Worldbuilding Part 10: More Questions Than Answers

First, a revised image for the book. I cleaned up the picture and also found a new font to use throughout for titles and headings. I like it. It's snazzy.

***

I suspect that this is the final entry in the series of worldbuilding posts, although I suppose I could surprise myself with an epilogue or two. We'll see. I held off for a little while (by my standards at least), but Shards has gone into the first stages of layout. It is not completely written; it's maybe 80%. However, the first 2/3 of the book is pretty close to locked down, so I felt comfortable starting to play with layout, and have run into a happy problem to have - I'm never going to fit all this art. I'm going to try, but some pages are laying out quite nicely with no art, and I'm managing to get a whole section or topic into one page with minimal remaining white space, so I don't want to force in art just to do it, or spread a concept to a second page when I don't need to. Good problems to have, I suppose.

Okay, let's wrap up some worldbuilding. 

***

This might sound egotistical, but I used to equate creating a setting with, in effect, being its god. If I was the god of this place, I would put this here and that there. I would set up rivers this way, and have the forests grow over there. I would put these creatures here, and those over there. But the problem is I'm not a god. I don't really think like one. I don't have that intellectual capacity. And besides, how much fun is that, anyway? Everything ends up the way you want it, and that's just boring.

So, I've instead learned to view myself as the world's greatest explorer. Yeah, it's still an ego trip I guess, but not quite as bad as casting yourself as the almighty creator of all things. I end up asking far more questions than I do supplying answers. How does this work? Why did they do THAT? If this is true here, then how can that be true over there? In some ways, I think of it as the rapid-fire questioning of a five-year-old, who wants to know everything about every part of the engine when he sees it for the first time, and you are in the middle of trying to explain how oxygen is necessary for combustion when he's pointing at the connectors to the batteries and asking about that. There's a good reason that my avatars in the last two games I have written are scientists and explorers. I am trying to think like them as I engage with the setting.

Rather than trying to know everything about your setting, enjoy the discomfort of realizing that you will never know everything about your setting. There has to always be some path leading off into the woods or a door in the basement the beyond of which you have no idea about. Once you get comfortable with leaving unanswered questions and loose threads, the more confident you will get, and the more intentional you will ultimately get. Here are the three things we know for sure about the messari, but here are the ten biggest questions about what they do and how they operate.

It comes down to flexibility. You want a setting that can grow and evolve as you think of new things.

That is better game design, as far as I define it. My best adventures have been those that have at least three ways into the adventure, and at least three things that can happen after the adventure. I might actually, now that I'm thinking of it, put that as some advice in the GM section. If you have to get the note from the princess that is carried by the caravan master and which is hidden in a secret compartment in the floor of the carriage for the adventure to begin, then you are already off to a rocky start. If, however, I'm not sure how the PCs are going to get involved, but these are three pathways that could lead into the adventure (unless something else comes up), I've written a better adventure, and I've got a more flexible setting.

There is one more really, really practical reason to do this, and this comes from my experience doing this for 30+ years now. If you know too much about your setting, and you lock everything about it down, you will get bored. Okay, I know that I'll get bored. I suspect you would, too. That was part of the problem I ran into with Army Ants. It was a small setting - the back yard - and I had figured how all of it worked together. There weren't any big pieces of real estate that were unexplored, or new species to discover. I knew everyone who was there, what they were up to, and how it would all interact. At that point, what more is there to do? What more is there for me, as the creator of the whole thing, to discover?

It is, ironically, a problem that the creative people behind Star Wars have run into. Yes, it's an entire galaxy - but we know how it all fits together. We have defined all of the important, and the vast majority of the unimportant, parts. The Mandalorian, again, has solved this by going smaller rather than bigger. Yes, we know about the big picture stuff. But what about that hole over there, or what's inside of this egg right here? It has to go to the micro level, because the macro is so well defined. They've done such a good job defining the setting, that they have very little new to discover.

Make sure you always have something new to discover.