World 8
Worldbuilding
How to make a place feel older and larger than what the player will ever see.
A player only ever sees a sliver of your world, and yet they can tell at once whether anything is behind it. Worldbuilding is the work that makes that sliver feel like part of something: rules that hold, names that belong together, a past that left marks. These words let you ask for exactly that, and let you stop before you have written a thousand years of history nobody will ever read.
- SettingWhere and when the game takes place, and the conditions of life there. It decides what can happen, who is around and what everyone takes for granted.
- LoreEverything known about the world beyond the immediate plot: its history, gods, wars and customs. Players usually meet it in pieces and mostly optionally.
- Canon and retconCanon is what officially counts as having happened in the world. A retcon changes that after the fact, so something established is now said to have been different.
- World bibleThe reference document that holds the true answers about your world: the timeline, the names, the rules, how things are spelled. It is written for the team, not for players.
- Iceberg principleKnow far more about your world than you show. Hemingway's version: an iceberg moves with dignity because only one-eighth of it is above water, and the rest can be felt.
- Internal consistencyThe world obeys its own rules every time, whatever those rules are. A world can be as strange as you like, as long as it stays strange in the same way.
- Suspension of disbeliefThe player agrees to accept things that are not true, in exchange for a story. Samuel Taylor Coleridge named it in 1817.
- VerisimilitudeThe quality of seeming true, which is not the same as being true. Small, specific details make a made-up thing feel as if it has been observed.
- ToneThe attitude a work takes to its own events: grim, silly, cosy, cruel. The same facts can be told in any tone and produce a different game.
- High conceptA premise so clear it can be understood and wanted from one sentence. It gives everyone on the team the same picture of the game.
- FactionsGroups with their own goals, beliefs and grudges, often against each other. Helping one usually costs you with another.
- Hard and soft magicHard magic has clear rules the audience knows. Soft magic stays mysterious. Brandon Sanderson's First Law: an author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands it.
- History layersA place that shows several past eras at once: a modern town on an older town on something older still, each leaving marks the next one built around.
- EcologyWhat everything in the world eats, and what eats it. A place with real ecology has creatures with reasons to be where they are, doing things unrelated to you.
- Used futureA world whose things are old, dented and repaired, so they seem to have been in use for years. George Lucas used the phrase about Star Wars in 1977, and it applies to any setting, not only the future.
- NamingNaming people and places using a consistent set of sounds, so that they sound as if they come from one culture. The rules for which sounds can sit together are called phonotactics.
- ConlangA language invented for a work, with its own sounds, grammar and words. Real ones are also given a history, with sound changes that split one old tongue into several new ones.
- In-world documentsLetters, audio logs, signs and item descriptions that exist inside the fiction. Each is written by someone, for someone, for a reason, and that is what makes them feel found and not delivered.
- Cultural textureThe ordinary habits that make a people particular: what they eat, how they greet each other, what is rude, what they swear by. It is mostly small and rarely explained.
- The map as a storyGeography explains history: towns grow at river crossings, borders follow mountains, roads go around the marsh. A map that follows those reasons tells a story before anyone speaks.
- Fridge logicSomething that seemed fine at the time, and only falls apart later, when you are at the fridge and have stopped to think. Alfred Hitchcock is credited with calling these icebox scenes.
- ScaleHow big the world claims to be against how big it actually is. Game worlds are heavily compressed: a capital of thousands is a few streets, and a kingdom takes an afternoon to walk.