I was digging through some old papers recently, and came across this:
These papers represent the very first appearance/iteration of Stardrifter in any form, written about eighteen years ago. Before the audiobooks, before the short stories, before the novels, I started creating a Stardrifter role-playing game; a different one than the game that exists now. The pictured relics are incomplete, and don't contain anything of the actual mechanics of the game, even though some had been produced; a few pages worth, anyway.
This early outline isn't special in any way, being highly derivative of other games. Even so, the bones of the future, and the political structure of the galaxy that I'm working on now, were already present in these silly scribblings.
So much so, actually, that, after dropping the original game project, it still seemed like a decent place in which to set a story. This resulted in "Motherload", and all the subsequent tales, podcasts, and audio stories. And I guess I've come full-circle, since a role-playing game exists now, too. Until finding these pages under a pile of books, I'd frankly forgotten about this early effort.
When the past reasserts itself, I think it's a good idea to pay attention...to remind yourself about what had been important once. Details get obscured, misremembered, or abandoned altogether. We can sometimes forget that there ever was anything to remember. It simply gets erased. I suppose you could argue that if a thing was truly important, we'd keep at least something of it in mind. That may be true, but then, if it had been important, we wouldn't have dropped it to begin with. Or at least, I wouldn't have.
Creating a game turned out to not have been, I guess. Back then, anyway. But parts of it had potential, so I used them. Nothing ever has to go entirely to waste; and sometimes, it can even lead you back home.
-David