[Stormflame]

I am into world-building. Over the last few years I have been creating an indepth world, (in my few free moments). I can see why it is often ignored, or just written over allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions on what the history of the 'world' is. World building is hard. It takes great lengths of time to set down and build up the gods, the religions that in the book itself may clash with the character whereupon changing the whole map the writer has in mind, making up times sheets and wars and harsh winters that evolved the world, plague years or perhaps famine or too much rain that killed the spice trade on the east coast that then killed the villages on the west- I mean, setting down and building history is an enormous and complex task. I could go on.
TSR has stumbled upon some of this problem itself. At the first, it was easy to just start somewhere in the life of a cleric and take that flashpoint of his TIME and Era and just write it in. But, as more and more writers have travelled the same world, the same highways, the same seasons, and their wars and triumphs have overlapped the fringes of other writers, the stories are now going back and writing about the life of these present day adventurers and saying that it is now time to see how they were earlier on.
Writing in the sharedworlds is a dream of mine. Someday, I may send them a query again as I did like nine years ago. My favorite writer of all times was once a writer I once hated-R A Salvatore. He has taken the painstaking tale of the Dark Elves and written every breath that their people have ever really taken. The tale of Drizzt caught me and I could not put the The Dark Elf Trilogy down for a year.
History makes a story if the artist takes the time to delve into it.