If the people involved in this project don’t do a maniacal laugh at least once during the process, I’ll be very disappointed.

“Dragon of Ash and Stars” by H. Leighton Dickson is definitely worth a read.

I would play this campaign.

It’s definitely my dream to one day find a campaign where I can play a character like this.

Thanks for this. :) I dunno why, but the way you worded things here made it clear what I needed to use in a search engine, and I’ve now got a couple of promising options. One is a lot smaller, but is specifically for people working in games, and the other is much larger for the digital tech industry as a whole (but includes digital creatives). Both have events every couple of months.

And doing some online gamejams looks like a great idea too. Thank you for the suggestion! :)

I’m in south west UK, unfortunately, so Seattle is a bit far to go. I’m right in the middle of a geographic area with four universities running game design degree courses, two of which are in a city with a few indie studios operating. (Sadly the biggest studio in the area was shut down by its parent company last summer - lots of alumni from my university lost their jobs.) So I’m genuinely not sure if there are no events happening, or I’m just not searching properly!

Regularly attend game-jams, conferences and meetups.

Not OP, but I was wondering if you had any advice on how to find when and where these kind of events take place? I’m a first year game design student at a very small institution (our class is just 9 students!), so I’d love to make some friends outside of my fellow students.