Hello. I’m not very good at talking about myself, but I’ll try. So, I’m Morgan, if it wasn’t already obvious from the way my name was plastered on the home page of the blog. I’m a freshman. My POE is professional writing, which I suppose is why I’m taking Writing Across Media. Well, that and the fact that most of the writing I do is either writing stories for fun or writing essays for assignments, so I really need to branch out.
I can honestly say that I don’t really know how much I learn in this class will actually be used outside of it. But I also don’t exactly know yet what kind of job I’m going to have after I graduate. Better to have something and not need it than to need something and not have it.
Rather than choose an existing company to pretend I work for, I made one up. Wanting to try to keep this light and poke a little fun at the imaginary aspect of this assignment, I decided to name this imaginary video game company “Games”. Their tagline is, of course, “We make video games.” Among their most popular products is a game called “Nothing”, and its companion game, “Even More Nothing”. Before the strike of the coronavirus and the quarantine, the company had been developing a new game to add to their popular titles. With the quarantine happening, the company has taken the chance to encourage people to play or reply these products as a way to hype up their new game, along with releasing teasers. And what else would this new game be called but “Even More Nothing 2: Electric Boogaloo”? Well, it made me chuckle at least.
The inspiration for this came from listening to Dungeons & Dragons podcasts like The Adventure Zone and Critical Role. I decided to do something like the latter, where a brief summary of each character’s backstory is presented at the start of each episode. I wrote up short versions of backstories for the characters in a game that I run, narrating them along with some sound effects and music clips.
Unfortunately, due to crappy microphone quality that I couldn’t fix, my recorded voice came out a little bit hard to understand in some places. To try to help with that, here’s my script.
Tales of adventures remain popular throughout the ages. The exploits of daring heroes never fail to delight and thrill. This is as true in our real life as it is in the fantastical world of Eymr, where a certain ragtag group of people slowly rise to fame in their efforts to uncover the biggest mystery their world knows. And yet, each will find their own personal struggles along the way. Some have carelessly trampled over others to reach their position in life, and it’s going to come back to bite them. Others have demons of their past to face. But these five not-quite-friends have their marks to make on their world. Their stories to tell.
Small but cunning, the goblin wizard Visoru hails from unexpectedly humble origins. The youngest of his siblings, he quickly grew discontent with life on the family farm. He had dreams of adventures and riches, and so upon reaching an age of self-sufficiency, he set out to realize them. It didn’t go so well. Poor Visoru, and quite literally so, found himself living on the streets and scrounging for his every meal. Coming into the ownership of a deck of marked cards was his greatest fortune. Seizing his chance when he met an apprentice wizard, Visoru challenged him to a game with those cards and swindled the boy out of his spellbook. He taught himself the magics within and, now armed with the beginnings of power, set out to achieve the dream that had stolen him away from his home in the first place.
A stark contrast to Visoru, Venera is kind-hearted but not exactly the most intelligent. This elf cleric never knew her parents, who had left her to be raised by the rest of her family as they set off adventuring. It seemed, though, that wanderlust was genetic. Venera resisted the pull of adventuring, trying instead to find her place within her tribe. She settled into a role as a cleric for her people as she entered the young adult phase of her life. It became normal and it was good…and it barely lasted. Some strange monster attacked the tribe one day, stronger than the people could handle. Most of the elves grabbed what they could and tried to escape. Venera refused. She stood against the creature, wielding holy light and flames to fend it off and inspiring several others to stand with her. After a fierce battle, the monster fled, though it left behind corpses of Venera’s friends and family. Despite their victory, the tribe’s morale was low. Venera had saved most of them, but for her, most wasn’t good enough. She knew now that she had the power to help people, but she would never be able to use it effectively if she remained with her tribe. And so she followed in the footsteps of her parents, striking out for adventure.
Venera is not the only cleric among the party, although the gorgon Akantha finds the allure of nature to be stronger than that of the light that Venera has. Born to a nomadic tribe, she discovered quickly that she had a natural gift for both medicinal and magical healing. For this gift, she had much to do among the tribe. It was during an assignment that took her and a hunter into the depths of a forest that Akantha discovered another talent. The two of them encountered a pack of wolves. Akantha found a deep connection with nature in her magic when she managed to speak with the wolves and convinced the pack to leave herself and her companion be. She practiced with this magic as she grew older, and in her travels with her tribe she also developed a growing curiosity towards the world around her. Her chance to satisfy this curiosity came in an unexpected way. It was chaos, the day the flames consumed the forest around her. A group of adventurers had been chasing a powerful beast, and an errant spell had started the fire. The chase tore through the tribe’s camp, as the adventurers carelessly struck out at everything around them in their efforts to fell their quarry. People scattered, and Akantha found herself alone. She would find her tribe again someday, but first… Well, it couldn’t hurt to give in to her curiosity of the world, right?
The sorcerer Malakyr’s story began long before him, with his ancestor Karliah. Though the how of the situation has been lost to time, she had found herself in the service of a great phoenix and, in reward, was gifted a small shard of its power. Her bloodline carried the magical fire with each new generation and though it pushed those who carried it into lives of adventure, Malakyr chose a different route. Using the wealth accrued by his family over time, he traveled the lands to visit courts. Whether gatherings of minor nobility or events hosted by royals themselves, he began learning how to integrate himself among the high society. Eventually, the skills of persuasion, deception, and subtle intimidation that he picked up among the courts became second nature. It was a comfortable life, but the flame burning within prevented him from ever becoming satisfied with it. Finally, he caved to its influence, and he set out to seek a more exciting lifestyle.
And now last but not least of the group, the only one who has found himself with no skill in magic, the half-dracoling, half-human fighter Rixalfor flies into the perils of the group’s adventures with nothing but his longbow. And his rapier. And his multiple varieties of crossbows. Hailing from a small island village, he grew up isolated from all but his parents. Being the result of a union between members of two different races that had been at war with each other for generations, he struggled to find acceptance outside his own family. This served to give him plenty of time to focus on his archery, along with his tracking, hunting, and other wilderness survival skills. He never let the sideways glances and whispers of the villages’s other inhabitants drag him down, though he also stopped making efforts to find any sense of belonging as he grew older. And so, when his parents fell fatally ill and passed away, he no longer had reason to stay. Rixalfor boarded the first ship he could find passage on and set out to explore the world and find people who would accept him without thought towards his bloodline.
It was only through chance that these five encountered each other in a tavern in a small town. Each with their own motivation, they formed an adventuring party and struck out together. Chance may have brought them to each other, but now, as one, they were going to control their own fates.
2020 has been quite a year. In the short (roughly) three months of what was supposed to be an exciting new decade, we’ve had world war 3 scares, wildfires and floods decimating Australia, and now a global pandemic. Human resiliency showed itself, however, and many people have been able to adjust their lives and continue on – this class included. You can’t move forward without some reflection on the past though.
Right out of the gate, this class has been beyond my expectations. Writing to me has always been about storytelling, and from even our very first section, I was learning new ways to tell stories. The visual story unit was such a new experience. The ideas of both writing with pictures and reading pictures were quite surprising but much more fun than I would have thought. The Explain Something project was a new experience too, and learning the video-making process was rather tricky. I also figured out pretty quickly that I’m not very good at it. Oh well. Everyone has their talents, and technology just isn’t one of mine.
This class has been full of experiences that have made me think about my writing in ways that I never had before. Even if it wasn’t a POE requirement, I think I still would have chosen to take this class and enjoyed it just as much. It’s a bit of a disappointment that the middle of the semester has been a hassle thanks to the virus outbreak, and online meetings aren’t quite the same as being in the classroom. But I don’t think it’s impacting my experiences with this class, or my opinion of it, too heavily. I’m going to keep moving forward, and I hope to learn as much from the sound unit as I did from the visual and video units.
Visualizing how I learn was tricky. Putting that into paper was even trickier. When I am first presented with a new idea, I look at it in parts. Sometimes I don’t like a part (usually because I find it boring) and I am quick to move on. When I do find a part that catches my attention, that is the part that I put effort into remembering. I take the parts that I didn’t like, and I find ways to combine and associate them with those that I did like, so that in remembering what I enjoyed, I can also remember what I didn’t.
Writing Is More Than Fiction 