For the last handful of years, I’ve spent most of my Friday evenings in the virtual company of a group of like-minded gamers. Now, none of us is too serious about the game that we play, and we tend to argue like siblings, but we (mostly) get the job done. I’ve mentioned this group before, we wrote an ongoing fan fiction story together. We bounced ideas and characterizations off each other, and our characters grew—as did our collaboration skills.

My character’s storyline had me loosely tying each quest into her journey to the city in which she meets the rest of her partners in adventure. And because we posted the story to the game forums, we didn’t want just to write the quests we ran, what fun is that to the players that read the forums? So, we improvised and tried to come up with backstories as to why our characters were in one of the most remote outposts one could reach on Eberron.

My character was Ashja. Kidnapped by slavers at age eleven, all she remembered about her family was that they traveled around the land in wagons that seemed bigger on the inside than on the outside. When most of her family was killed and the younger survivors enslaved, she was sold to a cult in a neighboring country, where she was trained as a spy and assassin.

Fricko’s character was Waldhorn, the young paladin who thinks the gods got it wrong and he will be unmasked as a fraud and punished at any moment by the deity he claims to represent. His experiences in The Mournlands scarred him for life—both on the outside and on the inside.

Hazelnut’s character, Curissa, was a young elf with too much innate power, and a whole lot of pride. She was stranded on the remote continent and forced to think for herself, and about others, for the first time in her life.

Drowsword’s character, a rebellious young dwarf named Koryx, was forced into his vocation by his family after a “practical joke” went horribly awry. They must have thought the structure of the clergy would settle the young renegade. Instead, it hurled the nonconforming healer through the aether to the remote jungles of another world.

The best part about finding these guys was discovering a group of like-minded individuals who enjoyed writing as a hobby. A portion of our posts to the forums included links to some of the research we found to back up our individual storylines and speculation on how we could move our characters and the plot forward, but most of that information was communicated through email. We wanted to make sure our tales made sense within the established canon of the game world.

Mind you, I’ve never met any of these men face to face, but I’ve come to know and care for them as friends, they are more than just “internet acquaintances.” I would love to meet them all in person someday. We frequently spend our Friday evenings laughing our tummy and grin muscles sore over something that happened during our gaming session. I get some of my best table gaming ideas from these fellows, and they come up with some of the cleverest villainous traits.

Stay tuned to read the story of our erstwhile heroes.