Since I was a child. I think I started in the mid-2000s.

Not long. I’ve been interested in it for years, but never wrote anything myself until less than 2 years ago when i started my current big project.

My love of some of the works that have inspired my stuff is much older, of course. I grew up on J. R. R. Tolkien and Douglas Adams, and various fairy tales and novels i only vaguely remember now.

My sci-fi setting can trace its roots to sketches I used to do years ago in class. (Some of those sketches have been updated into 3D models, and yet more are still ‘canon’ to the present iteration of the setting - if not necessarily released.) I found I could scratch out what was on the board and draw sci-fi equipment at the same time, so I started dragging a sketchbook around to class with me.

But the nature of the setting has radically shifted. It’s gone from a “20 minutes into the future” series featuring a stateless army dedicated to preserving world peace, to a ~200ish years in the future setting featuring conflict between various interstellar states following a bitter war across the solar system and an examination of the ideological differences driving them.

Ultimately, though, it’s just an excuse to make up lots of near sci-fi equipment.

The first step in the world I currently use as the basis for most of my fiction, and all of my ttrpg needs started in jr high for me too. This would have been late eighties, though I’m having trouble pinning down in memory exactly when the initial idea popped into my head.

I wanna say it was in physical science class in the eighth grade, which would have been 87? But it might have been earlier than that, depending on exactly how I trace the lineage back in precursor thoughts, as far back as the sixth grade. I tend to really count the initial phase a little later though, since it wasn’t until my junior year that I set it down on paper, which would be 90?

Anyway, the lead up to setting it to paper was a year or so of internal storytelling, daydreaming casually. I didn’t initially have a plan, per se, it was just ideas around d&d, plus ideas sparked by fantasy reading. Just a series of what ifs that got stuck in my head until I decided to really use it when constructing a home brew setting instead of using prefab stuff for d&d.

That first piece of paper was just a list of gods, and how they managed to win the position they had, just rough outlines to use for players wanting to run clerics.

Truthfully, the first five years or so, almost none of the world building was on paper more than that. It was all kept in my head as it got used in play.

Then, the system I had built up got used by my best friend in his first run as GM, so he wanted a lot of information about the hows and whys of it all. So I started scribbling notes in the booklets about the history of things, the underpinnings of how the magic actually worked, how and why the various churches and factions and such came to be as they existed in my version of the setting.

He didn’t use all of it, but having the majority of it written down made it more important to really work at. It eventually got compiled into its own folder (as in an actual folder, this was before I had access to a PC).

That was in the mid nineties somewhere. It was still not until the turn of the century that I started writing fiction based on the core concepts. I had written some fiction before then, but never in the setting and system that I had put the work into.

After that, though, it started being less general, because it needed more meat than what you need in a ttrpg session. And, that’s that :)