The Gaming Moment That Changed Everything

Couple of months ago, I was living my best medieval peasant life in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, blissfully unaware that this game was about to hijack my brain with an existential crisis I didn’t see coming.

Picture this: you’re playing as some half-noble nobody, rolling into a foreign town where absolutely no one knows your face or gives a damn about your supposed heritage. The locals eye you with the medieval equivalent of “pics or it didn’t happen” skepticism, and suddenly you’re stuck in this bureaucratic nightmare trying to prove you’re not just some random vagrant with delusions of grandeur.

Hours of gameplay later—after I’d leveled up, completed quests, and generally established myself as a reasonably competent digital human—this nagging thought started gnawing at my brain:

How the hell would a half-noble actually convince complete strangers of their identity in medieval times?

No modern conveniences whatsoever:

  • No driver’s licenses
  • No passports
  • No LinkedIn profiles or social media presence
  • No government databases or official documentation
  • No credit cards with your name embossed in gold

Just your word, maybe a fancy piece of jewelry, and whatever charisma you could muster while probably smelling like a barn animal.

The Research Spiral Begins

And that’s when my brain did what it always does: I immediately alt-tabbed out of the game and launched ChatGPT. One question about noble identity verification spiraled into more questions, and before I knew it, I was three hours deep into authentication systems while “Henry” stood frozen in that digital town square.

Here’s the thing: since LLMs became publicly available, I’ve been absolutely addicted to roleplaying with them. We’ve:

  • Slayed dragons in forgotten realms
  • Marched with 10,000-man armies across digital battlefields
  • Died in countless dungeons (and been resurrected just as many times)
  • Built empires from nothing but imagination and tokens

It’s genuinely the best thing in the world when I have nothing to do - pure digital escapism at its finest.

So while I’m waiting for ChatGPT to answer my increasingly obsessive questions about medieval identity verification, it drops this innocent little bomb:

“Want to roleplay how this plays out?”

That question transformed my harmless research rabbit hole into a true black hole I couldn’t resist.

The Week-Long Obsession

What started as a few hours of casual medieval roleplay turned into days, then stretched into an entire week of obsessive digital LARPing. I was completely hooked, living out this elaborate identity verification scenario with an AI that was somehow more engaging than the actual video game I’d abandoned.

But here’s where things got frustratingly meta: the context window kept depleting. Every few hours, ChatGPT would basically get digital amnesia and forget our entire adventure. So I became this desperate digital archivist, trying a thousand different ways to make it remember past actions and dialogues:

  • Copying and pasting previous conversations
  • Writing elaborate summaries
  • Creating character sheets
  • Drafting session notes like a D&D dungeon master
  • Anything to maintain the continuity of our ridiculous medieval soap opera

Here’s the thing about roleplaying with LLMs: they’ll shape the story however you want with zero objection. Zero pushback. Zero narrative resistance.

I went from being a nobody half-noble trying to prove my identity to becoming an actual God in that medieval world. The progression was absolutely fascinating - and completely intoxicating.

And then, predictably, another black hole opened up beneath me:

“What if… what if I wrote this roleplay as a story? I enjoyed living it. Maybe others would have fun reading it.”

From Roleplay to Writing

So I did what any reasonable person would do: I opened up VSCode and started writing from the very beginning. But of course, it couldn’t be that simple. I immediately started enlisting coding agents to fix my grammar and add fancy, flowery words.

“Move that dialogue to here,” I’d command. “Ask the woman if she’s ever seen a knight before.”

Then I’d pause mid-sentence and think, “Wait, let me grab my ASOIAF book - how did GRRM write this part? Let me check his scene descriptions.”

The Beautiful Disaster of Obsessive Micro-Management

My writing process became this beautiful disaster of obsessive micro-management. I’d write a paragraph, then spend two hours asking different AI assistants to make it “more atmospheric” or “add medieval flavor.” I’d rewrite the same conversation seventeen different ways, constantly second-guessing whether my half-noble protagonist should sound more formal or more desperate.

The endless questions:

  • Should he mention his father’s name first, or his lineage?
  • What about the weather - was it too cliché to make it rain during the identity crisis scene?
  • How formal should medieval dialogue be?
  • Is this historically accurate enough?

The Research Rabbit Holes

I started bookmarking medieval history websites, watching YouTube videos about feudal social hierarchies, and even researching what kind of bread they ate in 13th century because apparently my story needed that level of authenticity. I dove into the dark waters of Wikipedia rabbit holes, bookmarked medievalarchives.com, haunted history.ac.uk like some kind of digital ghost, and binged History Channel episodes about 13th century armor until I could probably identify a bascinet from a great helm at fifty paces.

I asked LLMs everything I could think of:

  • “What did medieval inns smell like?”
  • “How much would a horse cost in silver deniers?”
  • “What’s the proper way to address a minor lord?”
  • “Do people in the 13th century know what soap is?”

I researched medieval currency systems, studied period-appropriate curse words, learned about the intricacies of feudal land grants, and spent an embarrassing amount of time figuring out whether my character should wear a surcoat or a tunic in a particular scene.

Every tiny detail became a research project. Every sentence became a perfectionist nightmare.

Hours turned into days, days stretched into weeks. Again.

The Absurd Result

And then, after months of this beautiful madness, I’m sitting here staring at a ~360 page book. A book that isn’t even finished, mind you - this was just the first “Act.” Yes, I know how this sounds: I’m writing a book with zero writing experience, using coding agents as my literary co-conspirators.

Thanks, Claude. You did a great job helping me craft this ridiculous medieval epic. Oh, and every time I thank you, they burn another stack of money because apparently gratitude costs tokens now.

The Publishing Identity Crisis

And now I’m staring at this digital manuscript like it’s some kind of alien artifact. I honestly have no idea what to do with it. The questions pile up:

  • How does one even publish a book?
  • Do I need an agent?
  • A publisher?
  • Do I just upload it somewhere and hope for the best?
  • Should I split it into smaller books since this is apparently going to be a trilogy minimum?

The medieval identity crisis that started this whole journey seems quaint compared to my modern publishing identity crisis.

The Medieval Answer

So here I sit, having transformed from a simple gamer into a scribbling wordsmith of questionable talent, and I can finally answer that half-ass-noble’s dilemma with the wisdom of months spent in digital parchment and ink:

“By God’s blood and Mary’s blessed tears, mine own identity be proven not by gilded rings nor letters writ by lordly hands, but by the very madness that doth compel a fool to birth tales from naught but air and obstinate devotion to craft most ridiculous!”

And that, my magnificently weird friends, is why you write a book.