T. K. Arispe

 I was digging through storage, and found something I'd completely forgotten about--the "lore bible" for Tales of Lethe, my attempt in college at coming up with my own tabletop roleplaying game, complete with ridiculous amounts of worldbuilding. The game never really went anywhere (after a few test campaigns with friends, I realized that DMing actually exhausts me, and that was the end of that brilliant idea), but for a few years it was my big project. I even ran a message board dedicated to playing the game over the Internet (that was before I realized that running message boards exhausts me too).

It had some interesting innovations for a tabletop RPG, such as each character being probabilistically assigned an element upon generation (with the odds for each element differing by species), and that was the element the character was stuck with for life. The magic system was also extremely flexible, with less of an emphasis on preexisting spells/techniques, the players instead being encouraged to come up with their own uses for each element and the DM (or Lorekeeper) determining how many magic points a given technique would cost.

It was a pretty ambitious project, and an interesting early foray into worldbuilding, but I had a lot to learn about effective storytelling. I also learned that the success of any multiplayer game is highly dependent on other people actually wanting to play it, and aside from the aforementioned handful of friends, I just couldn't really get anybody else interested.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to revisit what I wrote about Lethe with some scathing critique modern commentary. Read on after the jump if you're interested.

(I also have to apologize in advance for the hideous artwork. I honestly did not get good at drawing until taking art and animation classes in college. I was not one of those people who seriously work on their art since childhood and are amazing by the time they're teenagers. Whenever my nieces get discouraged about their art skills, I remind them that it takes practice and learning to get good at something--I was definitely not born knowing things like human proportions and perspective and color theory.

Also, the style is wonky because after high school, I went through a bit of an artistic crisis phase where I didn't want to draw anime-style art anymore and attempted to make my drawings look more realistic without the appropriate training, and it just turned out awful. I reneged on that quite a bit when I started taking animation classes and realized it was okay to go for a more stylized aesthetic. It's not how photorealistic you can get your art to look--it's having the backbone of fundamental technical skills that makes for effective illustration.)

An overly fancy title page. I tried.

The elemental system for the game was pretty involved, if not entirely original.

I feel like the High Magic Cores are one of the more interesting and original aspects of Lethe. I snuck them into a recent illustration (not to suggest any sort of connection between Lethe and this novel; they just seemed like the sort of mysterious magical implements an immortal sorcerer would have lying around).

(Actually, considering the fact that Saturos openly admits in the novel to journeying around various worlds, it's entirely possible he visited Lethe and brought back some magic cores. Hmmmm.)

The High Sages are actually lifted wholesale from a really ridiculous fantasy story idea I had in high school about a group of physicists who accidentally create their own universe, and live dual lives as both scientists on Earth and nonhuman rulers of the magical world they created (no idea how that was supposed to work). The story also involved two average high schoolers inadvertently finding their way into the fantasy world and, I dunno, having adventures or something probably. That idea never went anywhere, but when I was creating Lethe and needed to populate it with NPCs, I decided to recycle the sages and make things easier on myself.

Honestly, now that I look at it, the High Sages have it pretty rough. They basically have to administrate the entire planet, but most of them also rule their respective home provinces? Do they ever sleep?

Not sure if I made this obvious enough, but King Roc is secretly evil and eventually betrays the rest of the Council. Also, his son is named Phoenix. All of the royal family are named after mythical birds. So original.

Also, it's just now occurred to me that although Roc was supposed to be the villain, I have no idea what his motivations were or even what his villainous scheme was. I just wanted one of the Council to secretly be evil, and I didn't want to go the cliché route and have it be the darkness sage (at least I was thinking there).

Roc's backstory was also really weird; it involved his wife giving birth to a mutant, so Roc imprisoned her and the baby and told everyone she died, and then secretly adopted a "normal" Raman baby and raised him as his son. I'm pretty sure my thought process throughout all of this was just "DRAMA". But looking at it now, I'm like, who let this psychopath be in charge of anything?! He's clearly a terrible king and a terrible husband and father and yet he's part of the planetary ruling body alongside people who actually have their heads on straight?! And none of these supposedly wise and venerable and highly magical people can tell there's anything off about him?!

Maybe it's a good thing none of my early story ideas really went anywhere.

Another thing that strikes me as odd about the Sages is how young some of them are. I'd just written up an entire page about the arduous road to becoming a Sage and how it takes years of training and experience and your superiors deciding you're ready for a promotion, and yet we've got a teenage centaur on the Council of High Sages. What.

One thing that bothers me about this world in retrospect is how dreadfully unoriginal it was for the most part. Like, I basically just took all the cliché fantasy species and threw them into a world together. Not only is the result not very interesting, but it also feels overburdened, like I was just trying to do too much. These days when I'm worldbuilding, I try to only add new elements of a world if I feel like they're actually going to contribute something, not just "let's see how many different peoples I can cram into this setting to make it feel large and deep".

The story for the Salguin and Morcai involved them historically being at odds with each other, each one believing they were the superior species, until eventually they realized they were actually the same species and had artificially segregated themselves based on appearance. #lifelessons

The Rito Ramans were intentionally designed to be unlikeable. Lethe is a utopia for the most part, so I was trying to inject just a bit of tension. I wanted Tales of Lethe to be less combat-heavy than most other RPGs, so I purposely designed a world that didn't experience a lot of conflict. 

I like the Bihrungs; they're definitely the most original species in Lethe. The idea for them came from a creature design I came up with for a junior high cartooning class. The original design for the Bihrungs gave them one large claw instead of a left hand, but then I realized how incredibly impractical that would be, and I also figured players with Bihrung characters would usually not want to try to figure out how to navigate a campaign one-handed. 

(You might be asking yourself how I expected waterbound creatures to navigate terrestrial campaigns anyway, but the idea was that most Bihrungs are water-aligned and create floating spheres of water to move in when on land, so terrestrial navigation is rarely an issue for them. Non-water-aligned Bihrungs usually just use wheelchairs. I dunno. It's very difficult to work marine creatures into a primarily terrestrial society.)

And of course the Spirit Realm was where I just dumped all the other fantasy species I wanted to use and couldn't fit in anywhere else.

Again, the geography of the world was painfully unoriginal. I basically just tried to make sure I had one of each biome. These days I approach worldbuilding from a more holistic perspective, designing with an eye for what makes sense and would enrich the story I'm trying to tell.

Yes, there are multiple instances in Lethe of ruins left behind by vanished advanced civilizations. You can tell where my interests lie. (Maybe that's why I enjoyed Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom so much.)

Definitely not a ripoff of Fangorn.

I'm really left wondering why the rest of Lethe let the Ramans get away with being so terrible. This world appears to have no justice system, which is worrying.

I'm not sure why I made an entire province whose sole purpose is to be tropical.

The two moons were supposed to tie in to the origins of the dryads (a species not mentioned here), who actually came from the smaller moon when it froze over thousands of years previous.

Incidentally, I recycled this concept in a novel manuscript I wrote recently because it was just too fun to pass on.

The Ancient Ones of the Deep were sapient whales that had developed both the ability to breathe underwater, and the ability to withstand the high pressures of the deep ocean. I need to recycle them at some point. They sound like something that would (or at least ought to) live on Europa or Enceladus.