I have been working on the background story for the character I play in Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden for about two months now. It has been more than a decade since I last wrote fiction, and I forgot how different it is from academic writing - although I have to admit that the tricks I learned for making sure your article does not appear like it was written by a halfwit are very useful for fiction as well. What I really struggle with, though, is the length of the piece.
Since PCs in the campaign should ideally have a reason why they want to help with the situation up in the North, and I am playing a character with the Far Traveller background, I needed to find something that both a) really motivates my ranger to risk his life in defense of the Ten-Towns, and b) explains why he is there in the first place. I am a sucker for details, so after lengthy research on the country Sossal and its people*, learning about folk instruments used in Slavic countries, planning the route taken to Ten-Towns, calculating the time needed for said route**, deciding how the people that originally accompanied the character died off, and generally learning what happened in the realms since the 3e Forgotten Realms handbook came out (think Spellplague and various Sunderings) I finally settled on Auril and her priesthood being bastards and endangering entire Sossar communities. That behaviour has precedent and isn't really that difficult to envision.
More tricky was finding an explanation for why what amounts to a lvl 1 Commoner needs to be part of this, as I am incredibly averse to playing characters with a backstory that makes them out to be a wondrously experienced person who should already be governing a small kingdom, given their equally wondrous exploits and heroic deeds. This has been mocked in a loving manner by the Viva la Dirt League guys in the first episode of their new 'D&D Logic'. If the character is a lvl 1 Ranger when he arrives in Ten-Towns I need to explain why someone as dangerously unskilled as that travelled across the entirety of Faerûn without at least advancing to lvl 2.
But I found that my RPG-brain got back into coming up with plots and stories pretty fast - like riding a bike, really, only with more fantasy elements involved. Soon I had sketched out*** two narrative strands, which only needed to be welded together into one smooth whole.
Last Friday I began this welding process. And I am going mad. After 6 1/2 pages of evocative prose - including a dream sequence! - I am now frelling stuck at the very last bit I need to write (want to write?): How the party of hardened Sossrim plus one lvl 1 Commoner leave their home, to begin their journey to the Spine of the World.
I know how the scene should look like, I know what I want to include. But I can't for the life of me get it out - brain just goes 'nuh-uh'.
I strongly suspect that this is just fatigue, and that I should probably give it a rest before coming back to it. But I really want to send it to the DM before our next session this Saturday so she has some idea of who my character is.
Sigh. Go mad with the attempt? Nah.
I guess I'll go back to more academic endeavours for the next few days. Which has the benefit of relaxing my RPG-brain's synapses... Although I have an idea for using some of the academic stuff I did recently in Savage Worlds: Weird Wars. But those are meanderings for another day.
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* There will be a posting about Sossal and the Sossrim at a later point.
** Which would have been impossible (or at least an extremely lengthy process) without www.aidedd.org, which was an immense help for half the journey. Highly recommended.
*** 'Sketched out' in this case means "14 pages filled to the brim with small handwriting, lots of abbreviations, and lengthy notes written in the margins".