I seek to renew the world

"From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king."

-J.R.R Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Last month a great calamity fell upon the world of Terra; a world that I am the sole guardian of. The very space in which Terra occupied became no more.

The cause?

My primary hard-drive died.

For roughly nine years I have been following down the same road Tolkien did, the act of world-building, or mythopoeia as he liked to call it. Admittedly, with computer software it was easier for me to record and alter my musings than it was for Tolkien to do so with pencil, paper and type-writer.... but now I realize there is a great deal of security that comes with engraving your thoughts onto physical material you can touch, even if the re-writings do require many sheets of dead trees to get it right.

Fortunately I have a backup of my world that was kept on a portable hard-drive, but it is from September 13th, 2010 at 8:25 in the morning, Central Standard Time. It was a Monday. I find some irony in that I begin my re-writes at the first day of the work week, but logically all this really proves is that I am a careless god who did not take enough steps to protect the denizens of my world.

So it can be said that I must now time-travel back to that day and start again, building from what I had so far on that Monday, guided by the ghostly echoes of the world etched into my heart. 

The problem with such a task is that I am not going to write it again exactly as it once was; there are voices in Terra which will now forever be closed to me; I have forgotten them, and it is as if they never existed at all. 

Through the re-telling I may get the concept the same, but the specific form of these ideas will forever change. This disheartens me, for every character was a piece of me. Pieces of me are forever gone.

As are some of my thoughts on certain ideas, which I reflected in my world-building.

For example, I  recall that I had spent months painstakingly describing the evolution of politics in a certain kingdom of Terra. While I recall it involved a council of philosopher kings modeled after Plato's Kallipolis, I do not recall the method by which leaders were selected, nor even how that system came to be through the centuries. I recall my implementation of this political system was meant to illustrate the failings of it, but I do not recall specifically how I went about spotlighting those beliefs. 

Additionally, the lost information must all be re-created without the flashes of genius that first compelled me to create that kingdom.

I have fears I may not be competent enough to re-create my own world, since I no longer remember everything that inspired it all. I recall moments where I was inspired by something in the real world, like a particular piece of architecture, such as the law library at the University of Michigan. It inspired areas of a castle. I don't remember the name of the castle, and I only have a vague recollection of what the interior of the library looked like now. 

Other, more important things missing are the mechanics of my world; its physics. These take of the form of a table roleplaying game I have worked on since 2009. While I have backups of the Beginner's Manual that covered levels 1 through 6, and I have a backup of the rules for NPC generation, what I do not have is the "Advanced rulebook" that details gameplay for levels 7 to 20. This must all be re-created, brand new.

I am comforted only in that my ignorance allows me one gift; to not know how things ought to be frees me to do as I please. It is is possible the second time around I may make something more brilliant than before. 

I cling to that belief. I need it, because the task before me is overwhelming.

The first thing I think I ought to do is change the name of my world. It's no longer the Terra I knew. It will be something different and thus needs a new name.

For the moment, I think I'll call it Samsaria, after the Hindu concept of samsara; that is, the wheel of reincarnation. Reincarnation plays a pivotal role in the makeup of my world, and the new version of Terra I need to make might be seen as a reincarnation of it.