What do you get when you cross a person with very bad luck and a roleplaying game? You get a character that doesn't use saving throws or attack roles to accomplish goals. What happens when you cross a player with that expertice with a fictional system that is magic heavy? You get the "Sarrl's Wonderful World" project.
"Sarrl's Wonderful World" is a project in mental masturbation with the intended goal being to show what someone living in a world with the Harry Potter level of magic integrated with their daily life would actually live like. Basically, after all three of the Harry Potter movies, I walked out of the theater and said, "Geez, they used their spells horribly! I mean there was so much more they could have done! And why are they living in a world based on 1890's technology while living just on the edge of a 21st century culture? Especially when half of them are actually FROM households with 21st century tech!"
So I figured, heck, if they have it all wrong, why not do something about it? Why not create an alternate world, possibly with even the same basic plot events with some of the details tweaked for the new environment? And that's what Sarrl's Wonderful World is (which in-and-of-itself is a play on words from the title of one of the songs from the first movie.) So then it came to the question: "How should I go about representing this world?" I pondered the possibility of creating a complete story, but realized that would require a large amount of work (A lesson I had learned with the CDRR story.) So while I was thinking, I began to consider writing a blog entry about it, to advertise my effort. And that's when it occured to me that the best method I could use, which would allow me to write stuff as I thought about it, was a blog. My original idea was to use my main blog and drop in little quips, but then I decided that since all of the quips where going to be in the first person anyway, so why not create a blog done by the character himself.
The only question to ask then was, who was my character? How did he/she fit into the universal scope? Well, the first question was easy to answer. Since I'm basically role-playing here, why not use my D&D wizzard: Sarrl. Then I could cheat and already know what his personality was like, while not directly having to try and play out a character that J.K. Rowlings clearly owns the intellectual property rights to. ^^
The second half of that question is much more difficault to answer. Since Sarrl's specialty was the creation, maintence, and operation of magical devices used to fill in for missing 21st century tech anyway, I figured it would be wise to make him a "Magical Technician", someone who is responsible for fixing broken Magi-Tech. Then I decided that, in order to make my world relateable to the movies/books I was trying to make a commentary about, that Sarrl would be an employee of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizzardry. (Yes, I know, I've only mentioned the movies, but that's because in the books I fill in the missing tech with my imagination, and then just try and ignore that they go unused by the characters in the books)
With my world established, my character carefully snuggled into his role in the world, and the website carefully prepared, I then began the process of documenting Sarrl's life in this strange new world. ^^