On The Principles Of World Building

Okay time to get back on the wagon people. Even if only for a day.

I love world building. I do it more or less constantly, for self enjoyment. I create and discard settings without a second glance, and am at the point where any really interesting idea I have demands it's own setting. The idea is the painting, the setting is the frame.

Of course, if ideas are paintings, then settings are rather more like galleries, and one hopes the gallery has more then one good picture. It becomes a bit of a game: what do you highlight? Do you feature only original work, or do you take from others? How do you arrange everything. If nothing else, it's a fun metaphor.

Did I mention I REALLY like this analogy?

At any rate, I have realized that my world building has three central tenets. They are Inclusiveness, Contrariness, and Simulationism.

INCLUSIVENESS

Inclusiveness is what I want to include. This usually refers to external ideas, other people's works. For instance, I have yet to make a sci-fi setting without lightsabers. BECAUSE LIGHTSABERS ARE AWESOME.

TOTALLY AWESOME

The ideas I'd like to include can be bigger. For example, I want this setting to be science fiction. It's a label that covers dozens of ideas I'd like to include, such as mega-corps, space travel, other worlds, the far future, ect. Often half the work is taking such grandiose inclusive statements and paring them down.

And the things I can want to include can also be much vaguer. In the current setting I'm working on, I want to include the ability to have Outlaw Star and Firefly style broke episodes. I want the players to have a spaceship, and for each session to be a madcap rush to pay their docking fees, fuel costs, and ship-mortgage. That kind of statement is the opposite of the genre statement, in that rather then be parred down, it needs to be built up. Okay, so I'll need a space fairing civilization, individual ownership of star ships, and someone powerful enough to collect what's owed if the players skip town. As you can see, there's some work ahead here too.

CONTRARINESS

Contrariness is just that: me being contrary. Going against convention. There's two ways to do this. The first is exclusion: what ideas do I not want to include? Well, sentient aliens. I think life is out there all right, but I don't we'll meet it any time soon. Also, I lack the time and skill to make up, completely off of my head, a unique alien biology, sociology, history, technology, and so on. It's just WAAAAAAY to much work. So that's something that's not going to appear in the gallery, if you will.

The second way to be contrary is to twist things. Using the previous example, I don't want separately evolved alien species who just happen to all be on the same technological level as humanity. But I do believe that we'll make great advances in genetic modification in the future. If a regular human were to meet such genetically modified person, they might not even realize they were once the same species! So why not fill the stars with Star Trek aliens: men with funny foreheads. This way I can have my cake and eat it too: there's a bunch of weirdo aliens, but they're all descendant from humans.

Well it explains why they're all humanoids, doesn't it?

As you can see, contrariness is in some ways the art of curation. You wanted to include a bunch of stuff: now some of it we remove, and some of it change around. Once you know what big ideas you want to use, the real work comes.

SIMULATIONISM

Simulationism is having to connect all my fancy pants ideas in some way that makes sense. If there are lightsabers, who has them? Who makes all those starships? If there's a bunch of aliens that are all modified humans, how did that come about? If genes are so malleable as to make all these species, then what's up with planets only having one race apiece? Answering these questions, and filling in all the blanks, is the role of simulationism. I'm just trying to get things to make sense. And occasionally the justifications are so strange or novel that they become original ideas themselves! In this way, idea begets idea, and the best settings, the really strange and weird ones, the ones that make your heart race with possibilities, grow on themselves and get weirder and stranger.