Exactly one year ago, on December 22, 2020, I decided to put to the paper, or to the screen, in that case, an idea that was in my head for a few days. At that point, I've been reading the
Brockton's Celestial Forge for nearly two months. I loved the concept of gaining new things depending on your word counts.
I thought to myself, "Okay, we got a great concept with a collection of crafting power but could we do it with something else? Namely, one of my favorite things, Summoning monster to fight for you."
I wouldn't even need CYOA docs for that, I could use directly the various wikis.
I opened a new doc, in Libreoffice that I called Celestial Menagery. And yes I've managed to make a typo in the title. And I started writing ideas, what category could be included, how to price creatures, ideas for powers. It's there that I wrote the concept of Custom Creatures, the idea of the Various category comes from there too.
It didn't take long for me to migrate to Google doc, I want to share my work at some points after all. from this moment on the Menagerie became my main hobby even before reading fanfiction and playing video games. I thought about it nearly all the time, even at work, probably too much.
It took more than two months for me to have something to share, after much hesitation, I create this thread and I made a post on the Celestial Forge Discord to advertise it a little.
The responses were disappointing, to say the least. I didn't expect immediate success, I'm not that arrogant but at least curiosity, perhaps question, demand to include that one setting. But nearly nothing on the forum, a little more on Discord but that's all. Still, I continue working, on the V2.
Someone proposed writing my own story using the CM, to illustrate how it works and to give it better visibility. I wasn't really motivated, I know my worth as a writer, and it's not impressive. Having ideas is easy putting them on paper is hard.
Still, the idea stayed in the back of my mind and it melded really well with another idea from Discord. Splitting the doc into two parts, Creatures on one side and Powers on the other.
At first, I hesitate, in my basic concept power should have been rare, just an occasional bonus. But as the number of categories increased I realized that gaining power would become vanishingly rare and I changed my mind.
When I implemented that change in the doc I was reminded of the possibility of writing my own story. It still doesn't seem very appealing to me, but a quest where the player gets to vote on what to roll for. That sounds much more doable, it means writing only 1000 words chapter, it means that the interest of the player would be my fuel. If nobody vote for two or three chapters in a row? Okay fine I'm not a good enough writer or the concept isn't interesting enough. I could just forget about it and get on with my life.
But it didn't happen like that, I post the first chapter just before the great April blackout, and when the forum was back people said that they were waiting for the second chapter. The interest remains, it motivated me to work on a V3 (that was supposed to be the final version).
And things snowballed from there. Today we're on version 4.1 and it's still growing, though we're closer to the end than the beginning. At least four different fics exist plus my still ongoing quest. I couldn't be happier.
Thank you all for your help and your support, I couldn't have made it that far without you all.
