problems all city dwellers deal with no matter what city you live in pulled me in and made me want to base my story there. 

     That being said, I apologize to all Bostonians for the times when my representations are inaccurate. I do my research the best I can, but given that the story is generated in real time as we play a game, sometimes details are lost, wrong, or made up to fit the narrative. Consider this an Alternate Universe Boston and maybe you can forgive me my sins. 

     This was a major undertaking for me, as I was building a world around an existing city, trying to come up with friendly and enemy factions, and allow for a level of player agency I’d never fully prepped for in my life. 

     It was a lot of work. 

     So why not add more work on top of it?

     There was another idea floating around the internet at the time where people were talking about how they wanted to take their table top game sessions and turn them into books. Or they’d hear people’s stories online and say “I’d read that book!” There was even a meme that I now constantly reference that was an author saying “My characters tell the story, I just write up the incident report.” D&D players around the world pointed at that and just said ‘this’ in regards to their own gaming group. 

     I looked at it and said… challenge accepted. 

     See, I had a lot of dreams back then. I still have dreams, I just like to try and prioritize them better, bite off more of what I can chew rather than overextend myself, and leave time for the people and things that I love in life. Again, thank you medication. Back then, however, I wanted it all! I wanted to run the game, but not just that game, another game that I would make into an actual play podcast, while also writing novels about the characters who were the forgotten heroes of that world, as well as novelize this series of books… It was a lot. 

     But it all came together. The podcast didn’t survive, despite a lot of love and effort. Once dominos started falling on that, the end was in sight. I’d love to go back to that storyline someday, but maybe in a quiet home game, or in a similar manner to how I’m running the games my current books are based on, but that’s not going to be for a long while if I do. What did come from that, though, was the collection of equipment we all collected over the years that allowed us to get good recording software and audio for our resident notetaker. 

     Nicole takes immaculate notes. We rely on her constantly for information that if it isn’t off the top of her head, is definitely in her notes. If you listened to the podcast, she is our resident Piper the Bard, and if you’re reading the books, you’d know her as Morgan. We often refer to her as the Hufflepuff, because she can find anything that needs finding, whether that be about our games or on the internet. (Seriously, an ex girlfriend showed me a video with a small dog and the owner saying ‘what are dis?’ repeatedly like fifteen years ago, and I could not find it for the life of me. She got it in seconds).

     Armed with the audio, her notes were so perfect I could give verbatim dialogue… that I often added to anyway, but no good lines were lost! That left me with one last thing to do. 

    Ask permission. 

     I told my friends that this was my plan, and they were all on board. They were excited to see what I would do with their characters, how I could bring them to life on the page, and a few months after we started I felt I had enough to create Lost and Bound. It took a while longer before I published it, wanting, I said, to have a few more done so I could just release them in a consistent order, not leave years between releases. 

     Well, I published the first one, then left years between. Because, ya’know, life happens. Moving, breakups, rekindlings, new jobs, back to old jobs, mental spirals, and financial hardships. All of these and more contributed. 

     But now. Now is the time to get serious about sharing these stories with the world. Of sharing with you everything from the tales of adventure to the tales of woe at the table, in the game, and in our lives. I don’t plan to hold back anything from me, and I’ll share what I’m allowed from them (I respect player and character autonomy), because this book is more than just a story of heroics and fantasy. It is a story of friendship, fellowship, and love that spans almost a decade now, and I’m not one to tell just half a tale.