The Guild of Stories, also called Àyrngáer, is the name of a fictional world and universe. In its primal form and with different names, it existed for most of my life. When I was younger (about eight years), I fantasized about a pastoral world, where only good creatures live, and a dark world, where only bad people live. This concept of duality is still present in my current stories and world-building projects. I projected part of this pastoral world on a small forest where I played with my sister. We built huts, tunnels, and treehouses and had small camps in the forest. We followed trails, learned about plants and animals and collected special items we found in the forest. This magic place we named “Greenwich” (pronounced as Green Witch) is still present in the current Worldbuilding project as the “Grenn forest”. The beauty of this place was translated into small poems and stories, the first dating from 2002 (called “Heldere Dagen (Dutch)” or “Bright Days (English),” when I was ten years old. Years later, around 2008/2009, the Greenwich RPG (Role Playing Game) game was created, where my sister and I wrote part of a story and reacted to each other’s actions. This was a very simple game with very simple writing, but it proved to be an enormous inspiration to create another, bigger RPG game online.
However, before this second online RPG game was created, the first actual Worldbuilding project was started in 2009, called Gowue. This was a fictional world with its own language, characters and history. Many elements from this project were used in the online RPG game and still have a place in the current Ayrngaer project. Most notably the basics of the fictional “Litran” language. However, the project was terminated after a few years because I was unhappy with its development and it lacked a clear storyline.
Parts of Gowue were reused to create a new world, which was transformed into an online RPG (Role Play Game) called Dust. Created in 2010, Dust was a fictional world made from the remnants of the old world, destroyed after a cataclysmic event. Where in the first RPG, only me and my sister wrote the story; now, everyone could create a character in the world and write about their adventures. The RPG ran for four years under different admins until it became inactive in 2014. The game is, however, still online and open to readers. Meanwhile, I was working on another Worldbuilding project, using parts from the Gowean and Dust world and diving into old stories and poems from my childhood, most notably the short story “In the Heart of the Forest”, written in 2012/2013. The world was called “Arinn” and consisted of an encyclopedia, a fictional language, characters, a working economy, maps and many artworks and stories. I worked on this ambitious project from 2014 to 2018, which remains the biggest one to date.
But then the development stopped. Between 2018 and 2023, adult life and COVID-19 got in the way, and there was no time or inspiration to work on Arinn. Also, the project became unmanageable because there was no clear development path and too many separate notes, sketches and unfinished ideas. But, I have always felt a special connection with it and wanted to transform it into a small animation movie and book(s). So, in 2023, with renewed inspiration, I started collecting all the materials from previous unfinished projects. From the fragments of words, sketches and ideas, a new (semi-)fictional world was born called Ayrngaer. This time I focused more on having a plan, main storyline and scope. This project aims to serve as an inspiration source for stories, poetry, artwork, video and music. Then began the search for the right tools to manage and also publish this ambitious project. I started developing the website in Webflow, but this became quickly too expensive, and there was a limit on the number of CMS items possible. So, I switched to WorldAnvil for publishing my project. This tool proved to be much better, but still had its limitations. Because it lacks a real relational database structure, it was still too much work to keep every article up to date. Therefore, I decided to split the project into two parts, namely (1) a main website for the whole world and (2) a website for only information relevant to the main story. I decided to build the main website in WordPress, with tools such as ACF and Oxygen. WorldAnvil will only keep the main articles relevant to the main storyline, but integrated into the main website. At this moment, the idea came to make the website more interactive and give the possibility to read the story from the perspective of a resident, which you are able to create yourself. This way, your choices will determine the outcome of the story. Of course, this gave the story a whole new level of complexity and changed the development path entirely. A lot still needs to be done to make this project “playable”, but we are slowly getting there. How it will go and if I can keep it running, I do not know. But working on it, even without having a finished result, fills me with joy.
