(ENG) Kobold Press 5a Ed. - Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding Volume II

The Worlds We Adore h Gabe Hicks 49 world. Maybe I want to think about a group that are incredible hunters. The more I think about it, the more I want them to be relatively nomadic. With that in mind, I have to figure out how they travel. Do they travel by land, air, or sea? Maybe I decide on land travel. I can expand their description a little bit by asking myself: What are they hunting with? This time, I decide I’m going to tap into the fantastical and say they are hunting with parts of their own bodies that they use to shake their prey. They are not werewolves but they are partial shifters—they can change their feet and hands to give themselves claws and change their faces to have more beast-like features. I ask myself: Where would these people live? I decide to put them in a forest because it feels very fitting. The part about the shifting is really interesting to me, so there’s no reason why I can’t focus on that and expand that even more; I start with something I really want and just build out little pieces more and more. It’s always noticeable when you read or watch something that someone had to do versus something that someone wanted to do. If you dive into the things you’re really passionate about and then build up the world around it, the things that excite you the most will really shine, and everything else still makes a beautiful picture. Once you start to see the pieces come to life and fit together, then it’s time to ask yourself how big this is going to be. You’ve probably heard the term “scale.” What is the scale of this experience you’re making? How you build the world will be different if you’re making a full adventure campaign versus making a one-shot because of how much of the world your players might actually encounter. In the case of things like food, you might go into more detail for a one-shot than you do for an entire adventure because the one-shot might take place in a restaurant. In a complete adventure, the characters might not eat in a place that’s specific. My first piece of advice was about passion and excitement, but here I want to actively say, give yourself the time to enjoy those things, but don’t make that all that you do. Remember that this is worldbuilding and there’s a lot of stuff that goes into a world. You don’t have to consider everything. You don’t have to consider sleeping habits, you don’t have to consider what people eat every day, you don’t have to consider why people chose to settle in a specific place—but you can. Worldbuilding is an opportunity to tell as much or as little of a story as you want to. It’s also okay to have blanks sometimes, especially if you plan to have those blanks in your story filled in with the help of your players. You might have come up with all of a kingdom’s culture, even the description and name of the ruler, but you’ve never considered what the people in the kingdom like to eat. At the moment, you might not have to. There is always the possibility this group of players you’re engaging with will think about that. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

50 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 This doesn’t mean, “I don’t want to think about this aspect of the world, so I don’t care.” What this means is, if you’re having trouble figuring out an idea or you don’t have something that feels right, sometimes you don’t need to have an answer right away. You might talk about the gap directly with your party or you might leave it open to encourage them to brainstorm. If you were struggling to develop what type of enemies are in this region, you might set up your party with a suggestion like: “There are strange creatures that have been attacking people. People have been left with burns and scars from the attacks but no one’s been able to get a really good look.” Let the group speculate and think about it, and if one of them comes up with a really clever answer, use it. This storytelling technique is one of my favorite worldbuilding tools because it can give you something incredible to work with, and it gives the people that are experiencing your world that satisfaction of being right. We all know that terrific moment where we correctly predicted something upcoming in a story. Even if the event wasn’t just what we were expecting, we followed the hints and clues to a moment where we still felt right about something, and that satisfaction is unlike anything else. You can also leave things open to allow yourself to come back later and fill in. This can really inspire you. You might finish half of one section and then go build up another, only to come back to that original section and find you can tie ideas from the two different sections together. For example, you might have no idea what this kingdom uses as a signature weapon, but later when you figure out that they are a culture that embraces fire magic, it might lead you to consider how they can harness that with their weapons. Maybe they have weapons that can shoot out oil to work with the fire magic and create some sort of flaming blade. Try combining your ideas together and see what happens. The process of building a world can feel like you’re creating something alive, especially if you start by asking yourself questions about what you’re most passionate and excited about. It’s also a very special kind of storytelling. Enjoy combining and unfolding your unique ideas to make a world that’s unlike any other. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Technology as a Set of Story-Telling Tools h Ken Liu 51 or, How We Can Learn to Build a World from Herodotus fter spending much of my life as a technologist, I now advise corporations, governments, and universities on visions of the future. I’m also a novelist, and my epic fantasy series, the Dandelion Dynasty, is known for placing engineers in the position of honor typically reserved for wizards and warriors. So I know a thing or two about using technology to build a rich fantasy world that can spark even more stories—the goal of every game master and fantasy writer. The most important piece of advice I can share with you as a worldbuilder is this: Think of technology not as machines, but as storytelling tools. Let’s unpack that. Typically, the word “technology” brings to mind computers, airplanes, repeating crossbows, double-acting piston bellows . . . complex machines that solve specific problems. While civilization does indeed consist of many machines, describing every piece of machinery in your fantasy world in excruciating detail isn’t enough to invoke a rich, fun world for your players and readers—no more than reading a French dictionary would bring to life the francophone world. Technology is derived from two Greek roots: techne, which means craft or skill, and logos, which means speech or discourse (itself literally a derivation from “I say”). So, “technology” could also be understood to mean “discourse about art,” or stories about how people get things done. A Technology as a Set of Story-Telling Tools Ken Liu Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

52 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 It’s only when you’ve progressed beyond thinking of technology merely as a matter of gear A drives cam B, which rocks lever C—that kind of thinking is important, for details give texture and color to the world, but you can’t stop there—when you see technology as the tangible manifestations of a society’s mythologies, philosophical traditions, social classes and economic way of life; when you understand technology as both the ends and the means for a people’s ongoing self-narrative; when you can both tell the story of the technology and use the technology to tell a story . . . only then can you truly realize the full potential of technology as part of worldbuilding. Perhaps the best way to illustrate what I mean is to go to one of the world’s earliest and most skilled worldbuilders: Herodotus. The task of our first historian and ethnographer is to conjure a new world for the reader, to bring the unknown to life much as a GM or a novelist would. Herodotus introduces the land of Egypt by recounting his conversations with the priests, through which he learns that1 The Egyptians were the first of all men on Earth to find out the course of the year, having divided the seasons into twelve parts to make up the whole; and this they said they found out from the stars: and they reckon to this extent more wisely than the Hellenes . . . They said moreover that the Egyptians were the first who brought into use appellations for the twelve gods and the Hellenes took up the use from them; and that they were the first who assigned altars and images and temples to the gods, and who engraved figures on stones; and with regard to the greater number of these things they showed me by actual facts that they had happened so. To tell the story of Egypt, the priests do not merely recite for Herodotus a pantheon or the genealogies of kings; they tell him about the inventions of the Egyptians: how they divide up time, how they endow the gods with form, how they take pride in being the first to engrave, to build, to craft. But note also Herodotus’s masterful focus: He tells us not merely what the temples, statues, calendars, and altars are like, but also what people are trying to do with them. Herodotus then devotes considerable space to describing the technology of the Egyptians: the crops they grow and the drinks they brew, the animals they keep, their manners of dress and modes of transport, the methods of embalming, Nile acacia boat making, and so on. 1 All quotes from Herodotus are from the Project Gutenberg version of The History of Herodotus, Book II, translated into English by G. C. Macaulay, available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2707/2707-h/2707-h.htm. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Technology as a Set of Story-Telling Tools h Ken Liu 53 But in every case, Herodotus’s focus is not on the specifics of how the artifacts (or techniques) work, but what the people do with them: the patterns of flooding and planting, the bustling markets, the dinner rituals, the intersection of public and private spheres (so different from the Greeks in some ways; so similar in other ways), gender roles, the impact on social classes (warriors are prized far more than artisans), the myths encoded by the temples, the political strife and religious debates. For instance, when describing the elaborate methods of embalming (as expected, this uniquely Egyptian profession takes up many paragraphs from Herodotus), Herodotus presents the technical details via an amazing vignette of how ancient undertakers would attempt to upsell the client by presenting different “packages” of embalming techniques at different price tiers (leading with the most expensive, of course, so as to numb the sticker shock of the mid-tier): Thus they deal with the corpses which are prepared in the most costly way; but for those who desire the middle way and wish to avoid great cost they prepare the corpse as follows: having filled their syringes with the oil which is got from cedar-wood, with this they forthwith fill the belly of the corpse, and this they do without having either cut it open or taken out the bowels. . . . It appears that sales techniques have not advanced much in the last 2500 years. Even the technology of death is intimately connected with stories of daily life. Finally, here’s Herodotus’s description of the construction of the pyramids: Cheops became king over them and brought them to every kind of evil: for he . . . bade all the Egyptians work for him. So some were appointed to draw stones from the stone-quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile, and others he ordered to receive the stones after they had been carried over the river in boats, and to draw them to those which are called the Libyan mountains; and they worked by a hundred thousand men at a time, for each three months continually. Of this oppression there passed ten years while the causeway was made by which they drew the stones, which causeway they built, and it is a work not much less, as it appears to me, than the pyramid. . . . . . . [The Great Pyramid] was made after the manner of steps, which some call “rows” and others “bases”: and when they had first made it thus, they raised the remaining stones with machines made of short pieces of timber, raising them first from the ground to the first stage of the steps. . . . Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

54 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Just by describing the Great Pyramid, Herodotus has recounted an entire epic poem: heroes and at least one villain; incredible feats of organization (a hundred thousand men at a time, two thousand years before the time of Herodotus, in an era when even writing was a new invention!) and engineering; endurance and patience (the construction lasted as long as the Trojan War or the wanderings of Odysseus); monuments; gods and demigods; the pinnacle as well as nadir of an entire civilization. Technology isn’t just machinery and knowledge; it is also wonder, pride, greed, wrath, sacred mysteries, and profane suffering. Herodotus strives to not only tell stories embedded in technology from his own perspective as an outsider—outsider observers are always at risk of misunderstanding or mistelling because they’re uninformed by the culture’s own internal understanding and grammar—but also stories discerned by the Egyptians themselves from their technology. At one point, Herodotus recounts the priests of Thebes using an awe-inspiring (and very Egyptian) version of a family genealogy to prove that humans are not descended from gods. They led me into the sanctuary of the temple, which is of great size, and they counted up the number, showing colossal wooden statues in number the same as they said; for each chief-priest there sets up in his lifetime an image of himself: accordingly the priests, counting and showing me these, declared to me that each one of them was a son succeeding his own father, and they went up through the series of images from the image of the one who had died last, until they had declared this of [341 generations]. Technology is literally how a people know who they are, where they come from, what makes them unique, how they leave a tangible record of their own story. But the story told by technology isn’t limited to one time, one people. Remember those “machines made of short pieces of timber” used in the construction of the Great Pyramid? Known as the “Herodotus machine,” this device has drawn interest throughout subsequent generations. Although the description above by Herodotus is vague, Leonardo da Vinci, who might have had access to additional documents now lost to us, drew up several plausible designs in his notebooks2 . Leonardo’s rendition of the Herodotus machine relies on a central fulcrum to bear the weight of the stone to be lifted, and short pieces of timber are then inserted under the 2 See Leonardo da Vinci, a Genius and His Secrets by Gabrielle Niccolai (2011) (available at https://www.renouveau-democratie.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Brochure-Bruxelles240314-LR1.pdf). This is the same source relied on for the reconstruction described later. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Technology as a Set of Story-Telling Tools h Ken Liu 55 stone as it is rocked from side to side, gradually lifting it up. A modern reconstruction based on Leonardo’s design shows that such a machine really could function as described, allowing a child of six to lift a weight of more than six hundred pounds with ease. And lest you think that the Herodotus machine is merely a mechanical curiosity of the ancient past, the same mechanical principles also led to the railroad jack (a device that relies on a beam with a series of holes, climbing locking pins, and mechanical advantage from a long handle), invented in 1905 and still an important part of modern life. From the time of the construction of the Great Pyramid to today, more than four and a half millennia of human history have passed, yet people still need to lift heavy objects with only muscle power, whether it’s a granite block destined for a god-king’s tomb or a pickup truck whose tire needs to be changed, and so the machines to fulfill that desire continue to evolve and unfold, telling a story of infinite variety and ingenuity. In the construction of an imagined world, no less than in the real world, technology is not just about gears, levers, materials, methods; to make technology bear its weight, to truly lift the mundane into the realm of the fantastic, the worldbuilder must focus on the stories of technology: the stories that outsiders can tell about a civilization through its technology, the stories that members of that civilization tell themselves with its technology, the values embedded in the technology, the joy and suffering witnessed by the technology, even the stories of the technology itself, transcending time, transcending space, illuminating the eternal light of human nature. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

56 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 tories have been a part of our world for as long as we have records— oral and otherwise. They help illuminate our histories and the human condition, showing how similar we are to the humans of millennia ago. Texts provide a basis for understanding one another, and intertextuality— the way media references other media, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—allows for a language-within-languages through which we can communicate between our different communities. Thus, the worlds we build should be just as intricate. Including fictional texts within your setting opens up your world, gives it depth and the feeling of being lived-in; if two characters discuss a bound novel they both loved, then your audience can make certain conclusions about the technology and literacy levels of the setting, as well as the kinds of social enjoyment its denizens tend to prefer. There will be no need for you to invent the economics of printing, or details about the author of the fictional book—the audience will imagine these details all on their own. But these inner texts can also be a great source of profound lines of dialogue that resonate with your audience. They can also be the source of twists and reversals, or even the hints that lead the characters toward solutions to The Big Problem. Creating a world is a large enough endeavor all on its own, but then also creating a body of lore and literature on top of that can certainly be daunting. One way of making it a bit easier is to divide your inner texts into three categories: canonized lore, which includes the backbone S First Came the Word C.L. Clark Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

First Came the Word h C.L. Clark 57 texts of your world; pop culture, which includes what people use for entertainment; and the interstitial, which includes all the texts that surround us that we no longer think of as texts. Canonized Lore At its core, canonized lore is the sacred literature of your world—the texts that must be respected or there will be consequences. Think academic, religious, magical, prophetic, and legal texts. Often, these texts aren’t in the hands of the masses (or at least, they may not start there); rather, there are certain people who are the only ones allowed to share them or lecture on them—holy clerics, professors, trained lawyers or politicians. How, then, does the canonized text get dispersed throughout the populace? Is it shared via a sermon, or are copies made easily available to every household? And if a member of the uninitiated masses does get their hands on a sacred text or starts masquerading as an ordained fellow—what are the consequences, in this world or the next? These texts are also usually used to form the basis of fundamental principles of the society. For example: What behavior does your canonized lore encourage or discourage? How has it shaped the moral, social, and economic codes of your world (or region or group)? Or, if there is no canonized literature, how does that absence shape your world? Popular Culture Just like popular culture in the real world, popular culture in your setting includes all the ways people in your world tell stories to entertain themselves. What kinds of stories do your people like to consume? Are they primarily oral or written? Does live theater play a large role? Are there stand-up comedians? Stories told by hedge wizards conjuring elaborate illusions? Are any stories forbidden? For example, anti-government stories, counterfactual histories, or stories that change the sacred texts or mock or insult the religious figures therein? Is reading itself forbidden or inaccessible, thus making plays and street ballads the main way stories pass from person to person? Consider, too, the environment of the cities, nations, or regions of your world. During a great siege, where people are dying of famine, do the people tell imaginary stories of great feasts to keep their bellies full on hope? Or do they tell stories of stout-hearted warriors who will break the siege, or a wily hero who will betray the selfish king who won’t surrender? Stories that lean into escapism or realism are both valid reactions to Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

58 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 traumatic situations. On the flip side, your people might be prone to cautionary tales during times of plenty or nostalgia for a golden era if people feel too stagnant or threatened by something new. In popular fiction, you also have the added option of qualifying a text. What do the denizens of your world consider beautiful or good writing? Do they prefer stories with high diction and chaste themes . . . or stories full of bawdy words and bawdier content? Are multiple storytellers competing to create the dominant version of a heroic myth? Are tales rendered as graphic stories painted on murals or woven into tapestries? Is poetry an influential form of art, and if so, is it more often narrative or some other form? This is a great way for your characters to show who they are by their opinions about the texts they come across. One character may like to whistle a dirty song that makes another character scowl and another one blush, while a fourth character makes up extra verses to go with it. Interstitial Texts Interstitial texts cover every other piece of media in your world that might have started as text but have become so woven into the fabric of the culture that the characters no longer recognize them as such. Take swear words, for example. If a character curses by saying, “Damn you to hell!” that implies several things: (1) There’s some sort of god or other system that will damn a person; (2) There’s a hell where the unfortunate target would experience that damnation; and (3) There’s probably a canonical text that teaches all of that. Characters’ jobs can also be a source of interstitial texts. For instance, any job that requires the work be done in a repetitive but steady sustained rhythm could easily have a song to go with it. This is also true of the songs children often sing as part of their games. Let’s look more closely at working songs. Most work songs have a call and refrain—marching songs, walking songs, and sea shanties have one person who sets the rhythm by singing the verse. Then the chorus joins in. The stress of the lines should create a rhythm that matches the work being done—a heavy emphasis on a left step, for example. They share gossip, poke fun, and commiserate. It’s also an easy way to make characters feel like they’re part of a community that shares a common culture, bond, or thread. You can also use this to bring together characters from different strata or cultures who still have a work or a cultural song or story in common. Be sure to also think about the events that might have originally spawned the material, even if many characters have forgotten where the words came from. The children’s game “ring around the rosie,” for example, was a troublingly joyful response to the black plague. Or perhaps your world Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

First Came the Word h C.L. Clark 59 had great poets who wrote against regimes of terror, who sacrificed their lives in order to leave behind one last message of beauty and hope. What great wizard penned the grimoire the characters find, and was that wizard worshipped or reviled? Social Considerations Consider also the social considerations of your fictional texts. For every text, ask yourself: Who has read it? Who has been exposed to it? Are people in this world expected to know it, even if they haven’t been exposed to it? Who is expected to know it? What are the consequences for not knowing it? These consequences can be as petty as being shunned for not knowing this season’s popular ballad or as dire as being executed as a heretic for being unfamiliar with the dominant holy text of the region. Pay attention, too, to what your inner texts say about what the people in your world value, and moreover, how these values might clash with the values of others. For example, if a magical society’s text says that all magic should be hoarded for the good of the people, but the street plays depict magical societies as greedy and feature a hero who steals from them, we have an in-world critique that can add thematic depth to your narrative even if your protagonists don’t interact with the play at all. Stories with generous characters, on the other hand, tell the reader that the society values kindness and generosity—as do stories that punish the selfish. And there are certainly ways to subvert these stories, as well—such as having a fable told in the story while the protagonists actively go against it. Creating Fictional Texts So, how do we actually go about creating such texts? Here’s an exercise to start with. If you don’t have a story in mind or characters to work with, this is a great opportunity to invent some. 1. Think about your world. What behaviors, values, or assumptions do people take for granted? Pick one and then imagine a figure to embody that. For example, the assumption that magic should be held only by a select few could be embodied by the powerful wizard of long ago who locked the magic away from the public. Then, imagine a text that fits into each of the three categories above featuring both this assumption and this figure. Even though you’re using the same subject, the texts do not have to feel the same way about the assumption and probably won’t have the same tone. 2. Determine what kind of character would know each text. How do they know it? How do they feel about it? As a bonus: Identify a character who wouldn’t know the text. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

60 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 3. Choose a place in your story where that character can reference this text, make a decision based on it, or perhaps have the text trigger an emotional response. 4. If you have characters you know really well, you can reverse this process instead: Choose a character and then pick a type of text for them to be familiar with. If you have any gaps (e.g., none of your characters know the canonized lore), ask yourself how the absence of that knowledge impacts the characters or influences their decisions or how those texts might act against the characters even without their knowledge. This can also be used for character building. Take an important character or location and consider the dominant trait. You can certainly pick a song or text that shows off that dominant trait, but you can also bring depth and complexity to the character or setting by attributing an unexpected trait— maybe the bawdy rhymer weeps when they sing a ballad of tragic romance, or a famed pirate port is full of loyal patriots singing a national anthem. Only Include as Much as You Need Don’t feel like you have to create an entire epic poem or vast reams of fictional history texts in order for your world to feel real; in fact, it’s better if you don’t. The characters needn’t quote from your world’s equivalent of Shakespeare every other page. Create just a few lines here and there that characters can refer to, especially if such lines are ones that shape their worldview or speak to the mores of the larger culture. In the empty space of what remains unspoken, the readers will fill in the rest of the story themselves, creating a larger text than any one author could possibly imagine. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Hamster Trek h Jeff Grubb 61 am looking at a card with a hamster on it. The card is from a recent Magic: The Gathering set. The hamster’s name is Boo, and he belongs to a ranger named Minsc. Minsc and Boo originally appeared in a computer game, which was set in a tabletop fantasy campaign setting, but which actually had its origins in another fantasy campaign setting, which in turn started with a glib comment about Giant Space Hamsters. It’s a great example of how concepts are created and develop in a shared universe. A shared universe is a setting where numerous creative hands contribute to the final product. (Sometimes the creators have ultimate ownership of those ideas, but often they do not.) Notable examples include everything from Forgotten Realms to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to Star Wars. But so too is your own personal TTRPG campaign a shared universe—built as it perhaps is with bits and bobs from other settings, fully enriched by you and your players. Ideas come from one source and are carried over onto other paths. Creativity, in particular creativity in shared universes, are the product of a lot of people. So how does a hamster named Boo fit into all this? Back in 1989, I was working on Spelljammer, which was a campaign setting/shared world describing Dungeons & Dragons in space. (Excuse me, that should be pronounced INNN SPPPAAAACE.) One of the keys to the setting was its star-spanning ships, and our process for creating them was pretty effective. I would ask for a number of ship types—“Give me one that looks like a butterfly for the elves,” or “How about a nautilus-shaped ship for the mind flayers?”—and the amazingly talented Jim Holloway would I Hamster Trek The Nature of Co-operative Creation Jeff Grubb Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

62 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 draw up sketches. I would fill in the lore and the equally-talented Dave (DSL or Diesel) LaForce would puzzle out the deck designs. It was a very effective system and created some beautiful and unique ships. We also had ships created by gnomes. (Which is another story in shared creativity, but we won’t get into that right now.) The AD&D gnomes in space are tinker gnomes from the Dragonlance setting—mad inventors with a taste for gizmos. So, I asked Jim for a ship that looked like it was cobbled together from other parts. He delivered something that looked like a couple ships crashed together in the middle of the night—the front end was a sailing ship, the back end was more of a liner, and there were two huge side-mounted paddlewheels. “Hang on,” someone in the office said, “You’re in space. What’s the deal with those big wheels on the sides?” “They’re hamster wheels,” I said somewhat glibly, not realizing what I had set in motion. I said this within earshot of the editor of Dragon Magazine, Roger E. Moore, who thought it hilarious . . . and thus the Giant Space Hamster was born—from a drawing and errant comment. We mentioned the Giant Space Hamsters in the boxed set, and the pairing of giant chubby rodents and mad scientist gnomes worked surprisingly well together. That could have been the end of it, but Roger really liked the idea, and so when we did an entry for the Monster Manual (called Monstrous Compendium in that period), he wrote up the stats for the giant space hamster. But he didn’t stop there. He wrote up descriptions for a large variety of giant space hamsters, each one riffing on classic D&D monsters. There were armor-plated giant space hamsters, carnivorous giant space hamsters, sabre-toothed giant space hamsters, fire-breathing phase doppelganger giant space hamsters, and the great space hamster of ill omen (also known as “Wooly Rupert”). And finally, there was a miniature giant space hamster, which looked like, you know, a hamster. And it was a bit of a lark, and we had thought we had pounded that joke to death and we’d all be done with it. Little did we know. In 1998, Bioware released the first of the Baldur’s Gate series, a computer game set in D&D’s Forgotten Realms campaign setting. A character in that game was a ranger from the barbarian lands of Rashemen named Minsc, who had a miniature giant space hamster named Boo. Or rather he claimed Boo was a miniature giant space hamster and conferred with him regularly for advice. Minsc was the creation of James Ohlen, which came from his own D&D campaign which was itself set in Yet Another D&D campaign setting, Dark Sun. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Hamster Trek h Jeff Grubb 63 Minsc was a popular character. He even had a cool catch-phrase—“Boo! Go for the eyes!” Minsc and Boo would return in several other Baldur’s Gate games, along with a novelization by Phil Athans and later comic books. He, and his miniature giant space hamster companion, were break-out characters. But for those keeping score, we’ve now linked up four different D&D campaign settings. Giant space hamsters from Spelljammer tied to gnomes from Dragonlance, teamed up with a ranger originally from Dark Sun, all in the computer game set in the Forgotten Realms. This is what I am talking about when you have shared worlds with a plethora of talented creatives all borrowing from each other freely. Ideas move from one setting to another . . . and grow in the process. Surely that’s the end of it, right? Not quite. Bioware also did a science fiction game called Mass Effect. In that game you could decorate your personal quarters with items, the options of which included (wait for it) . . . a space hamster. And so, the space hamster had jumped the boundaries of D&D and fantasy to make an appearance in not only other games, but other genres as well. (Incidentally, I have a magnet/sticker on my electric vehicle that reads “Powered by Miniature Space Hamster,” so it is perhaps moving out into the mainstream—or at least pulling out onto the highway—as well.) And now we get to the card. Wizards of the Coast, who publishes Dungeons & Dragons, also publishes the immensely popular Magic: The Gathering collectible card game. After many years of publishing the two product lines entirely separately, they finally decided to cross the streams and released an MTG set using popular characters and creatures from the Forgotten Realms. Including, of course, Boo and Minsc. So. Four D&D campaign settings, several computer games, comics, novels, and card games. Not bad for an off-hand comment that took on a life of its own. An idea that passed through many, many hands and many, many minds to reach its ultimate audience. Naturally, giant space hamsters are not the only thing that have evolved through multiple creatives over time. There is another card in this MTG/ Forgotten Realms collection titled “Volo, Guide to Monsters.” Volo is another popular Forgotten Realms character who has developed and benefitted from many hands at work. Like Minsc, Volo started in a personal campaign, in this case my own. I was running an ad hoc D&D campaign where the players would set out exploring the wilderness on behalf of a mapmaker named Volo, who would then publish the maps with his name all over them (shades of Amerigo Vespucci). The name Volo came from a small town on the Illinois/Wisconsin Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

64 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 border that my Lovely Bride and I would pass through on trips from Lake Geneva to Chicago. It was the home of Volo Bog, the Volo Auto Museum, and a number of other things named Volo. We decided that Volo was the guy who ran the town and named everything after himself. From that campaign, Volo made the leap over into canonical D&D with a series of guidebooks written by Ed Greenwood, from D&D’s original publisher, TSR, Inc. In those, Ed expanded Volo’s name out to Volothamp Geddarm. The first guidebook, Volo’s Guide to Waterdeep, appeared in 1993. Robh Ruppel created the cover and artist Clyde Caldwell was the model for this iconic figure. Volo was an excellent “unreliable narrator” for players and DMs in that his information may be reliable or off-base, depending on how authoritative you’d prefer him to be in your campaign. Volo even ended up with a couple novels and had someone imitate him in the campaign setting (a “Marco Volo” situation). He went quiet for several years, then returned with the latest edition of D&D as a quest-giving NPC and eventually headlining his own book—Volo’s Guide to Monsters. Like Minsc, Volo was intended as a mildly comedic character that could give the player characters a reason to go off adventuring, but then turned into so much more. Not bad for a guy named after a small village in Illinois. One more interesting example of shared creation comes from the depths of early D&D—the Outlands and Sigil. The Great Wheel of the outer planes first appeared as a Great Rectangle in Dragon Magazine #38 (1979), by Gary Gygax (with copious contributions from Steve Marsh). It presented a planar arrangement where the outer planes of existence were a ring laid out similarly to the alignment charts, with Lawful Good being the Seven Heavens, Lawful Evil in the lower left as the Nine Hells, and Chaotic Evil being the 666 Layers of the Abyss. But, in this design, there was no “plane of Neutrality” at the center. The Deities and Demigods book (later renamed Legends & Lore) by Rob Kuntz and James Ward remedied this in 1980 by proposing a plane of “Concordant Opposition” which occupied the hub of this (now) Great Wheel. However, details were lacking on this plane of Concordant Opposition, and when I wrote Manual of the Planes (1987) I had a free hand to extrapolate from it. The plane became a suitable meeting ground for extradimensional entities, a truly neutral ground. It was dominated by a huge mountain in the center, which rose at an exponential level. It would never have a peak, but would instead rise forever. A nice, mind-bending twist. The Great Wheel now had not only a hub but an axle. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Hamster Trek h Jeff Grubb 65 Then we get to Dave “Zeb” Cook and Planescape in 1994. The mouth-filling name of the Plane of Concordant Opposition was renamed the Outlands, and Zeb was looking for a central location for his “City of Doors”—Sigil—that gave access to the other outer planes. And we had this conversation: Zeb: “I want to put it on top of that central mountain.” Me: But it’s an exponential curve! It has no top! Zeb: Exactly! And so, we did that—put his impossible city in an impossible location, which was a bit mind-twisting in its own right. In each of these cases—Giant Space Hamsters, Volo, and the Outlands, the concepts developed over time and through the contributions of numerous talented individuals. In this same fashion, when DMs and players are making their own additions to the world, they carry on a tradition of evolving a shared space, a co-operative venture to continue to expand worlds, in ways both large and small. At the heart of it is co-operative creation, which enriches and deepens the worlds that it builds. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

66 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 hether a game or story is set in our world or in an invented secondary fantastical world, the author is creating an environment in which the narrative takes place. Every street traversed, every river crossed, every marketplace perused, every dungeon explored—whether real or entirely fictional—is part of the world being built within the story. The reader has no point of reference in this narrative world except what the writer gives them. The GM creates points of reference for players to have “ground” to walk on. This is especially true in secondary worlds unrelated to Earth, but it is also true in stories set in our world in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious. Worldbuilding is not only “things the creator makes up”; it is also “things the creator reveals and highlights.” Think of these reference points as if they appeared on a map. How a World is Represented on a Map A physical, geographical map is a common feature of secondary world fantasy novels and a staple of RPGs as well. Many think of a geographical map as an objective, value-free representation of a place, but it isn’t. Mapmakers must make many choices about how a place is represented and what to put on—or leave off—the map. This leads us to questions, such as: Who made the map and for what purpose? Is the topography there to aid military objectives? Are there locations that were left off the map because they aren’t considered important or necessary? Or are they absent because the mapmaker couldn’t W Building a Physical and Social Landscape Kate Elliott Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Building a Physical and Social Landscape h Kate Elliott 67 Building a Physical and Social Landscape h Miranda Horner see them or didn’t know they were there? Do we make our way via roads and coordinates? Or via landmarks and knowledge passed down through generations? If we see a photo of a place most know as Mount Rushmore, do we see the faces of four American presidents carved in the rock, or do we see the place the Lakota Sioux know as Six Grandfathers? The External Map Maps influence the ways we see the world. Crucially, they can be described in two ways: as a physical, geographical “external” map and as a sociocultural “internal” map. An external map is more than a geographical, spatial map. Externals are what can be called tangibles. These are things that have weight, mass, or that can be seen or tasted or smelled. Physical landmarks. Built environments. Plants. Animals. The actual physical food people eat and the clothing people wear. If a world- and storybuilder understands a map purely in terms of externality—what can be seen or marked on a physical map—then they may see culture purely in terms of its externals. Consider a setting in which women wear kimonos (or garments like kimonos called by another name) and people write poetry at court, are keen martial artists, and eat rice. These can be depicted as externals, as easy “visual” markers that serve as signposts for a casual reader driving past who brings with them a lifetime of expectation about who and what these markers mean for the story. An Internal Map What then is an internal? Internals are how these elements are understood by the people who engage in these behaviors and use these objects and for whom they are a fully lived part of their daily lives. In other words, if a worldbuilder focuses solely on externals and externality, they often end up focusing on an “outsider” view of the culture they are writing about rather than what cultures and people would say about themselves. People and societies have an “internal map” that orients how they see the world, that influences the choices they make and the perspectives they cherish, enforce, and share. This is true for characters and cultures in narrative as well. An internal map explains, represents, or depicts how the people in the world perceive the cosmos and their place in it—in relationship to the world around them and the elements of their daily lives and interactions. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

68 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Other elements of an internal map include cultural beliefs and expectations, laws and customs, and societally approved prejudices and/or rebellion against them. What are the rules and customs of behavior that govern a society or subgroup, and does any given character as an individual obey them or not? Expectations about things like hierarchy, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, and race will all be part of a character’s internal map. There will almost certainly be more than one “people” in a secondary world, and each “people” will have a unique way of understanding the cosmos and their relationship to their gods (if they have them), the natural environment, their culture and sub-cultures, and to other groups and peoples both within and outside their own culture. Internal maps are not monolithic to any given world or even any nation or culture (or even to individuals in the same setting). They will be influenced by the nuances, variations, and local characteristics that affect any given individual’s life. For example, a Japanese-American girl growing up in Nebraska as one of only a handful of Asian-American students at her high school is going to have a different internal map from a girl of Japanese ancestry growing up in Hawaii with its majority Asian and Pacific Islander demographic makeup. They again will have different internal maps from a Japanese girl growing up in Japan, whose internal map will depend on where and who she is in a country with its own regional and social variation and complexity. Material Culture and Social Space Two concepts can be particularly useful for creating landscapes that reflect both an external and internal set of maps: material culture and social space. • Social Space refers to ways in which people interact with the world they live in and what these interactions can tell us about their lives, their status, their expectations, and so on. How do people move (and are allowed to move) through the landscape they live in? How do they interact with others both in the public and the private spheres, among strangers, among countryfolk, and among family? • Material Culture can be defined narrowly as any assemblage of artifacts in the archaeological record. In worldbuilding terms, it can be thought of as the relationship between people and the physical objects used in life by those people and their culture(s). Material culture and social space are embedded in culture and society, not extraneous to it. Not separate from it. They profoundly affect how societies function. They exist in context to all the various elements typically Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Building a Physical and Social Landscape h Kate Elliott 69 Building a Physical and Social Landscape h Miranda Horner listed as essential for worldbuilding. They affect how history, politics, economics, technology, cultural interaction, family relationships, religion, subsistence, and all aspects of life play out. Why Details Matter Details are not trivial concerns. Every culture and sub-culture will contain different sets of material culture due to different needs, technological levels, cultural values, languages and language variants, religious beliefs, kinship patterns, household formations, and aesthetic preferences. Consider geographical differences and barriers. Why would a character who has grown up in a landlocked region with no access to the ocean use ocean metaphors, much less have experience in open-water sailing? A character in a trading town on a trade route might know bits and pieces of several languages as well as a local trade language as opposed to a person in an isolated mountain village whose dialect might be unintelligible to a person from fifty miles away. Consider the cultural ecology of a setting, the ways in which environment influences subsistence and culture. In other words, don’t have people growing water-intensive crops in a desert unless you know how this society is collecting and storing water. Different soil and crops necessitate different tools, so, too, must you decide what implements people use to farm. What can they farm in their region? Whether and how people fish or depend on water-based food depends on what kind of water they live nearby and if they have access to that source. Ecology puts limits on population density. It also makes some regions more vulnerable to famine and disruption. Geography determines what kind of housing and clothing people must have at minimum to survive, and cultures adapt in an interrelationship with the environment they develop within. For example, Pacific Islanders perfected the outrigger canoe to adapt to open ocean shoreline conditions by creating greater stability against waves and chop, while Inuit and other northern peoples invented the slim, light kayak with a wood or whale frame covered by sealskin for hunting and transport in killingly cold waters. The early medieval cog is a round ship, slow but able to carry a lot of cargo and even heavy cannon to protect its cargo. It plied the northern waters contemporaneously with the Viking longship, a sleek, swift vessel with a shallow draft that is both eminently seaworthy and able to raid far upriver and beach on the strand carrying an eager crew of warriors. These are examples of distinctive material culture that tell us something about environmental conditions as well as how these ships and boats were used—for war, for trade, for hunting, for diplomacy, for pilgrimage, for finding new homes, and so on. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

70 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 An Assemblage of Material Culture In each of these situations, a character will have access to (or awareness of) an assemblage of material objects. The presence of specific tools, food, clothing, furniture, living spaces, and religious implements—and how any given character relates to them or is allowed to relate to them—tells the reader an immense amount about the world. Consider sumptuary laws, which regulate status by regulating people’s behavior. Such laws might limit who can eat certain food, might reserve a certain color of cloth for the ruling family, or might forbid merchants from featuring more than a set number of glass windows in their shops. What about ordinary tools? Are there restrictions on who can use or even touch different tools? What about religious objects? Are some off-limits, and, if so, to whom? How does cooking happen? What is the fuel source? Is it scarce and thus needs to be mentioned? Plentiful and can be assumed? Who cleans up? Who does the dirty work? The Spaces Where Life is Lived Oftentimes the best windows into other ways of living are the day-today experiences of the world and the habits, interactions, languages, and rhythms that characterize people’s lives. These spaces are where most life is lived, whether in an isolated hamlet among hard-working farmers, a vast palace of intricate and deadly intrigue, or the forest camp of an army unit scouting for bandits. In the forest camp, for example, a conversation between two soldiers discussing the political events that brought about the infestation of bandits can occur while they are cleaning guns or sharpening blades or checking the fletching of arrows. By this means, readers learn without any information dump what the technology level of the story is and what kind of weapons common soldiers use to fight. What they are eating and who cooked it might also be touched on in their exchange. Scenes like this automatically incorporate social space. What Interaction Patterns Tell the Reader How do soldiers address each other or another soldier passing by? What is their status compared to others in the unit? How do they greet a stranger and figure out how the newcomer fits in? Is their gender, ethnicity, or religion important to the story? Are they from the same town or from different regions? They may act as they normally would, a technique which allows the reader to learn about commonplace assumptions in the society; or, they may be surprised by an event or interchange that is, for them, out of the ordinary, by which the reader, too, learns it is unusual. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Building a Physical and Social Landscape h Kate Elliott 71 Building a Physical and Social Landscape h Miranda Horner The way characters interact with each other tells the readers a huge amount about how the characters see themselves and their place in society. Think carefully about how interaction patterns and hierarchy function within the societies that characters are moving through. Try to understand or define individual characters based on the connections they have to other people. Because of Hollywood’s huge commercial presence, the iconic American ideal of the lone wolf, the gunslinger, the individual hero who works alone without having any significant connections to others oftentimes eclipses the way life is lived by most people, which is among a network of connections, some good, some bad, some indifferent, some intrusive, some bizarre. If a hero functions in a zone free of burdensome obligations and emotions toward others, then people exist not within that network of connections. Rather, the other characters become merely tools to be used on the hero’s journey. Humans are band animals. To generalize, we are commonly defined in— and make our way through—the world in relationship to our ties to others and our societies. Who is our family? Where do we fit into the family? Where does our family fit into the social structure? What is our primary concern in our social relations? Duty and loyalty? Honor? Wealth? Community or individualism? What part does hospitality play in this culture? What about reciprocal ties? Who has those? Status differences can include strong reciprocal ties or it can negate them. How do we act when we meet others? Social Space and Social Power Social space is related to and intertwined with social power. Different usages of social space enforce and reinforce authority, custom, and social patterns and kinships, both within the privacy of the home and outside in the public sphere. This is true across time, across regions, and within a culture. Power dynamics in many parts of the west often rest in control of land and property. But that’s not necessarily how power dynamics are or were measured in other cultures, some of which function through “vertical bonding,” the control of manpower and labor in which reciprocity between patrons and clients is vital to the society’s ability to function. Public interaction is a form of social theater. How is social space used and what does that tell us about a society? For example, does a processional avenue lead to an open temple area that is a public space in which everyone participates in public rites but there is a hierarchy of where people stand and the highest status people are allowed to come closest to the central altar? Or is a worship space surrounded by a wall, which separates believers from Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

72 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 non-believers, but in which every believer is deemed equal and enters via a gate into a shared communal space separate from the public world? Neither of these ways of organizing social space is better—they are just different. And yet they tell us so much about the expression of social space in such cultures. Despite their differences, both center a communal aspect to worship. Both use social space to invoke community and community solidarity, each with its own set of internal rules. Social space includes our relationship to the cosmos and thus how our characters or cultures relate to the cosmos, often in the smallest of ways and not always within spaces designated as authoritatively sacred. Thinking about social space and how it relates to characters allows creators to switch up power dynamics and interactions in unexpected ways. A humble monk confronts a tyrant because of social expectations that give the monk more cultural protection than an ordinary citizen would have. A mercenary soldier without ties to a local culture feels no compunction about stealing sacred objects from a church and killing the priests if they resist. A bakers’ guild stages a work stoppage to protest artificially-raised flour prices and directs the ire of the citizenry at a corrupt mayor. A kidnapped noble who once walked with power through the highest levels of their society finds themselves in a foreign country where their former status means nothing. A Physical and Social Landscape Taken together, details of material culture and social space offer a framework for worldbuilding because these details create both a physical and a social landscape. For instance, if the writer or GM introduces a sixteen-year-old girl who is selling fruit in the marketplace, that means there is a marketplace and some kind of exchange; fruit is sold rather than, or in addition to, being taken for tax or kept for family consumption; and the character lives in a culture where women can and do sell goods in the market rather than being forbidden from doing so. If the scene shows their public presence as both common and accepted, then a great deal of worldbuilding has already been accomplished. No invented world is going to be as complex as the real world. But having the understanding that there is both an external and internal map provides a foundation on which the creator can build a more nuanced landscape and thus richly complex and interesting stories. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Growing Your Worlds Organically h Andrea Stewart 73 ou probably know the feeling. You’ve just finished a particularly immersive game, book, television show, or movie, and your head is buzzing, you might have forgotten to eat a snack or drink a glass of water, and the fictional world you were just in was so real that the one you’re in now feels strange. If you’re anything like me, you’ve also spent so much time chasing that feeling, burning through the selections in the library or your streaming queue, being sad when you inevitably reach the last chapters/episodes of a particularly engrossing book or show—wanting so badly for the story to continue but also desperately needing to know the end. After spending my life chasing that high, as an author, I wanted so badly to create that feeling for my readers too; as a result, I devoted a lot of time to studying the work I loved, trying to figure out how they did that, how to capture that same magic. Plant the Seeds So, how does one accomplish that feeling? How do you get a world to feel lived in when it’s a place that only exists (perhaps vaguely) in your head? To you it may be shiny and new, but for the people that live there, years of footsteps have worn smooth indentations in the centers of stone staircases. Try thinking of worldbuilding as “growing” a world, as the process is not dissimilar to gardening. Start with your seeds, which are your first few basic Y Growing Your Worlds Organically Andrea Stewart How to Build an Immersive World Your Audience Won’t Want to Leave Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

74 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 assumptions—the things that make your world different, unique, that make it fantastical—then grow the rest of your world from those seeds. In order to make these things feel true, think through how these fantastical things affect the world’s inhabitants. An internal logic has to run through your world in order for it to feel immersive. We can accept that your world has a place called Skyland that are islands of land masses that float amongst the clouds, but how do the people in the world coexist and interact with this place? Have elevators been built between the ground and Skyland? Is air travel a primary mode of transport? And what about the vast shadows these land masses cast—how does that affect the people (and other forms of life) on the ground? But don’t just think through the implications, make your characters live with them. In order for a reader to remember that it is raining in a given scene, for instance, at least three reminders must be given. That could be the sound of rain pattering against the windowsill, the feel of moisture in the air, and puddles forming on the ground. This applies to worldbuilding overall as well; it’s not enough to only mention once some consequence of your fantastical elements. The consequences need to permeate your world. They need to be felt in daily life in the ways people think and move. Consistency is Paramount As soon as you forget one of the founding assumptions of your world, or these assumptions fail to make an impact in any meaningful way, a world that might have initially felt like it had fascinating unseen depths begins to feel like an uninteresting shallow fountain—pretty on top but with no substance beneath. Always try to keep not just your founding assumptions in mind, but also the cascading consequences of those assumptions. Let’s return to the Skyland example. Weave the effects of such a world into your story. A character may have heard of someone falling off the edge of a land mass—in spite of the fences or walls that have been built to prevent such accidents—which could be the start of a mystery. Or perhaps an important family’s airship has exploded, setting off a series of highstakes political maneuverings. How does the way your world is built feed into your plot? Sweat the Small Stuff In many ways the small details you sprinkle into your worldbuilding matter even more than larger implications when it comes to drawing your audience into your world. The devil is in the details, but a sense of reality is, too. If your founding assumptions are your world’s seeds, and the cascading consequences of those are the branches of your world, then the details are Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Growing Your Worlds Organically h Andrea Stewart 75 the foliage. Your world needs the foliage in order to live and to breathe. For a sky-dwelling city, an annual migration of birds may cause delays in travel. Perhaps there is an annual holiday where inhabitants throw blossoms off the edge to mark the anniversary of the end of a great war. There are also physical details to consider. Maybe the buildings in Skyland are all made from the same sort of stone . . . because it is the only stone that can be mined from the one quarry on Skyland, and it is too expensive to haul up stone from below. Conversely, a flashy, rich noble might stand out amongst Skyland’s populace by spending the large amount of coin to have statues or a home made of stone imported from below. Be sure to mention such flourishes multiple times so that your audience remembers these fantastical elements exist and, for the people in your world, these are merely facts of life. Engage the Senses Another important technique in creating immersion is to engage the senses when thinking through your world’s internal logic. In the earlier example about the rain, it wasn’t just about giving three reminders; it was about engaging three of the audience’s senses. You hear the sound of the rain, you feel the rain, you see the results of it on the ground. The audience is not just reminded of the rain; they are surrounded by it. Likewise, a lack of rain could be shown through cracked earth, dried lips, and wilted plants. Never underestimate the sense of smell. It can be a powerful way to draw your audience into your world. All it takes to bring certain holiday memories to vivid life for me is the faint smell of ginger and molasses. The lands in the shadow of Skyland might smell earthy or swampy, like freshly turned soil. Try to evoke such memories your audience might have—of cellars, of oldgrowth forests, of the colder places beneath that seldom see the sun. History, Change, and the Passage of Time It is important for your world to feel as though it doesn’t just exist in the present (and future) of the narrative, but also in the past. How has time affected the world you’ve built? Are the buildings old and in need of repair? Have things worn over the years in ways both comfortable and falling into ruin? The history of your world itself is important, but the history of the objects in your world is just as significant. Decay is a natural part of life. How do things decay in your world? At what rate? Who repairs things and who doesn’t, and what do they choose to repair? All of these things can reveal more of your world to your audience. You can build an intricate world, but you need to weather it at the corners for it to feel true. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

76 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 In Skyland, for instance, repair and disrepair of elevators to the sky would play an important role in the inhabitants’ lives. The doors might creak when they open. Rust might be visible at the corners. Maybe the elevator has been used to transport livestock, hasn’t been cleaned recently, and smells faintly of hay and manure. Things can be worn in comfortable ways as well—the grip of a character’s staff, how it has come to subtly mold itself to their hand. A favored chair, fraying in the upholstery but with a pleasant sink in its seat. A cast-iron pot with the bottom nearly giving out. Pruning Back the Clutter While you may think your job is done at this point—the seeds grown, the branches extended, the foliage in place—every good gardener knows that you still need to maintain that garden. While you’re telling your story, be careful to prune back branches that seem to be going nowhere and to leave out details that might otherwise bog your story down. Everything that’s in your head will never make it onto the page but will inform the choices you make and the way you tell your story. For example, you may need to map out a complicated history between two warring families in order to understand the current political situation of your world, but your protagonist may not know the entire story and your audience may not need to, either. Keep only what your audience needs to know in that moment in order to understand basic context. Instilling a Sense of Belonging If you’ve done your job as a worldbuilder right, when you invite your audience into your world, they’ll not just have a sense of awe, they’ll feel like they belong there, too. They’ll end your story with their head abuzz with images, with the sense they’ve woken from a dream they didn’t want to end, with that feeling that they can nearly taste your world at the edge of their senses. They haven’t just consumed a story, they’ve been there. For a short time, they were a visitor in your world, sharing your vision. And, if you’re lucky, all the thought and time you spent building your world will feel totally worth it, when someone who has visited it utters these six words: “I can’t wait to go back!” Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Worldbreathing and the Importance of Space h Rajan Khanna 77 orldbuilding. The word conjures up images of carpenters and masons and metalworkers, laying foundations, building walls and roofs, constructing items and edifices to be solid and sound. Only the ultimate aim, the end result, isn’t a wall or a roof or a house. The end result is a fictional world that comes alive in the mind of a reader or player. But if you look closely, the comparison starts to fall apart. A brick wall missing half its bricks is not a successful wall. For the wall to serve its purpose, to keep out the elements, all the bricks must be present, sealed together with mortar, each tiny space filled in. When it comes to fictional worlds, however, the lure of filling in all the gaps can be a trap. In many cases, filling in the gaps makes your world less, rather than more, effective. When you’re building a world, your creations need space. It seems counterintuitive. Surely the more detail you put into your world, the more alive it becomes. But in most cases, a fully spelled-out world will ultimately be less successful than a partially spelled-out one. How can that be? The first reason is purely practical—there’s not enough time. You could spend every spare moment—pour all of your time, energy, and passion into creating a fictional world—and there will still be gaps and holes, nooks and crannies left to explore and detail. A world, even a small one, is a vast and varied entity. So it makes sense to use what time you have to focus on the things that truly matter. W Worldbreathing and the Importance of Space Rajan Khanna Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

78 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Figuring out what matters can often be difficult, but it’s all part of being a writer or game designer. And whether you find inspiration from a muse or just bash away in a cycle of trial and error, you can get there. But there are some common-sense rules that make the task less daunting. If your story or campaign is set on the eastern coast of one of your world’s continents, for instance, you don’t need to spend a lot of time detailing a nation far to the west, unless that nation also features somehow in the story. Worlds have many layers, and not all of those need to be developed. If your story takes place in a city, you don’t need to work out the histories of all of the wealthy families; identify the heads of the city’s crime syndicates; or how, why, or if the city taxes its citizens—if these elements won’t be part of the story. Likewise, you don’t need pages and pages of backstory on each character, especially if their role is merely to steer a protagonist in a certain direction. A good rule of thumb—and as with many rules like this, it sounds maddeningly simple but can be frustratingly hard—you only need to know enough about your world to make it come alive in your mind and on the page. Here we come to crux of the issue, the true ultimate goal: To make your world come alive. Think of the fictional worlds you love, the stories, characters, and histories—likely, the one thing they have in common is that they came alive for you when you experienced them. One could think of worldbuilding as worldbreathing—breathing life into a collection of words, a skeleton of letters, a foundation of ideas, enacting an alchemy of magical creation that goes back thousands of years, to the first time people told stories and built worlds. This brings us back to the idea of leaving space for the characters—and the readers or players—to explore. While you’re worldbuilding, you’re trying to make the world come alive for you. But when your fictional creation goes out into the universe, you need to make it come alive for your audience. This is the horror and magic of writing—once your words are published, no single reader will experience your world the same way you do. The carefully chosen words that make up your world aren’t bricks, they’re seeds; when you do your job right, these seeds will grow, and blossom, and bloom inside a reader’s or player’s mind . . . but it’s they who provide the water, sun, and soil. The ultimate result is a new and unique world constructed jointly by your words and your audience’s imagination. It can be difficult and more than a little bit scary letting go of “your version” of the world, knowing no one else will ever experience it the same way you did . . . and knowing you have no control over that. But that’s a feature, not a bug; reading a book or Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Worldbreathing and the Importance of Space h Rajan Khanna 79 playing an RPG isn’t a passive experience—it’s a collaboration. Your words, colliding with another person’s brain and imagination, sparks a new act of creation, birthing a unique world partially shaped by that person’s own personality and experiences. Even given pages and pages of description, the face of a character, or their voice, or the exact shape of a mountain, or the way a nation’s currency looks and feels—the mental image your words conjure will vary wildly from person to person. They may be alike, if you’ve done your job well, but no two will be exactly the same. After all, what qualifies as tall to one person might be far shorter than what another person imagines. What constitutes a busy city street, or a gruff voice, or a tingle on the skin is contextualized by the person’s mind, drawing on both the very nature of their brains and their experience in the world. Most beloved works of fiction are so beloved because they make their worlds come alive for their audience—they harness that alchemy, stimulating the imagination, helping them create those worlds in each and every mind. But in order to accommodate this act of collaborative creation, you have to leave the imagination enough space to do its work. If you fill in all the bricks, seal all the gaps, there’s nowhere for that creative energy to go. How to do this is both the challenge and joy of writing. Rather than the bricklayer, you need to become a creative painter, evoking images and feelings with deftly executed brushstrokes instead of layering detail upon detail, all sealed up with mortar. Up close, those brushstrokes might appear sparse and haphazard, but when you step back and take the painting in as a whole, it evokes a world. Let’s consider an example. Imagine the tower of sorcery that’s a prominent feature in one of your main cities. The bricklayer approach to describing the tower might be something like this: The tower was two hundred feet high, constructed of speckled black granite that was mined and cut from the base of Mount Valimar and carried by wagon hundreds of miles to the city where it was sealed together with a mortar mixture that included the blood of its masons, an ancient practice now forgotten. Its base was forty feet in diameter, narrowing to a diameter of ten feet at its highest point. Sorcerers and arcane practitioners of all kinds had been using it as their base of operations since its doors first opened in the year 438, just two years after King Ludicar the First ascended the Azurite Throne. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

80 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 It may not be a difficult passage to parse, but it does throw a lot of details at the reader, many of them not vital. Consider the following passage instead: The tower dwarfed the other buildings of the city, casting a long shadow that reached clear to the outer walls. Its dark stone seemed to sparkle with stardust, and legends said that the blood of its masons had been used in its mortar. For over a hundred years it had been home to sorcerers, mages, and wizards—and held many secrets, arcane and otherwise. In the second example, the key points are still conveyed, but there’s more space for the reader to create the tower without unnecessary distractions. While the details in the first example might be things you, as the author, needed to figure out to create the tower and its relationship to the other parts of the city, those details may not be necessary for the reader and may actually crowd out their imagination. The burden is on the writer to tread the line between being evocative enough to stimulate a reader’s imagination . . . and leaving enough space for them to do so. In fiction, if you’re writing from a close point of view, descriptions and word choice will be influenced by the character’s viewpoint and personality, and unless that person is a craftsman, mathematician, or robot, they may not specify an object’s dimensions or a person’s exact height. In an RPG campaign, however, object dimensions like the height of a door or a statue may be necessary to provide a consistent sense of scale for your players. Only you can determine what serves the world you’re creating and what your audience needs from you to fully immerse themselves. Players in an RPG construct the world in their minds based on what the GM tells them. But RPG players are much more active participants in the story than a reader is, and their adventures and actions help to collaboratively tell the stories set in that world. The more space they’re given, the more they can add, weaving in their backstories and character goals—adding their own brushstrokes to the canvas. Most players will be more engaged and excited by a world they truly feel a part of as opposed to one that they are merely guests in. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Worldbreathing and the Importance of Space h Rajan Khanna 81 Leaving space also allows you to pivot and react to your players’ engagement with the story. An RPG campaign tends to be a living, evolving entity and may not keep the same focus throughout its life cycle. If everything in your world is fully defined before you even start playing, it can become harder to lean into certain aspects of the world that your players find exciting. If you suddenly decide you want to add in a new society of militaristic, fiend-worshipping elves, for example, and you’ve already filled in all the spaces on the map and determined the histories and relationships of each of the nations and cultures, you may be forcing yourself to do some creative contortion—either bending and warping elements of your original worldbuilding or else hacking material out so the new material can go in. Space gives you more options so that when your players express their excitement about the horror elements in your world, there are plenty of shadows and crevices from which more horror can emerge. Breathe life into your worlds, and let them go on breathing. Don’t strangle them—or your readers’ imaginations—with a surfeit of details that will ultimately hinder rather than help. Leave space for your worlds to come alive—for you and their audience—and they will be remembered, long after the last page is turned. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

82 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 y sophomore year of high school, my grades dropped badly enough that I needed to beg for extra credit. My English teacher asked me to read some extra books in the class, which I was happy to do. But the lifeline came with a caveat: I could only choose books from a list the teacher printed out for me. After scanning the list to see a lot of old, dead, white dudes, I found my favorite dead white dude on the list: J.R.R. Tolkien. My teacher knew I’d read the Lord of the Rings trilogy already, but I hadn’t read The Silmarillion. Tolkien’s collection of history, tales, and background notes on the world of Middle-Earth had always intimidated and yet intrigued me, so I chose that. The idea was that my teacher would read the book as well, that way when the time came for my verbal report, they would see how well I’d read and understood the book. The day came for our meeting, and my teacher confessed they hadn’t finished reading it. In fact, they’d be taking it off the reading list because . . . well, it was like trying to read The Bible in a couple weeks. Too tall an order for high school kids. I promptly spent our time together recapping The Silmarillion in, what I realize now, was excruciating detail. I got my extra credit and a small measure of respect for my cheerfulness at tackling such a massive book. (Honestly, I was just happy I dodged reading The Grapes of Wrath.) But what really hit me reading that book—and changed the way I saw Tolkien’s work—was just how much the author drawing back the curtain M Deep Time on Middle-Earth Tobias S. Buckell Layering in Time and Change for More Effective Worldbuilding Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Deep Time on Middle-Earth h Tobias S. Buckell 83 Deep Time on Middle-Earth h John A. Pitts and Ken Scholes dimmed the sense of wonder for me. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, the haunting and majestic procession of the elves readying to journey off into a whole new land in the mysterious West left me imagining such wonders. But reading The Silmarillion’s extensive (and exhausting) level of detail sucked some wind from my sails as a reader. My sense of wonder didn’t have as much room to flower in such clearly defined spaces. Reading The Silmarillion also showed me just how much of an impact time had on making those books feel so grounded, epic, and fully-realized. It taught me that the history of the world before the story is told is as important to worldbuilding as the world the characters currently live in. Setting as a Thin Sheet of Paper Many writers—myself included—have the instinct to focus on the present state of their settings. Draw out a map, mark out cities, bays, harbors, and political borders . . . and there’s your world! Right? Well, of course, not really—there’s much more to it than that. Now and then, I think back to the time one of my kids, when they were in the second grade, came home with a handout from a basic sociology lesson. It listed all the elements of a civilization, broken down for elementary schoolers: geography, architecture, food, culture, language, clothing, etc. I have a bigger list of my own now than was covered in their handout, but that worksheet fleshed out some of the things I may have missed as a less-experienced writer, such as architecture or fashion. While such checklists are useful for worldbuilding oversight, the author must be careful that they do not allow themselves to fall into a “paint-by-numbers” situation—where, in an effort to create divergences from the real world, they just quickly pencil in whatever comes to their mind across that wide range of categories as they go down the checklist. For rich, deep, memorable worldbuilding, we need time and change. A storyline that has hints of other stories passing through it feels more real to readers than one where every dangling thread is neatly tied up. It’s one reason prequels trip up so many creators; the world of the prequel is often designed too neat, too tidy—all the loops and crisscrossing stories already tied up. We lose mystery and wonder when the reader isn’t invited to the table as a co-creator. Deep Time Suggests Hidden Depths Imagine a newly created fictional world’s architecture. Say the denizens of this world live in treehouses with spiraling shapes. Then imagine the spiral treehouses were a recent development. The conical houses you can also see are from the previous generation, and beyond Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

84 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 them are ragged, square treehouses. Why were the current generation of treehouses built this way? Did they ever build on the ground? If so, why did they stop? For many writers, a world that stretches off into the distant past— particularly if paired with a prologue—is a nod to Tolkien’s level of “deep time.” But in these kinds of worlds, often thousands of years can pass in the narrative, and yet the monarch is part of the same dynasty as the one established in the long-ago times, and the borders are more or less the same. Compare that to our own lifetimes where the maps can experience huge shifts over a very short timespan. Our attempts at evoking deep time often miss the mark by focusing only on recent change. It’s there writers like Tolkien dazzle. Human towns displace others, dwarves seek to regain their grandfather’s fortunes, kingdoms fall into stagnation (or did generations ago), while elves that have lived for thousands of years walk amongst the shorter-lived hobbits and humans. There is history everywhere in Middle-Earth, trails of stories that pass through the setting. This may seem like an enormous amount of work, but we don’t need to fall into the trap of assuming it all has to be done ahead of time with copious notes and plans and timelines and detailed family genealogies; no one needs to write our own Silmarillion. Much of these kinds of details can be slipped in as we write, or one can wait until doing revisions to add this depth. If change suffuses the story, the reader will be faced with the knowledge that the grand, epoch-shaping events depicted aren’t on rails moving toward inevitable, foregone conclusions, but a narrative that connects to the deep history of change in your world. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Deep Time on Middle-Earth h Tobias S. Buckell 85 Deep Time on Middle-Earth h John A. Pitts and Ken Scholes Layer It In! If you do enjoy fully building worlds ahead of time (and for some authors that’s half the fun), one of my favorite tricks came from watching a team of high schoolers present a world they’d created at the teen writing camp Shared Worlds. The presentation started with a typical fantasy map, showing the rivers, mountains, towns, roads, and borders of their world, rendered using Photoshop. With a click, they made the borders disappear. Another click, and new borders appeared—but from an older age that defined the previous age’s political realignments. There’s obvious utility there, but the revelation for me was more profound: You can stack history on top of a map. Doing this for your world can help you embrace the idea of change and overlap. I’ve created maps that show religions that spill over borders, razed towns that became ruins, and even marked famous battles on the maps invisible to the characters who live many years later. Sometimes I don’t even have concrete plans about what to do with the imagined layers, but creating them forced me to dig into the past—to imagine the changes and the histories of the worlds I’ve built. Consciously incorporating change and time into my worldbuilding has caused some storylines to surface that I would not have thought to include otherwise. It’s a valuable tool to keep in your writer’s toolbox, one that allows us to add some depth when we start to look at our settings as archeologists and historians would. So, start digging into your novel’s deep past and see what turns up. Just don’t tell us every little detail about it! Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

86 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 met my husband playing D&D. Bear with me, it’s a bit relevant to the topic at hand. His mother was my hairdresser in high school, and she thought we would hit it off if we met. So he called me and invited me to play with his small group of friends. I’d heard of it, I’d always wanted to play, so of course I said yes. Later, we got married and a relative got drunk at the wedding and spat peanuts at everybody during the ceremony. And my ex-boyfriend painted rude things on our car. But that’s not the important part. The thing is, I loved the game immediately. I always wanted to be a writer, but growing up on a tiny farm in the boonies made that seem impossible. But there was no doubt. I was hooked, and I wanted more. I’m sure most of you know that fever. I wanted to tell stories about what I was learning from the game. I wanted to fill out that world that hadn’t even existed a few days previous. Remember when you couldn’t concentrate on anything because you were thinking about your next gaming session? I expressed that obsession by making maps. Maps of towns, of dungeons, of castles. I spent a ton of time on them, added in volumes of data I knew no one would ever see. I dreamed of running a long campaign when players would open every door in every hut, tavern, and palace, and I would have the details ready for that moment. What a heroine I would be! I showed the maps back then to my future husband, and he was very impressed. He pored over them gleefully. But at some point, a look of puzzlement came over his face. I asked what was wrong. I The Topography of Verisimilitude Gail Simone or, What Walt Disney Taught Me About Worldbuilding Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

The Topography of Verisimilitude h Gail Simone 87 “Well, everything’s flat,” he said. “All your dungeons and houses and buildings… it’s all flat.” He didn’t mean it unkindly, but it was true. And it was one of those moments in life that you don’t realize are going to shape you forever in some way. I was using graph paper, and so I hadn’t even thought of adding a second or third story—because I was looking at it from above. I didn’t even know how to convey such a thing. Imagine how dull that flatness would be, visually. How unrealistic. Also . . . where’s the motivation to explore when one side of my city looked the same as the other? It hit me hard, in a good way—and it’s a metaphor I use all the time, for more than just maps. Your setting doesn’t feel alive? Add depth. Your landscape feels barren? Build towers. Your characters don’t conflict believably? For god’s sake, add dimension. This is a good lesson for almost any creative. But especially when you’re building a world you hope has the charisma and intrigue to bring in visitors. I’ve written hundreds of comics, and I have often envied the breathing room a novelist gets (the greedy bastards). We comics writers have to convey a setting in mere pages, sometimes just panels. We don’t get to have lengthy exposition. In the early days of my career, I struggled with this, and left a lot to the wonderful artists I was blessed to work with. But then I came across a wonderful, long-out-of-print book where Walt Disney and several of his imagineers discussed building Disneyland. Not just the mechanics of it, but the philosophy. I use what I learned in that book every time I write. And now I’m sharing it with you, on the condition that you don’t spit peanuts at people, because that’s just rude. Remember, when you’re building a world, “realism” isn’t the goal. What we want is the illusion of believability. And to do that, we must add dimension everywhere we can. Separate the Outside World Walt didn’t want people thinking of the real world while in his park. He was well aware that the land around him, all formerly orange groves, was going to become a tornado of touristy, gaudy signage. Originally, it was thought that a huge wall would be the barrier to block all that out, but that would destroy the fantasy just as surely. Additionally, he wanted there to be a gateway, a subconscious feeling of arrival, upon entering. Something that was new and exciting, but welcoming at the same time. (For your world, “compelling” might Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

88 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 be a better word to use here, as your world may in fact be completely unwelcoming, like Mordor or Apokolips.) Walt’s solution was what is called a “berm” in theme park jargon. It’s a barrier that goes all around, that elevates the exterior perimeter of the location, separating the Insider from the Outsider just as completely as any fence. If you go to Disneyland, you may never see the berm itself; it’s covered with trees and other camouflage. But once inside, you know . . . you’re in. This can be applied to building worlds and settings for RPG campaigns and fiction as well. If your setting is fantasy, you will traditionally want to apply that notion of arrival and of being inside. It’s a feeling your readers and players will embrace without necessarily even fully being aware of it. But it’s the feeling, the richness of a world that makes audiences want to go back for more. People want to return to the place that enthralled them, mystified them, and welcomed them. When a reader reads Batman, a big part of the appeal is, they’ve already read a hundred stories of Gotham City. They know who lives there, they know about the Batcave and Arkham Asylum and Blackgate Prison. And writers of Gotham stories rarely violate that feeling of being inside with mentions of real world cities. Having Batman mention San Francisco simply deflates the feeling of fantasy that is at the heart of his locale. The berm tends to be even higher in purely fantasy settings. Middle-Earth is surrounded by waters; Oz can only be reached by tornado or balloon. The feeling of being inside something rare, something special, something other people don’t know about is tremendously powerful. It’s joining a club, it’s belonging. It’s recognizing landmarks that don’t really exist. We have to return to the real world eventually. A berm, physical or literary, lets us forget all that for a while. Build a Weenie You’ll notice at every theme park, there’s something tall and visually arresting just off in the distance, something that catches your eye and won’t let go. Walt called them “weenies,” and that terminology is still in use today. At Disneyland, the castle is the heart of the park, the first thing you notice when entering Main Street USA. Then there are the mountains; Space, Big Thunder, and the Matterhorn. Not only do they pull you subconsciously deeper into the experience, they also form a visual guide in your brain, so that you can’t help but navigate based on them, just as you would if an actual castle or mountain was looking down at you in the real world. Fantasy is rich with weenies. I get it, it sounds weird. But I like saying it. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

The Topography of Verisimilitude h Gail Simone 89 The hill called Watership Down in the book of the same name, the central tree of Lothlórien in Lord of the Rings, the Daily Planet building of Metropolis. It’s not an accident. These settings have that visual clue of immediately making your audience aware of where they are . . . and where the action is. But, more than that, the weenies elevate the reality of your world. If we’re on the ground looking up, we are looking in the distance, we’re imagining a much bigger setting than whatever road we’re walking or hovel we’re resting in. The weenie concept of having a visual cue to draw people in offers utility far beyond mapmaking. It helps flesh out characters and cultures, too. Every setting should have characters that are sky-dwellers, penthouse owners, and castle-building monarchs. The powerful who are either righteous, malevolent, or somewhere in the middle. And deliciously (for the writer, who craves opportunities for conflict), that also implies the opposite, an entire class of people who live in more desperate means. Instinctively, we understand this in a way that is beyond question. We know that there will always be the powerful—and the powerless. And every one of them is a story. Their own story, with caves and towers of their own. Kill Your Darlings An encyclopedia is not a story, nor is it a campaign. We’ve all read that novel where the author tells you everyone’s lineage going back generations; we’ve all played that RPG where the GM can’t shut up about the history of that one block of cheese you stumbled over. That’s not really storytelling—it’s a hostile play environment. Call HR and get a new book or GM, I say. The reader will tell you when they want to learn more. They’ll write excited reviews. They’ll post about it on social media. They’ll draw fanart and write fanfic. They’ll cosplay characters. If you’re a GM, they’ll paint and customize miniatures, they’ll engage with your story and setting and try add their characters’ stories to it as well. It’s important as a worldbulder that you don’t let your love of your setting become a tedious burden to your readers or players. Show them your sizzle reel, let them immerse themselves; if you do, they’ll come and ask you who built the Verdant Tower of the Crimson Plains or whatever the hell it is you keep going on about. Remember, storytelling is the cake, worldbuilding is the decoration. You need both, but eating only the frosting will make you sick in a hurry. Think big. But also think small. Think in dimensions. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

90 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 o god, one god, or many gods? Socialist, capitalist, or theocratic? A history of conquering or being conquered? Patriarchal or matriarchal structure? These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves when we start to build fictional worlds. The answers can help us create unique, interesting settings the audience will want to immerse themselves in. But these kinds of questions also start out with a base assumption: that all the conditions in our created world are modeled in some way on the conditions in our real world. Choosing between a history of being the conqueror or the conquered interesting, to be sure, but what about creating a world where the very idea of conquest—where the very word “conquer”—doesn’t even exist? After all, there is nothing that says a world we build has to share any similarities at all to the world we live in. That’s one of the great joys of making things up—you don’t have to follow any rules at all. The truth is, though, we’re all so ingrained in our own experience of living in our world, of being a part of our culture and society, that it can be hard to see—much less understand and break apart—our own assumptions, biases, and the lenses through which we view things. It’s easy to have a long debate about the kind of religion or gods that are in your setting, but it’s much harder to imagine a world that has never even had the concept of gods or religion. Think of all the things that would be different in a world like that; origin stories would be completely different; there’d be N Break the World to Make the World Shanna Germain Eschewing History and Cultural Norms to Create Unique Settings Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Break the World to Make the World h Shanna Germain 91 Break the World to Make the World h Elizabeth Ann Scarborough no holy wars, no swear words based on deities; there’d be no stories that only make sense within the context of a particular holy book; there’d be completely different ideas about sex, and sin, and so on. Questioning our base assumptions is vital for creating settings that leave our world behind—but it’s only the first step. We also want to look at why doing so matters and how to go about creating new worlds using what we’ve learned. Break the Norms Why create worlds that eschew the world as we know it? It’s a great way to create unexpected and evocative settings. Breaking apart what we know allows us to use all the pieces in new and interesting ways. Audiences who appreciate novelty and creativity will be drawn to such unique worlds. It’s also a fantastic opportunity for us to experience things from an entirely new perspective . . . which then can also inform how we look at the world we actually live in. The more we read and learn about history, culture, and religion, the more we understand our own blind spots—those things that seem to be inherent truths, but which are actually just cultural norms that we’ve known our whole lives. One thing to be wary of: When breaking apart the world you know to create the world you don’t, it’s important to consider our entire world at large, not just your own particular culture, country, or experience. Sometimes when a creator learns about other cultures that do things differently from their own, they seize upon those differences and throw them whole-cloth into their setting. Though finding those cultural differences can be a good starting point for making a world feel truly different, leaving it at that risks portraying someone else’s “normal” as our “exotic.” This doesn’t mean you can’t use ideas and inspirations from other cultures in your settings—you simply must be mindful that there’s a huge difference between using something as a jumping off point for creativity and just depositing a large part of someone else’s culture down into your setting. Any time you’re working with or incorporating a culture other than your own, it’s good practice to hire a consultant to ensure that your usage isn’t appropriative. Now that we’ve explored some of the benefits of creating worlds other than our own, let’s look at some simple tips for how to go about doing so. Interrogate Your Assumptions The first step in exploring settings that eschew the world we know is to start asking big questions. For example: “Am I operating from an assumption that this is the way the world must be?” Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

92 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 If the answer is yes, you might go with the idea anyway—that is a valid choice. But you might instead play around with the idea, to ask yourself that other all-important question: “What if?” What if this culture has never known any kind of religion? What if there is a world whose inhabitants have no concept of the individual self? What if everyone in this world identified as the same gender and/or sexual orientation? Some of the things we can start questioning about our own experiences and culture when building worlds include: • Religion • Politics • Gender • Sexuality • The forces of nature • Various -isms, including sexism, racism, and ableism • Consumerism • Language Of course, it’s important to recognize that this is a huge topic, and no essay—including this one—can be comprehensive on such a weighty issue. Start Small It’s usually best to choose a single element of our world to break when creating your setting, rather than breaking them all at once. That’s because everything about a setting is a tangled web. Change one thing—even one that seems unimportant—and you could already be changing everything. Let’s say your society is heavily community-based. In such a society, it might mean that concepts like individualism, hierarchy, personal success, etc. don’t even exist. Characters’ names likely would be tied to their particular community, not to their parents or their own accomplishments. (Would they even have names at all, since names denote an individualism that doesn’t exist in this society?) Grounding the Audience The idea of a society not having names brings up an important point in worldbuilding: When creating unique settings, ensure that you don’t go so far afield that your world becomes too convoluted for the audience to grok. The further your setting moves away from the world we know, the harder it will be for others to comprehend. Imagine reading a novel where the characters had no way to denote themselves or playing a game where the Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Break the World to Make the World h Shanna Germain 93 Break the World to Make the World h Elizabeth Ann Scarborough player characters didn’t have names or unique abilities. It’s an interesting challenge to conceptualize such a scenario, but it’s one that needs a strong solution if you hope to keep the audience’s interest and make it comprehensible. To help the audience feel grounded, it’s useful to cover both the big picture and the small details. The big picture might be something like, “This culture doesn’t have the concept of consumerism. Everything is shared as needed.” And the small details would be things like how the society has no economic system, no money, no markets. This means that the characters will never be lacking for much, but they’re also accustomed to readily giving up their possessions when someone else has a greater need for them. Hoarding would be an alien concept. So would stealing. It changes not just the culture itself, but what the characters do and what their goals and roles are. Build Back Creatively When doing this kind of worldbreaking and worldbuilding, it’s important to not only eliminate things; you must also imagine what might fill the void left by what you removed. If there isn’t religion, for instance, how and where does the community gather and why; what are their celebrations like; where did their guiding principles and social mores come from; what do they go to war over (if they even do go to war)? This is where things can get really fun . . . and really weird. If you don’t have to play by the rules that exist, then you can add anything into your setting and find a justifiable reason for it to be there. You don’t even have to obey the forces of nature as we know them. Your world could have a different kind of sun (or suns), climate, geography, and so on. Of course, this will cause the world to be filled with unusual flora and fauna, but it will also have an effect on the culture and mindset of the characters. What if the characters live on a world where gravity’s pull is less powerful than Earth’s? Would the inhabitants of this world still place so much emphasis on height the way we do in the real world? Would they still bow down to show deference, rise their lauded up on thrones and pedestals, believe their gods lived somewhere in the skies above? Perhaps in a world with less gravity, it would be a sign of power and prowess to be able to stay grounded, to dig deep, to keep your feet planted firmly on the ground. Imagine the rulers and the rich live in complex structures deep below the earth and the poor live in needlelike buildings reaching toward the sky. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

94 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Untangle History History, too, can be a complicated and tangled web. Sometimes we don’t even understand how many parts of our culture are directly built on top of something that happened hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years ago. If you change something in history, you must follow that thread all the way through . . . and when you do, you’ll discover thousands of implications, small and large, in your new world. What if the dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct and were still around at the same time as humans? That idea in of itself is beautifully worldbreaking, because it would likely change the evolutionary timeline for humans, and we probably would have evolved differently in order to co-exist in a dinosaur-filled world. But it would also cause many other ripples through history, from wars to science to religion, and would likely lead modern culture and modern humans to a whole new place. Deepen Through Language While most people won’t know (or care) about the obscure origins of the words and phrases that you use to describe things in your setting, it’s a fun exercise to see just how much of what we say is derived from a specific history or cultural element. For example, phrases like “by the skin of my teeth” and “gave up the ghost” are directly out of the Bible. Even a common word like graveyard comes from a religious background—graveyards were originally burial places in the church yard. The word cemetery, on the other hand, comes from Greek and means “sleeping place.” In a world where individualism and advancement isn’t as important as it is in ours, is there even a distinction between “me” and “us” in the language? Do names matter? What about honorifics? If the society you create isn’t patriarchal (or even tied to that kind of thinking), then how are family names passed along? (If they are at all?) Language around gender is another interesting idea to explore. Some of the world’s languages are deeply and inherently gendered—in many, even objects are assigned a gender by the language itself. In a world where there are many genders, or one where gender isn’t important at all, how does that affect the language of objects, actions, and individuals? Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Break the World to Make the World h Shanna Germain 95 Break the World to Make the World h Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Avoid Perfection Utopic worlds—such as ones without racism or sexism, without slavery or disease or poverty, where everyone is happy and healthy and without trauma—are tempting (perhaps more so now than ever) but they’re also likely to feel fake and hard to believe. Not to mention that by creating a “perfect” world, you’re removing what might be the very heart of story: conflict. Without conflict, what do the characters do in your world, how are they tested, how do they grow? Additionally, when creating “utopias,” take care not to eradicate things that might be offensive to the audience if they were eradicated, such as gene-splicing technology that eliminates any people with disabilities, neurodivergences, or mental illnesses. We as humans know life is complicated and messy. And we as storytellers know stories live in those places where things don’t match up perfectly, in the broken places and the struggles. What If? There are so many ways to interrogate our understanding of the world in order to design new and interesting settings. Start with what interests you the most, then ask the all-important question: “What if?” Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

96 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 fficiency is not a value you hear writers talk about a lot. It’s a little clinical, and a lot of creative people chafe at the clinical. But the more books I write, the more valuable efficiency is to me, especially when I’m building a new world from scratch. Let me put it this way: If you only have room in your backpack for three tools, but you have five tasks to perform, you want your tools to be able to perform more than one task. Likewise, there’s only so much room for worldbuilding in any given story. So when I set about building a world, I want to include the elements that can do more than one job. And one of those is religion. Religion tends to come with a lot of baggage, which is why many writers prefer not to bother with it. But think of how much work the religions of the Jedi and the Sith do in Star Wars. Or how much you learn about the world of Dune via the Bene Gesserit shaping genetic destiny and seeding prophecy. Or what the culture of Kushiel’s Dart would lose without Elua or Naamah’s Service. The religions in those works add complexity (and, you know, plot) to those stories. Telling Origin Stories So, why are fictional religions such an efficient worldbuilding element? There are a few reasons. First, religion suggests origin. For example: in Poland, Catholicism was (and is) closely tied to national identity, distinguishing it from the predominantly Lutheran Germany to the west, and the predominantly Orthodox countries to the east. This has continued E Revel in Revelations Veronica Roth Worldbuild Efficiently with Fictional Religions Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

Revel in Revelations h Veronica Roth 97 into modern times. Within the last decade, 87% of the population was baptized Roman Catholic. The church has an important place in Polish history, too—you can’t talk about Polish identity without talking about Catholicism. You can’t talk about Tibet without talking about Buddhism. You can’t talk about Israel and Palestine without talking about Islam and Judaism. You can’t talk about Parable of the Sower’s America without talking about Earthseed. Religion is not the only aspect of those places that defines their origins, but it can’t be ignored, either. Establishing a Society’s Priorities Second, religion communicates priorities. Not just those of an individual, but those of a culture. Take the concept of “filial piety,” from Confucianism3 . “Filial piety” is simply described as devotion to family, particularly elders. It centers the family unit as the most important unit in society. It also prioritizes parents over, say, a spouse or a sibling. If you were basing a fantasy religion on filial piety, you would have to decide to what degree your character adheres to this “deference to elders” philosophy. You would also have to decide how this affects the political structure of your fantasy country, as well as how it impacts the legal system—children’s rights! Medical proxies! etc.—and fables—what stories do they share with each other that communicate this ideal?—among other things. Generating Conflict and Culture Through Differentiation And lastly, religion is also a useful point of differentiation. Rarely do we encounter a culture in which there is only one religion universally practiced, and even within a single religion, there is always some variation in religious commitment and belief. These differences create conflict, and conflict informs worldbuilding. Are there systems in place to prohibit “fringe” or alternative religious practice? Laws? Is there a history of conflict between believers and nonbelievers? Is there proselytizing and/or evangelism? Missionaries? Another form of differentiation is in clergy. Who are the clergy in this religion? Do they withdraw from society or participate in it? Are they predominantly one gender, or are they gender-inclusive? Are they well-paid or undervalued? What buildings do they serve in? Are those buildings beautiful and ornate? How much space do they take up in a city or a village? These questions give us a lot of information—not only about the religion itself, but about the culture that surrounds it, too: What they love, what they hate, what they fear, what they invest in, what they’re willing to legislate. 3 Not always considered a religion but, as a belief system, it still works for our purposes. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937

98 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Flavor or Focus In the examples I’ve given—Star Wars, Dune, Kushiel’s Dart, Parable of the Sower—their authors chose to make their fantasy religions a focal point, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve never written a story that revolves around a fantasy religion, though I’ve always included it in worldbuilding in one way or another. In my book Chosen Ones—which is about a group of adults who saved the world as teenagers and are called upon to put aside their trauma and do it again—I created an alternate universe in which magic had proliferated on Earth in 1969. When considering religion, I thought of the stratification that often occurs now between the more liberal and the more conservative branches of the same religions. In the world of Chosen Ones, there’s a moment where the protagonist overhears a Christian pop song on the radio called “Jesus, You Did a Working on My Heart” (a “working” being an act of magic)—which tells us at least one branch of Christianity in this world has embraced magic, tying it to miracle. However, in the world of the story there are also whole cities, known as Haven Cities, that are closed off to the practice of magic for religious reasons. These are all just small details that populate the background of the main story, informing character origins or setting the scene, but they contribute to the feeling that this is a real world that the characters really live in. (Also known as “verisimilitude.”) A world doesn’t need to be “realistic” so much as it needs to feel true. But making a world that feels true is a tall order. That probably applies to any area of worldbuilding—“make up a fake religion” is right up there with “how does the magic work” and “what does the setting look like” in terms of Big Worldbuilding Tasks. (Also known as “Tasks that feel impossible if you can’t break them down into smaller pieces.”) In my experience, the hardest part is usually knowing where to begin. But the bad news is the same as the good news: There is no one definitive “right place.” People like to ask writers whether they start with plot or character; my answer is always “neither.” I start with a concept and an image, and everything else comes after. I know other writers who begin with just a scene or a line of dialogue. It doesn’t really matter where you start, it only matters that you start. Worldbuilding starts with a single decision, one that you commit to and allow to inform every choice that comes after. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937