During my sadly non-gaming-occupied free time during COVID, I often contemplated the difficulties of creating and sustaining a gaming group of mostly functional, relatively responsible adults, since I would eventually be faced with doing just that. The quarantines eventually ended, but the anti-social tendencies nurtured by those quarantines were (and still are) very much a thing. This further exacerbated the already well-documented, game-destroying issues of scheduling and periodic personal drama. My thoughts converged on the possibility of running a West Marches campaign, as that sort of thing makes it possible for players and their characters to come and go as life allows. But what about when players come and go and then stay gone, and their characters take with them important bits of your campaign?
Perhaps the game universe is actually, say, the dream of a sleeping god? Weird stuff happens in dreams, and generally the dreamer doesn't question the plot holes. So, if everything is a dream, sudden changes that would disrupt a regular campaign could just be accepted with a (Jedi-like) wave of the hand and a tacit agreement amongst the players. The half-elven cleric played by Javier was, in fact, a tiefling rogue played by Kim and ALWAYS HAD BEEN as far as anyone could remember. All of the in-game things that still made sense would be kept and the rest minimally ret-conned. If by some weird happenstance the half-elven cleric unexpectedly reappeared, their reinsertion would be completely transparent to the other characters. The show would go on no matter what, and that wouldn't be problematic if it's an established part of the game. It might even add to the fun.
Obviously, there are problems with this idea. For one thing, player agency would come into question. Do the characters' actions matter if the story can be infinitely ret-conned to erase defunct character arcs and subplots? What other kinds of abuses might this style of play enable? I decided that if everyone was on the same page and no one decided to be a dick, it would work out fine. When you think about it, having everyone on the same page and an absence of dickish behavior are already what defines a good group, right? If you don't have a good group, nothing will work for long anyway. Nothing to lose, I say.
And so, Ualeon was born. Ualeon, being a dream, has gone through a ton of changes in the months and years since I first conceived it, big changes, wholesale rewrites of cosmology and geography, but it is still functionally the same. It's my meta-setting, an empty box that will always contain whatever I need at the moment. Just knowing what it's called and how it works helps me focus on what matters instead of repeatedly scrapping entire universes because I have a new idea I want to explore…which is possibly more important (for my sanity, at least) than all of that other stuff I talked about above.