Why I'm Building a World

I've been drawing, writing, painting miniatures, running D&D campaigns, and reading fantasy for as long as I can remember. For most of that time these were separate hobbies. Separate folders on my hard drive. Separate notebooks. None of them talked to each other.

At some point I realized they were all the same thing. Every sketch was a character who needed a story. Every story needed a place. Every place needed a map. Every map needed history. It was all worldbuilding from different angles, and I'd been doing it in fragments for years without connecting the pieces.

Second Self Studios is the connective tissue. One world. One set of characters. One history. The art serves the stories, the stories populate the map, the map gives structure to the lore. When I paint a miniature it's a character who lives somewhere specific in Veridia. When I write a short story it happens on a street I can point to on the map.

The Rules I Set for Myself

No schedule. No monetization pressure. No measuring this against whether it could replace income. That kind of thinking killed every creative project I've started in the last five years. The goal for the first year is volume and connection. Make things. Put them on the site. Let them reference each other.

I work on whatever has energy on a given day. Some days that's writing. Some days it's drawing. Some days it's painting a 32mm figure with a tiny brush at 5 AM before my son wakes up. The point is forward motion, not a production pipeline.

What's Next

The world map needs to be redrawn without baked-in text labels since the site handles those dynamically now. I have a stack of location descriptions that need to be written. Kael'Doran has one story so far and needs at least two more before it starts to feel alive. And I have character portraits that exist as sketches in a notebook but haven't made it to the screen yet.

If you're reading this, you're watching the foundation get poured. Check back in a month and things should look different.