World Rebuilding Notes: What's the Matter
This is an overview of a life plot twist with a long trace of effects: how my random FFXIV fan fiction turned into original and how I'm reworking it. Here I cover my motives, the goals and scope of the world rebuilding, and what to expect from the notes about it.
The venture started when Dawntrail robbed the players of the story and any hope for its recovery. Every game discussion turned into repetitive doomsaying, and I resorted to writing fan fiction to entertain myself and cheer up my fandom friends. I took my article about the Final Days, where I gathered the details on them scattered over the quests and lore books, and slapped a tale on top of it. In that tale, an original character traveled the World Unsundered, met its inhabitants, and discussed the looming calamity. And then the Sundering ended everything. Essentially, it was my usual loremongering, embellished with some narrative.
To my surprise, the readers told me to ditch FFXIV and rework the world into a fully original one. They liked the story, and its end with the world's end evoked strong resentment. Baffled and disagreeing, I attended a writing class to see if there truly is any value in my piece—and got the same response: to rework. So the endeavor to have some fun left me bewildered, dazed by clashing opinions, and dismayed by the new roadmap.
There is time before Evercold releases, and I accepted the rework advice as a way to fill the time. There isn't much to promise, though, as I have never built anything more complex than a SCH glamour.
Goals of the Rework
place the plot into a different, original world and keep the story intact as much as possible;
preserve core ideas, motifs, and mood when altering details and events;
keep subtle FFXIV references as an homage to the world I hold dear.
What to Expect from the Notes
strategies employed in the process;
insights on the worldbuilding from FFXIV writers (my ten-year archive of interviews is finally in use!);
examples of changes and the reasons behind them.
caveats, difficulties, and trade-offs.
Possible Nuisance
Discussing the changes made from FFXIV means dealing with its terms, names, and concepts. It will be impossible to avoid them, and this may be confusing and alienating for non-players.
There will be around ten notes, I guess. In the first one, I'm going to tell about the estimation of borrowed elements: overall amount, origin of every entry, and the ways to change them to fit the new world.
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