The Grounding Principles of Worldbuilding

Me, apparently, getting quartered by the Four Horsemen of Distraction: Fancy, Whimsy, Obsession and Acedia.

What’s this bugger been up to, then? Well, frankly, fulfilling both the golden and silver lose-conditions for an RPG enthusiast: not running, not playing. On to the mitigating silver-lining, then: I’ve been reading, pondering and turning wheels, of course, buttering the very toast of the armchair go-getter!

As I start to gain momentum for some light lifting on the world building front I come to grips with a slew of questions.

I know what I’m striving for, a game-world that players will want to explore and me the GM will want to create and load down with intricacies and layers of symbolism.

How to get there and make it compelling, that is something else entirely.

A world that is faux-medieval in outlook but that has a bronze age beating heart, much like the original game itself. Magic that exists as a rare and unharnessed force, fragmented and decentralized shards of civilization, little to no supra-tribal cohesion, deities that are simultaneously present yet out of reach.

If my reading pile didn’t stand quite so tall, I might get something out of reading some Jack Vance or Robert E. Howard, both unknown authors to me and that probably carry the vibe that I’m after.

Thought of rereading Tolkien, but the first time around left a sour taste and one I don’t care to rekindle. Pondering upon it, many of the conceits he laid down are of use and interest to me: the different races as isolationist and carrying on with little interaction instead of the contemporarily standard cosmopolitanism that I find completely displaced, the depiction of foes as twisted tools of evil gods instead of misunderstood noble savages (that the publisher ensures – of course – that you'll get to play in a future supplement of the rules, as long as you front the cash).

I speak of “evil”, but rest assured: I enforce no notions of morality upon the players. Alignment has been thrown out the window; that splattering sound you heard when you began reading this post was it, hitting the pavement outside.

When I get to the grounding principles, I begin to appreciate the true measure of how we’re trapped in the box of our own preconceptions, our cultural and geographic world-view. I can call the north a hot land of deserts and the south a lurid polar landscape, it just won’t ring right with my fellow continental europeans, who have been nurtured with maps featuring their country of origin as the focal point and to whom the knee-jerk of “deserts north, snow south” would rub their fur right against the grain.

It’s not that I’m not after some degree of knee-jerk and out-and-out weirdness, it’s just that it all needs a proper contextualization of stable and predictable geographic elements so that it’ll hang together when put up on the wall for display.

Nonetheless, I don’t think using the real world as the stage solves all, if any, of my problems. You can argue that the physical geography will look right as peaches but then it is the civilizational deviance dictated by the existence of deities, demihumans and supernatural entities that’ll derail the entire affair right back into the muddy pit of disbelief.

But, going back to Tolkien, it behooves one to appreciate that, for all of his creative mythos building, he did not stray far from the contemporary european worldview: northerners are pale, southrons are swarthy. Cold is to the north, Familiar is to the west, Heat is to the south, Exoticism is to the east; It was very much a philologist’s dream, not a geographer’s one.

Could have been worse: G.R.R Martin simply grafted - root, trunk and leaf - both the geography and history of Europe wholesale into an ersatz-fantasy simulacrum. Anyone endowed with a knowledge of history ought to recognize Martin for the hack that he is.

In the end, I’m afraid I’m not here to trumpet a solution, but merely to appreciate the problem.

It is also apparent that any solution to be reached will have to forcibly consist in a pretty personal set of choices, one that I expect will be of little use to anyone else, for it is such a sensitive array of dials and knobs that the best one can hope for as an author is for someone to nibble bits off to go chew in their own private corners.