It’s funny. I’m known among my writer friends as hating worldbuilding and saying that it’s a waste of time. This is partly an earnest opinion and partly projection. I see in myself the ability to be one of those people with binders full of notes nobody cares about. I tend to think it’s better to write a story and consider world details when it becomes relevant to the story.
Well, it’s recently become more relevant. Here’s the reason: I have a first draft of a 10,000 word intermission story. It comes between Secret of Gloam Lake and the second adventure, and it’s meant to give a tour of The Stranger, a tavern that exists outside of the normal world, which serves as a home and trade hub for hoppers like you. Beyond that, it sows the seeds of the overarching plot, which will eventually veer into cosmic horror and, better yet, cosmic wonder.
This has led me to do a lot of thinking to make sure the world setting and its high fantasy elements are equipped to tell all the stories I want to tell. A world with a background framework that can support any kind of fantastical nonsense my brain produces, without the world feeling too constrained by a particular gimmick.
As a Sci-fi/fantasy fan, surely you’ve experienced both pitfalls. It can feel stale if every problem in the world is explained by meteor rocks that mutate people; the simplicity ironically ends up feeling unrealistic, because the real world isn’t so neat and tidy.
At the same time, you want some sense of the world’s general rules and logic you can sink your teeth into. It can be unsatisfying when writers randomly introduce something with big implications and then forget about it. The starship engineer figured a way to send a message back in time? Yeah, that will never come up again, because it would break the show.
I’ve also realized that, if I want other people to contribute to the world, I need to give them a more solid framework so they know how they can contribute, what gaps to fill in.
All that is to say I’ve made up 4 or 5 alternate cosmologies recently and always seem to end up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or some wikipedia article about the mysteries of spacetime. But as of last week, I think I’ve settled on a pretty solid foundation. A world where you can take a Naga Crossroads to the Arc of Heaven, measure your chime acuity, tunnel through the dream and wander the paths of Heth. My next task, then, is to rewrite the intermission story with a clearer world setting in mind.
And with that, thanks for reading and let me send you on your way with a traditional blessing:
“May those lost in Heth be found wise in the Eyes of the Morai. Let the wanderer
take solace while he may, for the paths of Heth are lonely.”