YarRPG (new short story)

Another entirely new short story! This blog post is a reflection on a couple of things in regards to it. Click the button below to read it, with some more backstory afterwards if you’re interested:

I got the idea for the title YarRPG when I was playing Game Dev Story+, one of the many games available on Apple Arcade (yay for subscription services). Anyway, it’s a fun little game that I’ve not reviewed yet, but I came up with the name while playing and thought it was a great starting point.

It makes me sad that pirates and pirate themed stuff is often overused and so people are consequently tired of the theme. Especially the “golden age of piracy”, largely due to Pirates of the Caribbean series.

Here’s the thing though; pirates have existed for thousands of years. There have been pirates in the mediterranean sea at the time of ancient Egyptians (called “Sea People”). One of my favorite pirate stories is that of Julius Caesar being taken hostage by some pirates in 75 B.C. (he was around 25 years of age). He negotiated his own release, hunted down the ship and got the whole crew crucified. Talk about vengeance!

So since people working outside the confines of established nations were always part of our history (and will likely continue to be), I was thinking where to place this particular short story and how to do it. I was playing around a few different settings and plots and then my wife suggested the initial location for the story which I loved (because monks in a mountainous monastery are as far away from sailing as it gets!) and went from there.

But on top of that, as I was assembling the outline and figuring out how to write it, I realized something. The way I was setting it up, it could’ve easily been a longer story, perhaps even a whole novel. And like I say with all my other short stories, maybe one day it will be part of one. 

Either way, it was fun and hope you enjoy it as well!