The Making of Shardfall: A Dragon Legends Adventure – Part 2

The Making of Shardfall: A Dragon Legends Adventure – Part 1

The Spark

The years passed.

Life moved on. Filled with work, raising my daughters, and a YouTube channel that scratched the RPG itch in its own way. I was mostly DMing campaigns for friends and folks from the community. It was fun, rewarding even. But still, I never forgot what happened with the game. The idea that stuck with me.

Every time I opened Google Drive, there it was a folder labeled “A Needed Thing.” I named it that intentionally. It always appeared first in the list, right at the top, like a reminder from some deeper part of myself. A nudge. A whisper. “C’mon, you can do this.”

But let’s be honest: most of the time, we ignore that voice. No time. No money. I have kids. It’s just a rough draft anyway. It would take years to polish this turd, right?

Well… yeah. Yeah, it does.

In the time that followed, I went through an amicable divorce, got 50/50 custody of my girls, and later, another long relationship came to an end. After that, I figured maybe I just wasn’t cut out for having a partner. And I was okay with that, maybe even relieved. Life was already full.

And then, out of nowhere, someone showed up.

Not a stranger. Someone I’d known for a long time. A friend. I was always the one who looked out for others. And now, somehow, she wanted to look out for me. That was… new. And honestly? Still a little hard to wrap my head around.

Sometimes we have all the fuel in the world. But what we’re missing is the spark. The spark of someone who sees your dreams and says, “Go. You can do this.” Someone who doesn’t just believe in you now, but believes in your future.

One summer afternoon in 2024, I casually mentioned Shardfall to her. Just a throwaway line in a lazy conversation. And she smiled and said something like, “That sounds really cool. You should make that.” That might not have been the exact quote, but that was the moment.

The Spark.

The moment someone else looked at this weird little dream and didn’t just nod politely… they meant it. They thought it was something worth doing. That day, that buried creative part of me, the geeky, hopeful little nerdling I used to be, finally came back. Not just peeking out. He took over (creatively speaking). There was only one path forward now: jump in with both feet and figure out how to swim.

A day or two later, she handed me a hand-drawn map. Just a pencil sketch on notebook paper. An early vision of a game board. It was tiny. Inconsequential, maybe, to anyone else.

But to me? It was huge.

That simple drawing meant I wasn’t in this alone. Someone else believed in this. Believed in me. And was willing to help make it real. Sometimes, all it takes is one person. Just one. When someone sees the best in you, when they believe not just in what you’ve done, but in what you could do, your whole future opens up.

And that’s when the polishing began. Shardfall really began that day.

The Making of Shardfall: A Dragon Legends Adventure – Part 3